If you’ve been following my recent Instagram reels, you’ve seen the highlights: hyper-modern skylines, bullet trains gliding silently at 300 km/h, and street food stalls serving recipes older than most Western nations. But short clips only capture a fraction of the story. Moving past the camera lens, my time in China completely reshaped the questions I ask before forming an opinion.

Here is the deeper story behind the footage.

What fascinated me: the frictionless future

The sheer pace of daily life in China’s mega-cities is mesmerising. What fascinated me most was how effortlessly technology is woven into the mundane.

Cash is virtually non-existent, and plastic credit cards feel like ancient relics.

Everything - from buying a 50-cent steamed bun from a street vendor to booking a cross-country train - happens seamlessly through a smartphone.

Yet, right beside a neon-lit, cyberpunk boulevard, you’ll find a centuries-old courtyard temple with incense drifting through the air. It is a place where the year 2026 and 1000 AD exist in harmony, proving that rapid modernisation doesn’t have to mean erasing history. Nor does high-tech living have to strip away human warmth.

In a bustling café in Shenzhen, I accidentally knocked over a fresh cup of coffee the waitress had just brought to my table. Entirely my fault, I walked up to the counter to pay for a second one. She stopped me resolutely, waving her hand with a warm smile, and made me a fresh cup free of charge.

These quiet acts of kindness followed me everywhere.

In Shanghai, the clerk who sold me a local SIM card wrote down his personal WeChat handle, telling me to message him if anything went wrong or if I needed help returning it in another city.

In Kunming, when my Alipay app glitched at a kiosk and no cash could be accepted, the shopkeeper simply handed me a bottle of water with a dismissive wave, refusing to let me walk away thirsty.

Share

Behind the dizzying infrastructure and high-tech headlines, it was these quiet, daily gestures of generosity that truly defined my experience.

What amazed me: scale, speed, and human energy

You can read about China’s infrastructure, but experiencing it firsthand is staggering.

• The Cities: Places like Shanghai and Shenzhen don’t just feel big; they feel like living, breathing organisms of light, engineering, and architecture.

• The Mobility: The transit systems make travel elsewhere feel like it’s stuck in slow motion.

• The Public Life: Parks come alive at dusk with locals practicing group dances, playing chess, or painting calligraphy on the pavement with water brushes.

The sheer scale of development paired with the everyday vibrancy of the local community is undeniably breathtaking.

What puzzled me: the paradoxes

China is a masterclass in contradiction, and navigating it as an outsider is genuinely puzzling at times. You step into a completely different digital ecosystem where familiar Western apps are replaced by all-in-one super-apps that control every aspect of living.

Then there is the cultural dynamic: a society that feels intensely communal in public spaces, yet deeply private in personal interactions.

Trying to reconcile the rigid narratives I had consumed back home with the warm, helpful, and curious people I encountered daily created a constant state of eye-opening cognitive dissonance.

Beyond black-and-white: escaping Western dualism

The narrative surrounding China in the West often defaults to a rigid binary: freedom vs. oppression, good vs. bad. We are told to view the country almost entirely through a single lens, usually dominated by its government’s authoritarian structure and human rights record.

When you travel with an open mind, you don’t ignore those heavy realities - if you were Uyghur, Tibetan, or a political dissident, your lived experience of China would be vastly different and undeniably painful. But travel forces you to confront a deeper truth: the world is rarely dualistic.

It is almost always both/and, never either/or.

To focus exclusively on a nation’s dark chapters while blinding oneself to its monumental achievements - lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty, engineering world-class infrastructure, and fostering a dynamic middle class - is to hold a fundamentally incomplete view.

Every “good” country harbours quiet injustices, and every “bad” country is home to human beauty, progress, and everyday joy.

Living in a constant state of geopolitical tribalism is exhausting. Real perspective means holding space for complexity: recognising real concerns while celebrating genuine human progress.

The cost of the future

There is another side to China’s relentless push toward the future. The same obsession with technological dominance, hyper-efficiency, and rapid economic output that amazes visitors creates immense pressure on the people building it.

During my journey, the most striking conversations weren’t about grand national ambitions - they were about the human cost of the grind.

In Guangzhou, a 23-year-old architecture graduate told me his main goal was making money to support his parents. When I challenged him to think beyond filial duty, he sighed.

“I’ve spent my life fulfilling other people’s expectations,” he told me. “I don’t even want to be an architect. If I had no obligations, I’d become a Buddhist monk. I just want to slow down, pause, and listen to myself.

Share The Making of a Journey with Ilona Vinogradova

• The Reality of the “996” Culture: Many young adults (ages 20–27) face the infamous 996 work culture - working from 9:00 AM to 9:00 PM, six days a week - in pursuit of corporate success.

• The Desire for “Quiet Life”: Rather than dreaming of climbing the ladder at a tech giant in Shenzhen or Beijing, a growing number of young people talk about tang ping (”lying flat”) or bai lan (”letting it rot”).

• Seeking Peace over Prestige: Their ultimate dream isn’t a promotion; it’s escaping to a quiet village or small town, growing their own food, running a modest café, and reclaiming their peace of mind.

China’s race toward tomorrow has created a generation that is deeply tired. In a culture that has sprinted for many years without stopping, the most radical act for a 25-year-old today isn’t inventing the next app - it’s choosing to slow down.

China isn’t a monolith, a movie villain, or a flawless utopia. It is a vast, hyper-complex realm where the future is being built at breakneck speed, while the humans living inside it search for the same things we all do: connection, dignity, and a moment to breathe.

Why you need to go (to change your mind)

Let’s be honest: our days are filled with short soundbites, curated feeds, and second-hand opinions. It’s easy to form rigid ideas about a country when you’ve only ever viewed it through a screen.

Travel at its best isn’t about confirmation; it’s about challenging your own assumptions.

On a train ride to Chengdu, a retired math teacher named Lin noticed me struggling to translate a snack wrapper. Using a voice-translation app on his phone, we ended up sharing an hour-long conversation about his grandkids, British rain, and Chinese tea. Without a word of shared language, a small screen bridged a gap that news headlines make feel impossible.

If you truly want to expand your perspective, China is an essential destination. It forces you to unlearn simple narratives, sit with complexity, and witness a completely different model of modern human development. You don’t have to agree with or understand everything you see, but you will leave transformed.

Leave a comment

Share The Making of a Journey with Ilona Vinogradova

Subscribe now

Argentina, mi amor, I cannot imagine you without Patagonia.

Part 1 of this essay is here

I close my eyes and I am back in you – not to you, but in you.

The windows of the house where I lived in Ushuaia looked out onto the Beagle Channel. The very same one through which Magellan sailed in 1520. The one through which Darwin’s ship passed.

Before either of them, the Yaghan people – the world’s southernmost nomadic navigators – knew these waters and called this land their home. I did not know their names until after I left. Now I say them aloud, because a love letter should name all the loves – including the ones I arrived too late to meet. Search them up – these people have a fascinating yet tragic history.

Many others have come and gone. But you remain. Ushuaia. The southernmost city in the world. Beyond it lies only Antarctica, some 1,000 kilometres away. Street signs remind you that Antarctica is closer from here than Buenos Aires.

The house in Ushuaia belonged to Sonia and Ariel, and for a while it was mine too.

Every evening I would sit for minutes that felt like hours, staring out of the window in disbelief: Am I in Patagonia? Am I looking at the same channel through which Magellan sailed? The view was so improbable it felt like a gift I hadn’t earned.

I will never forget how these two looked after me. When they realised I had no waterproof trousers and was planning to walk 20 kilometres through the national park in the rain, Ariel quietly kitted me out with his motorbike trousers and a thermos flask. Both came in very handy. That is the Argentine way – not a fuss, not a favour. Just: here, take this.

On our last evening together, they put on a mini-concert: Sonia sang and played the guitar, and Ariel played the drums – bombas, as they are called here.

After the concert, Sonia poured us all a glass of wine and said, very casually: “We’re not married.” I thought I’d misheard. She repeated it. “Ariel and I. We’ve never been married. We tell everyone we are because it’s easier. No questions. No raised eyebrows. But twenty-three years together, and we never signed a single paper.”

I asked if they would ever change their minds. They looked at each other. “Maybe,” Sonia said. “If one of us gets sick. For the hospital visits.” Ariel added: “But we’d need to find the right ice cream place first.”

That was three years ago. Sometime after my visit, they finished building a new house in another part of Patagonia and moved there. Then, six months ago, the house burned to the ground. Peat fires in the forest. Around fifty houses were destroyed in a matter of hours. Some five hundred people lost their homes that day. None of them had insurance. Sonia was home alone and managed to escape.

You, Patagonia, are vast. When I flew from Ushuaia to El Calafate – just an hour – it felt like a slightly different version of you.

There isn’t much to do in El Calafate itself. People come to see the Perito Moreno Glacier, 70 kilometres away, and then go to the hiker’s paradise - El Chaltén (I wrote about this special village here).

The Perito Moreno Glacier – I spent a whole day there. A mini-expedition. Guide, special gear, crampons over the bumps of that vast, ancient ice. Unforgettable.

The revelation of that day: your snow isn’t snow-white. It cannot be, because cliffs and low mountains surround you – dust, stones constantly falling. If I see a snow-white glacier on Instagram, it is Photoshop. But the greyish dust does not detract from your beauty. On the contrary, your breath of eternity feels even more intense.

Your other side: villas miseria and cartoneros

I also saw your other side, the one that doesn’t make it into travel blogs. From the window of a colectivo on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, I saw the villas miseria. The slums. Cardboard and corrugated iron.

And in the city centre, the cartoneros – men and women pulling carts piled with cardboard, sorting through rubbish by hand because that is how they feed their families.

A family surviving on 50,000 pesos a month – roughly 50 US dollars at the blue dollar rate – was not a statistic. It was someone I passed on the street. I did not stop. I am not proud of that. But I saw them. And I carry that seeing with me.

The darkest place you showed me

Back in Buenos Aires, I went to ESMA. The Espacio Memoria y Derechos Humanos – a former naval academy turned secret detention centre, torture facility, death camp.

During your dictatorship, from 1976 to 1983, 30,000 people disappeared. Los desaparecidos. I walked those halls. I stood in the rooms where they were held. I looked at the black-and-white photographs on the walls.

Graciela Alberti, aged 27, was detained and has gone missing. At the time of her detention, she was four months pregnant.

Ida Adad, aged 65, was detained and has gone missing.

Pablo Lepiscop, aged 41, has disappeared without trace.

María Garreiro, aged 18, was detained and has gone missing.

I learned about the death flights. Victims were rendered unconscious with barbiturates, then thrown from aeroplanes or helicopters into the Río de la Plata or the Atlantic Ocean.

I came to the museum with one of them. An old woman in a white headscarf. She did not cry. I did – I only noticed because I tasted salt on my lips. She took my hand and said nothing. All her tears had been cried long ago.

These faces are also you, Argentina. This past is also you. I cannot write a love letter that pretends otherwise.

…Buenos Aires siempre te espera

You are always waiting for me, Buenos Aires.

This slogan is displayed on all the planes of my favourite local airline. I sat on one of those planes, looking at those words with bittersweet nostalgia. How many times have I flown away from you, knowing full well I would be back within a few weeks?

Now I am writing this, and I don’t know when I will return. But I know I will. I always will.

I am deeply grateful to you, Argentina. To your people. To all my kind strangers. To the universe for placing you on this planet.

I get to leave. Your people don’t. Perhaps that makes my love lighter than theirs. But it is not less real.

Subscribe now

I will miss your atmospheric cafés, your people reading books in them, the conversations over mate. Your long walks and lovely parks. Your delicious food and wine. Your murals and graffiti. The smiles of your passers-by. Your theatres and museums. Your whimsical buildings with staircases reaching up to the sky.

I won’t miss the slow service, or the bureaucracy, or having to show my passport everywhere – even to buy a ticket for the opera. But there is something about you that cancels out all of that. All that remains is a pleasant aftertaste, like that of a fine wine. And it makes me want to come back.

I am fascinated by how a place can go from being an abstract concept to becoming a part of you.

How, from mere echoes, unknown places gradually fill with flavours and sounds, colours, almost always music, scents, conversations – and sometimes the feeling that you have been here before. And finally, with memories.

You, Argentina, were once just an empty sound to me – someone else’s experience, a photo on Instagram, a passing remark. Now you are my own experience. My own memory. My own people. And that is a miracle.

This transformation – from an empty sound into a blend of scents and touch, into a warm embrace, into a gentle breeze against my cheek – from nothing into a part of me – is pure magic.

And you did that. You.

Estoy enamorado de vos, Argentina. Siempre.

If you enjoyed reading The Making of a Journey today, tap the 💙 below - it helps my stories get discovered!

Share

Leave a comment

Buy me a coffee

Estoy enamorado de vos, Argentina. ¿Cómo empiezo esta carta de amor para vos?

Where do I begin? How do I express my love for you?

Almost ten years ago I made my first ocean crossing. The starting point for the racing yachts was Uruguay. I had to fly from London to get there. For the first time in my life I was that close to you – so I couldn’t miss you. I had only three days before the race started, and I spent them in Buenos Aires.

I walked through you – 20 to 25 kilometres a day – without even realising it.

One alley beckoned to another. One street led to a beautiful cemetery, then to a square where an elderly Argentine woman in a red dress with a red rose in her hair – as if she had stepped straight out of a film – was dancing tango, then to a wall with a huge mural. I stopped dead in my tracks and couldn’t take my eyes off it. I wanted to become a mural on that wall myself.

You, Buenos Aires, with your beautiful art deco buildings, invited me to touch you, to inhale deeply all your smells – from dog mess on the pavements to Malbec in my glass, from fallen leaves to the scent of mate in my bombilla.

And I inhaled, and inhaled, and by the end of the day my head was spinning and my legs were unsteady – I had walked 25 kilometres – but I smiled, because I felt good.

I sat in a café or just on the pavement and watched your people. I wasn’t there – I had dissolved into your tangible air – and at the same time I saw myself in your passers-by, in their quick hand movements, in their laughter, in their exclamations of “¡che boludo!“

Three days was enough for you to get under my skin. I promised myself I would come back – soon, and for longer.

I came back three years later, at the beginning of my nomadic life. I thought I would stay a month – ha! – but you had different plans for me: I stayed six months, and had I stayed one month longer, I would essentially have made you my home.

I know I saw you from a place of luck. I had pounds in my pocket when the peso was crumbling. I could leave when I wanted. That is not everyone’s Argentina.

But I also saw how your people laughed and danced and talked until 2 a.m. while the economy burned around them. That is not denial. That is survival. And I love them for it. I love you for producing that kind of human.

