I’m writing this from a couch in an Apartment in Pula, a small city in northern Croatia. Today I woke up late and made breakfast. Two cups of instant coffee, a small bowl of muesli and some peanut butter toast. I went through my daily routine of a 30 minute seated meditation, 10 minutes of Wim Hoff breathing exercises and some yoga. I caught up on all the news around the world, finding nothing interesting enough to click beyond the headline. We went for a bike ride, a swim and a little shopping trip and then came back to the apartment to cook dinner and write this blog post. And that’s pretty much how we’ve spent every day for the past 3 weeks since we arrived in Pula and we’ve still got another 10 days to go. We’ve done almost no sightseeing, we haven’t eaten out once, and the highlight of day might be finding a new bike trail or striking up a conversation with some random tourist in the Old Town or filing a much delayed tax return.
It probably sounds boring. It is. Intentionally. After a year of travel it’s hard to stay motivated and interested enough to spend time wandering around art galleries, eating at restaurants or checking into a different hotel each night. And it’s not just the fatigue. There’s also a niggling feeling that by filling up the day with ‘travel stuff’ there’s little time left to do anything productive. Or achieve any personal development goals. It’s easy to let things slip and suddenly realise that, whilst there’s been plenty of amazing memories and nice photos, there’s a whole other side of life that has been neglected.
Which is why we’re taking this break from travel. It’s actually our second such break. We spent an amazing month holed up in a log cabin in Bariloche, Argentina back in March. We stayed in a little township about 10km from Bariloche next to a glacier lake. The roads were all dusty gravel and the nearest supermarket was a 30 minute walk from the cabin. We cooked for ourselves every day using a gas hob and, when it started getting cold later in the month, we lit a fire at nighttime. All around were amazing mountains, trails, rivers and lakes that could be explored during the days without the need of a car or a bike. After 9 months driving the Pan American it was the perfect place to recover our fitness and settle down for a while. Best off all I was able to devote some time to work on some projects that were hard to do snatching a few hours here and there while travelling.
So now we find ourselves in Croatia taking another month off from travel. It’s a similar setup to our time in Argentina, but this time I have a second hand bicycle that I bought in the UK, a gym membership, the beaches of the Adriatic only a 5km ride away. The weather is glorious. And once again I’m enjoying having some time to work on personal projects (and procrastinate as is often the case). With this experience I’ve learnt to be a little more intentional about travel. Driving the Pan-American was great because there was a goal to it – reach Santiago from Canada by February 2023. However, after Bariloche we spent a fairly aimless month backpacking through Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil. We didn’t nearly enjoy that sort of travel as much as living in the log cabin. So for the remainder of this trip I’ve set a few goals. I’ll bike touring the Adriatic from Pula to Athens. In September I’ll do a 4 week yoga teacher training course in India and after that will head up to Nepal to teach english to monks at a monastery in the Himalayas. I feel a lot more comfortable with that sort of a plan then something like “spend 5 nights in Paris then take the train to Amsterdam and see some museum”. It just feels so much more….intentional.
Adrian Falvey 