I came up with the idea to write a book at the end of 2017, when I got fed up with people telling me that they wished they could live like me, but they “didn’t have enough money”. I wanted to explain that I barely ever had much money at all and that traveling around the world doesn’t require a lot of money. It does, however, require a different kind of lifestyle and world view. I wanted to explain what this lifestyle and world view was all about, so I started writing.

At first, I wrote this blog and a few stories, then I decided to detail my entire 13-year-long journey around the world in one book. I wrote a few dozen pages in 2017, but then I put my book to the side for all of 2018 because I was too busy with life in Russia. I traveled across Russia several times, worked as a hiking guide in Siberia and hitchhiked through Mongolia. All of this was really fun, but it distracted me from the book :D.

In winter of 2019, I isolated myself in a small village on Lake Baikal and forced myself to work on the book again. Unfortunately, I only had about a month and a half in this village before I was distracted yet again by an ice diving expedition :D. After that, I took the railway across Russia, hitchhiked from Moscow to Spain and then tried to settle down and live with Tio in a small Spanish town called L’Estartit. ‘Here, I’ll definitely be able to work on my book!’ I thought. :)

Unfortunately, it was difficult to figure out a way to stay in Spain legally, so I was forced to leave because of visa restrictions. I went to the UK, Turkey, back to Spain and then to Romania. During this time, it was difficult to focus on the book.

At the beginning of 2020, Tio and I settled some paperwork and I was finally able to stay in Spain (and of course, we also got locked down). I spent most of 2020 working on my book and I finally managed to complete a full draft of the entire book by January 2021. The book is approximately 165,000 words long and now I am working on editing the entire thing (hopefully I’ll make it shorter :D). Once it’s finished, I will try to sell a hard copy, but I will also publish a trade-free e-version of the book here on my website.

If you would like to support my work, you can do that here. I don’t need much, but it really helps to be able to live in a quiet place and not have to worry about the job game while I work on my book. Any help would be appreciated :)

Below you can find a few blogs that will be included in my book in one way or another. I hope you enjoy them!