Thanks for dropping by the site. Here you can get to know me a little better. Hopefully we can…I don’t know…hang out or something?

Who the hell is ‘Snik’?

My real name is Malcolm Jenkins; Snik is a nickname of which I have many. Actually Snik is one of my more recent occurrences in my slew of nicknames: MJ, Mal, Mloclam (more on this later), Jenky, Mal J, Mow Cow (don’t ask). So why ‘Snik’s Travels’? Two reasons:

1. It is catchy and memorable (good for blogging!)
2. I am a musical dork and it is a reference to one segment in an incredibly eccentric Phish song.

If you are really interested, there will be more on the nickname at the bottom of the page but I think we can move on.

The making of Snik

I was born and raised in Charleston, SC. Si, soy Americano. I’ll spare you with the details of my childhood (applause) and move into the stages of my life that may have an impact on you, dear reader. All of these periods overlap and have been recurring at various points in the last 10 years. Sometimes that’s good – sometimes not so much.

The travel blog addicted non-traveler

I’ve always had the itch to move, and once I finally broke away and moved across the country immediately after college I dreamed of more. I was stuck (literally, I owed them a shitload of money) in a job I hated, so I did what many of you are probably familiar with. I consumed every bit of travel blog info, watched every episode of Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations” fifteen times and generally just stared at Google Maps for hours on end. But I wasn’t traveling. Yet.

The super entrepreneurial non-entrepreneur

This phase started at about the same time as the previous phase and has faded into and out of the forefront since. It started when I immediately realized I was NOT cut out for a 9-5 job. I couldn’t handle the bureaucracy (read: bullshit) of it. So when I wasn’t dreaming of the far corners of the globe, I spent my time reading finance books, entrepreneurial books, get rich quick books, get rich slowly books, you name it. I even wrote a business plan or two! The problem? I never started a business.

The location independent employee

Finally. I’ve made it. I scored a location-independent job by teaching myself how to build websites with a $40 book. Screw you, $30k in student loan debt. Screw you. For a while in this phase I was on cloud nine. I had a great paying job that I could do anywhere. Well almost anywhere. I still needed to keep an EST 9-5 or so. Damnit, 9-5 again! This phase wasn’t all bad though, as I spent it living out of my backpack for six months crashing with friends in New York City, Reno and San Francisco and working from some pretty cool places (the Starbuck’s overlooking Pike’s Place Market in Seattle!). After a while, though, the work became too much and I had to settle down to meet the growing needs of the company. That’s the employee part of it. This phase was good, but I still wasn’t really traveling.

The traveler!

Woo, we made it! After all this time and I didn’t even know if I really liked travel. It’s one thing to have a few beers and dream about life on the move, but actually doing it is different. There are tons of people who have the build up and take the trip and either hate it or simply get it out of their system. Not me. My 4 month trip to SE Asia reinforced everything that I thought travel would be and more.

Bridging the gap: The traveling entrepreneur

So now it is time to take my talents (or lack thereof) on the road. As I write this I am putting the finishing touches on my first day in Mexico. I’ve built up enough of a freelance profile online to support myself, I’m going to make this blogging thing work and, and I’m going to take advantage of any other opportunity that presents itself. So as I sit here in my hammock, avoiding the strange “did he leave the hostel today?” looks, I am excitedly looking forward to my time living and working on the road.

So do you want to come along for the ride?

The Nickname

As promised the story of how I got the nickname ‘Snik’. It’s short. It’s stupid. If you are reading this you are probably my immediate family and you probably call me ‘Mal’.

In middle school and early high school I carpooled with a couple of friends. Like any annoying adolescents, we wanted to find interesting ways to unintentionally make the carpool driver want to strangle us. Our method of madness? Lets see what our names are backwards. So we did. Here’s the list: Mloclam Sniknej, Adnama Notgnilrad and Haras Swerdna. I told you this was stupid. Anyway there was only one takeaway from that stunt. I would be called Mloclam for the rest of my life by my friend Amanda. Well years went by, people came and went, until one day after a hefty day of liquid recovery (commonly known as ‘Sunday Funday’) the conversation was brought up. We rewrote our names out and I didn’t think anything of it. Two days passed and I call a friend who answers with an evil sounding “Snniiiikkk.” What? Oh no, this had become a thing without my approval. The nickname stuck briefly and started to fade until I revived it for an incognito travel blog. Oh well, it’s better than Mow Cow.