Finding the Adventurer in Me: Lessons from a Year-Long Quest Across the Continent
Don Clyde Clyde is a world-travelling wordsmith rockstar with dreams of grandeur. His passions include playing the blues, following the world’s best football club Liverpool FC, and exploring the world. Read all about his exploits at ClydeMeetsWorld and ClydeMeetsWorldii.
A long way from home in the mountains of Mestia, Georgia.
You’ve been there before. It’s Monday, and you’re stuck at the office waiting for the day to end. You’re watching the minutes tick by, and counting the weeks until the next long weekend.
You’ve only just returned from a 4-day / 3-night getaway to some exotic island resort nearby, and you really ought to be feeling recharged and raring to go, but you’re not. You’re feeling hollow.
Something’s missing, and you’re not quite sure what.
The word you’re looking for is Adventure, with a big fat capital “A”. A week at a villa in Phuket is great, but it’s all starting to become oh so predictable.
Also Read: Here's Why Most Singaporeans Should Travel Alone At Least Once
Learning to ride a bike along the rugged dirt roads of Pakse, Laos.
As a child, you used to read about travellers venturing into the great unknown. You admired them for their courage, and dreamed that someday, you’d do the same. But now that you’re all grown up, you realise that the world is a scary place, and you’re not sure if you have it in you to stomach all that uncertainty.
I’m here to tell you that you do, and that the world really isn’t as scary as you think it is. Take it from me. I’m an expert. And I used to be just like you.
A year on the road
My route from Singapore to Zagreb:
Singapore-Malaysia-Thailand-Laos-Cambodia-Vietnam-China-Kazakhstan-Kyrgyzstan-Kazakhstan-Azerbaijan-Georgia-Turkey-Bulgaria-Romania-Bulgaria-Macedonia-Albania-Montenegro-Bosnia-Croatia
On the 1 Dec 2014, I left Singapore with my fiancé, not knowing where I was heading or for how long I’ll be gone. I had a few thousand dollars to spare and a backpack full of clothes, and I was determined to find my own Adventure.
When I left Singapore, I was timid and afraid, but I returned a year later a changed man. I had travelled a total of 19 countries, making it all the way to Croatia, covering the entire distance by land.
Before I left Singapore, I was anything but a seasoned traveller. The furthest I’d gone prior to my year-long trip was to India for a friend’s wedding. Other holidays I’d taken was to places like Phuket, Bangkok, and Langkawi.
Everything was always safe, comfortable, and pre-booked, and nothing was left to chance.
I had spoken with a few of the backpackers I’d met on these holidays though, and I was shocked to discover that many of them had been travelling non-stop for months or even years. I asked them how they did it, and I was even more surprised to hear how easy and affordable it all sounded.
I envied their free-spiritedness and decided that I wanted some of what they were having for myself. And so I made the decision to save up and leave my job at the end of the year.
Meeting a German backpacker while on holiday with my family in India.
The idea of a year on the road without a destination nonetheless seemed crazy at the time, but I was quite stubbornly determined to plunge right into the deep end. I established from the get-go a set of Adventure Ground Rules to ensure my excitement quota was met:
Rule 1: Take risks
The entire concept of the trip when I first started was a great big risk in my mind. Being a Singaporean, I naturally worried about my career and whether I’d ever find work again upon returning home. Everyone I spoke to thought I had lost my mind – how would a year-long travel break look on my resume when I finally got home?
It’s a silly fear to have, when you really think about it. I have an education and experience, and now that I’m back, I’ve come to realise that interviewers are actually quite impressed when I tell them about the incredible journey I took.
Traversing the war-torn streets of Bosnia.
The other concern which everyone I talked to in Singapore had was that of general safety. Somehow, we all have the impression that the world is a crazy dangerous place with muggers and murderers lurking around every corner.
While I do come from one of the safest countries in the world, the rest of the world isn’t some criminal warzone. You’ll be quite safe just about anywhere as long as you exercise a little common sense. The only way you’ll find this out for yourself is by getting out of your comfort zone and experiencing it first-hand.
Rule 2: Go without a plan
This is true up to a certain degree. We only really planned our journey one or two towns at a time. When I left Singapore, I hadn’t a clue where I was heading, except that I was going North and then probably West. Not knowing where you’re going is perhaps the very core of exploration.
If you want to see and experience the things they don’t tell you about on the websites or brochures, then don’t follow a plan. Be flexible and go where the wind takes you. Forget about that Lonely Planet itinerary, and talk to the locals and other travellers instead.
Let them lead the way, and you’ll find that the doors that open for you will be plentiful and unique. You’ll be out of your element, but that’s exactly where you want to be.
Shashlik and music with Lola and company in Aksu, Kazakhstan, near the Russian border. Met Lola while entering Kazakhstan from China, and she invited us to stay with her family for a few days.
Rule 3: Spend as little as possible
Would you believe me if I told you my year’s worth of travel cost me just a little over ten thousand Singapore dollars, all expenses included? That’s less than a thousand dollars a month, which was the seemingly insane budget I had set for myself before the trip.
Travelling on a tight budget not only allows you to stay out on the road longer, it also makes your trip a whole lot more exciting. Not being able to simply spend your way out of any problem means that you actually need to be resourceful.
It forces you to talk to strangers and ask for help, which in turn leads to the realisation that most of the people out there are actually really very nice and helpful.
Lancelot the friendly farm-dog adopts us and watches over our tent in Romania. Camping out and hiking in Europe was a great way to save money and enjoy the countryside.
Rule 4: Travel the entire trip by land
There were several reasons why I chose to do this but the main reason was so that I could see the world change gradually as I made my way slowly across the continent from one town to the next. I also did not want to miss all the in-between places you don’t get to see while jet-setting around the world.
Having completed the trip, I’m super glad to have travelled this way. You don’t realise how vast the world really is until you’ve seen it all go by through the grimy windows of buses and trains. In many of our minds, we think of the world as Paris and London and Shanghai and Bangkok, and a collection of all these famous places. This was not the world I witnessed.
Feasting in a Kyrgyz yurt with a nomadic family.
Travelling by land reveals to you that there is an unbelievable amount of the world we don’t see or hear about, with people living and thriving everywhere. Flying from airport to airport around the world is easy, but if you want to see the people and the places in the spaces between the airports, then I strongly urge you to travel by land as much as you can.
Following these basic ground rules paid off much more than I had expected. The places I saw and the experiences I had were straight out of an Adventure novel, and I feel truly blessed to have enjoyed them. It would be criminal of me not to encourage others to take the leap I took, and so here I am writing to you.
You know who you are. There’s a fire burning inside of you already just from reading this, and you want to stoke the flames, but you’re afraid. Don’t be! You owe it to yourself to, at the very least, give it a go.
You’re young, and you’re restless from playing it safe all the time. So go ahead and take that leap of faith. You’ll discover three things:
One – It really isn’t that much of a risk at all, travelling the world; Two – You had it in you all along; and Three – why on earth did you wait this long to do this?!
Jamming with the locals in Tbilisi, Georgia.
Take it from me, a reformed version of you. If I can do it, then surely you can too.
Also Read: Singapore to Europe by Land: It Took Me 7 Weeks and S$3000
“I’d rather regret the things I’ve done than regret the things I haven’t done” – Lucille Ball