Listen to the audio version of this article: Podcast Ep 31 KHAYAL DIARIES | Lessons From Life on the Road by Alex Reynolds
I had literally no idea I would travel for so long when I packed my life into two backpacks back in 2016. My loose plan was to travel for a year or so with my then-boyfriend until we ran out of money, then find a way to make money somewhere warm and most probably Southeast Asian.
… but plans never happen as planned.
I ended up traveling for more than a year on my savings. I broke up with that boyfriend. I figured out how to make money while traveling through blogging, freelancing, and selling foot photos on the internet. Just kidding. Or am I?
Though I’ve been living on the road for more than four years now, I gotta be clear: I have no grand intentions. Traveling overseas to find yourself makes no sense to me. How are you supposed to learn about the depths of your soul while struggling to float in a sea of foreignness?
But I won’t deny I’ve learned a thousand and one life lessons on the road. Some are simple in scope—like, hand sanitizer each day keeps the diarrhea away— while others aren’t as simple.
To me, the four most important lessons I’ve learned from four years of full-time travel are…
1. You can’t see everything. And that’s totally fine.
When I first started traveling, I wanted to see EEEEVERYTHING. I headed to a new place every two or three days. Zipped around entire countries in one month or less. I oohed and ahhed and snapped way too many photos of every marginally impressive thing I encountered. But those days are over.
As days blend into weeks and months and years, Top Ten Must Sees lose their charm. In Thailand it’s “temple fatigue”. In Uzbekistan there’s “tile fatigue”: the feeling when you’ve seen too many temples or mosques or churches or busts of Lenin or charming squares or whatever and you could not give any less f@cks about seeing more. What was once exciting becomes underwhelming.
People who make you feel bad about your sightseeing choices are the actual problem. Home folks insist you’re “SO LUCKY” to see all these things, then you feel guilt for not caring. Others remind you of all the things you haven’t seen that you “ABSOLUTELY MUST SEE “or else did you really even visit?
Screw them. Do what makes you happy.
These days, my ideal outings involve walking streets at sunrise to enjoy the silence and golden light. Eating ice creams while watching people take horrible vacation selfies in ugly locations. Reading particularly absurd Google Maps reviews. Meeting locals for coffee and whiling the day away talking about anything and everything.
None of these appear on TripAdvisor Top 10 lists, but who cares? I travel the way I want to, not the way other people tell me to.
2. You’re privileged AF. But it’s not bad unless you ignore it.
Long-term travel is not accessible for anyone and everyone; the club is Privileged People Only. You can try arguing, but you gonna lose.
To travel internationally at all, you need a passport, which many people do not have. Maybe they can’t read, can’t afford one, have never needed one, are forbidden from getting one, or don’t have access to systems to apply for one. Heck, only 42% of people in my own country, the big, bad, wealthy US of A, have passports.
Even if you do have a passport, you need visas. Money for tickets and accommodation and food. Time to travel in some capacity. Language to communicate. Familial freedom or permissions in some cases. Health to physically be able to do so. That’s a lot, right?
Sure, people break norms. Some travel without money. Others with weak passports find countries that will let them in. Travelers fight families for their freedom all the time. Still, they’re privileged.
Travelers without money are usually from wealthy Western countries who have financial security nets at home. Travelers with weak passports are often elites in their own country, wealthy enough to consider recreational travel. People fight their families, but many times their family is well educated or well off enough to sustain themselves if one of their children leaves to travel the world.
And you know what? That’s okay.
As long as we admit it, we can come to terms with it. And, more importantly, find ways to use our privilege to uplift those who aren’t as privileged.
I used to get defensive about my privilege. I’m not a trust fund baby! I’m actually a broke backpacker without a home and I pay for all my travels myself and my parents still harp on me to go back to the US to get a real person job. Acknowledge my struggle!
Now I know better. I have two extremely powerful passports, a good education, no debt, plus technical, life, and language skills to keep me afloat pretty much anywhere. Instead of going on the defense, I now ask: How can I use these to have a positive impact on the world?
