As a 22 year-old with $300 cash, Rafael traveled from New York to New Zealand where he lived with a Maori family, worked as a farm-hand, woodworker, and pizza-maker, and walked for hundreds of miles throughout unspoiled beauty.  In Australia, he worked as a construction worker on a 16-story condo on the beach to make enough money to get home via Singapore, Malaysia, Moscow, London and finally back to Brooklyn.