Shouldn’t travel be about more than just Instagram photos?
Hi, I’m Quincy.
I’ve learned that tourism can have amazing impacts on local communities and on travellers themselves, but that travel has to be authentic. If visitors aren’t opening themselves up to experiencing the real local culture, then there are no new experiences or lessons for them to learn. In turn, that same local culture will be replaced by something more profitable and marketable to tourists, like a Starbucks.
Here on Seeing the Elephant, I like to help people travel authentically. That means eating local food, meeting local people, seeing all the sights and living as much as you can – because if you’re travelling just to have the same kinds of experiences you have at home… that’s kind of silly isn’t it?
“Seeing the What???”
When 19th century miners travelled west as part of the gold rush, they’d use the phrase “seeing the elephant” to describe their experiences. “Seeing the elephant” symbolized the profound impact of their journeys, from experiences of awe and wonder to overcoming unexpected challenges. It’s a humbling combination of discovery, disillusionment, and personal growth. To me, it summarizes what travel should be about. It’s sometimes messy and stressful, but when it’s real there’s almost always something to be learned about the world and yourself. We’re not going to ride the elephant, and we’re not going to tame it. We’re going to go out further than we’ve been before to see something bigger than ourselves, see what we see, and then go home the wiser for it.
Seeing the Elephant started off as a hiking and outdoor adventure website, and that’s still most of what’s on here. But since then I’ve expanded to writing about all the things that make a place special; restaurants and museums and breweries and so on.
All aBout Me
I’ve been running this website for more than two years before finally sitting down and writing a section talking about myself like this, but I figure it’s finally time to let people know who I am.
1998 was a great year for me because that’s the year I was born in Newcastle, Australia. At five my parents picked up and moved us to the UAE, where we lived for another half decade before moving again to Canada. During that time I was lucky enough to travel, and by the time I was ten I had taken trips to Turkey, Syria, India, Sri Lanka, Egypt, the UK, and Germany with my family. What those trips had in common is that we were never just relaxing in an all-inclusive resort somewhere; instead we were out exploring, getting food poisoning and getting lost.
It was awesome.
After finishing high school in small-town Alberta, Canada and working a crappy job for a couple years, I still wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, but I knew I wanted to travel and that I wanted to get out of Canada. On a whim I applied to teach English in China, and six months later I was in Suzhou. It was my first real experience abroad as an adult, and I loved it. Travelling by myself meant being able to fully immerse myself in the local culture and being a grownup (sort of) meant I could have all the sorts of experiences I missed out on travelling as a kid.
After my teaching job ended, I had another two weeks before my flight back to Canada, so on a whim I decided to visit the Philippines, somewhere I knew almost nothing about. I loved the beautiful sandy beaches and blue skies in Cebu, and ended up living there for two years, working online teaching English.
Enter the villain of our story: Covid19. With lockdowns in Cebu City some of the harshest and most drastic anywhere in the world, and no end in sight to the pandemic, I decided in mid-2019 that it was time to come home from the Philippines. Not long after that my online teaching job stopped being profitable, so it was time to get a real job in Canada. Not wanting to waste my compulsory time back in Canada wishing I was back on a beach, on a whim I moved to Banff and started working as a housekeeper in one of the hotels there.
While living in Banff I learned that mountains are cool, hiking is also cool, and that it turns out there’s cool stuff in Canada after all. Who knew. While there I happened to overhear someone talking about how there wasn’t any money to be made in blogging any more and it was a stupid thing to do. So the idea for a blog was born, with the first post written in April of 2022.
That same year I visited Vancouver Island on the west coast of Canada for the first time, saw the mountains and beaches and and decided that this was going to be one of the next places I lived. After Banff, I moved into my car and spent a season in Fernie saving up for a move to Vancouver Island.
And that’s me mostly caught up. I live in a house now instead of a car, but I’m still living on Vancouver Island, just outside Victoria. Between shifts at a local liquor store I’m spending all my time hiking and travelling around the Island, working on adding as much to this website as possible. My goal is to be able to make the equivalent of a full-time monthly income from Seeing the Elephant so I can get back to travelling full-time, and I’m so close. That’s why I’m so appreciative to you for spending time on here, because every view gets me just that little bit closer to doing more of what I love.
Thank you for being here, and I hope you’ll continue to follow along with my future adventures.
