Addressing My Absence
3 months is a while
My apologies to paid subscribers, I hope to make up for the lack of content in due time.
I spent the last 3 months or so as a vagrant in Europe. I highly recommend doing this for people that are in a transitional period in their life with minimal responsibilities, as currently I am. The only real constraint is time, not really money. I did this all (including 1000USD flights from Australia) for ~6000USD. A combined 8 weeks or so of it I was homeless, sometimes in urban areas. I didn’t have a tent for fear of getting fined so I’d sleep on benches when they were available, when they weren’t I’d sleep on the ground with my handy dandy 15USD foldable foam mat. It would make nearly any surface comfortable enough to get a decent sleep.
The flexibility, freedom and lack ‘time stress’ that this mode of travelling brings can’t really be compared. Some days I’d just lay about on Croatian beaches, not worrying that the day was ‘wasted’ as I didn’t pay for any hotel/hostel. Since I never really booked anything more than a day in advance after I initially landed in Athens I could take random leads to random places. The lack of planning inevitably lead to fuck ups which just made things more interesting. Once I’d reached Budapest about a month into the journey I decided to buy a 100USD second hand bike and just start cycling with a vague idea of Italy in my head. 5 weeks, 1000 kilometers and a tour of Vienna and the alps later I’d reached Italy. All unplanned things that you can do if your daily expenses are so low (about 20USD while outside of cities for me). Or if you are rich (I am not currently). I think that bike touring/bikepacking is the best way to enjoy travelling for more than a month. The balance of city, wilderness and countryside complements each other very much so. Travelling to cities alone can become one big blur partly thanks to globohomo.
Anyways, I'm not intending to write about all the odd and memorable experiences I had since I’m not motivated enough to write it in an interesting way. Take this as a mostly unjustified exhortation to hobo travel. If you want to do it there are few excuses.
I do wonder if it rewires your brain somewhat. Maybe it will only have this effect on young people such as myself, or maybe I am currently feeling a temporary effect that will settle down. Perhaps both.
Posts unrelated to my personal life coming soon. Thanks for hanging in there!
Hey, post more.
Welcome back! While I never travelled myself, I never really understood the point. If you look at the map, it's just human dwellings one after another. And aren't all human material culture ultimately the same? There are only two kinds, agriculture and pastoralists, and the nomals have gone the way of hunter-gathered since... Unless you mean the social experiences? Now that would obviously be worthwhile because culture is the most distinct thing about human ethnicities, but you'd need to be sociable (and maybe even good-looking) for that, which is impossible to gain without the proper genetics.