This Black Travel Life, the T. Barnes Way
Every night Wayan Mojito takes me from the rice fields back into Ubud Center so that I can have an hour and a half Thai massage before bed at Yeh Pulu Spa. A hole in the wall spot where the toilet is separated from the very small reception/foot massage area with a curtain. Have y’all ever had a proper Thai massage? It is good. It is good like sex, tacos, and tequila. It is good like the first few weeks of being in love. The massage lady jumps up on my bed and uses every part of her body to stretch me, to work me, and relax my tired body. This is my life now and I am happy.
During this body work I am receiving, as I slip in and out of bliss, I can’t help but reflect on the path that led me to Yeh Pulu. I fell in to planning trips while I was building T.Barnes Beauty, my skincare and cosmetics company. I have been building it for 15 years. I recently expanded into fashion and began sourcing manufacturers globally, which requires an excessive amount of travel. My customers wanted to travel too.
A Jamaican Rastafarian village hosted the first T.Barnes curated group experience. My goal was to design an empowerment retreat. It became a powerful learning experience, I quickly realized that I am not trained or built to get people past their emotional boundaries. I was building my best life but had no idea how to help someone else achieve their dreams. I never claimed that I was a guru but as the trip leader there was an expectation that I could not meet. That pedestal, especially when it is self-appointed, is a sure-fire way to fail and be knocked down to reality. The trip was amazing, and the participants enjoyed it, but I will never plan a healing retreat without a healer again. Although my own healer says it is my destiny. Humph. I will fight it.
My next trip was also audacious. 24 travelers followed me to Morocco. I rented a beautiful villa outside of Marrakesh. 12 women came the first week and the remaining twelve met me for the last week. I focused this time on making the experience as affordable as possible. Flight and accommodations were included but many of the activities and tips were not. This was a mistake. I learned the hard way that even if you prepare people in advance for these charges, collecting money during the trip will be a hassle. Everyday I found myself asking, person by person for fees and tips. It felt like I was hustling people out of extra money but really, I was just paying for the trip extras that they requested. Having had this experience, I now include all the extras in cost of the trip. Outside of lunch, dinners and some tips that people pay for at their discretion directly to the vendor, my company is never asking any participant for another dime beyond what was already collected. This was one of the best moves I made.
I curated a few more experiences around the West Indies on different islands. They were successful, and I felt I was finally ready for a trip to West Africa. I chose Ghana. My clientele, which had grown quite a bit since Jamaica, were very excited. This was my first time taking a group to West Africa and I wanted it to be amazing. I made that trip at least 4-5 times before I brought a group with me. I love the continent of Africa and West Africa specifically, but it is not easy to make plans. There are so many areas that are at times not consistent with the expectation of the Black American traveler. Especially if you are restricted by a budget. I wanted so badly to find a Black owned hotel in Accra and I simply could not. The group was very large and consisted of 35 Black women, some of them traveling outside of the U.S. for the first time. Ghana is one of the jewels of West Africa but there were challenges. Demands for gifts and bribes, different standards of service, and the expectations of my group. I had to make the decision to provide a hotel with accommodations that would be the equivalent of a Western standard.
I could control some variables, but travel is at times frustrating. I have experienced many canceled and or unexpectedly rescheduled flights while traveling in Africa. I am used to it and can sit back and read a book when I am alone. With a large group frustration spreads like the flu. I decided to add Benin to the agenda. I had visited Togo and Benin and fell in love with Benin. (I also I fell in love with someone in Benin but that is a different article). I added it to the trip and took on the responsibility of securing Visas for each traveler. Well I failed to get a multiple entry visa for everyone in the group and did not realize it. 35 sets of eyes staring me down. I was so devastated. I had never made a mistake so big. It was surreal.
