Being FREE! What a wonderful idea, right? But wait, CALM DOWN!
Anyone who follows my endless - and always more adventurous than I'd like - sagas knows that since September 2022 I've adopted a nomadic lifestyle.
I spent many early mornings auctioning off all the objects I had in my apartment, getting rid of any material goods, clothes that would only fit me for specific events, furniture, appliances, make-up, and anything else that wasn't basic and extremely essential to my survival.
I bought combinations of black and white clothes that would make up the greatest possible variety of outfits with the fewest number of pieces. I reduced a five-story shoe cabinet and a collection of sneakers to three pairs of shoes - one hiking, one casual and one pair of sandals.
I bought the biggest backpack I could find and during the journey I managed to reduce the weight of it by 14kg. I dropped off clothes I loved in Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand for the sake of my financial survival - or the airlines luggage fees.
I was very afraid of regretting and wanting back the things I sold or gave away. I was afraid of wanting the living room of my apartment back, my bed, my sofa, my TV, but living with a minimum of material possessions was by no means one of the biggest difficulties in my new lifestyle.
Travel bloggers and "nomadism course" salespeople love to literally sell this lifestyle as if it were possible and suitable for everyone, when it simply isn't!
It's obvious that the experience is wonderful, it's obvious that working while traveling is something very cool. Especially after a certain age, it's important for us to do things for the first time and stimulate our brain so we don't have that feeling that time is passing and nothing is happening. But I've never seen anyone talking about the frustrations and difficulties of this lifestyle, most likely because those who follow it make money selling this dream to other people.
Many times, those who dream of being a nomad have never left their own countries or continents and have no idea what it's really like to be far away and experience these cultural exchanges. Watching videos from other nomads on YouTube doesn't teach you what it's like to be Latin outside of Latin America - for example - and doesn't show what it's like to be away actually from home - it means: having no home at all.
That's why I decided to share my experience with you. I've been to eight countries in seven months. Eight new beginnings, eight discoveries, eight entire lives in completely different languages and cultures. Here are some of the things I learned on this journey through Asia:
1) It’s one thing to not have a routine, it’s another thing to not have a foundation
We see nomads all the time talking about a life without routine. Not having a routine is great, it's true, but not having a foundation isn't so great.
A life without routine is like the life I led in Florianópolis and even in São Paulo: not having time to get in and out of work, not walking the same streets every day, not doing the same activities every Monday and so on.
A life without a foundation is one in which you need to establish a new “non-routine” almost every month. You arrive in a new place, take your things out of your suitcase, get to know the potential - or no potential - of the shower, memorize the switches, memorize the path to get from your "home" to the nearest market, take a tour to the nearest markets, understand what each one has to offer, reprogram your brain to understand whether things are expensive or cheap according to a new currency, discover which cafes and gyms are nearby, discover what there is to do at night or what to eat, Befriend a waiter, make friends, discover your favorite place to read a book. And when you're finally feeling almost used to it, it's time to change again and start from scratch.
This process is EXTREMELY exhausting, especially for those who combine travel with work - this is not the case for backpackers, who move from place to place every 4 days or 1 week. There comes a time when you just want to stop and not spend so much energy and time searching for a snack bar on Google for 40 minutes when you feel hungry - and I promise you can't stand being constantly disappointed by going to places that only looked cool on Google.
Even when you want to stop, you can't because you are not a citizen of whatever country you're in. The longest a visa will let you stay is around 3 months - in Indonesia there is the possibility of applying for longer visas, which are a little more expensive but worth it if you want to have peace of mind there. When you are finally used to a country, culture and currency, that's when your visa expires and you need to go to the next one - or make a "day trip" to a neighboring country, which is not cheap and is also quite tiring.
Living without a routine is cool, living without a foundation is very stressful!
2) It's very easy to get sick
That feeling of moving from a beach city to a big city - or vice versa - but almost every month.
Change the quality and humidity of the air, the altitude, the temperature, it's OBVIOUS that you're going to get sick - and you're going to get sick SEVERAL times.
I no longer know how to enumerate the collection of illnesses I had during that period, but they are definitely things that don't happen when I'm in Brazil, much less at this frequency. This didn't just happen to me, but also to everyone I came across on these trips.
Candidiasis, worm, diarrhea, tonsillitis or all at the same time. Not to mention food poisoning.
