After 4 months of travel, here's what I've learned

It's not all fun and games

Me on the far northern tip of New Zealand.

By this point, whether you’re a long term subscriber here, a new subscriber who watches my videos on YouTube, or something else entirely, you probably know that I’ve been doing a lot of traveling lately. In late January I set off with my partner to go see the world! And specifically, to see the geography of the world. I’d always been a fond traveler, but I was writing and talking about so many places that I could only look at from afar. This was my chance to actually see as many of those places as I could.

To that end, because I’m a content creator, I decided to start a new YouTube channel and Substack newsletter (link below) to document those adventures. It’s been a lot of fun to do that, get comfier talking into the camera without a script, and to generally see it grow — almost 10,000 subscribers after just a few months!

But this article isn’t about the content creation side. It’s about my experience and reflection on traveling for a few months straight, something I’ve never done before at this length. I actually got the inspiration for it from Alexa who did something similar over on our travel Substack. Maybe this would have been better off on that newsletter, but I didn’t want to directly copy her. 😅

Traveling long-term is exhausting

Exhausted.

This one might seem obvious, but it bears repeating: traveling for more than a couple weeks is exhausting. After the initial excitement wears off from being in a new place, something that likely fuels us through normal vacations, the actual act of getting yourself from one place to another kind of sucks. And it doesn’t matter how you do it really (flying, taking a train, renting a car and driving) it saps so much energy each time you pick up and move to a new place. Part of this is mental, especially for someone like me who is largely orients themselves by a mental map. Every time I go to a new place, I need to start making a new mental map. It gets hard!

The world is more similar and more different than you think

This is not a contradiction, believe me. Every place we went to, I noticed similarities to places like home. And I frequently spoke about these similarities in our videos. But a place like eastern Taiwan reminded me so much of the Oregon coast, including the vibe among the small coastal towns. And, of course, southwest Australia looked and felt so similar to California. You start to see the natural patterns in the world, the more you experience it. You can see what I mean in our video this week:

That said, every place was so much more different than I expected as well. But not in the big things, it’s the small things. The way birds sound, as an example (I’m not a birder, mind you) was particularly startling. I’m used to the birds in the Pacific Northwest I guess. The difference in the way trees look, even in places that climatically are very similar. Tasmania with its wet, cool climate mirrors that of the Pacific Northwest, but the flora is completely different. And, of course, there are the cultural differences. We’re all humans, of course, but culturally we prioritize things in different ways. It makes people watching so much more interesting!

The hard to get to places are worth the effort

Khao Yai was incredible.

Alexa and I traveled to a bunch of really cool cities. Tokyo, Saigon, Bangkok, Singapore (and so on) were all well worth visiting, but one thing I’ve learned is that getting out of those major cities and to places that are a little harder to get to, is well worth it. Oddly enough, most of this was fueled by the need to film something interesting. If we didn’t have the obligation, I’m not sure if I would have made such a consistent effort every place we went to. But visiting Khao Yai National Park in Thailand, or driving up the east coast of Taiwan, or even in Australia where we drove to the far southwest part of the country (and all the things you’ll see in the upcoming videos) made every trip so much more memorable.

Traveling as an American is interesting right now (to say the least)

This is not a political post, so I’ll steer clear of everything that’s happening. But needless to say, the United States has been in global news a lot lately. Specifically, we were traveling when all the tariffs started getting announced which has not been popular amongst a lot of people abroad. But here’s what I’ve learned:

People in southeast Asia are still very pro-American broadly. The tariffs, the threats, the other stuff never seemed to matter much to the average person. If they heard we were American, they were very interested in speaking to us and, often times, taking a picture with us. They were also very interested in selling us stuff (obviously). In Vietnam, specifically, the people seemed overtly pro-American, which I thought was kind of odd given the whole Vietnam War thing (fun fact: they call it the American War).

People in Australia and New Zealand are curious and empathetic. Like they just want to know what’s going on and why this is even a thing in the first place. But more than that, they felt for Americans who’s economic lives were being upended as well. No anger. No “go back to your country” comments. Just curiosity and empathy. I’ve seen Americans mention on social media that they’ll claim to be from Canada if asked because they’re embarrassed or scared to admit they’re American during these times. And, I guess what I’ll say is: don’t do that. It’s not fair to Canadians, first of all. But also, trust that most people are decent and, so long as you’re not obnoxious, you’ll likely end up with a refreshing conversation more than anything else.

What’s next?

If you haven’t guessed yet, Alexa and I are home right now in Oregon. We’ve just wrapped up our first four months of solid travel through Asia and Oceania. We’re about 6 weeks ahead of our videos at the moment. We’ve got a couple more coming out about Australia and then three videos for New Zealand. This has been nice because it means we can catch our breath a bit while back home. Now that said, we are doing a couple videos here in the Pacific Northwest. We’ll be heading to Eastern Oregon for one and then the Olympic National Park for another. Those should be a lot of fun! And then… well we’re off to Europe where we’ll be traveling around until late September. Mostly we’re going to be checking out eastern Europe because I’ve never really been there before and, like I mentioned above, I’m all about places that are just a little more challenging to travel to. So stay tuned for more adventures.

I’ll probably do another one of these articles after we get back from Europe.