I’m still figuring out that question of course—I try to encourage responsible tourism and support other women and promote local voices to varying degrees of success—but what really matters is that I’m actively learning and trying. Purpose has replaced guilt.
3. It’s okay to take breaks.
Spend enough time on the road, and you’ll learn traveler culture is often a never-ending cycle of one-upmanship.
How many countries have you been to? I’ve been to 398 if you count the territories!
You took the bus? That’s cool but I hitchhiked here from the Galapagos Islands on the backs of sea turtles.
I’ve been on the road for 13 years living only on whiskey, cigarettes, and organic honey I collected with nomads in the Himalayas.
No matter what you do, there is always someone who did something more extreme or traveled longer or visited more places you’ve never heard of. Most travelers are perfectly pleasant, but there’s always a loud ego or two who feels the need to one up everyone in the room.
Honestly? These travelers got to me. The more off the beaten track I traveled, the more pressure I felt from all the seemingly hardcore travellers I met. Gone were the casual vacationers and backpackers, in were the adventurous souls whose lives were inextricable from the road. In the early years I felt like an impostor, too wet behind the ears to associate with such worldly folk. I needed to travel farther and longer and crazier and never stop if I wanted to be like these guys.
Becoming an ~influencer~ didn’t help. I felt the need to show a strong face to my followers, too. There were times when I wanted to slow down and do nothing, or go somewhere just to hang out and relax and maybe visit a friend or two… but I felt like that was cheating.
… but again I realized: who cares?
That’s great that you hitchhiked on sea turtles. I like taking the bus because it stops for snacks and I can listen to music and avoid human interaction for a few hours. Cool that you live on cigarettes and honey. I like cheap cookies and treating myself to salads occasionally because I think I’ll probably die of scurvy if I don’t.
Congratulations on traveling for a thousand years to a million different countries. I’m actually going to go visit some friends and family for a bit because I miss them and I’m tired of dealing with douches like you all the time. Also, country counting is overrated.
There’s still a niggling feeling of guilt or weakness every time I spend more than a few days visiting an “easy” country, but I’m cooler with it now than I ever was before.
4. Long-term travel is lonely.
Forget parasites ravaging my bowels, nearly dying of altitude sickness, and being harassed and assaulted on the reg. The hardest part of all my long-term travel is… loneliness.
I’m not talking loneliness in the night when you’re in a dingy room on your own in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do but Netflix. This loneliness is much bigger.
See, the experiences you have while traveling are extraordinary. Your perspectives change. Your understanding of the world changes. You change. Everyone else at home? Not so much.
These changes isolate you. Though family and friends may have shallow interest in your adventures, they often can’t relate. Most of my friends and family don’t want to hear anything more than a gripping near-death tale or two… if even. When you return home—or settle somewhere where travelers are few and far between—it’s like your vast treasure chest of experiences simply evaporates into thin air. And it’s a shock.
No one actually cares about what you’ve seen and how it’s changed you. You are alone in your experiences.
Now, I often feel overwhelmingly lonely and isolated whenever I visit friends and family living “normal” lives in the United States and Europe. Like a cultural pariah, disconnected for too long from the worlds they exist in to fully relate to them; the reverse is also true. Going back “home” to visit people is like waking up from a magical dream: vivid as it was, no one really wants to hear about it.
Does this mean I’m doomed to be lonely forever? Maybe. Perhaps I need to make a better effort to surround myself with travelers. Or maybe I need to stop fixating on the distances between myself and those living “normal” lives, and instead find ways to build bridges between them.
What I do know for sure: regardless of how lonely or pressured or exhausting travel may be at times, I wouldn’t trade all of the experiences I’ve had for anything else in the world.
Listen to the audio version of this article: Podcast Ep 31 KHAYAL DIARIES | Lessons From Life on the Road by Alex Reynolds
The original post by Alex can be found on her blog Lost With Purpose.