It's not just a matter of having travel insurance - you'll probably never use a hospital - but it's mainly about not being prepared and not having a comfortable environment to get sick.
It already sucks being sick at home, with a pharmacy on every corner or even having a delivery service, in a country where you know the names of the medicines you need to take and the pharmacists speak your language, now imagine getting sick in the completely opposite scenario.
When you get sick, who do you ask for help? Now imagine being in a place where these people simply cannot help you and where you may not know anyone at all.
3) No one survives alone
After years of living completely alone, proudly owning my own medicine cabinet and my blender, I didn't see this challenge in front of me. I felt like a lone wolf and remembered that human beings cannot survive alone and without a support network.
At first, the idea of arriving alone in a place and being 100% open to all the new people, friendships and relationships that can happen is very tempting. It's like pressing a "reset" button on life, as if the person you were before was going to die and everything new was going to be good.
Nobody knows you, you can invent a name, a profession and pretend you were born in another planet. No one will know. You are free from any stigma or guilt that exists where you once lived.
You can again believe that you will meet new places and people and this will free you from the boredom and meaninglessness of being in a place where you no longer see new possibilities. It's a seductive invitation for anyone who is tired of old problems, frustrating routines or who wants to avoid dealing with feelings and traumas linked to normal life events - loss of a job, end of a relationship, change of career, existential crisis, and so on.
On the one hand, it is a positive experience. I couldn't wait to be in a place where I could meet people and introduce them to Isabella, without having to hear "that guy I know follows you". I was also tired of being identified by my traumas and the stories about me that had become urban legends in the city I lived. I wanted to show who I am to new people, without having to be "that feminist", which at first was possible and it was great!
This only lasts until the first moment you face the slightest difficulty.
Anthropologist Margaret Mead - author of the book "Sex and Temperament", about which we have already talked a lot on my book clubs - points out that the first evidence of a civilization is a 15,000-year-old fractured femur, found in an archaeological site. This is because, only in a society where people take care of others, a person could have survived with a broken bone until it healed.
In the same way, it is impossible to survive without having a support network wherever you are. You may have friends back home who are available 24/7 for video calls, but no one will know how to help you better than those who are traveling and experiencing the everyday life with you.
It's one thing to have colleagues, it's another thing to have friends. You will definitely meet a lot of people. If you stay in hostels you will probably always have company to talk, eat, play a game or drink a beer. But colleagues are not friends. Colleagues are not a support network. These are people you don't know and who don't know you - when I say that, I mean the kind of person you won't talk to about your biggest fears and vulnerabilities, about the big events in your personal history and about your complexity as an individual.
Making friends in a hostel is something that becomes no longer worth it. Every 3-4 days you repeat the same conversations: "what's your name? what country are you from? how old are you? what do you work with? what country were you in before? how long have you been traveling? where are you going next?" After the twentieth time this happens, you just completely stop talking to people.
This may be different among nomads, who tend to stay in each place for a longer time. And when finally someone becomes your safe place, they go to one place and you go to another. Unless you meet another nomad and you decide to travel together, or meet up again from time to time.
This is a theoretically large group but very small if you understand that it is only in this group that you will have the possibility of developing true relationships. You've spent your entire life since school, meeting thousands of people until you have friends that you can count on one hand. Now try to make friends among people who are few, not part of your culture and not brought together by any specific common interest other than nomadism.
You will certainly meet nice people with whom you will share a walk, a song, an afternoon at the beach, a brief love story, a dinner and some conversations, but finding someone who is a perfect match (friendship or romantic) and who you would choose for your life even outside the nomad journey is like finding a needle in a haystack.
Even so, anything can happen. That person could no longer be there from one moment to the next, and you won't even have someone to hug or cry with during your grief, because your support network is far away.
You can go to nomad meetings, meet cool people and have good exchanges, but NOBODY will be like your real friends. No one will love and understand you like those people who went through heaven and hell by your side. True connections are rare and the path to them is lonely. Most of the time what you want most is an afternoon at your best friend's house, doing something in your city that you once sure said you couldn't handle anymore.
4) Getting to know other cultures is really cool, adapting to them can be very frustrating and tiring
Imagine that you sent your clothes to the dry cleaners and when you got the package back, you realized that an item was missing. In Brazil, the company would never do this, because it would register piece by piece at entry. But, if it happened, they would reimburse you in some way, give you a voucher for eternal free washes and, even so, you could sue the company and win moral damages.