Share The Making of a Journey with Ilona Vinogradova

“He jumps off his ego”

Your people have a peculiar reputation among Latin Americans. They call them arrogant, entitled, superior to the point of rudeness, and narcissistic. There is a common joke: How does an Argentine commit suicide? He jumps off his ego.

They may be all of this – but this nation of immigrants, Italians and Spanish, and waves of Russian, Jewish, German and British settlers, knows how to laugh at itself. And you gave them that gift. You also gave them self-reflection.

Psychoanalysis is deeply rooted in your culture. Most of my local friends in their thirties and forties had their weekly therapy sessions. Buenos Aires – you – are considered the therapy capital of the world, with the highest number of psychologists per capita globally.

And let’s not forget the music, the literature, the films, the god of all gods Maradona, now Messi – all the gifts you have given the rest of us.

Your people may be full of themselves, but it is justified – not that they care about justification, and I love them for that too – by how open-minded and curious they are about themselves and the rest of the world.

Sipping my morning or afternoon coffee, I would eavesdrop on conversations that began: “You know what’s happening in Serbia, Iran, the UK, Russia – it all brings us back to…” And here they would refer to a relevant historical event.

At some point I would go to your cafés just to listen to these conversations, and sometimes to join in. The day would be lost – or actually lived beautifully – because we would continue over lunch somewhere else, and I might even be invited to an asado at one of the estancias outside the city at the weekend.

But you are not only European faces and European minds. I travelled north to Salta and Jujuy, and there I saw your other face – the one that was here long before the Spanish arrived.

The women selling empanadas from clay ovens had cheekbones like the mountains. The men leading llamas down dusty roads spoke Spanish with an accent that still held something older. I bought a woven blanket from an elderly woman who did not meet my eyes. She placed it in my hands and said: “Llévate un pedazo de mi tierra” – take a piece of my land. The warmest blanket I ever slept under.

You are many things, Argentina. But what would you be without your people?

During my first two weeks in Buenos Aires, I rented half a house in San Telmo from a local architect, Raúl.

Raúl taught me my first castellano words and expressions – ¡Qué quilombo! ¡Che boludo! – which I heard and used a great deal during my stay. He took me out to village bars and estancias, explained why inflation is so high, how everyone complains about the economy and politics yet every terrace is full from Monday to Sunday.

His Thursday men-only dinners made an exception for me, and his circle of male friends became mine for a while – endless conversations about peronistas mixed with inside jokes ranging from music to sex to politics and back again.

One Thursday, I came home early to grab a jacket. The dinner hadn’t started yet, but Raúl was in the kitchen, alone, cooking. He was crying. Not sobbing – just quiet tears running down his face while he stirred a pot of something that smelled incredible. I almost backed away, but he saw me.

He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and laughed. “Onions,” he said. I knew it wasn’t onions. Years later, he sent me a message out of nowhere: “That night you saw me crying – my brother had died exactly one year before. He loved my locro. I make it every anniversary.”

“At least I am bored with people I love”

As an amateur sailor, wherever I am, I usually find a yacht so as not to lose my skills. Or the yacht finds me. In Buenos Aires it was Daniel’s yacht that found me – a 30-year-old economist from a good family, old money combined with a modern, witty mind.

We would go out on ad-hoc sailing trips, and on the water our conversations became existential. I cannot survive without those. On what, how, and most importantly, why.

Daniel is a brilliant economist who could work anywhere in the world. London, New York, Singapore all came knocking. He turned every single one down.

One evening, as we were cleaning the boat after a sail, I asked him why. He was quiet for a long time. Then he said: “Because where else in the world could I call my school friends at midnight on a Tuesday and say, ‘I’m bored, let’s go eat fugazzeta at that place in La Boca,’ and someone would actually show up? Where else could I text a friend at 2 p.m. on a Sunday and within an hour we’re on the water with a bottle of Malbec and no plan? Where else can you talk until 2 a.m. about everything and nothing – and nobody checks their phone?”

He took a long sip of his wine. “My job is stale. The same reports. The same meetings. I feel my brain slowly turning into dulce de leche – sweet, spreadable, and utterly useless. But then I call Martín at 11 p.m. and he is already outside my apartment with two bottles of Quilmes and a crazy idea to drive to the countryside and sleep under the stars, and I remember: I would die anywhere else. Here, at least, I am bored with people I love.”

He looked at your lights shimmering on the water. “To being stuck in the best city in the world!”

And I understood, perhaps for the first time, that staying isn’t always a lack of ambition. Sometimes it is a very deliberate choice. You do that to people, Argentina. You make them choose you.

Share

“I teach tango instead”

I met Micaela, a feisty woman in her early thirties, in my first days after arriving, and she became my lodestar for the next six months.

Thanks to her, I learned to dance tango without stepping on anyone’s feet. She took me to underground milongas where tourists never go. She taught me that in Buenos Aires, a song can be a conversation and a conversation can last all night.

In my last week, she told me she could not have children. Not “don’t want to” – physically cannot.

I only found out because we passed a playground and she stopped walking. She stood there for a full minute, watching a father push his daughter on a swing. Then she said, very quietly: “I would have been a good mother, you know.”

I didn’t know what to say. She shrugged and started walking again. “I teach tango instead. Same thing, really. You hold someone, you lead, you make sure they don’t fall. You watch them get better. And then they leave.” She smiled. It was one of the saddest smiles I have ever seen. The next day she was her usual feisty self again, and we never spoke of it. But I think of that smile every time I hear a tango.

On your bookshops

And your bookshops – the quantity and quality of them – mind-boggling.

You have the highest concentration of bookshops in the world – roughly 25 for every 100,000 of your people. Avid readers need to offload the burden of knowledge to the shrinks. I wonder if there is a connection. I wonder if you know something the rest of us don’t.

Everyone talks about El Ateneo Grand Splendid - a bookstore housed in a lavish 1919 former theatre. It’s worth visiting at least once.

Yet El Ateneo, to my taste, is not the best bookshop in the world. It is too grand for that. The best bookshop has to be intimate, with nooks and windowsills where I can sit lost in a book for hours, no crowds. And you have plenty of those too.

My favourite, stumbled upon by chance, was in Patagonia, in El Chaltén. Tiny. Intimate. No crowds. The titles ranged from Hannah Arendt to Tolstoy to St Augustine – almost no pulp fiction. If I can go anywhere in you, even to a small village, and find a good bookshop, you are a safe space.

But you were not done with me, Argentina. Buenos Aires had got under my skin – now you wanted to get into my bones. You were calling me south, to the place where you are most fully, most brutally, most beautifully yourself. Further south, the wind strips everything back. And underneath, Argentina, I found the parts of you that hurt to look at – and loved you no less for them.

Part 2 lands in your inbox on Thursday.

If you enjoyed reading The Making of a Journey today, tap the 💙 below - it helps my stories get discovered!

Share

Leave a comment

Buy me a coffee

I am learning a new language. It is perhaps the most difficult, yet the easiest at the same time, of all the languages I’ve ever attempted to learn (21, to be precise).

The depth, the beauty, and the simplicity of this language mesmerise me.

As with any new language I learn, especially in the beginning, there is a sense of wonder - a childish sense of magical discovery - the feeling that I am entering a new world.

The more I like a language, the more it turns into a love affair: an intense, at times blind, infatuation in the beginning which transforms into something deeper.

I started learning this language two years ago. When I first arrived at that place in the mountains, I didn’t initially realise that what I was about to learn was a language. After two or three days of immersion, it became clear: of course, it is a language.

I began to remember my countless encounters with this language throughout my life. A multitude of childhood memories came and went. I realised that many times, I had experienced it as a punishment, because the people around me used it as such.

Two years ago in the mountains, for the first time in my life, I realised - no, I sensed it with every cell in my body: the essence of this language is love and beauty. A joy you cannot contain - it oozes through you.

It turns into punishment only when people abuse it, just as a knife can become a weapon instead of being used for cutting bread, carving beautiful pieces of wood, or cutting an umbilical cord. Like any other object, idea, or concept - beautiful in its essence - it can become ugly when we misuse it.

The longer you are immersed in that language, the less you want to use any other. The less you want to share. You just want to be inside this new space, this new world you discovered - or rather re-discovered - because it was always there.

At some point, you start feeling that you are not learning a new language, but remembering a language that was once your own.

The easiest way to learn any language, and especially this one, is to be immersed in it for as long as possible - to be surrounded by native speakers.

So, I immerse myself for weeks at a time. The feeling is as if I am diving deep into the ocean, swimming with all the creatures and admiring the corals.

Just like being underwater, I experience a state of weightlessness. A sense of euphoria. And that feeling returns: the longer you stay there, the less you want to go back to the normal world and start using all the other languages you know.

The tricky thing is to integrate this new language into your daily life when you are not surrounded by natives.

In the beginning, when we first start learning something, we all need support. In this particular case, you just find people who, like you, want to learn this language, and you practise together. For hours, days, and months.

This group practice helped me immensely. It is much easier to start learning this language in a group. There was a catch, though: the longer I practised in a group, the more difficult it was for me to practise on my own.

Group practice is beautiful, but it does not necessarily prepare you for solo exploration.

If you have read this far, you know that I am talking about the language called silence.

One of the best-known (and, alas, fashionable) group practices is called Vipassana. Derived from Pali, vi (clear/special) and passanā (seeing), it translates to “clear-seeing” - to see things as they really are.

It is a method, a technique meant to dissolve the ego and open the heart; a way to erase blind spots and just hepl you be in the present moment.

But this practice is like a knife that can be misused. Some perceive it differently, turning it into “spiritual tourism” and commodifying it in many ways.

“How many times have you done Vipassana?” these people like to ask. They count their retreats and ensure everyone knows the tally.

It’s not an achievement. It’s a tool we can use to carve something beautiful - or to fool ourselves that we are carving something beautiful.

One can go to Vipassana many times, yet Vipassana never comes to them, my teacher used to say.

It clearly hasn’t come to me yet. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be judging “other people” or their illusions. I have enough of my own.

There are over 270 Vipassana centres across the world. You find the one closest to you, stay for ten days or two months, and start your journey.

You get up at 4:30, start your first silent meditation at 5 am, and the day continues with walking, working, and sitting meditations.

By 9 or 10 pm, you are asleep. No gadgets, no reading, no talking (obviously - you are here to learn the language of silence), no writing, no usual everyday distractions - just sitting, walking, working, and breathing silently. And in between, eating - silently - some delicious vegetarian food.

Usually, the first two or three days are the most difficult for everyone. Some people leave, but most stay.

For me personally, days three and four are the most beautiful. Something opens up in you, something softens. You are not climbing the mountain anymore; you are not enduring something you don’t want to endure; you are not trying to achieve anything. You are just there. In the space called the present. The most unpopulated place in the world. And it feels like the best place to be.

And then you lose that feeling. Something (your mind?) yanks you out of that blissful space. For the rest of the days, you are trying to get back to that space, making an effort, and coming up with strategies on how to get back there.

Your meditation teacher will tell you later - well, he will tell you later.

You yourself will understand certain things as well: the more consistently (that’s the key word) you practise, the faster you will unlearn your own mind’s patterns that closed the door leading to the space called the present. You will learn how to get there and stay in that space for longer. And longer. And longer.

Not long enough to become enlightened. But long enough to see a lot of light within.

… The most difficult thing - you realise on day 10 - is to leave and go back to the noisy world with all its distractions and immense audio pollution.

The real learning starts here: how to continue practising this powerful language, how to integrate it into your everyday life when you are not in the beautiful mountains and not surrounded by people who keep silent. Each one of us who is travelling in the direction of silence will discover their own ways.

I found my “native speakers” in unexpected places.

The Great Wall of China taught me that silence is a physical weight. Terabytes of it are immured in the stones, alongside the fatigue and strength of ancestors. It is a silence that outlasts empires.

India taught me about the “inner pocket.” In one of the noisiest countries on earth, you can still find a cocoon of stillness. It is the best place to learn that your own mind can be a sanctuary, regardless of the chaos outside.

And, of course, Japan. This country has mastered the art of the pause. From the eerie quiet of a Shinkansen train to the hushed wine bars of Tokyo, I learned chinmoku - silence as a form of respect.

During a tea ceremony in Tokyo, my host explained the four elements of the ritual: Harmony (wa), Purity (sei), Respect (kei), and Tranquillity (jaku). They are all held together by silence. The hieroglyph on the wall - “One meeting, one opportunity” - reminds you that every encounter is unique.

It always comes back to the same thing: the here and now. Focus on the moment. Inhabit the space called the present. That is the only space you ultimately have.

***

If you are learning the language of silence - I’d love to hear how it is for you - what are the highlights and lowlights? Because I know that for each one of us it is a different journey.

Each of us travels in the direction of silence at our own pace. If this resonated with you, I’d value your thoughts or a simple share to someone who might need a moment of “the present” today.

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

There are not many places left in this world that do not necessarily surprise you, but instead give you a sense, a smell, and a touch of something you thought existed only in books and movies. Yangon is definitely one of those places.

I didn’t realise before arriving what an architectural treasure this city is. Yangon, as it turns out, has the largest collection of colonial-era architecture in Southeast Asia. I couldn’t take my eyes off so many majestic art deco, Brutalist, and modern post-colonial buildings. Most are now in decay, yet somehow this doesn’t detract from their past grandeur and beauty – it adds to it.

Knowing a little of Burma’s history, I read pain and injustice in the facades of many of the city’s most beautiful buildings. So many violent things happened inside them. For those who built them, life was often unjust and cruel.

Woman on the balcony

On day two, I found myself in the streets of a newer, posh neighbourhood with tall buildings of glass and concrete. Not as beautiful as the heritage buildings downtown, but these new structures also ooze injustice.

On the large second-floor balcony of a tall building facing a lake, I saw a woman sitting in a rattan chair with a book in her hands. She read, then closed the book and looked at the sunset approaching the horizon.

I stared, caught in a spiral of questions. I wondered who could afford to live in such a luxury building in a country where more than half the population lives below the poverty line; a country which has been at war with its own people for more than 70 years – an on-and-off conflict that intensified again after the 2021 coup against Aung San Suu Kyi’s government.

Is the woman now looking peacefully at the sunset – or her husband (or father) – part of the current military government, or somehow affiliated with it? Is she a self-made woman who built her business and now enjoys life, belonging to the luckiest, most privileged part of society, who don’t live on $100 a month and can shop in the flashy nearby centre with brands like Armani, Burberry, and Hugo Boss?

I wished she were a self-made woman, even though my critical voice tells me that in a country like Burma/Myanmar, it’s impossible to build a big business without friendly relations with the government.

Dining with foreigners and murderers

In an Italian restaurant not far from that woman’s apartment, there were two Chinese ladies eating on a huge lawn by the lake. The rest of the place was empty. A bit later, more customers arrived – four white men followed by two local men who arrived in a Lexus Sports car. I noticed because until then, I’d seen only old, almost retro, cars on Yangon’s streets.