I spent an entire day running around Accra, begging, bribing and flirting my way to a solution. I had three options, stay in Accra, pay an extra $60 to secure the proper visa or take a trip to another region of Ghana. They chose to stay in Accra. This cost me thousands of dollars that was not built in and as you could imagine, I lost the trust of a few of the travelers. The frustration flu spread. You only need one negative Nancy to think they can do it better than you and they started to plan their own activities. They had no idea that amount of work that went in to them avoiding the many pitfalls that can ruin your trip to West Africa. I had lived that for them, got malaria twice, fought off the parasites, made the relationships, paid the bribes, picked the restaurants and positioned the group the best I could, and it all still fell apart.
So many of the small details and the real-life connections I had set up, the experience that I had painstakingly planned were missed. I scheduled a private shopping experience. A tailor and business owner agreed to close his business and accommodate our group of 35. Each woman would return to the U.S. with a piece of custom clothing. I believed that this would be an unforgettable souvenir, but the frustration of the visa bled into everything. One person believed that I was getting a kickback from the service and spread the rumor. Another woman threw a dress at me because it was not what she expected. Thankfully I had a core support system within the group and the visit to the slave castles shifted the energy of the experience. There were life changing experiences to focus on and this was meant to be the trip of a lifetime. We prayed at the Last Bath where our ancestors were washed and branded before slavery. We remembered our common connection. It regenerated the love and got the trip back on track, but again it was the lesson of a life time. Never take on the visa for the participants. Hire an assistant to comb through the fine details just in case. Don’t add on too much to a trip, the variables are not worth the frustration. After that trip I learned that multi-generational trips have the most balanced energy.
So how did I find Wayan? After this experience I decided to hold my large group experiences in a region of the world that prides itself on providing exceptional service. I planned a trip of 45 participants to visit Bali. There were no challenges, and everyone left lighter and happier then they came. I hired an assistant to make sure I was fully supported and no details were missed. I finally arrived at what I would call my ideal vision of what a TBarnes curated experience should be. As much as I love the groups of fabulous fly girls in all the same color bikini and I get this millennial Instagram, look at me on my latest adventure culture, I have found it to not be the most conducive to a great trip filled with deep and positive spiritual connections and no drama. My trips are multi-generational, they incorporate adventure and REST. We need the wisdom and pace of our elders to remind us not to sweat the small stuff and the energy and vibrancy of the young adult just beginning to explore themselves and the world. Those of us in the middle benefit from knowing just enough about ourselves to be present, yet open to learning and exploring more about who we are. My trips have grounded energy now. I can not be more thankful.
I am sharing all my hiccups and mistakes because experience is the best teacher. For Black American’s traveling, this global life is a new frontier. We are in a very strange purgatory because we sit on the periphery of our own country however we have access to a certain standard of living that is not necessarily the norm in other countries. We are at once extremely oppressed and extremely privileged at the same time. I know that what a trip offers in terms of service and accommodations can appear to be the negligence of the planner when in fact there were no other options. It is just what the country has to offer. Simultaneously, I know everyone does not plan the way I do. It cost more to pre-travel, turn over mattresses, build the relationships and know exactly what you want people to experience. I know that I am a curator of culture. I take that very seriously and I know and love luxury. I have also been privileged enough to experience it in everyday life, my entire life. We are all coming to the table with a different bar for what is acceptable and what is not. I set the bar high. Planning travel is a skill. I am about the mastery of it.
This Black travel life is layered my people. It is at once a vacation, an adventure, a teaching, a learning, a political statement and a resistance. It is also CRUCIAL that we can experience ourselves beyond the borders of these United States. It is past time to recognize that borders between countries are simply a social construction. As humanity moves forward it will be more and more important to recognize ourselves as global citizens without boundaries physically or mentally, this is especially important for Black people. Those that are #GLOBAL will move through the world as a bridge, a bridge to new experiences, to creating new ways of living together and recovering old ones. We need to be gentle and respectful with each other as we attempt to break free. That is what travel is….Freedom. I can’t wait to travel with you guys on a T. Barnes Global Travel Trip or meet you out in the world.
Love, T.
T. Barnes. Solana’s Mama. Lover of Black People. Beauty/Fashion Entrepreneur. Esthetician. Thinker. Speaker. Social Justice Activist. Educator. Travel Curator. Global Citizen.
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