In Southeast Asia you get a: "I'm sorry, you must have lost your pants." Of course they have consumption laws in these countries, but: 1) what difference does that make for a tourist?; and 2) there is no supervision and no one cares. Where are you going to call to complain? How are you going to open a case? You don't have the slightest chance and end up with nothing but defeat and conformity. This happens again and again.
The laundry:
During these months there were all kinds of possible problems, from losing clothes in the laundry to canceling a bus I needed to take to the airport and no one notifying me, no one reimbursing me and not helping me in any other way to get there. In these places you learn to never count on "common sense" and the notion of basic rights you have. At first we even laugh, but over time the stress increases each time something new happens.
This doesn't just apply to consuming things, but also to basic customs and things you do on a daily basis. You need to learn to drive on the other lane - after you've already been forced to learn how to drive a motorcycle, walk on streets without sidewalks, calculate prices according not only to the currency, but to what is cheap or expensive in that country, among many other things.
Potentially you will find bathrooms where you have to squat - love them - and where people think it's normal for everyone to get water from the same bucket with the same mug to wash their butts, and put their pants back on without drying them at all - instead of using paper or SOMETHING.
In some places people are not aware of concepts such as: hot water in the shower, garbage collection, sustainability, human rights, gratitude, privacy, hygiene or kindness - don't get surprised "1st worlders", I'm also talking about you.
All of these concepts are obviously constructions of our own culture and we will only find out whether they are right or wrong on the FinAL Judgment Day - however it works. The point here is: adapting to a completely different reality requires enormous effort and a lot of patience. You don't just get out of your comfort "zone", you have to forget what comfort is.
This includes, for example, your diet. In more "neo-colonized" places like Bali, it is possible to find food that we know. There's even a Brazilian steakhouse - of obviously very questionable quality, but good enough to satisfy your craving - feijoada, coxinha and other things you can find in specific places. This means that there is also a large community of Brazilians, which helps you not feel so alone.
In other places, you only find western food of mediocre quality, which ends up irritating you more than helping you, as you create expectations. Of course the goal is to adapt to the local cuisine and It may seem cool, but it's not easy to live without your "comfort foods". I'm tired of seeing bloggers saying that eating in Asia is ridiculously cheap and that they can have lunch and dinner for R$10. It's possible? Yes. Good luck to you eating only Nasi Goreng - a typical Indonesian dish that is basically fried rice with egg and a few other things - or Pad Thai - Thai rice noodles with mixes just like Nasi Goreng - EVERY SINGLE DAY.
Not to exaggerate, I would say that each country in SA Asia has a variation of five typical dishes that are the same you will find in all restaurants. Wherever you go to eat, the menu will always be the same. It's cool for tourists, but a big challenge for who was raised in completely different habits and need to feel home somehow.
I arrived in Thailand saying I was going to eat green curry and Tom Yum - a coconut soup with chicken/shrimp - every day. A month later I literally stopped eating - Tom Yum or anything else - because I couldn't stand eating the same 5 dishes every day. In Vietnam I lived based on Bahn Mi - a sandwich with chicken/beef and salad - because the only other option was Pho - the famous noodle soup - cooked in environments that Brazilian health surveillance would undoubtedly consider inappropriate, to say the least.
It's not difficult to find a pizza or pasta - I believe anywhere in the world - but, especially in places where there aren't many foreigners living, the price won't be low and the quality will probably be disappointing, after all it's not their cuisine. Over time, this also makes us a little irritated.
Our hostel experience also included everything - until we became experts on the subject. In Ha Giang, in the north of Vietnam, we arrived at a hostel at 3am and found all the tables and the reception floor literally COVERED in trash, while an employee was on his cell phone behind the counter and a lady was sleeping on a sofa with a dog. We didn't shower or poop several times because the smell and dirt in the bathrooms were impossible to tolerate.
Here's an addendum: before anyone thinks I'm talking about asians, in hostels the majority of guests are Europeans and they are the ones who make everything dirty. The difference is that in Brazil - my reference, cause it's where I come from - hostel owners invest in cleaning to keep everything healthy and in certain places people don't have Brazilian cleaning standards and simply don't care. Eventually you freak out because you only find the famous "bus station kinda bathroom" everywhere. After months of not being able to SHIT comfortably in a clean place, I doubt you won't go crazy.