The white men went straight to the adjacent tennis court. The local guys ordered some beer and sat on the lawn by the lake. I felt like I was inside a movie, a bad one. Why am I here? Am I dining among foreigners and (potentially) murderers? Well, I know why. Because I wanted to listen to the stories of that crazy Spanish woman whom I met on my first day in Yangon. And who, after a month of eating only local food, was craving some pasta al dente.

On other days, I ate with locals in cheap, unpretentious noodle places and felt much more at ease than in this expensive, nearly empty restaurant.

For the first two or three days, I couldn’t help it: my inner voice constantly questioned the people passing by – who are they, which side are they on, how can they live and laugh, and eat in restaurants, and go to the cinema as if nothing is going on, as if their country is not at war?

Then this voice fades away – you get used to the reality you are currently in. Just as all Burmese people have got used to it and get on with their lives, because it is impossible not to.

People under duress need distraction more than empathy

In my first two days in Burma, I was reminded of… myself, 20-odd years ago, when I first reported from a war zone as a journalist.

I arrived (as probably any civilian would) with the notion that war engulfs everything, that you can’t think of anything else if you live in a country where there is a war. After a couple of days, one of my older, more experienced colleagues looked at me and said: “Wipe that expression off your face, immediately!”

I didn’t even realise I had a particular expression. “What do you mean?” I asked her.

“You have this expression of permanent sadness, horror, and pity, mixed with doom. People here suffer enough; they don’t need us, who come and go, to look at them with all these mixed feelings. They don’t even need our empathy – they need to be distracted. And they need some practical help. Talking to us, sharing their stories, cracking jokes – it’s all part of the distraction.”

The white men concept of non-ethical travel

I kept postponing my trip to Burma, hoping that what became known as the world’s longest civil war would finally end, and I’d be able to see the Burmese people in less stressful times.

For me personally, it has nothing to do with ethical or non-ethical travel (what a hypocritical Western concept!). As a journalist, I’ve been to and worked in countries torn by war, and that completely exposed the concept of ‘non-ethical travel’ as total bullshit.

Or rather, any travel to any country can be unethical if you treat people like animals in a zoo.

People living under the duress of endless war and its associated restrictions sometimes need distraction even more than empathy. And seeing or talking to foreigners is part of a very welcome distraction and a source of income.

Talking about intentional travel - if by intentional you mean having an impact on locals’ lives, here in Burma right now, you can do exactly that.

Those of you who think that by going to dictatorial countries you are, first and foremost, supporting a vicious government, are wrong. You support the people, first and foremost, by your presence, your conversations, and by buying something directly from them. And yes, inevitably, some of your money will end up in government structures. But that is not a bad trade-off when you see that your presence is needed and welcomed by normal people who are tired of everyday suffering.

Everywhere I went in Burma, people told me how foreign tourists used to help them live a better life and how they want foreigners to come back.

Share

Just remember that in your own countries, you support big businesses that do all sorts of unethical things, and governments that invest millions to produce and sell weapons, aka kill people, if not in your country then in others.

One more thing to remember: when we hear about a country at war, we usually imagine bullets flying everywhere and bombs exploding unexpectedly. That’s not the case. It is definitely not the case in Burma.

The military has cordoned off the dangerous war zones, so people living in Yangon, Bagan, Mandalay and other government-controlled areas do not actually see the war. They ‘only’ suffer the economic and psychological consequences of it. Foreigners, as well as local civilians, are not allowed to travel to those parts of the country where the war is actually happening.

The spooky, yet inevitable, part of many wars is that while people are fighting and being killed in one part of the country, in another, they go to cafés and movies, sell flowers, fall in and out of love, have petty quarrels and continue with their lives.

The notion of safety is subjective - it’s more in your head than on the streets. You might feel falsely safe in Baltimore or Detroit (one of the most criminal cities in the USA) because it’s the USA and less safe in Yangon because it’s a far-away, foreign country. But then again – it’s less to do with reality and more to do with your perception of it.

The most famous father and daughter

Back to Yangon. I’m sitting now in one of the cafés located on the grounds of the beautiful post-colonial building known as the Secretariat. Talking about beautiful buildings and pain.

It was the administrative seat of British Burma and is the place where the founder of independent Burma, General Aung San, and six cabinet ministers were assassinated on 19 July 1947.

His daughter, Aung San Suu Kyi, before becoming the first female Minister of Foreign Affairs and State Counsellor, spent 15 years under house arrest. In 2021, she was arrested and deposed by Myanmar’s military junta after they declared the November 2020 general election results fraudulent.

Aung San Suu Kyi’s final sentence is 33 years in prison. The junta – men in their 70s – are afraid of an 80-year-old woman. She is held in solitary confinement, with access to the outside world strictly controlled and only rare, supervised visits from her legal team. Even her son Kim Aris doesn’t know her exact location.

“I am extremely concerned,” he told The Guardian in June 2025. “A lot of the world seems to think she’s under house arrest, and that’s just not the case. I don’t even know if she’s alive or not – there’s no way to confirm that.”

…I’m sitting in this historical building, which among other cafés and restaurants also houses a KFC, and thinking about the violent twists of Burmese history and the most famous father and daughter of the 20th century in this beautiful and seemingly cursed country.

Yet, this is the same country that was one of the richest in Southeast Asia, particularly during the late British colonial period (up to 1948) and the early years of independence.

Traders from Baghdad to Glasgow flocked to Rangoon (today’s Yangon), and by the 1930s, immigration took place on such a scale that it made Rangoon the world’s leading port of entry for immigrants, topping even New York.

History is treacherous, but it doesn’t stand still. Everything changes, sometimes even for the better.

(To be continued)

If you enjoyed reading The Making of a Journey today, tap the 💙 below - it helps my stories get discovered!

Share

“Part of me envies the lifestyle you’ve created for yourself – travelling the world with a one-way ticket, never knowing how long you will stay in one place, yet free to leave at any time”, a friend told me recently.

After a long pause, she added, carefully choosing her words so as not to offend me: “Doesn’t it make you feel not even lonely but rootless though? To feel that you are not part of any community (she avoided the words “you don’t belong anywhere”), more of an observer than an insider?”

So, I started thinking deeply about it, trying to be brutally honest with myself. Am I missing a community or THE community? Do I feel rootless? Where do I belong, if at all?

I’m looking back at all the places where I’ve lived a settled life. The U.K. was the place I lived for 17 years; before that was the Netherlands for a couple of years, the USA for a year, and Estonia for 15 years.

In none of those places did I feel I was part of any community. I had a circle of friends but not a community. And it didn’t matter. I was not craving to belong to any particular community.

I was and still am curious to explore different parallel worlds we people live in. I love to dip in and out of various circles, be it underground theatre, music scenes, mountain climbers (there’s some sort of brother/sisterhood among us mountain lovers), or the semi-professional sailing world, for which I needed to learn a new language. Unlike many other sports, sailing has its own language and you need to understand it even to dip in and out.

Share

I never wanted to choose between those circles or communities and become loyal to one and only. Many – formal or informal – communities at some point expect you to become loyal, which inevitably entails following the rules and regulations. This is the part where I usually lose interest, as I don’t want to follow rules that haven’t been written, if not entirely by me, then at least with my input.

What about a neighbourhood as a community? The only time I felt, albeit briefly, part of a neighbourhood community was when during COVID we created a WhatsApp chat with 50 or so neighbours in our cul-de-sac in a place I lived not far from London.

It was a very practical chat – who needs help, groceries, etc. – but somehow it helped us all get through that forced isolation. It bonded us as neighbours as well.

For the first time ever I knew over 50 of my neighbours by name, by face, even by their sense of humour (which WhatsApp chat can survive without jokes). I also knew that I could actually knock on several of my neighbours’ doors to ask for the proverbial salt or some garden tools I was missing.

Even when I left the neighbourhood and went travelling, I didn’t want to leave that chat. It took me two years to finally exit and delete it.

Now, when I live everywhere and nowhere, my experience of communities has changed. As paradoxical as it might sound, I now have several communities in different parts of the world, which I know I belong to.

No, I don’t belong to a digital nomad community, which I thought I would. But then I discovered that people who want to live in special digital nomad co-living and co-working spaces are not my people.

Not all of them, but many digital nomads are too attached to the idea of being a nomad. Like many people are attached to the idea of travelling solo, making it almost part of their identity, basking in other peoples’ admiration: “Oh, my God, you travelled to all those places by yourself?!”

Maybe because for me travelling solo is like breathing. Why would I pay special attention to it? You breathe, I breathe, we all breathe. Does breathing itself define who we are?

Contact improv: shared weight and shared humanity

One of the best communities I stumbled upon while travelling is CI – contact improv dancing.

I was initially attracted to the idea itself of this type of non-choreographed dance, so I started attending workshops and jams in Bali (where there’s a very strong CI community), then in Thailand, India, and Argentina. What hooked me even more than the freedom of improv movement were the people I met on the dance floor.

These were my people – open to the unknown, curious, playful, challenging norms, self-attuned, taking physical and creative risks.

Every workshop and jam is different but the people who are attracted to CI are similar. They can be from totally different backgrounds, but they share a curiosity for exploring movement through shared weight, touch, and physical awareness – and our shared humanity.

That’s a community with simple, not over-regulated, ultimately very human rules. For the first time in my life I didn’t mind following the rules.

Another amazing feature of the CI community: it is unbound to a location. You could first try CI in one city or country, then come and join it in a different location anywhere in the world – you will still feel that you are part of the same big family.

People who like to sit silently for hours

The community that gives me a similar vibe to CI is made up of people who like to sit silently for hours in a group meditation.

And again, you can come for a group meditation in a monastery, or a non-religious meditation centre (often organised by people with a scientific background), or a local temple, or even a local restaurant which has a rooftop, anywhere in the world. Next time you join people for meditation in another place, you will have a sense of homecoming.

With some of those people you will go on longer (10 to 30 day) silent retreats, with some of them you will accidentally meet in another country, and with most of them you will never cross paths again, but you will know: there is your big family out there and you are part of it.

The NVC as a way of being

Another family I’ve found while living on the road is the NVC community. Nonviolent Communication was created by Marshall Rosenberg in the USA in the late 1960s. I’ve heard about it before and always wanted to attend a workshop, thinking it would make me even a better communicator and negotiator. Even a better journalist.

In my busy journalistic life I never managed to attend such a workshop. Maybe it was for the better that I only ventured to go to an NVC workshop in India of all places, and only after I discovered CI and meditation.

Both contact improv and meditation, unbeknownst to myself, prepared me for NVC in a way my whole life didn’t.

I thought the concept of nonviolent communication was mainly applicable in conflict situations, be it geopolitical, work- or family-related. In reality it’s much – much – bigger and deeper than that. It’s a paradigm of being.

At the core of NVC is our universal sameness, our shared humanity. Love as a foundation. Ultimately, nonviolence is an expression of love. And love has a dimension of identity.

For NVC practitioners, expressing love is not just about actions but also about a way of being and a sense of self that is rooted in compassion and empathy.

It completely blew my mind when I realised that nonviolent communication is not only about how you communicate with the world but also about how you communicate with yourself.

Do you love yourself? Do you treat yourself with compassion? Are you honest with yourself? Do you judge yourself? Are you aware of your own needs?

I really don’t want what I want at the cost of another’s wellbeing or happiness, nor do I want to leave myself behind for another’s sake. When two people or a group experience this shift together, a range of new possibilities, often previously unthought of, open up.

Your body is your home

I feel rooted in those communities, as I feel rooted in my own body. Once you are rooted in your own body, you never feel rootless, regardless of where in the world you are. Your body is your home. No mortgage needed.

I know that for many people community means the same place, same people, same values, and some shared activities.

I am inviting you to look at it from a different perspective. Out of all those “same” things, what’s the most important?

If you go for values, you open yourself up to more possibilities, for more communities you can be part of without living in one place.

And perhaps that’s where true belonging begins – not in staying put, but in knowing what matters most.

So when my friend asked if I felt more like an observer than an insider, she was right – but that’s exactly how I found my way in.

The role of an observer often gives you more insight than being an insider ever could – you see the patterns others are too close to notice. You learn to recognise your people by how they move through the world, not where they live.

***
I shared three communities that changed how I think about belonging – contact improv, meditation, and NVC. What’s yours? Tell me about a community that makes you feel at home, wherever you are. And if this piece spoke to you, pass it along to someone still searching 💙

Leave a comment

When I first came to India in January this year I was, well, disappointed is one – mild – way to describe it. It felt like I’d come from the 21st century with all its perks and conveniences into the 19th – a sleepy, dusty village. The funny thing? The sleepy, dusty village was Goa – one of India’s most famous destinations.

I have nothing against dusty villages and travelling in time can be fascinating, but this was different. It was a village in the most prosaic ways: scrawny stray cows, ugly houses with barred windows, lethargic villagers, and in contrast, rude staff in all tourist areas.

Unlike the friendly service staff common across Asia, Goa’s were indifferent at best and openly rude at worst.

The parking attendants who’d shout at you because you left your motorbike for 10 minutes while stepping from a café to a beach; the bike renters who’d try to cheat you and ask three times the price and become boorish when you call them out; the homeowners who’d want to rent their shacks - offering the bare minimum - for the price of a luxury villa.

Goa as a Disneyland

The Goa of the Beatles sitting (probably stoned) under the banyan tree, while other hippies sang songs around the campfire, made love and slept on the beach or somewhere nearby for free – this Goa is long gone. Those nostalgic hippies now in their sixties and seventies still come here or even live here, but the Goa I’ve read about is nowhere to be found.

Now it’s a Disneyland of commercialised counterculture, where the rebellion is scheduled, the spontaneity is curated, and even the dirt feels expensive.

Add to this Russian package tourists, traffic jams, and concrete hotels where those banyan trees used to be.

The unique thing about Goa is that it still attracts Indians from all over the country. People here like to repeat that Goa is not India (and who would doubt it?). But in one day without leaving a café you can have conversations with an IT guy from Delhi, a digital nomad from Bihar, a business owner from Mumbai, a music producer from Punjab and a content creator from Gujarat.

“I’ve done it all for my parents, now want to live my own life”

On day three I was asking myself whether I really wanted to see the rest of the country if even the most well-known place was so underwhelming. On the same day I was sitting in a café digesting both my food and unpalatable thoughts when a well-groomed Indian woman joined my table with a heavy sigh.

One word led to another, and soon we were discussing the rude parking guys and her (as well as my) ordeal with finding a short-term rental apartment. Two days later Anuradha was helping me to move from an Airbnb flat to a better apartment, giving me a lift in her rented car.

