Wide world was young traveller’s happy place
By age 25, he had travelled to 32 countries
In his short 25 years, Kyle Arndt travelled to 32 countries, ate dog meat in Asia and guinea pig in Peru, surfed on volcano ash in Nicaragua, got a tattoo of a blow fish on his right shoulder and a centipede on his left arm and planned on finding Shangri-La.
While Kyle didn’t make that trip — he died suddenly on Christmas Day while travelling in India, with an autopsy yet to explain why he didn’t wake from sleep — friend Murray Glenn strapped on both his own and Kyle’s backpacks and carried close to 230 pounds during the final trek to honour Arndt.
“Shangri-La is a (supposed) mythical place in a story by a British author in 1933 about a place that’s a Himalayan utopia,” wrote Glenn, 29, in a Facebook chat. He travelled extensively with Kyle and helped get his friend’s body back to his family in Edmonton for burial. “A permanently happy place isolated from the outside world.”
For Kyle, the world was his happy place, from the Philippines to Costa Rica, from Belgium to the Netherlands and Guyana and Burma.
“Travelling wasn’t important to Kyle; learning how other people thought, felt (and) lived was,” Glenn wrote to the Journal. While in India, Kyle loaned his iPod earphones to a shepherd guiding water buffalo so he could listen to the song Walking on a Dream by Empire of the Sun.
“(Kyle) would sign-language his way into their hearts,” Glenn said. “The shepherd went nuts after hearing his loud music and smashed his stick off a rock. Funniest thing ever. … It was adventure to (Kyle).”
While in Honduras, Kyle gave his flashlight, knife and medical supplies to a family in need.
“It didn’t even faze him,” Glenn said. “They needed it. That’s all there was to it.”
Lori Arndt said the eldest of her four children was always very generous and funloving. Some weekends, Kyle would invite so many friends over for sleepovers, Lori had to count the shoes at the front door to figure out how overrun her house would be.
Kyle snuck healthy things such as shredded carrots into his father’s lunch, since Peter Arndt preferred junk food, Lori said.
Unlike his brother Kole, 20, and sisters Kayley, 23 and Kenzie, 18, Kyle refused to have a TV in his bedroom, instead choosing to watch the Oasis nature channel and comedy shows with his parents in the living room. There, he kept his Talking Globe from childhood that talks about the languages, currency and national anthems of various countries.
He would take his dinner plate outside to eat on the sun-drenched deck, and take photos of his mother’s Virginia Creeper that she found so beautiful on the acreage between Fort Saskatchewan and St. Albert.
“He found joy in the smallest things in life,” Lori said.
During the summers, after a day of work at his father’s concrete business, Kyle would insist his father drop him off at the front door of the family home before parking. Kyle refused to wait to taste his mother’s delicious food, Lori said.
Meals sometimes went down with a cool Pilsner, but although that was his favourite beer, he was always eager for culinary adventures. Friend Brayden Lequire, 24, said Kyle insisted on visiting The Delirium Café in Belgium: the world-record holder for types of beers available at 3,000.
In Peru, Kyle ate traditional guinea pig. In Asia? Dog.
“I’m ready to try this pooch,” he said in one of his many homemade videos exhibiting his sense of humour. Before breaking into barks and howls, Kyle said, “There’s a reason we eat pig rather than dog at home.”
Playfulness aside, Kyle’s travel habits aimed for authenticity. He rejected the artificial, commercialized fun created at the Atlantis in the Bahamas, where he met his parents one holiday, preferring instead the world’s natural wonders, Lori said.
“He completely blossomed into a traveller,” Lori said. “He couldn’t get enough of all the sights and all the beauty. … He kind of lived for today and tomorrow.”