In Vietnam we took several bus trips, but these buses were nothing like the ones we know:
In addition to the Vietnamese being generally physically smaller than us - and the seats being made for their average size - they also don't share our concepts of privacy and security. On some buses you can literally lie in a "truck" with 5 other unknown people, very close to you - so close you can spoon them if you feel comfortable enough. Most of them have a kind of bunk bed, forming two "floors" of seats, on metal structures that would certainly crush the people below in case of an accident and leave those who survived trapped. At the same time, the ones above are also lying very close to the ceiling. Some of these buses do not have bathrooms. On some trips, passengers lie on the floor, in the space between the rows. Most of them don't have seat belts.
This is an issue that caught me on several occasions when traveling through Asia: people's safety is not a priority in the legislation of these countries. Whether due to the unsanitary conditions in which the food is cooked or the irregular means of transport: the tuk tuks and all the other thousand forms of improvisations they do on motorcycles, the five people and two dogs on the motorcycles, the trains that pass through busy streets over people's things, the boats that work in way above their capacity, the buses that are a big mess.
In Vietnam, for example, talking to locals we discovered that the few safety measures we saw - such as a maximum limit of 2 people per boat on a river in Ninh Binh or the closure of the "train street" in Hanoi - only apply to tourists. The government doesn't care about the safety of the locals.
5) The services will drive you insane
This part is particularly difficult for those who come from large centers, such as São Paulo, New York or wherever is BIG enough.
We can get into the capitalism/culture debate at another time, but for now, let's focus on reality: because our consumer legislation is taken very seriously in where I come from, we are used to impeccable services in any corner bar.
When in Asia, the first 30 times you order food while you're starving and they just forget to bring it, you laugh. Then you get irritated. You get irritated when the laundry promises to deliver your clothes at a certain time, but they don't. Or when there is an employee at the restaurant or shop where you are but they won't leave their cell phone to look at your face.
Conversations like this one are common:
I GO INTO AN ESTABLISHMENT THAT HAS A SIGN WITH THE "WESTERN UNION" LOGO AT THE DOOR - THE ESTABLISHMENT IS LIKE ONE OF THOSE CANDY SHOPS YOU FIND IN SUBWAY STATIONS
Me: Is this Western Union?
Attendant: Yes
Me: My physical card has been blocked and without it I can't withdraw money from the ATM. Is it possible for me to pay you with my digital card via Apple Pay and withdraw in cash?
Attendant: No
Me: Can you tell me how I could get money here?
Attendant: I don't know
Me: But isn't this Western Union?
Attendant: Yes
Me: So a person in my country can deposit the money for me and I can withdraw it here?
Attendant: Yes
Me: And where should the person send the money to? Does this establishment have a name? A code?
Clerk: She has to deposit it there and you withdraw it here
Me: But where should she send it to? How does it work?
Attendant: I don't know
Me: I saw that you also have the MoneyGram logo at the entrance, do you know how it works?
Attendant: No
6) It's not as cheap as everyone says
It is true that in Asia, for example, the cost of living is much lower than the cost of living in Brazil, especially in São Paulo. There's no comparison. This does not mean that this lifestyle is financially possible for everyone.
You will pay less to eat and you will have many things to do for free, some luxuries that in Brazil are not for everyone - such as having massages, going to beach clubs or even visiting paradisiacal beaches - in these places are more accessible. This doesn't mean you can travel without any money - as bloggers say. Unless you're really open to a real hippie lifestyle - like sleeping on the street and bathing in waterfalls.
It is important to remember that you cannot stay in the same country for many months, so you will always have to have money for plane tickets and visa renewals - these prices are calculated according to the budget of Europeans and North Americans. You will be sick a lot more than usual and you need to have a reserve for that too. Emergencies will happen, plans will go wrong and you will have unforeseen expenses from time to time.
You will need a few days in a hotel room, your computer charger will break, you will need to buy clothes, you will lose things, etc. These things cost money.
What helps you save the most is volunteering in hostels to save money on accommodation. If you're short on money and can't afford to pay rent, it's a great alternative. But volunteering won't always work out and you can't COUNT on it - I personally strongly do NOT recommend it. Furthermore, there are several social and economic problems that make volunteer work a socially not very interesting alternative - I'll write a post about that later.
7) Yes, you English has to be fluent
This is one of the biggest absurdities that bloggers who sell courses say: you don't need to know how to speak English.
