About This Modern Pilgrim

What This Modern Pilgrim Is

This isn’t a travel blog about ticking off attractions (although I will be doing that too). It’s a pilgrimage—a personal, cultural, and spiritual exploration through language, land, and belief. I’m not searching for one answer but listening for the quiet wisdom in many.

This Modern Pilgrim is a living record of those discoveries, unfolding through journal entries, photography, and the people I meet along the way.

Where It Really Began

My love of travel didn’t start with the pandemic. It began in 2001 during a summer abroad program in Brighton, England. On weekends, I’d explore France, Belgium, and Italy—each place deepening my hunger for cultural connection.

In 2008, I drove cross-country across the U.S.—from San Diego to Boston and back—seeing firsthand the many Americas that coexist beyond coasts and headlines.

An MBA program in 2015 took me to Switzerland. That led to solo journeys through Spain, China, and Hong Kong. Travel, I came to realize, wasn’t a luxury for me. It was a form of learning. A way to better understand the world—and myself.

Faces of the Road – Southeast Asia: From the night markets of Taiwan to the nightlife of Thailand, the Chocolate Hills of the Philippines to the backstreets of Kyoto and the rice fields of Bali—these are some of the people who shaped my journey. Expats, digital nomads, locals, and fellow travelers. Each encounter a mirror. Each face, a reminder that connection is what makes travel truly meaningful.

Southeast Asia: Where the Modern Pilgrimage Began

When the world opened back up after COVID, I flew to Asia: Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, Bali, Singapore, the Philippines, and South Korea. I met digital nomads living simply but richly, locals who valued community over consumption, and expats who traded burnout for balance. These encounters raised hard but necessary questions: What am I working for? Who am I trying to become?

Along the way, I found something else: the sacred in the everyday. In Thailand, monks in saffron robes chanted prayers. In Bali, small offerings lined doorsteps like poetry. In Japan, the silence of shrines felt alive with reverence.

Faith wasn’t forced or explained. It was simply present, and that presence opened something in me.

Latin America: Faith, Culture & The Road Ahead

In 2023, grieving a personal loss, I continued my pilgrimage through Latin America—Peru, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico. Catholicism felt much more prevalent here, woven into plazas, sidewalks, homes, and holidays. It was startlingly public—unlike in the U.S., where faith often hides behind closed doors or gets politicized into silence.

In Peru, especially around Cusco, I also encountered rich Indigenous traditions: reverence for ancestors, the land, and daily life as sacred. These spiritual expressions—Catholic and Indigenous, ancient and evolving—reshaped how I saw my own roots.

Across the region, I discovered faith not as dogma, but as rhythm. Not hidden. Lived.

The Sacred Everywhere: Across South America, faith isn’t confined to Sunday services or hidden behind closed doors—it’s carved into cathedrals, displayed in plazas, and woven into everyday life. While the legacy of Catholicism here is tied to colonial history, its visual presence is undeniable—and surprisingly ubiquitous. Coming from a country where religion is often private or politicized, I found myself rethinking how Christianity exists in the world: not just as doctrine, but as something embedded into the rhythm and texture of daily life.