We quickly became friends, this Delhi-based “I’ve done it all for my parents, now want to live my own life” woman and I, and for the next month we shared lots of stories, laughs, even dates. Yes, out of anthropological interest and mischief we had double dates and even more fun sharing our notes after those dates.

When the country reveals its other side to you

The shift – and I hate admitting this because I was so ready to leave, so ready to write India off – came quietly. Not with some moment of clarity, but through small cracks, letting in light I wasn’t looking for.

I started bumping into kind strangers who’d try to help me with different things, or just share a laugh, a hug, a long walk by the ocean; they’d invite me home for their home-cooked meals, recommend that “local jazz bar where musicians from all over India come to play”, or that yoga teacher who doesn’t advertise himself yet whose lessons are more like moving meditation.

Once an Indian guy even apologised to me on behalf of his compatriots when we found an angry note stuck to my scooter (someone made a real effort – it was handwritten in English) admonishing me for parking in the wrong place.

That was an empty street at 10 pm, yet when I returned after midnight there was that rude note. Apparently, the building I parked by was a hospital and the note said what a heartless bitch I was to take space from poor children. At 10 pm in an empty parking lot!

Life is harsh here. Generational traumas are deep. Violence and aggressiveness are common. And sometimes people genuinely think they just tried to convey a message but got a bit carried away.

Frustration sits deep. There are many reasons behind it. I get it. But on that night I was stung to see such a spiteful note. My local friend was surprised too and apologised profusely as if it was him who had written the note.

India is a 50/50 country

It’s 50% positive versus 50% negative. And this is a very low ratio in my books.

Of almost 90 countries I’ve been to, my usual experience is 95% positive versus 5% negative. There are only two countries with such a low rate, and India is one of those two.

Whenever I shared this observation with my Indian friends, they would laugh and exclaim: spot on! And add: all this is considering that we treat foreigners better than ourselves, so to us Indians our country is even harsher.

Why do I come back?

Why did I end up spending three months travelling through India, then returning again and again?

The answer is simple: because that 50% positive is remarkably powerful – warm, kind, profoundly human, revelatory even.

And it usually happens straight after the negative, often within hours or even minutes. This emotional pendulum becomes addictive – unhealthy in the long run but irresistible in the moment.

… At some point Goa showed its other side: Portuguese heritage in beautiful, story-filled mansions, crowd-free beaches in the south, Old Goa with its fairytale churches, and locals who embraced me with genuine warmth.

After Goa, Kerala was a revelation. I fell for its picturesque villages and Syrian Christian churches, the Jewish heritage of Kochi, and Varkala’s relaxed vibe – crowd-free beaches and Ayurvedic clinics everywhere.

In Tamil Nadu I lived in Auroville – an international community founded at the end of the 1960s by Sri Aurobindo, an Indian philosopher, and a French woman, Mirra Alfassa, who’s referred to here as The Mother.

Remember this woman’s name. What a mind-boggling biography! Mirra Alfassa was born in Paris in 1878 to an Egyptian Jewish mother and a Turkish Jewish father. Mirra was a force of nature with a powerful imagination and the energy to execute grand ideas. I met people in Auroville who knew her. They still speak of her with an intensity that makes you realise she wasn’t just a founder – she was the force that held contradictions together.

A sect? A human experiment? An idealistic community turned into a tourist attraction? A place of creative and spiritual research? That’s a separate story and I’ll share it soon.

The Dalai Lama and the view from his window

In Himachal Pradesh I chanted for hours with the Buddhist monks in a temple opposite the Dalai Lama’s residence. The view from my house where I lived in Dharamkot was much better than the Dalai Lama’s view and I wanted to share with him the blue mountains, the sunsets and the silence of my place, thinking how unfair it was that the holy man had to live among the crowds with a restricted view of the mountains.

Then I laughed at myself for having those thoughts, realising that in his world concepts like “fair/unfair”, “beautiful view/no view” must be irrelevant. For a man who has lived in exile for most of his life and oozes patience, the optics through which he sees the world (with its mountains and sunsets) could be totally different.

Oh Kashmir!

During the four days of India-Pakistan conflict I happened to be in Kashmir – oh Kashmir!

“A man comes to Kashmir to enjoy life, or to end it, or both”.

The way Kashmiris took care of me and showered me with their hospitality and kindness in a stressful time for their own families – while dealing with internet blackouts and their own fears – that generosity still undoes me.

On the day when a ceasefire was announced, like many other locals, I was walking in Srinagar’s beautiful gardens designed during Mughal times. The palpable collective relief was in the air. Soldiers with rifles on the boulevard didn’t disappear, of course, they had been here for over two decades and wouldn’t leave soon.

The militarisation had become normalised. People get used to everything. Except for radical kindness, the sort I’ve experienced in Kashmir, which I will never take for granted.

The human experiment of Auroville, the radical kindness of Kashmir, or the secrets of Kerala? Let me know which story you want next - hit reply and tell me.

Leave a comment

They say India gets under your skin. That’s not quite right. It’s more like India splits you down the middle – one half remembering the frustration and rudeness, the other half aching for the unexpected tenderness. You’d think that would tear you apart. On the contrary though, it makes you feel whole and constantly present.

When people ask me about India now, I tell them about my 50/50 observation/rule. Some laugh. Some book tickets anyway. Some look at me like I’m describing an abusive relationship – and maybe that’s not entirely wrong.

Some places don’t want your love. They just want your attention, your presence, your willingness to be undone. India is that place for me. And, apparently, I’m a willing participant.

Know someone who’s been fascinated or frustrated by India? Share this post and see if they agree with the 50/50 rule.

If you enjoyed reading The Making of a Journey today, tap the 💙 below - it helps my stories get discovered!

Share

A person is not what he says, nor what he appears to be, but the atmosphere that is created in his presence. That is what bears witness. For no one is capable of creating an atmosphere that does not belong to his essence.

Sufi wisdom

Not a country, not a city, not a point on the map. More and more, I realise that, both in the moment of an experience and in its recollection, what I cherish is not the whole (a country or a city), but the (hyper)private: smells and sounds, people’s gestures, someone’s laughter, a look in the eyes, a picture on the wall, a pattern on old wooden furniture.

I may not like a country or a city, but there is bound to be a place in that disliked country that I will want to return to.

And that’s the place I’m travelling back to right now in my imagination. It is an old hacienda between the town of Ica in Peru and an oasis in the Huacachina desert.

Stepping through the door of an ordinary wardrobe into Narnia

The house itself, the garden, the stables, the owners who live here are also an oasis. Somehow they have managed to create an atmosphere - it is difficult to describe it - of peace and at the same time of family life and history (the house has ceramics from 500 years ago and antique crockery and furniture from 100 years ago) and of living here and now in the moment with the aroma of coffee, the scent of blossoming trees and the musky smell of horses.

In the courtyard of the house, building work is going on; at the family council, which also handles work matters, they discuss who is doing what, how many guests are in the house today, what to buy for the groceries. All this together creates an atmosphere of peace.

It is rare to find such places on the road: harmonious. And it’s very hard to leave such a space. I sit under a huge tree, watching all this life unfold in the moment, horses grazing peacefully nearby, the owner passing by, not forgetting to smile at me in passing.

When, a little earlier, I had sung his praises, admiring the place, the house, and most importantly the hardest thing to create - the atmosphere - he took out his mobile phone and showed me a picture of a woman with the words: this is my wife, this is her house and her merit. In a machista society, those words are worth a lot.

To accidentally find such a place - it’s like stepping through the door of an ordinary wardrobe into Narnia.

Why did a UN translator decide to change everything and open a café?

…In my now favourite Bolivian city of Sucre (read more about it in my earlier posts), such a place was a café. You go inside and you are enveloped by the jazz of the 1930-50s.

Share The Making of a Journey with Ilona Vinogradova

Your eyes move across the bookshelves, where the history of Bolivia keeps company with the history of the Romanov royal family, then to the gramophone, the dim light, the fireplace. You walk out and discover a garden where time slows down, where you can lie on the grass and forget everything else.

Food is delicious here, and the aroma of coffee is mixed with the fragrance of flowers and trees.

The owner was a former professional actor and translator who had worked for many years in various international organisations like the UN and the IMF. He was born in Bolivia, then lived in the USA for a long time, and returned to Bolivia in his fifties.

Why did he decide to change everything in his life again and open a café?

“I’ve been translating at high-level talks for a long time, and at some point I felt ashamed to translate all the nonsense that the local ministers were saying,” says Eduardo, or Pato, as he is known.

“Guys from the IMF looked at me with bewilderment, as if I had mistranslated; they couldn’t believe a minister could have said such a stupid thing. And that’s it - one day I decided that I had had enough.”

Share

How did a man who had no experience in the restaurant business manage to create a unique place?

Yes, simply because he had the desire and imagination. He made this place for himself, so that he would feel good there.

It turned out that this café is a franchise. There are four of them in the country, and I’ve been to every one of them. None of them compare to what Pato has created in Sucre.

When I told him that I had stayed in Sucre for three days longer because of his café, to immerse myself in that magical atmosphere, he had tears in his eyes.

“In which of his lives had he been happier?” I asked him, anticipating the answer.

“In this one,” he said without a second’s hesitation.

Neither acting nor the translation profession had filled him as much as creating his own café, his own Narnia.

I take my hat off to people like that. People who reached, found, took a risk and managed to create something more than a space surrounded by walls. They’ve created a space where you forget about time. They’ve found the magic and the spirit - genius loci - of a place.

If you enjoyed reading The Making of a Journey today, tap the 💙 below - it helps my stories get discovered!

Can we create magic intentionally, or does it only happen when we stop trying? Pato made his café for himself, without grand plans - and somehow that’s precisely what made it extraordinary. What do you think? Hit reply and let’s talk about it.

Leave a comment

How do I find my dream job and be able to work from anywhere in the world? I asked myself this question from time to time, even while having a dream job.

Because even if you are lucky enough to have a dream job, you will still occasionally hit a wall: tedious routines eclipse the deep satisfaction – the fun, the dream – or a jerk of a boss ruins not the dream itself, but your desire to be in the place where you can pursue it.

Now, I have transformed one of my dream jobs (as an international journalist and a documentary filmmaker) into another, and I can work from anywhere in the world. So, the most frequent question I get from people is the one I started this newsletter with.

To answer this, I need to take a slight detour. Come with me. We will get to the answer together.

Dynamic, static and borderline jobs

You are in the business of selling dreams when your job is to elevate and inspire people. Usually these are what I call dynamic jobs – any job that gives you space to experiment, invent, play, stretch boundaries. Selling bananas, by contrast, means delivering a consistent, reliable product or service – there’s dignity in this, and the world needs it desperately.

Static jobs have much less space to experiment and play – they follow protocols (and a good thing they do), because in some cases following protocols saves people’s lives (doctors, nurses, firefighters, pilots etc.).

Usually static jobs are also location-bound. As a pilot, doctor, firefighter or plumber you can’t work online. What you can do, though, if you are really good at your static job, is expand it into the dynamic realm by inspiring, elevating and empowering others.

When you have a dynamic job and you are good at it, you reinvent it constantly. You might also have certain rules and protocols, but you have the freedom to change them. Not for the sake of change, but to improve the processes.

The world is not binary, of course. There are, as I call them, borderline or hybrid jobs – the professions that can be practiced as either static or dynamic.

In the modern knowledge economy, many roles exist on a spectrum (you could even plot them on a 2x2 matrix of location-dependence vs. process-innovation).

What kind of life do you want?

Whether you are 20 years old making your first career decision, or you are 50 making your 221st decision about what comes next, ask yourself not about the job itself, but about your life: what kind of life do you want to live? Not until you die. Just in the next 3 to 5 years, because after 5 years, if you are still alive (in more than one sense), you will change.

Share The Making of a Journey with Ilona Vinogradova

Consequently, your ideas about a dream job will evolve too.

So, for now, just focus on the near future and be brutally honest with yourself: what kind of life do you want to live? Not your parents, not your friends, not your lovers, not your teachers - you! You don’t owe anyone the life they’ve imagined for you.

If you want to explore the world, travel deeply and slowly, and at the same time you want to sell bananas, i.e., have a static job, I’m afraid you need to choose. This is one of the few either-or situations in life. No ‘and’ here – only ‘or’.

A doctor who missed his job while travelling

I met a British doctor in his late twenties while travelling in India. He had taken a year off from his demanding NHS job to travel full-time.

When I met him he was half-way through his grand journey, and he confessed during a long conversation over many cups of Darjeeling tea that he really missed his job. The travel was no longer fun because it deprived him of his daily practice.

I got goosebumps when he said it. It is rare and profoundly beautiful to be in the presence of someone who loves what he does to the point that he physically misses his job.

For him his static job was much more fulfilling than the notion of freedom often associated with long-term travel. The funny thing is that long-term travel helped him to realise it.

He was a banana-seller at heart – and he loved his bananas. He needed the structure, the protocols, the daily practice of saving lives. The dream wasn’t in constant reinvention. The dream was in mastery and presence.

If your dream job happens to be a static one - it will not bother you. Other things will matter more to you than perpetual travel.

But if your stomach tightens at the thought of spending most of your life in one place – then you probably won’t choose a location-bound job. Intuitively, you’ll gravitate towards a dynamic job.

You (almost) never burn the bridges

You might ask: what if I sacrifice a stable, if not meaningful, career for the dream of travel, only to find myself lonely, unrooted, and financially insecure? How to run low-stakes experiments before I burn my bridges?

Your career decisions are almost always reversible.

Leaving a job you don’t like isn’t burning a bridge; it’s building a new path. And by the way, who said you can’t earn a stable income by constantly travelling? You can. Plus, a healthy dose of risk-taking makes you feel alive and gives you experiences you can’t get from a predictable, routine-based life.

The power of questions

Let’s go back to the beginning. How do I find my dream job and be able to work from anywhere in the world? More importantly: are you selling dreams or bananas – and which one actually feeds your soul?

By now, you can probably answer this yourself.

Once you have found a dream job and if it happens to be incompatible with long-term travel, that will not be a problem.

But if the most powerful drive in your life right now is freedom of movement and owning your time – you will, if you listen to your gut, go for a dynamic job.

We’re told to seek answers. But the real power lies in questioning the questions themselves.

​​The question is no longer ‘What is my dream job?’ – it’s ‘Am I chasing someone else’s dream, or my own? And what does my body tell me when I imagine my life three years from now?’ Your stomach tightens or it doesn’t. Your breath deepens or it becomes shallow. Your energy rises or it drains.

The journey begins when you find the courage to trust those signals over everyone else’s definitions of success.

Share

I know from experience that this kind of self-examination doesn’t happen accidentally – it needs structure, the right prompts, a bit of gentle provocation.

