Ithaka – Stop 0

Allgemein 11 Minutes

64 Days, about 9.800km and 18 Countries. What a journey.

More statistics will follow later, but right now we’ll first of all focus on what is new to this whole story.

And that is: the end.

The Odyssey is over.

My initial plan was to spend my last night in the tiny country of Liechtenstein in the middle of the alps, just to be able to add another country to my „been there“-list, but I was honestly too exhausted for that after two months of travelling.

That is something that I’ve only noticed at my last stop, which was not a regular one if you remember. When I was visiting Björn for the second time, in the Zillertal in Austria, I was able to calm down a little bit and could get out of the stress which my way of travelling inevitably forced upon me. It was a stress that made me work in the travelling-environment, but as soon as I didn’t feel that stress anymore I felt just how exhausted I was because of it. It felt more than right to go home at that point.

And so I did. On the 18.09. I boarded the Zillertalbahn again, took the train to Munich and then had to wait there because the Deutsche Bahn did what it could do best: be late. Three hours to be exact. It wasn’t completely their fault however – 2:20h of the delay were caused by an accident on our route and the following resceduling. They’re still to blame for the remaining 40 minutes though.

We caught up a bit along the way though and arrived „only“ 2:20h later in Hamburg (2am instead of 11:40pm). I was greeted by my family and a freshly baked apple pie and we made our way home through the night.

Right now it feels like I’ve always been at home, but the first few moments when I entered my house again were quite different in a positive way. Everything felt so familiar, yet strange and new. A truly rare, but beautiful feeling. I was glad to be home again. It was 3am at that point, but for some reason I was way too excited to go to sleep yet. Yes, I would’ve loved to enjoy the luxury of my own bed again, but I just couldn’t at that point. All of the exhaustion was gone for a little bit of time, but eventually it came back and right as the sun was nearly about to rise again I decided to sleep.

And so I did. And it was good. And it was done.

  • 64 days
  • 18 Countries
  • 9.800 kilometers
  • 21 stops
  • 63 nights
    • 17 at friends/family
    • 7 camping
      • 6 on camping grounds
      • 1 in the wild
    • 32 in hostels
    • 1 in a hotel (fuck Narvik)
    • 3 on trains
    • 2 in buses
    • 1 on a ferry
  • 499h and 40min of sleep in total
  • 79h and 55min spent in trains
  • 65h and 49min spent in buses
  • 27h and 15min spent on ferries
  • 2.331,48€ spent
  • 25 blog posts
  • A whole bunch of experiences
  • and just me who planned and executed it all

At this point I’d want to say something about how hard I would have expected it to be, but I honestly didn’t have any expectations. I think I was too stressed in the beginning to even think about it and didn’t have any idea of what would await me (or I just didn’t care). I feel like the fact that I started packing five hours before my trip started (with having to sleep in between) or the fact that until half an hour before taking the train to Fehmarn I didn’t have a place to sleep there are perfect examples for that.

I think it was the stress though. My last day of work was on Friday and I started on Wednesday, while having to write a report (and party) in between. I didn’t have much free time to prepare or do anything that is related to the trip other than what I really needed.

But this non-planning is exactly what made this trip special and what I set out to do. You may remember my very first post (I’m really impressed if you actually do btw.) in which I talked about a „free feeling“ I’m trying to achieve and not planning too much in order to experience it. The question now is though:

Did it work?

Yeah. A bit, but not as good as you might think.

„Why?“ You might ask.

Let me explain. Not planning far ahead and just following my vague route gave me the opportunity to choose my stops and how long I would want to stay there while I was travelling. That was a very cool thing to do, it took a bit of time and effort, but was fairly easy to do with the right apps and websites. In that sense I was free.

But, in the very sense of „feeling free“, I was not free except for a few occasions (I’ll get to those in a bit). Maybe I was free from work, from responsibilities I had at home, but I was still bound to the bus and train scedules, I was still mostly in cities like I’m used to and I still had to spend money like I have to at home. There are ways around those things, but not the way I travelled and on the route I travelled.

The occasions on which I felt „free“ however where on Fehmarn (Stop 2) because my camping ground was just in the middle of nowhere, in Alta (Stop 8) when I walked an hour to put up my tent next to a river on the outskirts of civilisation and in Athens (Stop 18) while sitting on the hill next to the Acropolis when I closed my eyes, thought about my journey thus far and opened my eyes again to look at the beautiful city.

Those are rare moments, but you have to enjoy them. „Feeling free“ can have a lot of meanings and it can surely be discussed without end what „free“ means or whether it is possible to be free nowadays, but for the sake of the ever shrinking attention span of my generation I will carry on. You can talk to me privately if you want to have that discussion.

Being free however often requires you to be alone. And when travelling on your own you are alone for quite a while – but it’s not as bad as you think (at least in my case). Loneliness is a thing I sometimes had to deal with while I was travelling, it maybe was a little bit boring being completely alone on a few occasions, but at no point during the two months did I feel like I was really alone.

Two factors are responsibile for that:

  1. This blog and all the other contacts via Social Media I had during my trip
  2. All the people I met along the way

To be honest (or maybe you could’ve guessed it), I am not the type of person who starts a conversation with a stranger that often, but hostels provide the perfect (and maybe a bit cheesy) atmosphere to do so. You’re a traveller who needs friends, the other person is too – boom – you’re friends (at least until one of you leaves the city and you never see each other again). It makes it as easy as it can be to start conversation. And so I did (sometimes) and met lots of cool people.

