Free like a bear

It was Monday 28th January 2019… finally… my last day at work! The time between the day I signed the termination agreement and this day felt quite long. I guess it is normal when you know that something will come to an end and are just waiting for it to happen! Like a divorce! I am happy I had great colleagues who enjoyed having long coffee breaks with me to make time pass by quicker, and my friend and colleague Dr. Knut to entertain me from the other side of my monitor.

My last day at work also marked the start of the countdown until the trip starts… a little bit more than 2 weeks until the big departure on 13th February 2019. 2 weeks to rest but also to get ready and prepare everything.

As usual, my body knows when it will get a break, and I got sick some days before this last day… a nice bronchitis with 39 degrees fever. Quite bad when you organized a farewell party and invited over 60 colleagues! I really shortly thought about letting them have the party without me, which would have been quite unique, but I finally decided against this idea! My friend Mister Paracetamol helped me to survive the day… and I tried not to shake too many hands or give French kisses!

I organized a breakfast with croissants, jams and Nutella… but also got bread with cheese and sausage to make German guys happier! Haha! It was a very nice party and it felt great to have all these people around me, people from all the departments I worked for united for my departure! It’s nice to feel appreciated by colleagues and to have the feeling you will be missed a bit! With a little voice, I gave a little speech, which I think wasn’t too catastrophic given the fact I was not in a good shape! I hadn’t much to say though since I already wrote a quite long goodbye mail to a big distribution list, with a picture of me as a souvenir. It might sound a bit weird, but I loved the idea of making an ironic picture in which I placed some random items to share some hidden messages…

I got some really nice farewell presents, the highlight being money in many different currencies in a big wallet, but also a beautiful carved soap with the company logo (Daniel is such a talented artist-colleague!) and some smaller things like a travel towel or some company goodies.

It was a weird day though, because I had a hard time realizing I would leave this company forever, after going there almost everyday for the past 11 years! It felt a bit like a dream… I guess I finally realized it was over for real after I gave back my company ID and key to my boss and left the office with 2 bags full of breakfast leftovers and old paper stuff I wanted to take with me!

After taking care of all the boring administrative stuff, the nice part is to plan the trip itself, or at least to think about it.

Most of the people doing a world tour have a very precise idea of what they want to see and do… They know which countries they are interested in and which countries they don’t want to visit. I am quite different. I like to think that I am interested in all the countries, even the ones nobody wants to visit. I use to find beauty in the ugliest places. I remember even enjoying Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro, which is subjectively the most awful city I have ever experienced! But of course there are some places I have been dreaming about that I would like to put on my to-do list, like Iran, Uzbekistan, Mongolia, Sri Lanka, Bali, French Polynesia, Easter Island, the Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia, and many more I guess.

However, the challenge while planning a trip is that you cannot just go from one place to another without thinking about the seasons and climate zones! This influences strongly the route. For example, nobody wants to be in Asia during monsoon season, or to visit Australia in the rainy winter! Since I am leaving in February in German winter, I thought it would be nice to be as quickly as possible in a warmer weather area. I looked on a map and found out that a close place with good winter weather on the way to Asia are the United Arab Emirates, so I decided to start my trip there! It might be nice to be there as long as the temperatures remain human! Looking for the flights to get there, I found a very cheap flight from Budapest, so I had the idea to fly to Budapest first, even though I had been there twice before. But it is such a great city I am not getting bored of! Since I already knew I didn’t want to stay in the Emirates forever, I booked the next flight… to Sri Lanka. That’s where the adventure really starts! Knowing the first destinations, I took care of the flights and of the visa for Sri Lanka; another administrative work but a fun one! While requesting the Sri Lanka visa, I noticed it was possible to stay for maximum 30 days only with a online visa. Since the Sri Lanka part had a programmed end, I thought about the next step too and booked a flight to South India… and also did the visa work for India!

A great way of planning my trip was to dream in front of my Europe and world maps, and to look at my world stress ball I got from my friend Knut. This always gives great ideas! I could spend hours in front of a world map. By the way, the flags are the places I have been to… but there are still enough places without a flag!

So that’s how I am planning! The plan is actually to have no plan! My idea is to be as spontaneous as possible… to follow my feelings and my mood, and to remain flexible so that I can do whatever I want whenever I want. I want to be able to stay somewhere if I really like it, or to leave a place quickly if I hate it. I want to have the chance to follow fellow travelers whose company I enjoy without having to tell them no because I already have fixed plans. For this reason, I didn’t buy any around the world flight ticket. I prefer buying the tickets about 1 month in advance when they should still be cheap, and see where it goes.

A negative aspect of this free planning is that it doesn’t really allow friends to join me. Several friends asked me if they can join me somewhere and if they can book their tickets but I was absolutely unable to tell them when I will be where. But we will see… maybe someone will be quite flexible and join me somewhere, which would be awesome!

I want to keep the same flexibility concerning the length of the trip. I don’t have a concrete plan of how long I want to travel… I like thinking that I will be on the way as long as I enjoy it! One thing is sure: I want to be back in France for next Christmas. Being with my family for Christmas has been a tradition forever and I like it a lot so I don’t want to break it. But who knows if this Christmas break will be the end of my trip… or… just a break in-between? Or maybe I will be back home way before because I had some trouble, got sick… or I am simply fed up!

Concerning the style of traveling, I would love it to be different than usual. I guess this trip is the chance since I have no time limit. Less planning of the activities, less pressure. No planning of the accommodation weeks in advance… Leaving a lot of room to improvisation, following the flow. This is quite challenging since I am a perfectionist control freak and I love planning and organizing. I really love to know what to expect and I don’t like surprises…  but isn’t such a trip also the chance to challenge oneself?

I would also love to change my targets. Usually, my trips focus on old stones and concrete, and on nature. I love sightseeing, visiting a temple or doing a great mountain hike. But this time, I want to focus more on people. I want to meet locals, I want to learn more about their culture. This is the reason why I want to use Couchsurfing as much as I can. For those not knowing Couchsurfing, it is an internet platform (and app) bringing people together who are offering a sleeping space to travelers… for free! It is all about community spirit, giving and taking. I started using Couchsurfing as a host in Berlin about 9 months ago and had amazing experiences, hosting about 20 guys in total. The challenge about using it as a traveler is obviously that you cannot be picky. You don’t always know in which neighborhood the place you sent a request for is. It might be 20 km in the suburbs! And not everybody has a nice bed in a guestroom, so you must also be ready to sleep on a couch (as the name says!), on the floor, or share the bed with your host. It is also quite hard to find hosts in some areas, and you need to send many requests before somebody accepts you, and maybe only for one night instead of the 3 you need. But it is worth the work! I really love the fact that people don’t do that for money. It is very rewarding to pay hosts in a non-material way, like by cooking a dish of your country, helping them cleaning the apartment, or just entertaining them with your life experience and travel stories. I am quite excited to report about how this works for me in this blog in the future!