How do you think we would have gotten through all these troubles without speaking English? How can you ensure your own safety if you can't communicate? How do you expect to create connections with other people if you can't communicate with them? What do you do if you need to call the police? What do you say to the doctor if you have an accident?
You don't need to speak English to see a landscape, but you need to speak English to make friends, to solve problems at the airport, to ask for help, to offer help, to eat, to buy medicine, to take transportation, to find a location. Yes, you can mime and use the Google translator sometimes, or on a quick trip. But it is impossible to live without being able to communicate - anthropology and basic communication theory.
It is a visibly emotionally exhausting process for those who are involved in it. If you're not 100% comfortable with speaking English at some point you just wish everyone to speak your language, because not even speaking other languages fluently can you establish connections as authentic as those you establish in your mother tongue.
Traveling without speaking English is not only uncomfortable but also dangerous! Especially for women.
8) Being Brazilian in places full of Europeans is not a bed of roses
Of course, it's super cool to meet people from all corners of the world, but in Brazil we are strays from the north and end up not realizing how colonized we are.
Let's start with something silly: Europeans don't know how to party. While you're traveling, you'll naturally want to take a stroll from time to time. These parties will be designed by and for European tourists, because local parties have nothing to do with what we understand as a party and are also not advertised to tourists.
Although Bali's beautiful beach clubs look attractive, that's because in the photos you can't hear the music playing there. Think about that New Year's Eve party in the tackiest place you can think of, now call the DJ from that party and ask him to repeat the 2014 set - or worse.
Don't worry, it gets worse: people don't know how to dance and, worse, they don't know how to drink! We Latinos have more BARRIO and learned to drink as adults without causing embarrassment when we were young. It's normal to see Europeans aged 30+ vomiting after a night out, falling off their bunk beds because they're drunk, shouting and doing stupid things that we already thought were cringeworthy when we were 14 years old.
Another thing is, obviously, how they sexualize our bodies and probably our whole existence. It is not a possibility for a latin woman to dance as she would normally do anywhere in her country without being sexually harassed by an European or North American man. This is the thing that for me, personally, has the power to awake the scariest demons who live inside of me and are capable of things I can't even write here.
Their sense of humor is very silly and they know very little about the "rest"of the world. Just as US Citizens are the worst at geography, Europeans are the worst at history - some don't even know what colonization was and most truly believe that Europeans dominated the world because they were more advanced, technological and intelligent, not because they killed every other population on their way.
This Eurocentric thinking manifests itself in small actions, such as the day when a Dannish guy stopped the reggaeton and put ABBA on at a Latin party at a bar called "no más", in Ubud, central Bali, Indonesia. According to him, the place's playlist had "a lot of songs in Spanish" and therefore "not everyone could understand and have fun."
Now imagine yourself - being a politically literate citizen from Latin America, survivor of chaos, professional dancer by nature, possessor of a sarcasm that only the needy know, warrior in a wild job market that pays you a minimum wage only if you have higher education - what is it like for you to share your days with people who: don't know that being liberal means being right-wing, don't know what a social movement is or what it means to be marginalized, don't know how to move their own body, have a total of zero good joke themes because they doen't go through difficulties and receive a comfortable salary without needing to know where Angola is.
Every time you say you're from Brazil to a European or North American - which are the majority in these places - you'll hear "Wow, that's cool" or "Wow, you came from far away". Always interested looks but rarely enough for those people to have wanted to set their foreign feet on our land at some point in their lives. If you are a woman, then you already know, right? I got to the point where I had to punch an old Belgian man on the face in a mini market because he simply grabbed me by the waist when he heard me telling someone else on the line that I was from Brazil.
You will hear stupid questions like: "Is it very dangerous there? What are the streets like? Do you have electricity? Do you speak Spanish?" among other pearls that are not funny at all.
At first this won't bother you, but over time it also becomes annoying to be surrounded by ignorant people all the time, in addition to increasing the sense and then the desire for isolation. At one point it gets tiring having to explain to the European liberal that the cocaine he snorts to be "posh" has blood from Latin human trafficking.
It's all this and much more!
None of this means that being a nomad is horrible and that it's not worth leaving your comfort zone to try something new, but it's important for us to understand what reality is and align our expectations with what happens in practice.
And you, did you also dream of being a nomad?