The price of setting off – what travelling really costs

There is this moment, just before you leave.

Not the romantic one. Not the one with the sunset and the suitcase and that smile you see on Instagram. But the quiet, slightly queasy moment when you ask yourself: Am I sure I want this? And the honest answer is mostly: No. Not really. But you go anyway. I’ve been on the road for almost a decade. Without a fixed address. Through countries that were never at the top of my list, and through situations no travel guide in the world describes. Cameroon right now. Before that Nigeria. Before that Crete, Bulgaria, everything in between. And the question I get asked most often – by family, by strangers, by myself at three in the morning – is not Where to next? It is: How do you endure it?

What traveling really costs

The truth is uncomfortably simple: It costs. Not just money, though that too. It costs nerves. Physical strength. It costs the ability to deal with situations you can’t prepare for – borders that suddenly work differently than expected, buses that don’t come, plans that dissolve into thin air. It costs frustration tolerance to an extent you simply don’t know beforehand. And above all, it costs willpower. Not courage. Courage is a moment. Willpower is every day, anew.

The biggest misconception about a life on the road

The biggest misconception about a life like mine is that you have to be particularly brave, particularly free, particularly something. That’s not true. You just have to be more stubborn than your own doubts. A little hungrier for the next step than for the safety of the previous one. That sounds trivial. It is not. Because the hunger – for change, for what waits beyond the next border, for the version of yourself you only find when you’ve stopped waiting – that hunger is not a given. It must be nurtured. On days when everything goes wrong. On days when you ask yourself whether you shouldn’t just stop.

The dream costs nothing. The departure costs everything – and gives back even more.

Not immediately. Not always in the way you expected. But it gives back. I don’t know this from books. I know this from ten years on the road and the quiet certainty that I am exactly where I belonged – even if from the outside it sometimes looks like the exact opposite.

Are you standing right before your own departure? No matter how big or small – I believe in you.