A solo traveler's blog

 This post first appeared  here  in March 2025. I am backpacking solo through SE Asia since a while now. While visiting Laos, I found myself in a small garage in Vang Vieng run by a hilarious French guy. Among the wrecks, there it was—my future ride: a barely-holding-together Chinese clone of a Honda Wave 100. This thing wasn’t just old. It had lived. A bad life. I thought that it would have been a as good as stupid challenge to cross Laos on it. Sometimes I should just ignore my brain. But not this time. It had no lights. No fuel gauge. No speed and distance indicators. Nothing to tell me if I was going fast or about to run out of gas in the middle of nowhere. I thought “who the f**k does even need that?”. And on top of it, it still had a sidecar welded to it, because the French guy used it to move pigs around the fields. “I don’t think this will make it to the south,” I told him. He grinned. “It’s going to be an adventure. A good one.” That was all the encouragement I n...

  I grew up thinking I was supposed to become someone. Not just a person, an important person. Get good grades. Get into a good school. Get a good job. Become good at something. And then, if I really played my cards right, I’d get a house, a car, maybe a balcony with plants I’d forget to water, and enough money to pretend I was fulfilled. That was the idea, anyway. And to be fair, I did a decent job of following the script. I studied hard. I earned degrees. I got a PhD, for God’s sake. I did the thing. And for a while, that made me feel like I mattered. Like I was building something real. Like I was someone. Then I found myself walking alone on a dusty road in some remote part of South-East Asia, wearing a sweaty T-shirt, a broken flip-flop, and the sudden realization that no one cares. Not in a rude way. Just… genuinely, absolutely, beautifully indifferent. The guy selling grilled bananas didn’t ask about my thesis topic. The woman stirring soup into plastic bags didn’t blink at m...