“WHEREVER YOU GO, THERE YOU ARE.”

My father used to say that all the time, and I easily dismissed it as Dadspeak, something I was meant to nod at in apparent agreement, so as not to provoke him to expound upon it further. Years later, it made a great deal of sense to me. However, I have now added a slight variation to that aphorism: “Wherever you go, there it is.” The succinct summation of both of these thoughts is that wherever you travel, you have to adapt to your new surroundings. They won’t adapt to you.

Back in 1987, shooting the Vietnam drama Casualties of War with Sean Penn and director Brian DePalma, I had the privilege of witnessing how a particular part of the planet—in this case the Southeast Asian island of Phuket, Thailand—resisted the attempts of a big budget Hollywood crew to transform it into anything other than what nature, climate, geology, botany, and biology intended it to be. In fact, all the crew was trying to do was make the place into another version of itself. Let me explain.

We had a series of nighttime jungle-combat scenes to film. Understandably, the difficulty of running camera-dolly tracks through the rain forest, along with a plethora of other practical issues, made it impossible for our crew to work in the actual jungle. So, Brian and his technicians went to plan B. The idea was to approximate a jungle in a large barren area that once was wooded, but had long since been dedicated to some kind of gravel mining—a quarry of sorts. They picked a parcel of land on the edge of a series of cliffs. Into these cliffs they had dug a network of tunnels, or half tunnels, exposed to Brian’s cameras. The bonus was that Brian could get frighteningly atmospheric shots of Viet Cong crawling, weapons ready, through the tunnels beneath the jungle floor, then pan up slowly to find American GIs patrolling unawares. To create this illusion, set decorators brought in hundreds of potted trees and plants and dug a small pond, all covering approximately an acre or so. Shortly after the new greenscape was in place, Brian and cast were able to rehearse scenes to be shot a few weeks later.

What happened next provided a lesson in “wherever you go, there it is.” The surrounding flora and fauna quickly responded to our changes to the environment by reclaiming it. They subsumed it, overtook it. As if it were nothing more than a giant petri dish, the seasonal rains and sweltering humidity acted upon the “set,” fomenting a riot of uncontained growth. Birds filled the canopy. Snakes moved in after them. Plants that only a few weeks before had been mere vestigial shoots poking their way through the forest floor now grew tendrils several meters long, which crept atop the soil to assert death grips around newly transplanted palm trees, entangling the feet of clumsy actors who had rehearsed in the exact same place only a few days before. Night scenes necessitated large, carbon-powered arc lamps and other Hollywood lighting equipment. This attracted swarms of insects, whose size, shape, and violent dispositions were so unearthly that only the most dedicated entomologist would have dared to capture them for identification.

At one point, I remember struggling to absorb a piece of acting direction from Brian, a large and imposing man of concentrated seriousness. He seemed bothered by my distraction as he laid out his interpretation of my character’s present dilemma. “I’m sorry, Brian,” I apologized. “I’m paying attention. It’s just that there’s a Volkswagen crawling up your arm.” At that, the unflappable DePalma flapped, waving his arms to shake loose the scarab-like creature. I’m still half-surprised that it didn’t carry him away. The new sets served the filmmaker’s purposes, and I’m sure conditions were far better than they would have been in a pre-existing jungle, but the rapidity and enthusiasm with which the surrounding ecosystem replicated itself on this formerly barren patch of Thailand was a humbling reminder of the power of nature and the purity of place. Wherever you go, there it is.

Just as you can’t change the essential nature of a place, don’t count on the place to change the essential nature of you. It may be tempting, at some point in life, to seek a fresh start or even establish a new identity by uprooting from one location and transplanting physically to another. This is what pop psychologists and people in recovery refer to as “doing a geographic.”

But for young people, who are defined by a sense of rootlessness, new places and new experiences can be savored for their own sake. In my early twenties, my hope was not that travel be transformative, but simply that it be fun. The first time I ventured to Mexico, for example, did not involve the exploration of Mayan ruins or the study of the people and their culture. My most striking memory was falling shirtless over a cliff in Cabo. As I tumbled through the cactus and over the rocky outcroppings, I struggled for control. I wasn’t worried about being injured. I was worried about spilling my beer. I landed with a thud at the bottom of a small arroyo. Exhilarated that I still had a full bottle of Tecate, I was at first unaware of the six-inch slash on my right shoulder. Typical ignorant gringo that I was, I wanted no part of the local hospital, trusting instead the advice of the crew on our chartered fishing boat the next day, who advised me to douse the wound in tequila and let it cauterize in the Mexican sun. See, I might not have gone to college, but I didn’t miss Spring Break. That’s not travel, though, that’s an incursion.

From childhood road trips across Canada in the family Pontiac to my most recent adventures in Bhutan, high in the Himalayas (more about this later), travel has always been a big part of my life. Even when my trips are predicated on business and not pleasure, on location shoots like that one in Thailand, or publicity junkets in Europe and Asia to promote new movies and television projects, I always take the time to appreciate where I am for what it is. I seek out the excitement of the strange and not the comfort of the familiar. I’m not trying to lose myself, or even find myself, for that matter. My goal is just to enjoy myself, learn something, and gain an appreciation for the amazing complexity of this planet and the people who live on it.

Wherever I go, I bring myself. And so far, it’s always been a roundtrip.