Key Takeaways
- In 2006, few weeks after I returned from my first round the world trip, I was eating lunch with a friend. “Have you seen A Map for Saturday?” she aske
- “It’s the world’s best travel movie. I think you can go to the website and buy it directly. It’s a documentary.”
- The movie follows the 11 month trip of Brook Silva Braga from when he quits his job to when he returns home. It was — and still is — the best movie I’
In 2006, just weeks after returning from my first round-the-world trip, I was eating lunch with a friend. “Have you seen A Map for Saturday?” she asked me.
“It’s the world’s best travel movie. I think you can go to the website and buy it directly. It’s a documentary.”
I went home and immediately ordered it online.
The film follows Brook Silva-Braga’s 11-month journey—from quitting his job to returning home—and remains one of the most authentic portrayals of long-term travel ever captured on screen. No other documentary so vividly conveys the emotional arc of backpacking: the exhilaration of new places, the quiet lulls between destinations, the fleeting yet profound connections with fellow travelers, and even the restless urge to hit the road again after coming home.
Since that first viewing, I’ve shared this film with friends, gifted it to aspiring travelers, and watched it countless times. I even watched it—and cried—on what I thought would be my final day of travel back in 2013.
Ten years after its release, I sat down with Brook (now a friend and longtime collaborator) to reflect on the documentary’s lasting resonance and cultural impact.
Route for Less: As a refresher, tell everyone about yourself! Brook: Well, I’m a guy who quit his job to travel the world for a year—which, obviously, a lot of people have done. But I also brought along a video camera and made a documentary about backpacking culture called A Map for Saturday. I met travelers in Australia, Asia, Europe, and South America and tried to capture what it was like for all of us out on the road.
I got home broke, moved into my parents’ house, and edited the footage together. Then—in a stroke of great luck—MTV bought it! I think the fact I had traveled alone for a year gave the film a kind of authenticity. And I was also fortunate to have a background in TV (I had been a producer with HBO Sports beforehand).
Backpacking had trained me to live cheaply, so I was able to take the MTV money and travel on and off for several more years. I went overland across Africa north to south and China east to west. I made two more documentaries during those years and then settled into a somewhat more traditional life back in the US.
What made you decide to quit your job all those years ago? When I was 24, HBO sent me to the Philippines to do a story on Manny Pacquiao. I added a short side trip to Thailand and met these two guys from Belfast on a round-the-world trip. The idea of that totally captivated me. I had never heard of such a thing.
After a week of traveling with them, I decided I wanted to do a big trip too and that now was probably the best time. So I went back home and started planning. I left eight months later. (Route for Less says: Thailand is where I met backpackers who inspired me to do the same thing. There’s just something about that place!)
How did you save for your first trip? I just stopped spending money. I never took a cab or went to a nice dinner and, when I went out, it was somewhere cheap. And, to be totally honest, I had a pretty good-paying job so with some hardcore scrimping I was able to get my savings up to the $20,000 USD I needed for the trip pretty quickly.
I also had a bunch of airline miles from work travel and used them all—140,000 points and miles—for a round-the-world ticket from Delta. That really helped make it affordable.
How did people react? Back in 2005, I was thinking about traveling too, and the idea of quitting your job was super alien. Most people in my life didn’t know what to make of it. What did people in your life say? Yeah, I think the main response was confusion. I was a very driven 25-year-old, and people saw that as career ambition. I had been pretty successful for my age and worked hard to get there. So why was I walking away from that?
What they didn’t see was that my ambition was about living an exciting and full life, not just having a fancy job. So from my perspective, traveling the world was just an extension of that “ambition.”
But my parents were very supportive. They had both traveled a lot when they were young, and I think they thought I was a bit too career-focused before I left.
What made you want to film your trip? Well, making a documentary helped ease the sense that I was throwing away my career. I knew I would be in some really cool places; tying them together with one project was very exciting. I brainstormed lots of documentary ideas and never came up with anything great, so I ended up just filming my trip and the people I met, and that became the film.
Do you wish you did your first trip differently? I really don’t. It was great. My current big-trip dreams are a bit different: I’d like to go to a series of places for a month and get to know each one before moving on.
So it’s the ten-year anniversary of A Map for Saturday. How are you feeling about it? With time, all the rough edges have gotten worn off the trip and it’s just become a kind of magical memory. The days when I was lonely or bored…
