The People You Meet: How One Backpacking Trip Changed Everything

In 2010, Melissa Rodway was 35 years old, working in the corporate world in Toronto, and restless. She had always been someone who loved adventure, someone who tried to fit exploration around the edges of a busy professional life. But that year, she did something different. She took a months off, packed a bag, and set off on a backpacking trip through Southeast Asia with a partner. Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and China. No fixed plan. No safety net. Just curiosity and an open heart.

Fifteen years later, that trip became a book. The People You Meet is a travel memoir built from the emails Melissa sent home during those weeks on the road. They were raw, unfiltered, sometimes funny (the travel tips in the appendix are hilarious!), sometimes deeply uncomfortable accounts of what she was seeing, feeling, and learning. She didn't write them with publication in mind. They were just her way of processing a world that kept surprising her.

In a recent conversation on The Auto Ethnographer podcast, host John Jörn Stech sat down with Melissa to talk about the book, the trip, and the quieter lessons that only surface years after you come home.