Matt is a guy from Connecticut who had no higher goal than developing video games. When he found out other people would quit their job to travel around the world, he decided to give it a try.
To keep friends and family updated he started a blog. One day a friend came up with ‘why don’t you stand over there and do your stupid dance. I’ll record it.’ Matt uploaded the video on his site and in 2005 he found it on YouTube. A kid was collecting donations and apparently got about $200. All Matt said about it was ‘good for him’.
Since then Matt made many more videos, all of them extremely funny. But this is not the point. I can’t explain exactly why his videos move me so deeply. Maybe because in a few minutes they express all I love about travelling: the carefreeness, the mix of cultures, the foolish serenity when you are thousands of kilometres far from home and have no idea how stupid you look among the locals. Maybe because in every scene of every video, Matt is the worst dancer and at the same time the one having most fun.
A journey, especially if long and adventurous, it isn’t just an idillic trip among paradisical spots and lovely people. It is strain, uncertainty, sultriness and thirst, hunger and nausea, cold and fear; it’s the eternal questioning which way you should take and the often answering “it wasn’t this way”. As for me and many others, travelling is also loneliness, if chosen or forced. But in every journey there are a few moments persuading you that in billions of possibilities, at that time you are exactly in the right place, with the right people, the right state of mind. Sometimes even the right clothes.
That’s it. Maybe I really love Matt’s videos because they remind me of those moments. The moments I love travelling for.
A degree in journalism and a professional limbo ranging from press offices to newspapers, magazines and finally the web. I lived in Verona, Zurich, London, Cape Town, Mumbai and Casablanca. I hate flying and I love jodel music. And when I grow up I wanna be a cosmonaut.