If you want to deepen your understanding of which path to choose and why, I’d like to share a simple list: my ten questions and five mental exercises I have created to make that decision-making process easier ⬇️

buy me a coffee to get access

P.S. This is in no way career advice. These are powerful questions that will help you see whatever you’re stuck on from different, unexpected angles. And exercises that will reframe your thinking.

Three years ago, I came here for the first time for a month. And stayed for a year 😊. Well, not quite – but that’s how the story often goes.

This is how many foreigners’ stories begin: they came for a week/month, usually broken-hearted after a recent break-up, and Bali didn’t let them go – they stayed here for months or even years, searching for themselves, for new meanings, new love, a new sense of why and how.

I came here with zero expectations, my heart unbroken. I just played my favourite game – looking at Google Maps and spinning the globe, deciding where to go next. Bali caught my eye and I thought: yes, let’s go and see what all this hype is about.

South-East Asia, light

And what is it about? What makes Bali so magnetic? It’s South-East Asia light. Yet it’s layered; you can go as deep as you are ready to. Good infrastructure (with caveats, admittedly), top-notch chefs, relaxed and super-friendly locals.

Foreigners who’ve lived here for years often prefer staying at that surface level: hanging out with other expats, frequenting foreigner-only cafés, working out in luxurious gyms, alternating between saunas and ice baths.

Surfing fits between work sessions, gym visits, and parties – or perhaps work fits between the surfing, gym sessions, and parties. This crowd usually settles in Canggu or Uluwatu.

Another tribe drawn to Bali consists of people who abuse words like “spirituality”, “authenticity”, “consciousness”, and “mindfulness”. Ubud becomes their chosen base.

Free-spirited free-divers gravitate towards Amed.

Pensioners (and families with children) congregate in Sanur and Candidasa.

And everyone goes to the same Instagrammable waterfalls, rice fields, beaches, and temples.

Promised paradise, avo on sourdough, and yogis glued to their phones

These were my first-year impressions – week by week.

Week 1: Where’s the promised paradise? Just traffic, noise, and piles of garbage. Thousands of ‘spiritual’ foreigners crowd cafés, eating avo toast that locals can’t afford and don’t want. Hmm, so I did have expectations.

Week 2: From your rice-field terrace, there’s only the hum of waves. No crowds, no petrol smells. You’re hypnotised, you’ve found your pocket of beauty. Maybe a sunset yoga class?

Week 3: The traffic is crazy, but locals smile and give way. You fall for the bike, the chaos, the conversations. The cafés now seem charming.

Week 4: You’re diving with turtles on neighbouring islands, walking beaches at sunset. And yes, you order the avo on sourdough.

You do some online work from the beach, and the yoga teacher instructing students online from the next table stops annoying you.

You start asking locals about long-term rental of their houses, which they all call villas (Villa Borghese is a villa in my book, but never mind), and you think to yourself: why not stay for a year?

Breaking my own stereotypes about Bali

The next year, I came here to rest after Japan and Korea, and stayed for six months. That time, I discovered a different Bali.

In Canggu, I met foreigners who didn’t ride half-naked, displaying tanned, muscled bodies as if constantly posing for perfect shots. And the 25-year-olds didn’t try to sell their life-coaching courses.

People in Ubud who didn’t talk about spirituality at all, yet were quietly spiritual, walked into my life. I started slowly breaking my own stereotypes about Bali and the people who come here.

Village life around Ubud meant staying in Balinese compounds with local families. Neighbours regularly invited me to temple ceremonies. One evening, returning from a ceremony featuring masked dancers and music, I jotted down:

The most impressive thing was that after all this noise and commotion everyone gathered, practically the entire village, knelt down, and silence fell: a collective prayer began.

When people can so easily and quickly transition from noise and bustle to silence, almost deafening, and begin to pray silently, five minutes seem like an eternity. And you want this eternity to continue uninterrupted.

Share

The “live like a local” delusion

Don’t get me wrong, though. I lived among locals but I did not live like a local. That romantic notion, appealing mainly to inexperienced travellers, had evaporated from my thinking long ago.

In real life, to live like a local in most parts of the world means having an excruciatingly monotonous, unimaginative, and boring life.

I know it sounds harsh, even judgemental. But it is what it is. And if you’ve seen the world and lived in different countries, you know what I am talking about.

I love practising vertical travel, so I do spend time with the poor and the rich, the “ordinary” and the “extraordinary”, yet I can only repeat: most people’s lives are excruciatingly monotonous, unimaginative, and boring. In other words, you don’t want to live anyone’s life but your own.

For those who still romanticise the idea of living like a local, here’s a day in the life of many Balinese:

You get up at 4 am, go to your stall at the local market, and sell food.

Around 11 am, you ride a scooter to your rice field and work under the scorching sun or pouring rain for hours, your bare feet knee-deep in mud. You eat the same nasi goreng or nasi campur every day, return home to prepare offerings for a ceremony, and do endless chores for your extended family.

In the evening, you go to the temple. If there’s no ceremony, you crash into bed, glued to your phone, scrolling through reels until you fall asleep. The next day, you repeat.

If you also work in hospitality or rent out properties, you squeeze all that in, too. For men, add drinking with friends every other evening.

Share The Making of a Journey with Ilona Vinogradova

Reading books, writing, going to a gym or just walking for the sake of walking, learning something new, spending hours in cafés philosophising about life and death and everything in between, attending all sorts of workshops, watching sunsets – that is viewed as a waste of time.

Ironically, most of the Balinese I know have more physical assets – land and properties – than most of us nomadic travellers.

However, there is no concept of spending money to do what you love, no habit of experiencing things that enrich you as a human – it’s mainly about accumulating things that give you a false sense of security.

This mindset is deeply rooted in tradition – a tradition that often comes at a high cost for others.

And this is where the “live like a local” fantasy faces its starkest reality. Consider the Balinese women. These are the women who, despite working much harder than men, are still legally stripped of inheritance – all parental land and property goes to the sons.

They are the women who do your nails, your massages, your laundry. And they are often abused at home by their “lovely” husbands, the same men who smile at you so warmly you’d never believe them capable of harm. To truly ‘live like’ these women is to understand a life of immense resilience amidst profound constraint.

I still hope that my beloved Balinese women, at least some of them, will find a way to know themselves and do what they want in this life, not the next.

The irony of “here and now”

Bali is a place where many foreigners come to learn something about themselves, to learn how to be more present, more in tune with who they are, and to listen to their bodies, not only their minds.

The irony is that locals seem never to be present – they are constantly busy accumulating things, and when they want some rest – they are glued to their phones.

Yet the Balinese don’t seem to be unhappy with the life they have. They are grateful, and their gratitude is contagious. Things can go wrong for them on many fronts, yet they radiate calm and peace.

The energy of gratitude

And that is a big part of why anyone who has been to Bali once wants to come back.

There is a powerful energy of gratitude here, a feeling that you live among gods (every single house has its own temple), and a sense of community.

The Balinese have their communities, and foreigners who have settled here have created their own tribes too.

I recall all my conversations with the locals on the island – dozens of conversations with a wide variety of people – and it strikes me that no one said they wanted to leave for another place – a better/warmer place, a place where they could earn more money – no one. Well, in reality they do work abroad to earn money but they always stress that they come back home. I have never seen this in any other country.

Everywhere else, people have talked about how they wanted to leave their country for a variety of reasons.

Here, people can work in rice fields, as taxi drivers, or as waiters (usually three jobs at once), own a small hotel, etc., but everyone is happy where they are. Or maybe it’s not about work, but about how Balinese people live in general.

Every day, the Balinese make offerings (either to spirits, gods, or simply the universe): at the entrance to a house/restaurant/barber shop, on the road, on the beach – anywhere – a small box is placed with petals, a handful of rice, a slice of mango or banana – basically whatever is to hand.

The offering is a sign of gratitude. For what? For everything. For the sun, for the air, for food, for a new day, for life.

You wake up and there will definitely be a small box or just flower petals in front of your door. Gratitude. Every day. For everything.

Why we keep coming back

I used to think first visits were always the most intense and unforgettable.

This year I returned to Bali for the third time – and it was probably the most beautiful encounter so far. A homecoming. A feeling of recognition and of being recognised.

Yes, it’s crowded and chaotic, but something deeper happens here - you start seeing paradise in the daily gratitude, in the way locals smile through traffic, in finding your pockets of beauty. That’s why you return - not despite Bali’s flaws, but because you learn to see past them to something essential about how to live.

You don’t come back for a postcard. You come back for the feeling you get two weeks in, when the frantic search for ‘paradise’ ends.

It’s the scent of frangipani and petrol at a traffic light, and the smile from the rider next to you, not because he wants something, but because that’s just how it is here. It’s the quiet hum of a village settling into prayer after a day of chaos.

This is why Bali keeps pulling us back: not to escape our imperfect lives, but to find the sacred in the everyday chaos. To wake up grateful, even when – especially when – nothing has gone according to plan.

The broken-hearted arrive seeking something external to fix them. The spiritual seekers come hunting for enlightenment. The digital nomads chase the perfect work-life balance.

What we all find, if we stay long enough and look closely enough, is something simpler and more profound: a different way of being in the world. A way that finds abundance in simplicity, peace in chaos, and paradise not despite the imperfections, but within them.

Share The Making of a Journey with Ilona Vinogradova

If you’ve been to Bali – what was your experience there? I’m curious to learn which Bali I might have missed completely. I’d love to hear your stories in the comments.👇

If you enjoyed reading The Making of a Journey today, tap the 💙 below - it helps my stories get discovered!

Leave a comment

Whether you travel fast or slow, far or close, as a consumer more than an explorer - regardless of all of these, you usually travel horizontally. What do I mean by this?

You stay within your strata of society. If you are a middle class professional - who do you meet when you travel abroad? Of course, you’ll meet people outside of your strata of society but usually these are the people who serve you (like it or not): waitstaff, hotel personnel, tour guides etc.

I am asking you a different question: who do you talk to, who do you have meaningful conversations with, and spend time with apart from your own company?

Do you engage in meaningful conversations with a hotel receptionist, a street cleaner, the minister of finance in the country you are visiting, an art gallery owner, a teacher, an architect of the building you were admiring? Probably not.

Usually you stick to your own strata of society - both at home and whilst travelling. That’s what I call horizontal travel.

Have you seen a janitor hanging out with a minister? Or a tea picker sharing a meal with a tea plantation owner? Or a school teacher invited to a movie by a film director and both having a conversation after it?

That would be what I call a vertical travel - a type of travel when we transcend our own class, age group or any other limiting labels society and ourselves impose on us.

Yes, it’s not easy to travel vertically. Much easier to travel horizontally, that’s why most of us do exactly that.

What gives you that feeling you are talking to someone who gets you?

When you travel horizontally nobody challenges your beliefs, your values, your assumptions about the world. It's a convenient, reassuring, comfort food type of travel.

From my extensive travel experience I can tell you this: the easiest way to find common ground with someone who doesn't speak your language isn't your nationality, cultural background or traditions you’ve been exposed to since childhood.

Similar education, shared values, and belonging to the same social stratum - these are the things that bring you closer and give you that pleasant feeling that you are talking to someone who gets you.

Vertical travel, on the contrary, initially can make you feel uneasy, out of your comfort zone, misunderstood or misinterpreted.

Ultimately though travel through strata of society reveals thoughts and feelings you didn’t know you have in you, eliminates some of your fears and brings your empathy to a completely different level.

When you are drinking tea with someone who is out there on the streets protesting and on the same day sharing a meal with someone whom they protest against, you listen to their stories, their voices full of anguish, confusion, anger and many other emotions - you probably won’t take sides.

You empathise with both of them. Because both of them have their stories, reasons, delusions. And each one of us could find ourselves in the shoes of another.

Share The Making of a Journey with Ilona Vinogradova

Vertical travel begins at your front door

This is not about tourism. It is about a fundamental reorientation of how we engage with the world. The good news is that you need not board a plane to practise it.

Vertical travel begins at your own front door. The city you inhabit is a stack of unseen worlds, and the work is to learn how to move between its floors.

How, then, do we cultivate this? It requires a different kind of effort, one that is more intentional than picking a destination from a map.

Learn the art of the generous question. We are often taught that being interesting is the goal. For the vertical traveller, being interested is the entire point. This means asking questions that open doors rather than ones that simply confirm your own assumptions.

Understand that vertical travel is an act of reciprocal vulnerability. It is not a form of social slumming or a way to collect anecdotes from 'colourful' characters. To be effective, you must be prepared to share something of yourself in return.

This does not mean unloading your burdens onto a stranger, but rather offering a piece of your own reality as a gesture of good faith. It is the difference between an interview and an exchange. This reciprocity is what dissolves the dynamic of observer and subject, allowing a genuine, if temporary, connection to form.

As a vertical traveller you are invited to relinquish the need to be an expert. The horizontal traveller often seeks to master a place, to know the best restaurant or the “hidden gem”. The vertical traveller accepts the role of the perpetual novice.

You will misunderstand local customs. You will miss the subtext of a joke. You will be corrected. This is not failure; it is the point. Embracing your own ignorance with good humour is the quickest way to invite someone to become your teacher, and in doing so, they will often reveal the unspoken rules and hidden textures of their stratum.

This kind of travel is not comfortable. It can be awkward and humbling. But it counteracts the gravitational pull of our own social circles that constantly reinforces what we already think we know.

To travel vertically, whether in Kathmandu or Canterbury, is to actively seek out the friction that sandpapers smooth your preconceptions. It is the most reliable way I have found to discover not new landscapes, but new eyes.

Leave a comment

How to start practicing vertical travel

This notion inevitably prompts a practical question: how does one even begin such a conversation? The janitor does not simply bump into the minister at the water cooler. The gap seems too vast, the protocols too obscure.

The key is to locate a shared point of focus that exists outside of your respective roles. The janitor’s access is not to the minister, the person, but to the minister’s environment.

Similarly, the film director is most accessible through the artefact of their work. The school teacher, having seen their latest film, could write a brief, thoughtful note not of praise, but of observation.

The approach is not about demanding time, but about demonstrating a shared humanity through a common interest. It is about finding the connection that already exists in the space between you.

Share

In an age where disagreement is so often met with immediate dismissal or outright hostility, this practice offers a vital antidote.

Vertical travel is not about finding common ground, though that may happen. It is about learning to stand on different ground entirely, and to do so without feeling the need to conquer it.

You learn to listen not for weaknesses in an argument to exploit, but for the human experiences that forged those convictions. This is how we train ourselves to separate the person from the position, to understand the motivation without having to endorse the belief.

It is a masterclass in holding two opposing truths in your mind at once, not to decide which is right, but to comprehend how both can be felt so deeply.

The skill it cultivates - that of engaging with profound difference without resorting to animosity - is perhaps the most valuable one we can acquire in our polarising times.