In total I’ve met people from 25 countries and all six inhabited continents, but (with just very few exceptions) we could still speak English and understand each other.

Those people were all a bit different though. Different in culture, language, music taste, the way they grew up, the place they live at – whatever.

I also met a lot of Germans. And when I say a lot, I mean a lot. Probably a third of all people I’ve me in hostels. It kind of leads me to believe that Germans just want to get out of their country for some reason, but that is not my point. Hold up – it actually is my point.

You see, meeting people from my home country and speaking my mother tongue in nothing unusual in my everyday-life – obviously. In yours it is neither, I suppose. But it becomes something special, when you don’t do that all the time.

This is what I did, or rather didn’t do, over the last two months. I travelled through a number of countries, which all have different people living in them. They have different currencies, different history, languages and cultures. Whether it was the interesting Finnish language, the ridiculousness of the Hungarian Forint, the Greek food, the Swedish people or the History of the Baltic States – all of those things you can not experience at home. You can read Wikipedia articles, books or blogs about it, look at photos or try to learn languages with Duolingo or whatever, but it will never be the same feeling as when you go out into the world and really experience it on your own.

There maybe be obstacles in your way, like the currencies for example. Paying with Forint or Złoty certainly also has its charme, but I prefer the convenience of being able to use Euros. And while we are at convenience: the EU.

I only left the European Union on three occasions:

  • When I went to Norway (no, Norway is not in the EU)
  • When I went to San Marino (yes, San Marino is a country and no, it’s not in the EU)
  • And when I went through Serbia

There were no passport checks when I came to Norway and none when I came to San Marino, but I obviously had to go through them when I went to Serbia and left the country again. All of this was just so tedious and added a good 20 minutes each time to our journey in the bus. I know that it is a law and that it could be way worse, but it showed me once again, that living in the EU/Schengen Area and not having to go through passport checks at every border is a privilege and a convenience we shouldn’t take for granted.

Just like the Euro which is a currency in many countries yet features country-specific coins, Europe is a continent consisting of various countries, yet, they are all defined by their own language, history and culture. This diversity is something quite fascinating and being able to travel mostly freely though this continent is something you cannot be thankful enough for in my opinion. Also, so many countries and cultures, but we still manage to live next to each other quite peacefully, at least nowadays – that is truly beautiful.

This conglomeration of differences (and the free travel) is one of the three reasons I deliberately chose to travel through Europe. The other two being that Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US are way too mainstream at this point and that I didn’t want to fly.

This trip wasn’t one on which I wanted to „find myself“, I don’t think much of those as of now, but I rather just had the feeling that I needed to get out and wanted to see something of all the things that are out there. And you read what I experienced, what I saw, what I ate – whatever. A lot happened, but even though so many things happened: it was „just“ two months and it was „just“ Europe. Not even half of it actually.

What I want to say is that the world has way more to offer than we could ever even hope to see – to visit every place, to meet every person, to know every mystery or to speak every language is just impossible, but we can do our very best to try to see and do as much as we can in this tiny fraction of time the universe has put us onto this spinning ball of rock and water in the unending vastness of space and declared us as „alive“.

There is an unwholesome tendency for us humans of the 21st century to revel in our everyday-life by binging Netflix, working in our jobs we kind of like (but not really) for 40 years or doing some other sort of thing which doesn’t get us anywhere. It’s just a thing humans do when we get too comfortable. If there is no need to do something, then we oftentimes won’t do it – I mean, why would we? It’s extra effort. But for all the times we are not doing something and rather sitting at home or doing the things we do day-in and day-out, we are missing out on so many things that lie beyond the everyday-life, that lie beyond the usual curriculum vitae and that lie beyond the things we have experienced so far.

There is so much to see and do out there. Go out into the world, maybe take a friend with you if you want to, set a goal and just go. It doesn’t matter how you get there, as long as you go.

This may also lie beyond your comfort zone, but getting out of just that zone is something real travelling is also about. It is about pushing your limits in a sense – and that is exactly how you experience new things.

I can assure you three things that will happen when you come back after such a trip:

  1. You will have stories to tell – whether you like it or not
  2. You will have learned something – whether you like it or not
  3. You will view your home and your everyday-life from a completely different perspective

… and being home will feel special again. Everything feels so familiar, yet strange and new. A truly rare, but beautiful feeling. You will be glad to be home again.

On a last note, you may be wondering why this post is called the way it is. I let you figure out one half of it, but the other I will explain: „Stop 0“. 0 does not come after 21, I know. Yet, it does come before 1 and is the origin – the origin of my journey if you will. Of this one and also of the next. I don’t know when that „next trip“ will happen or even where it will go, but it will certainly start from here, Stop 0 and go to somewhere, Stop 1.

The end and a new beginning are always connected.

Thank you

List of all posts if you want to read them again:

There’s nothing more here.

Not even an Easter Egg.

Go do something more useful than scrolling. Travelling maybe, I don’t know.

Did you turn off the oven?

Alright, you scrolled this far, so I’ll tell you something, but don’t tell it anyone else. People should earn this information. Congratulations, by the way.

I’m still working on something, might take a while, but this Odyssey-thing is not 100% done yet. So, maybe for a very last time in a long while – stay tuned and thank you very much for reading! Danke!

Avatar von Unbekannt

Veröffentlicht von Louis Köhnke

Veröffentlicht

Hinterlasse einen Kommentar