The job: Around world in 52 weeks
Writer who grew up in Pojoaque visiting ‘New York Times’ list of 52 Places to Go in 2018 for newspaper
Afew days before Christmas, in a combination office-laundry room in her childhood home in rural Pojoaque, Jada Yuan plugged an Ethernet cable into her laptop, took a deep breath and sat down to an online interview for one of the most sought-after jobs in the world.
A 1996 graduate of Los Alamos High School who built a career as a Manhattan-based features writer, Yuan had spent the days leading up to the interview in a fit of nerves, running a dozen test webchats with friends to make sure the often-shoddy internet connection in her parents’ home, where she was spending the holidays, would hold fast.
It would be the New York Times on the other end of the webcam, after all.
Yuan had made it to the final round of the newspaper’s search for a writer whose job would be to travel the world for a year and document it. Thirteen thousand candidates had applied to be the paper’s inaugural 52 Places Traveler.
The interview went off without a hitch, and days later, Yuan landed the gig. What has followed has been a cyclonic but welcome upheaval to a life — and career — in need of a refresh, Yuan said. It’s a job of intense highs and lows that she admits she’s still striving to master after four months on the road.
“It’s very renewing, in a way,” Yuan, 40, said in a telephone interview Monday from Branson, Mo.,
the 17th stop on her trip. “I did this live talk, a live conversation thing in Cincinnati, and someone asked me what it’s like to leave your life behind or take a break from it in this way. The past seems so far in the past right now that all I see is runway and future. It’s all forward momentum, and I think I was feeling pretty stagnant before.”
So far on her journey, Yuan has partied with famous musicians in hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico, waited out a rainforest downpour in an abandoned prison in Chile, spent an entire day riding roller coasters in Branson — and learned how to pack much more efficiently.
To date, she’s visited 18 locales in North and South America. She’ll fly to Western Europe in a couple of weeks before exploring Africa, Eastern Europe, Asia and Australia. Her trip wraps up in December. Yuan’s itinerary includes every destination on the New York Times’ list of 52 Places to Go in 2018.
Journalists who’ve written about it have described it as “the most enviable job in journalism,” “a dream job” and possibly “the best job on the planet.” But for Yuan, it’s proven more complicated than that.
Traveling the world and writing about it, it turns out, is tougher than it looks.
The schedule doesn’t help. Yuan, who is single, finds herself on the road every few days. She has weekly deadlines — and a lot of alone time. And the learning curve, in some cases, has been steep.
“The rhythms of it are hard,” she said. “I [went] from being just a print feature reporter to being someone who takes photos and videos and posts, and I don’t always get to the posting, so that becomes a source of guilt.”
Yuan has cried in the back of cabs, found strength in intense loneliness, pulled as many ondeadline all-nighters as her college-freshman self (about two per week, she estimates) and worried she won’t be able to appreciate this once-in-a-lifetime experience while she lives it.
As she nears the halfway point, Yuan said she’s finally getting a handle on the constant travel. She’s also hoping to feel better about the job soon.
At New York magazine, where she had worked since graduating from Yale University in 2000, Yuan wrote long-form celebrity profiles.
In her interviews with the New York Times, she touted her ability to drop into high-profile situations — movie premieres, awards ceremonies and the like — and quickly get the access she needed to get the story.
She’s put those skills to good use for the Times. On the Baja California Peninsula, Yuan navigated what she described as a “choose-your-own-adventure” web of unmarked dirt roads en route to Las Palmas Tropicales, a palm oasis on the peninsula’s west coast.
“One choice took me to a steep, winding hill road with grooves so deep I thought my tire would get wedged in one,” she wrote in her dispatch for the Times. “Another took me into a den of snarling dogs.”
The long but beautiful detour cost Yuan precious daylight hours, preventing her from visiting the beaches she originally set out to see. But the unplanned journey was well worth it.
Her Northern New Mexico roots, she said, have helped prepare Yuan for the trip.
Yuan was born in Los Alamos, where her father, Vincent Yuan, works as a nuclear physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Her mother, glass artist Lucy Lyon, exhibits at LewAllen Galleries in Santa Fe.
On at least a couple of occasions when she was young, Yuan and her parents loaded camping gear into the black cargo van her mother used to haul artwork and set out for Mexico to see how far they could get before the van broke down.
The answer? Not far. On one epic trip, Yuan said, the van overheated 100 miles south of the border. In the era before cellphones, the family was stranded until someone with a tow truck drove by looking for customers. They spent the rest of the trip going from backyard mechanic to backyard mechanic, Yuan said, until they reached the beach. There, Yuan and her parents camped with hippies from British Columbia, sneaking onto resort hotels’ properties to wash up in the pool area.
“I have these really fond memories of trips like that, where things went wrong and you just sort of had to make do and have a good time,” she said.
As the months have passed as the 52 Places Traveler, Yuan said she’s started to channel that sentiment more and more.
“I’m learning to appreciate it more,” she said. “And now that it’s starting to hit me how quickly a year goes by and how quickly this will be over, I’m just going to have to find ways to take a break and appreciate where I am.”
She’s had some success in that realm of late.
Yuan spent 12 days in Chile in March — a relative lifetime compared to the three- to sevenday stints to which she’d grown accustomed.
One day, while exploring abandoned buildings vacated during a volcanic eruption 10 years ago, Yuan wandered into an overgrown, graffiti-clad building that she eventually decided must have been a prison. Blue bars still adorned the doors. It started to rain — a deluge. Yuan tried to wait out the downpour, but an hour later, it hadn’t let up. Her cellphone had died. She spied her car in the distance and ran for it.
“Water flew up my nose and soaked my socks, which wouldn’t dry for days — and I was laughing. Laughing and running,” Yuan wrote of the experience. “And there was my car, but I didn’t open the door. I wanted to stand there, getting wet, taking it in.”
Yuan said that moment will stick with her.
“It felt very freeing,” she said. “I want to try and recapture that feeling, to feel really elemental and free.”
Two days later, her socks still damp from the downpour, Yuan set out to climb the volcano. In 2008, Volcán Chaitén, a caldera along the Route of Parks in southern Chile, spewed a plume of ash so thick that winds carried it across the continent to the Atlantic Ocean.
After a long, wet hike, Yuan reached the summit. It started to hail.
“I crested this volcano, and my fingers were going numb,” she said. “I felt so lonely and sad. This German guy, Manuel, showed up, and we traveled together for four or five days afterward. To make a friend on a volcano in a hailstorm is really — I don’t know when that’ll happen again.”