People are more approachable than you think

Only now am I realising that we journalists are probably the ultimate vertical travellers, simply because we practise it so often; it’s part of the job.

I know that for many of my friends outside the media, talking to someone significantly higher or lower in the social hierarchy is awkward at best, and overwhelming or deeply uncomfortable at worst.

If you relate to this, I want you to know: people at every level are more approachable than you think.

The secret lies in how you approach them, specifically in whether you can offer them something they value in a social interaction - be it intellectual stimulation, genuine admiration, or by seeking their advice. And people love it when you seek their advice.

For those who find this practice challenging to initiate alone, know that this is the core of every journey I design. My role as a journalist has always been that of a vertical traveller, granted access to diverse worlds in order to listen and connect. I extend that same invitation to you: to step into this practice with a curated group of fellow travellers, ready to explore the vertical dimension of a place, together.

What do you think? Is this a practice you already engage in without giving it a name? Or does the very idea seem impossibly difficult in our stratified world? I’d love to hear your perspectives in the comments.👇

Leave a comment

I lived in this small country for a month, travelling all over it. I had no associations with Rwanda other than the genocide. And for the first few days, I walked around its capital, Kigali, and looked closely at every face, thinking to myself: did this person kill their neighbours or, on the contrary, was their entire family slaughtered?

Virtually everyone in this country of 11 million suffered from the 1994 genocide. In just three months, more than a million people were slaughtered: Hutus killed Tutsis. Yet there is no ethnic difference between them. They are one people.

The difference between a Hutu and a Tutsi was about 10 cows

I was stunned to learn that before the arrival of first the Germans and then the Belgians - who introduced divisive identity cards in the 1930s forcing people to declare as Hutu or Tutsi - the division was not ethnic but economic.

If you had more than ten cows, you were Tutsi; if you had fewer, you were Hutu. In other words, you could transition from Hutu to Tutsi and back again during your lifetime.

Of course, the 10 cows rule is a simplification of a more complex socio-economic hierarchy. The point is that Hutu and Tutsi are not different races, they are distinct social groups with a long history, albeit one that was fluid before colonialism.

The Belgians instituted a rigid racial hierarchy, favouring the Tutsi elite to enforce their rule, a classic colonial 'divide and conquer' strategy that planted the seeds for future conflict.

Now, 31 years later, people walk past you smiling, machetes in hand (this is, after all, an agricultural country), and you feel no fear.

Even though you know that those same machetes (bullets were expensive) were the primary weapon during those terrible three months from April to July 1994.

Whether in Kigali or a village on the Congolese border, you are surrounded by smiling people carrying machetes, and you are not afraid.

We have forgiven, but we cannot forget

Once again, Hutus are marrying Tutsis, as has always been the case. No one asks whether you are Hutu or Tutsi; it is practically taboo. The official narrative is that ‘we are Rwandans, we are one people.’

Unofficially, when hiring, as locals have told me, they still find out who you are through indirect means.

"We have forgiven, but we cannot forget," a Tutsi might tell me when I ask point-blank - a question that is, of course, inappropriate. It's considered indecent to abruptly talk about the genocide and its aftermath a mere 30 years on. Why rub salt in a wound that is still fresh?

But I needed to understand, on a deep level, how a society lives with this when those who remember the killing - both as victims and perpetrators - are still alive. When you start this ‘inappropriate’ conversation, people first look around, lower their voices, but then often share stories that chill me to the bone and twist my stomach.

And yet, if you didn't know the history, that 31 years ago in this small country, the Hutus slaughtered more than a million friends and neighbours - the only hints of the past would be the genocide memorials. Nothing else in the everyday scene betrays what happened.

Share The Making of a Journey with Ilona Vinogradova

Everywhere you go, you see smiling, friendly people. Kigali is one of the safest and cleanest places in East Africa. It has proper pavements - a rarity in the region - meaning you can actually walk around rather than being forced to use a motorbike or car. Be warned, though: the city is incredibly hilly, so your walk will feel more like a constant climb or descent.

Kigali is full of art galleries with prices starting at $10,000, cosy cafés and expensive hotels. Plastic bags are banned, so everyone uses paper bags, which means less rubbish on the streets.

The cleanliness, safety, and enforced unity ("we are all Rwandans") are top-down policies, achieved at the cost of certain political freedoms and human rights violations.

The authoritarian, but effective, as many locals would tell me, rule of Paul Kagame who has been the president of the country since 2000, creates a complex reality for Rwandans, who often express both gratitude for the peace and quiet unease about the price paid for it.

The country of a thousand hills and a thousand NGOs

There are even more NGOs , which left the country on the eve of the genocide and returned as soon as it became possible to make money here again. Rwanda is called the country of 1,000 hills and 1,000 NGOs. The effectiveness of the latter is highly questionable.

The employees of these NGOs sit in large offices, drive SUVs, publish brochures about ‘poor women’ on expensive Finnish paper, and charge 300 bucks for a one-day excursion to coffee plantations to see "local women who work on these plantations and thus pull themselves out of poverty".

Both Western tourists and NGO workers pat themselves on the back, saying, ’Aren’t we wonderful for helping the locals fight poverty?’

But when you are alone with this woman and she tells you that, yes, she now earns $70, sometimes even $100, a month (the average monthly salary in Rwanda is $70), but it is not enough to pay for her children's education or buy new clothes. She is astonished to learn that tourists pay $300 for a single day to come and watch her work.

Overall, Rwanda is like Switzerland. In the sense that it could be the Switzerland if it were in Europe. A beautiful, hilly country filled with lakes and volcanoes - a hiker’s dream.

But damn circumstances. If you don't control them, they control you.

If you enjoyed reading The Making of a Journey today, tap the 💙 below - it helps my stories get discovered!

Subscribe now

This essay is a glimpse of the journey. If you felt a pull to see for yourself, to move beyond the headlines and step into the real, complex story, you might be the right fit for our next trip.

I curate journeys for a small group of thoughtful travellers who want more than a holiday. We don’t just visit; we listen, engage, and gain access to people, conversations, and places that are simply off-limits to conventional tourism.

If this resonates, I’d love to hear from you. DM me to learn about my next curated trip.

Several people have died, hundreds have been injured and public buildings have been burnt and looted after thousands of people took to the streets in anti-government protests across Indonesia over the past week.

The clashes between riot police and rock-throwing protesters that began in the capital and quickly spread beyond Jakarta have been seen as a major test for President Prabowo Subianto, a former general who has been in office for less than a year.

You’ll read this in the news. Or maybe you won’t. If you live far away from South East Asia, it might not pop up in any of your feeds; major news for one country will go almost unnoticed in many other places. And there is nothing unusual about it; that’s how it works. People are interested in what’s near them and impacts their lives directly.

If you are interested in this region and have even personalised your news feed you might have read that the protests began on 25 August, with thousands demonstrating outside parliament against a housing allowance for MPs that was nearly 10 times the minimum wage in Jakarta. The president of the country has simultaneously implemented strict austerity measures, including cuts to education, health and public works.

People are fed up with inequality, blatant corruption and the repressiveness of security forces among other things.

I come to Indonesia quite often - it is one of my favourite countries in South East Asia. For months at a time, I live among those people who are now described as “looters”, “violent protesters”, or “women with brooms” (the Alliance of Indonesian women joined the protests as well).

Narratives behind narratives

How do we perceive news from far away - from a country we’ve never been to, do not know anyone there, and frankly do not really care about? We scan the headlines, maybe read a couple of sentences, remember the key words and move on. We are bombarded by megabytes of information; we don’t have time to process it all, let alone understand the essence and empathise with the people written about.

When you produce news, you talk to real people who are affected by whatever you are reporting on, so you hear their voices, intonations, you feel their anguish, confusion, anger etc. You feel for them more than an ordinary news consumer would.

However, the biggest shift happened when I started travelling extensively, slowly, deeply embedding myself within different local communities.

Share

The more countries I lived in and visited (luckily for me, it’s half of the world), the more my perception of news, or rather the patterns we follow in producing news, has changed irrevocably.

The chronic fatigue of people in Jakarta

Let me immerse you in Jakarta - the city which is in the headlines now across South East Asia at least.

It's hard to call it a beautiful city. There's too much audiovisual noise, as in any Asian city. Of course, it has its gems. And when you find one of those gems, you want to dive into it and stay there for a long time without coming up for air, especially since the air is polluted.

I'm talking about people who live, work, sleep, argue, hug, wash - spend their lives on the street. Maybe they have a place to sleep, but most of their lives are spent on the street. The street is an endless stream of people, cars, scooters, a never-ending hum.

There are other people. They smile, rush around, spend a lot of time in traffic jams, their Audis, Hummers and Lexuses take them from point A to point B, the air conditioning is always on, from one gem to another - the day passes quickly.

At the end of the day, they take a dip in the pool (they all live in houses with pools), take a shower, change their clothes and go to a cosy restaurant for dinner.

Everyone wants to escape from their reality

As everywhere else, people here live in parallel worlds, only they are more contrasting than in Europe, so they immediately catch the eye. Of course, this is not noticeable to the locals: they are used to it. Besides, the eyes of those on the street and those in cars are downcast all day long - everyone is on their phones.

No matter what reality a person lives in, they want to escape from it. At least, that’s the impression when you see people who are constantly glued to their phones.

Share The Making of a Journey with Ilona Vinogradova

It's clear that the whole world is glued to their devices, but here it's more grotesque. It feels like no one lives here and now, everyone is in a different reality. You walk by and feel it with your body: here he is, a person, standing nearby or sitting on his scooter/motorbike, but he is not here - he is in another space, only his shell is here. You feel a lot with your body here. To the point of your bones crunching.

How can one maintain a sense of dignity in such chronic poverty, or rather destitution, in which many people live here? Some manage to do so, and it inspires nothing but admiration.

The flow of cars stops at another traffic light. People have 30 seconds to earn at least a little money. And so they walk, men and women with tired faces, sunken cheeks, and dull eyes. Each carries something of their own, some trinkets that no one needs, napkins, and other goods that rarely find a buyer.

Among them is a man of about 60 (or he looks 60, he could well be 35).

Her 100 Gucci bags

…These are the protesters who went and ransacked several MP’s and a Finance Minister’s house among other places, and threw her 100 Gucci bags onto the street.

The finance minister, of course, has her own story and reasons why she needed to compensate for something missing in her life with all those expensive items her house is filled with. And it’s irrelevant now whether there were 10 or 100 Gucci or Louis Vuitton bags - people in Jakarta, Yogyakarta, Bali are telling each other this story and turning it into a meme.

Subscribe now

We are different but we are the same. We are humans. We all have the same basic existential needs, desires and hopes. We want to be loved, valued, understood - and all of that not on an empty stomach. We all want to have dignity and look at everyone not obsequiously, but as equals - eye to eye and with a smile.

Vertical travel as an antidote to taking sides

But if you travel extensively focusing on people rather than sightseeing, if you have at least one local friend in different countries and many kind strangers in as many countries as possible, you will never read the news from those places with an indifferent eye and heart.

And if you practice what I call vertical travel, meaning you travel through strata of society, drinking tea with someone who is out there on the streets protesting and on the same day sharing a meal with someone whom they protest against, you listen to their stories, their voices full of anguish, confusion, anger and many other emotions - you probably won’t take sides.

You empathise with both of them. Because both of them have their stories, reasons, delusions. And each one of us could find ourselves in the shoes of another.

If you enjoyed reading The Making of a Journey today, tap the 💙 below - it helps my stories get discovered!

Leave a comment

Aren’t you tired of living on the road? Doesn’t it ultimately become boring, like anything that one does day-in and day-out? Aren’t you stressed about all the logistics each time you move to a new country?

These are the questions I'm asked most by people who have never travelled full-time. They don't know what to expect from this lifestyle, yet are curious to try.

Maybe, one day, well, I don’t know. What if I don’t like it? What if it’s not for me?

One thing is obvious to the point of banality: you’ll never know if you don’t try.

And whatever ideas, fears, or preconceptions you have - I can guarantee you - once you start, things will be different. No better, no worse, just different from how you initially imagined. That applies to almost everything in life, not only travel.

So, how to travel non-stop without burning out? Don’t laugh - you can burn out even from the things you really enjoy doing if you do them on repeat.

First of all, you slow down.

In my first year of travel I moved every 3-5 days to a new location. I was hungry for new impressions, new people, new places. And I was enjoying it until I was not.

So, I slowed down; I started spending more time in one place. I’d make one city/village my base from where I’d explore the rest of the country. It did change the dynamics of my travel, and I started enjoying it even more.

Second, you shift your preferences from sightseeing to experience and access, from doing to being. Long gone are the days when I’d travel hundreds of kilometres to see something, especially if that something is on everyone’s “must see list”.

But I will travel thousands to have a profound conversation with someone intelligent about life, death, sex and everything in between. I will travel many kilometres to see my favourite director’s new theatre play and then discuss it over dinner with him.

I will also drop my plans for an unknown underground theatre, jazz bar, or art gallery if the people and their storytelling captivate me so completely that time stops.

Share The Making of a Journey with Ilona Vinogradova

I would (just did) ride a couple of hundreds of kilometres on my bike to go to a full-moon, zero alcohol, secret party in the forest by the sea to dance the whole night under the stars. That, I can do on repeat. 😊

Third, you find your community wherever you go.

You ground yourself by becoming a member, however temporary. There, you learn new things and share your own knowledge. Together, this creates a sense of - not necessarily belonging - but something close to shared humanity.

There are many more points I could share with those of you who one day want to try a nomadic lifestyle. But for now I’ll leave you with these three.

The beauty of this type of slow travel is that your experience will be different from mine. It will be unrepeatable and yours. And that’s what makes it powerful.

Love,
Ilona

If you enjoyed reading The Making of a Journey today, tap the 💙 below - it helps my stories get discovered!

Subscribe now

Perhaps because I live now in a land of gratitude, where locals make offerings to their gods several times a day to thank the universe for what they have, I myself feel enormously grateful for almost everything I have and don’t have in life.

So, today’s letter is a thank-you note to all of you who decided to subscribe to and follow The Making of a Journey. Some of you I know personally; some of you are my dear friends; others I’ve met briefly and shared some experiences with; and some of you I don’t know at all, but I am grateful you are here.

To those of you I know personally, I’d like to say a very specific thank you by sharing one memory that comes first when I think of you.

I won’t call you by your names, but I am sure each one of you will recognise yourselves in these memories. Do wink at me at the end if you did. Or, since there is no option for winking here, give me a heart, so I know you are actually reading it :-).

You are a powerhouse – never forget that!

The first time I met you, we were both 15-17-year-old kids. I came to your lyceum as a journalist with a cameraman to tell a story about all of you smart boys studying there. The first memory I have of you is your kind smile and intelligent eyes.

Since then, many things have changed – we have both moved around the world, uprooted ourselves, settled and unsettled again – but the one thing has never changed: your kind smile (and real help behind that smile) and your intelligent eyes. And to whom else would I text from anywhere in the world when I forget a password for my website?:-)).
***
First, I admired you as a powerful storyteller. The interview you gave us about Afghanistan – your home country, and the things you’ve witnessed there – people talked about it for years, and I am not exaggerating! Then, I admired you as a beautiful woman and a wise friend. Whenever I need a word of wisdom, I come to you. You are a powerhouse – never forget that!
***
You came into my life at a very turbulent (I realise this now, in retrospect) confusing time, and your friendship, among other things, helped me to anchor myself.

Our smashingly beautiful and fiercely intelligent sons (I am so unbiased:-)) were born a day and a year apart and speak the same language, which wasn’t native to us. We speak the language of friendship that has lasted for years. I can cry and laugh shamelessly about anything with you.
***
You are one of the few school classmates I am still in touch with, and I always know that we can talk deeply, even though we hardly see each other. You are a deep thinker with a tender soul.
***
You are my ex-colleague turned friend turned my personal cooking instructor and inspiration:-). You are the person who can travel from one end of London to the other to help me move or carry my huge paintings. And the one who can take me to the best Iranian restaurant in London.

Your future is walking towards you whilst you are walking towards the future

We had only one conversation over the phone, but I still remember it almost word for word. Your future is walking towards you whilst you are walking towards the future. You are becoming who you truly are. So grateful!
***
Remember that 100 women project we worked on? I would nominate you! Of all the brief professional encounters we had, I will always remember your kindness, your honesty, and your generosity.
***
My beautiful, sharp-tongued colleague turned friend, I am happy for you that you have the courage to leave things and places if they start to suffocate you. I felt as if I had taken off a tight bra on a hot summer day:-). Go, girl, only forward!
***

We met in Ubud, in that beautiful village which we both made our home for some weeks. Edery is still waiting for you and all the stories we can share over a Kintamani coffee.
***
We had only brief encounters in London ranging from being very vulnerable and sharing some very personal stories with each other, to some funny outings at Chelsea restaurants with famous chefs who actually poisoned us. Laughter aside, I admire your courage for becoming a mother again!
***
You are my wise ex-colleague with whom I had the most pleasant night shifts ( and usually I hated them!), because I always enjoyed listening to your stories. Going on air at 2:30 a.m. seemed all right after all the tea and stories we shared.

“Let’s go - it will never end!”

You made my trip to Uganda memorable in many different ways. I enjoyed walking with you through your village as much as I enjoyed driving through the endless savannahs listening to your stories.
***
We would probably never have climbed Mount Sinai at night if not for you. I didn’t even know that one could do it, since the only association I had with this mountain was Biblical. Now, when I think of Moses, I picture us climbing the whole night and that sunrise - one of the most beautiful in my life.
***
With you, my dear friend, I shared many memories and many deep conversations, but that Easter night service in a small church of a godforsaken town and your plea at 3 a.m. - “Let’s go - it will never end!” - comes to mind now and brings a smile to my agnostic face.
***
We had only one conversation in Kathmandu, sharing a table at a lovely café. But I still remember it. Keep on exploring and walking towards the fear - that’s where the real deal is!
***|
Dharmkot. A chance encounter turned into a beautiful day of talking, walking, and discovering a café in the mountains with what was maybe an ordinary sunset, but which on that day seemed quite extraordinary. Intensity over longevity – I liked and appreciated that.

Fear not, just walk your own walk
My beautiful ex-colleague turned into my hairdresser during Covid. The things you taught me then proved to be super useful for my life on the road. And your video editing skills are impressive; fear not, just walk your own walk!
***
You and your wife made me feel at home in Thailand. I won’t forget the local places you took me to, the conversations and meals we shared, and that feeling of being taken care of.

And another precious thing I’ve learned from you – how one can age gracefully. If and when I turn 80, I’d love to be as fit, as mentally alert, and as full of life as you two are.
***
We met only once or twice in London, then in Holland, but I still remember your distinctive style – both as a woman and as an artist.
***
Every time I think of you, my dear Iranian colleague, I smile. You radiate warmth, light, and beauty. I hope that one day we can coincide in time and space and be in Iran at the same time.
***

I love Iran and I love Florence. Your beautiful ceramic shop in Florence made me feel between the spaces, as if I was in Iran and Florence at the same time. What taste you have! Every object in your shop is poetry in itself.

Vienna without your guidance, your knowledge, your love for opera, history, choral singing, and long bicycle rides would not be the same – ever.
***
Your Italian lessons during Covid were like a walk through Tuscan hills that somehow ends by the sea with a glass of Prosecco in one hand and a good Montepulciano d’Abruzzo in the other :-).
***
Buenos Aires, a small yacht, happy sailing. You and your friends made me fall even deeper in love with Argentina. Where is the rest of the crew? Call all hands on deck!:-)
***
We never met, but your book made me see my beloved place on earth through a different lens and inspired me to take Richard Feynman’s daughter to that place and make a documentary about it. I wish I could have taken him – the man who made me fascinated with quantum physics and showed me (albeit posthumously) what real freedom is.

God, it feels so good to have all these memories. It makes me feel rich, privileged, unstoppable, and immensely grateful. And to think I've only thanked a small fraction of the people who've touched my life - each one of us has so many more people to thank, and the act of gratitude is powerful, humbling, and therapeutic. Thank you, all of you!

To those of you whom I don’t know personally: I hope one day you can join me on one of the experience-and access-focused trips I will curate, and there will be plenty of opportunities to create some memories together.

If you recognised yourself, press the little heart, so I know you know:-).

Love,
Ilona

Leave a comment

In my first week in Bolivia, it has become increasingly clear to me what a rich country this is! In terms of resources: gold, silver, lithium, uranium, precious stones – some of which are only mined here. And what a poor nation it is.

The sacramental question is: what the fuck? Why, in a country rich in natural resources, do so many people live in poverty? And that’s the question I ask all the locals.

Hector the driver, Josefina the cook, Luis the museum curator, Jorge the restaurant owner, Leonardo the hotel owner…

‘What the fuck?!’ I ask them.

The big bad wolf and my favourite question: wtf?

Reality is different for everyone. It doesn’t matter what history, economics, Wikipedia, or textbooks say – it matters what Hector the driver, Luis the museum keeper, and Josefina the cook think and feel. They think they’re being fucked over by the big bad wolf named the USA. ‘We are not poor - we are robbed’. I heard this phrase constantly in Bolivia.

Various business owners say that ‘it’s not all clear-cut’.

Everyone has their own truth. Or someone has more to lose.

I remembered my conversation with Muhammad Yunus, professor of economics, founder of Grameen Bank and Nobel Peace Prize winner. Now, to all those titles, another one has been added – he’s the de facto current Prime Minister of Bangladesh, although his official title is Chief Advisor of the Government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh.

We have a mutual and very good friend who introduced us in 2014. So I was sitting in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, in his office; he poured me tea and said, ‘Ilona, the next two hours are yours – ask me anything you want.’

And I asked him my favourite question: what the fuck? (Well, a bit more polite version of it, but he got the drift). Why are there so many poor and uneducated people? Why do women earn less than men? Why, Muhammad, do you get paid $70,000 for an hour-long lecture for which you don’t even have to prepare, while the women I met yesterday at a textile factory in Dhaka are paid $100 a month?

Yunus may have regretted saying, ‘Ask me anything,’ but he didn’t show it. He smiled and said, ‘It’s not that simple – it’s more complicated than it seems at first glance. You have not seen what was here 30 and 10 years ago; step by step, we will change everything.’ And for two hours, he patiently explained to me why the world is the way it is.

Share

How did I get from Bolivia to Dhaka? Back to Bolivia.

Uyuni: from silver boom to train graveyard

Back from the Uyuni salt flats to the town of the same name. A hundred years ago, it was the country’s largest railway centre. From here, trains from England, Spain and the United States transported silver, gold and other precious metals abroad.

On the one hand, nothing has changed: almost all natural resources extracted in Bolivia are exported. Even quinoa, which is grown in the highlands – ‘we can’t afford it,’ the locals say; everything is exported.

On the other hand, the town of Uyuni has turned into a backwater, littered district centre, and tourists are taken to the train graveyard – the same trains from England, Spain and the USA which, in the early 20th century, transported silver from here.

The huge silver deposit in the neighbouring town of Potosí has exhausted itself after intensive mining, and there is nothing left to export – at least from this part of the country.

I took a bus from Uyuni, travelling to Potosí. In the town of Potosí, there is a street called Moscow at the intersection with Avenida Italia. Most of the inhabitants know nothing about Moscow or Italy.

‘Where are you from?’ they asked.
‘From London?’
‘Where’s that? In Paris?’

…In Potosí, I changed to a minibus and drove on to Sucre, one of the two capitals of Bolivia. After two and a half hours on a mountain serpentine, I arrived in… Spanish Andalusia.

Sucre - where the rich people live

That’s the impression Sucre gives. It’s a different reality again. White houses with red-tiled roofs. Well-dressed people. Lots of children and youngsters (amongst other things, it is also a university town).

Atmospheric cafés, interesting architecture, many museums, old churches, parks, houses with beautiful gardens. And the people – different people live here.

As the owner of the house with a garden where I stayed told me: ‘People with money live here.’

And again, I wanted to ask my favourite question: what the fuck? Why do only people without money live in Uyuni?!

I will ask this and other questions to the local Muhammad Yunus – someone who might explain the economic disparities as patiently as Yunus had explained global poverty to me.

For now, though, my body is blissfully and gratefully relaxing in the garden, basking in the sun. Is this really Bolivia too?

What’s your answer to my ‘WTF’ question? Don’t overthink it - just say it like you mean it.

Leave a comment

'What will you call the chapter in the book you'll write about me and Rukhaya?' asked Miriam whilst we were hiking in the mountains. The question caught me off guard, but then again, everything about Miriam does.

She is a woman who works in a riad in Marrakesh, where I stay every time (three so far) I pass through the city on my way elsewhere. More importantly, Miriam is a woman who took me to a hammam during my first week in Morocco and washed me the way only my grandmother ever had.

By my third day, I was already overwhelmed by the street noise, the dirt, the petrol fumes, the rubbish, and the constant hassle from local men. That was when she brought me to her local hammam.

I could see she was nervous about how I'd take the very local experience – women bringing their own buckets, black soap and scrubs, sitting on the floor to wash themselves for hours whilst chatting.

But the moment she saw I was enjoying myself, she relaxed, laughing and talking with the other women, who watched me with curiosity.

After giving me time to cleanse myself, she laid me back across her knees, told me to stretch out, and began to scrub me thoroughly: my face, neck, shoulders, breasts, belly and between my legs. Her breasts hung so close to my mouth that I could have kissed her nipples, but I kept my mouth shut, letting them brush against me as she moved – vigorously yet gently.

The last time I'd been washed like this was as a child, by my grandmother.

At one point, I nearly cried, overwhelmed by the kindness. Here was a woman I'd known for only a few days, bathing me as my grandmother once had, surrounded by women doing the same for each other.

For them, it was a mundane weekly ritual. For me, it was a moment of shared humanity, care, tenderness – and beauty.

No room and no dreams of her own

She took me home and introduced me to her four children and extended family. None spoke any language but Arabic, so they smiled at me and their mother whilst I conversed with her in broken French.

Ten people live in Miriam's house. When she showed me around and I asked where she slept, she pointed to the floor behind a wardrobe.

She's the family's sole breadwinner; her husband works occasionally, and her adult children – some over twenty – don't work at all, because it’s not easy to find a job.

Miriam has no privacy, no room of her own, no dreams for herself – only for her children.

We hug daily, and I tell her how much I admire her – she's a superwoman. Her eyes light up; no one has ever called her that.

She thinks I'm strong, courageous and free. But I lack half her strength and endurance, the resilience to live her life and still laugh every day.

He kissed my lips only once

… Two months later, we are hiking in Imlil, gazing at snow-capped Mount Toubkal. We pause so she can type Arabic into Google Translate and I can reply in English – our French isn't enough for deeper conversations.

I ask about her childhood (married off at sixteen by her father, whom she loves but resents him for ending her education), her marriage, love and sex.

'We were never friends, but we were lovers once. Not anymore,' she says of her husband. 'Even then, he kissed my lips only once. No tenderness, no foreplay, no aftercare.'

'Have you ever had an orgasm?' I type into Google Translate.

'Yes,' she replies. 'Years ago.' A pause, then rapid typing: If he came to me now, I'd have so much to give. I'm burning inside.

'You are the first person I've ever spoken to about these things,' she says, 'and it feels so good to talk about it.'

Yes, she has considered divorce. Yes, she dreams of a lover. No, she won't act on it. This is her lot in life, and she needs to accept it as it is.

Rukhaya, who fled the village with her baby and no money

I don't know why she assumes I'll write a book featuring her – perhaps because I'm a journalist, travelling her land more than she ever has, bringing her stories like Rukhaya's: a thirty-year-old Berber nomad raising an eight-year-old son alone after divorcing her husband for taking a second wife.

Proud and defiant, she fled the village with her baby and no money. The handmade carpets she weaves in her scarce free time – between caring for her son and elderly mother in their tent – sell for €300–400 in Marrakesh.

In Europe you'll pay at least €700 for such a carpet, convinced that you are helping nomad women to live decent lives. Yet Rukhaya gets only €30 for a carpet she spends two weeks weaving – the rest is pocketed by middlemen.

'Well?' Miriam nudges. 'What will you call the chapter in the book you'll write about me and Rukhaya?'

I want to say: First, I need a book – a whole story inside me. Instead, I answer: 'Des Femmes Admirables.'

Share

Bolivia. This country was an absolute terra incognita for me before I arrived here. Not even before arriving, but before entering, because I literally walked across the border and found myself transported from one reality to another.

On the Argentine side, a taxi driver drove me straight to the checkpoint window. There was almost no queue (only one person stood in front of me). I crossed the border easily and quickly, despite some travellers describing this checkpoint as ‘the worst in the world’. Your experience will almost always be different - just yours.

I stood for a while on the bridge separating the two countries, watching the locals with their bags, their daily trudge from Bolivia to Argentina and back. The economy of these two border towns, as a restaurant owner on the Argentine side explained, consists mostly of illegal trade in assorted junk.

Tupiza, Butch Cassidy and cross-dressing

From the border town on the Bolivian side, I got into a minivan and drove to the town of Tupiza (a two-hour journey). It's not a particularly remarkable place, except that according to legend, it was here that Bolivian policemen caught and killed Butch Cassidy, the elusive and legendary American gangster of the 20th- century.

It turned out that the day I arrived, the people of Tupiza were celebrating the city's 400-plus-year anniversary.

On one street the military were marching; on another, a more interesting scene was unfolding.

The people gathered in a tight circle around a local man who was changing from men’s to women’s clothes to the approving squeals and hooting of the crowd. In a skirt, torn tights, and high heels, he danced a couple of solo dances. The people clapped and laughed approvingly.

The city is poor: men in tracksuit bottoms, often drunk, vomiting on the pavement; women in traditional attire - skirts and distinctive Bolivian hats, some with a bundle on their backs, others with a child strapped to their backs. There are a lot of old women (or women who look old - clearly not from an easy life), sitting on the pavement with their belongings and selling food. But the atmosphere is good-natured; everyone is relaxed, content in their own way.

There are beautiful red-brick mountains all around.

Salar de Uyuni: trekking through Bolivia’s salt flats

Early the next morning, I set off on a four-day trek - a jeep safari through mountains, deserts, volcanoes, geysers, and thermal springs - heading for one of Bolivia’s crown jewels: the Salar de Uyuni.

The salt flat lies in the foothills of the Andes, at an altitude of 3,560 metres above sea level, but to get to it by off-road vehicle from Tupiza, we climbed up to 5,000 metres. I chewed coca leaves vigorously, but the main remedy for mountain sickness is acclimatisation. By the third day, 5,000 metres becomes almost unnoticeable.

Salar de Uyuni is the largest salt flat in the world, covering just over 12,000 square kilometres.

A few years ago, I saw photos of this otherworldly landscape and the miners toiling in its salt, lithium, and uranium mines. They were the work of the legendary Brazilian photographer - and visual alchemist - Sebastião Salgado (look up his masterpieces, and you’ll understand).

Sebastião Salgado and the miners of the Uyuni salt flats

Unearthly photographs of unearthly landscapes. True, Salgado wanted to draw attention not so much to the landscapes as to the miners’ gruelling labour. But to this day, the miners remain of little interest to tourists or locals. Although, according to residents, miners earn good money and are considered rich in this poor country. They ruin their health, but their families live well and drive jeeps.

And here we are, also travelling by jeep across the mountainous off-roads that fascinate me. Every day we drive 200-300 kilometres, and I wish the road would never end.

Mountains, geysers, volcanoes, stony desert, and again mountains of different colours and shades. And a vast, endless sky overhead. And lagoons - dozens of beautiful lagoons. In some of them, flamingos waded, though most had flown to warmer countries for winter. In summer (from December to February), there are thousands of them here.

Then there are llamas and vicuñas. They're everywhere. I didn't know about the existence of vicuñas until I came to South America, as this is the only place where they are found. I looked them up on Wikipedia: a species of ungulate mammal in the camel family. Physically, vicuñas are similar to llamas and guanacos, but more slender and graceful. And, unlike llamas, they are not domesticated; they are wild. Their wool is worth its weight in gold.

All this beauty is set against biting-to-the-bones fucking cold, the absence of hot water, toilets only outside in the street, and - no internet connection (that's bliss! A digital detox).

How one experience helps you to survive (and enjoy) another

But beauty triumphs. You stand in the wind as snow and hail fall, wearing four layers of clothes. Your phone - now only a camera - is losing power from the cold. Your fingers won’t bend. And yet, you stand there smiling from ear to ear, unable to believe your happiness at being surrounded by such beauty. Tears run down your cheeks from the wind - or maybe not just the wind.

It reminded me of another experience when I faced such bone-chilling cold. In 2019, I crossed the ocean from Uruguay to South Africa as part of the crew of a racing yacht.

Nineteen days across the Southern Ocean (the notorious Roaring Forties latitudes), 4 hours sleep, 4 hours on deck. By day 7, everyone was chronically sleep- deprived and nerves were exposed. I remember typing on my phone with fingers curled up from the cold:

I am lying on the constantly sliding mattress of the swinging bunk on the starboard side. And all around, the sound of waves hitting the yacht like shells from a cannon.

...when you sit on deck at night - an hour, two, three - the wind blows, the waves hit you in the back, the cold penetrates to your bones. All thoughts and feelings freeze. You sit there and think of nothing, except: I wish this would end soon. You fall into an indifferent stupor. You stare into the darkness through the slit between the hood and the high, tightly buttoned collar of the survival suit and stupidly think about nothing.

Then you shake off your stupor, move your stiffened limbs as best you can, and - click - your brain switches on for a while and starts to think about how you will get to your sleeping bag, take off all the wet/sweaty/ clothes, curl up and fall asleep. Next - you visualise and methodically go through in your head all the warm clothes that have stayed dry and calculate how many layers you can wear on the next watch.

After that, your brain shuts down again, leaving only cold cold cold cold cold - and indifference.

At the edge of my consciousness flickered thoughts of pioneering seafarers, conquerors of peaks and poles, and ... the Soviet gulags: how these people endured the bitter cold without any Gore-Tex, neoprene, or other modern equipment, which still do not save you from the fucking cold mixed with buckets of salt water, hitting you in the back, in the face - wherever it hits. And for a split second strength comes from these people of the past: somehow they survived it all, so I will too.

I also realised: you can sleep everywhere - sitting on deck waist-deep in water, standing half-bent near the helm (half-bent to make it easier to dodge the water and wind), on a swinging bunk with a mattress constantly sliding - everywhere.

Besides the breaks in the cabin, only warm memories from life and fantasies about people who helped create these memories warmed me up. They were 100 per cent better than hot tea.

And this past experience helps me survive the current cold here in the mountains of Bolivia.

The power of ancestors

Now, I suddenly felt behind me hundreds of my ancestors, strong and quickly adapting to the ever-changing conditions of life - without them there would be no me. And now, I’m part of that chain, giving strength to those who’ll come after me. Yes, such thoughts help when heading to the loo in darkness and biting cold.

On the last day of the trek, we rise at 5:00 a.m to see the sunrise at the Uyuni salt flats. There are not many jeeps with tourists, and the salt flats are huge. Everyone spreads out to different places in this white desert. It feels like only you and a few companions exist.

The silence here rivals the Sahara’s - a mystical, rare quiet in our noisy world: an immense white expanse of stillness and peace.

Only human shrieks and cries of amazement disturb it.

Share

Let me answer straight away for those of you who want to go back to whatever you were doing before opening this newsletter.

The blunt answer is: it does both if you really travel.

Now, for those of you who want the story behind the story - here we go.

I became a journalist not just out of idealism but selfishly - to live many lives in one. By 15, when I first got published, I knew few professions offered that, and journalism delivered: hundreds of people who trusted me with their stories, each offering different points of view and opposing truths - each a life briefly lived.

Yet for years, I clung to "journalist" as my core identity - until nomadic years showed the irony: chasing multiple lives whilst fixating on one label.

Now, living near Buddhist monks, I meditate weekly with them. This week's deceptively simple question: Who am I?

The first identities that surfaced were: human, traveller, storyteller. The longer you meditate on this question, the more identities arise - mother, friend, lover, dancer, child, thinker, doer, explorer - on and on until you have no idea who you are. And that, too, is liberating.

Identity dissolves into liberation and the realisation that every day, you can create yourself from emptiness. You can draw whatever you want on the blank sheet of paper you essentially are - if you overcome your fear.

The case against travel

So, what does travelling have to do with your becoming or un-becoming? Everything and nothing.

I agree with much of The New Yorker's "Case Against Travel." Agnes Callard argues that travel often leads to superficial consumption of experiences rather than genuine enrichment, distracting from daily monotony without fostering profound transformation.

She refers to - I was about to write holiday-style travelling - but actually she talks about 95% of how people travel. You go to Paris, visit the Louvre, climb the Eiffel Tower, snap hundreds of photos - done. You return home telling friends you've had a "once-in-a-lifetime" trip.

Or you venture somewhere exotic - an African safari. You sleep under the stars in the Serengeti, wake at dawn chasing lions and elephants. Never mind the jeep-to-animal ratio - you've broken routine and done something different.

Did those trips transform you? Of course not. That type of travel distracts from routine and, as Callard notes, perhaps helps you prepare for… death. You feel less miserable about your own mortality when excitement breaks the "more of the same" rhythm.

“Travel splits this expanse of time into the chunk that happens before the trip, and the chunk that happens after it, obscuring from view the certainty of annihilation.”

Why moving slowly doesn't (always) mean moving deeply

But what if you travel for years, moving slowly, living among locals? You're still not immune to being a tourist.

In my four years of non-stop travel, I met many "digital nomads" who'd been on the road for ages. Most lived with other foreigners in co-living spaces, rented in expat-heavy neighbourhoods, and socialised almost exclusively with fellow travellers - showing little curiosity about locals and their ways of life.

I'm dangerously close to making you think I'm a "better" traveller than all those tourists. After all, "tourism is what we call travelling when other people are doing it."

If anything, my nomadic life taught me to withhold judgement. How often were my first impressions - especially in unfamiliar cultures - foolishly wrong!

Perhaps it comes down to expectations. Why expect one trip to alter core values? Even twenty trips won't change anything if you follow the crowds, see only what's recommended, and stay where everything caters to "more of the same." When I write "travel," I don't mean that.

Travel's superpower: It works like compound interest

Travel, in my vocabulary, begins when you stop asking for "travel advice" - when you realise you want to discover, not follow ready-made itineraries. When curiosity leads. Add to that one more caveat: you accept that wherever you go, you bring yourself - all your angels and demons - with you. There's no escape.

Like investing, the power of travelling lies in the compound effect. Change accretes silently.

I felt no different after crossing the Southern Ocean as part of a racing yacht crew. Though I'd learnt about myself and others, I didn't feel transformed.

Days after arriving in Cape Town, whilst deep-cleaning the boat, I vented my disappointment to an older crewmate. He said: "The change has happened - it's in you. You just don't see it yet. It will unfold slowly."

Two years later, I noticed I behaved differently under pressure - more calmly, as if observing myself and others from a distance.

My decision-making had shifted. To outsiders, my choices seemed bold and impulsive. Inside, I knew: I'd weighed each one deeply, accepting that I could never predict all outcomes. I acted on instinct, ready to embrace failure.

The catalyst? Crossing an ocean with 20 strangers, enduring constant pressure - external storms and internal ones.

It didn't happen overnight. I needed time to process it, to make it mine.

Now, as I write, I'm still processing my travels - digesting, distilling. The change has happened; some I see, some I don't. It will unfold in its own time.

Part 2 arrives soon. Until then, next time you're alone, ask yourself: 'What would I un-become if I weren't afraid?' Don't reply if it's too personal - just live with the question.

You can still press the little heart to show me - and everyone else - that this resonated with you. Your reaction matters.

Love,
Ilona

Arriving in an unfamiliar place at night often makes that first impression so jarring I want to leave the next day.

But come morning, sipping coffee at a café table while watching people pass by, breathing in new scents - suddenly the place feels transformed.

Or is it me who’s changed?

The strongest rejection I ever felt was in Marrakesh. By the second day, the urge to leave wasn't just about the city but the entire country. Yet stubbornness won out - that promise to myself to travel slowly and allow for second, even third impressions.

As a result, I ended up living in Morocco for three months, travelling up and down the country. I befriended Berbers who simply said, Stay with us. So I did - for a month in the desert, which turned out to be one of the happiest months of my life.

At the time, Morocco had closed its borders, leaving behind no tourists, and the 20 kilometres of sand dunes around Merzouga were mine alone.

Yet that first Marrakesh impression? A filthy, roaring bazaar of a city reeking of petrol fumes.

Amid all the clamour and grime, though, there were gems: beautiful riads, atmospheric cafés, museums - and, of course, among the throngs of people trying to lure you in and sell you something at triple the price, there were good, kind souls you’d want to return to, to continue the conversation, to share more mint tea with.

There was the seller to whom I spoke first in Italian, then in English. Thrilled to practise my Italian in such unexpected circumstances, I ended up buying argan oil from him - despite not even needing it.Twice, on different days, he guided me to the right place when I got lost in the medina’s maze.

The silver ring purchased from another salesman still circles a finger - a favourite. Maybe because I associate the ring with an hour-long conversation we had about love, death and everything in between.

Masturbating old man and museum sage

Then came Bert Flint.

... Walking through Marrakech’s Jewish Quarter (home to a cemetery where 7,000 of the 20,000 graves belong to children - victims of a 19th-century typhus epidemic), I stumbled upon the small Tiskiwin Museum, filled with Tuareg and Berber artefacts collected by Dutch archaeologist Bert Flint.

In the courtyard of the beautiful old building that held the museum sat an ancient man - so thin he seemed made of nothing but bones and papery skin.

The ticket attendant led me to him, explaining that he was the museum’s owner: Ask if he’ll let you in free as a journalist.

The old man adjusted his hearing aid and replied in French: No, you must pay. It’s my private museum. I paid and began exploring, not realising I had been standing before Bert Flint himself (I’d assumed he’d died long ago). Wandering through the exhibits, the sudden realisation struck: the museum’s founder was right there - it was him.

I went into his office. We spoke first in Dutch, then switched to English. With passion, he told me how, 60 years ago, he’d come to Morocco as a student during a revolution (that revolutionary spirit had drawn him in).

He’d met young Moroccans who later became the country’s ruling elite. And so he stayed, dedicating himself to studying Berber life. Everything in the museum was from his personal collection.

"I’ve read about you," I admitted. "Thought you'd be... gone."

He chuckled. I should’ve died a year ago. I was unconscious for four months - COVID. Kind people nursed me back.

At 90, he had not just the will to live but the will to work (This is the only thing keeping me here, he said).

Such people fascinate me. A relic of another time. A treasure trove of knowledge. A man who cares about depth, not surface (that much was clear even from our brief talk).

Conversations with people like him feel sacred - they’re of a different breed, doors to another epoch, another world, another way of thinking.

(Bert Flint died a year after I met him. I’m happy for him that he died in his beloved house/museum, surrounded by thousands of art pieces he had collected throughout his life).

Marrakech doesn’t contrast - it fractures

... That same evening, the usual medina gate was locked and I got lost. Luckily, Idris - a Berber I’d met earlier over Sahara stories - guided me through an hour of wrong turns.

By 11 p.m., it was pitch dark, reeking to the point of nausea. Stray dogs rummaged through rubbish. An old man sat on the ground, leaning against a wall, trousers unzipped, masturbating. Lonely figures drifted past.

Marrakech doesn’t contrast - it fractures, leaving clichés like “city of contrasts” gutted in the dust.

By day, you talk to Flint - one of the wisest old men alive. By night, you see a very different old man.

... The next day, I left for the Sahara and fell in love - with the dunes, the surreal landscapes, and the Berbers who call it home. But that’s another story.

Someday, I’ll take a bold few to Morocco - where travel doesn’t just move you, it rewires you. If that calls, comment ‘Morocco’ below ⬇️

Leave a comment