Reflections from a one-year trip around the world

In July 2023, I left my home in San Francisco to start a backpacking trip through Oceania, Southeast Asia, and Europe. 

20 countries and countless memories later, I returned in July 2024. I had circumnavigated the globe and accomplished something I had dreamed about since childhood. 

My life changed in a lot of ways while traveling. I loaded my belongings into two backpacks, and I never lived somewhere for longer than 2 months. 

Since returning home, I’ve had a lot of time to think about what this trip meant to me. I’ve been reflecting on what I’ve learned — about others and myself. 

Here are some takeaways from my trip around the world. 

I have way too much stuff

When I finally returned home, I felt completely overwhelmed by the amount of things I left behind. I had huge boxes of clothes, decorations, furniture, and knick-knacks sitting in my parents’ garage leftover from my life before I moved. 

I was so used to living with just a few possessions that it suddenly dawned on me how little I actually needed.

I’d lived for a year with only the belongings I could carry on my back. I’d packed two backpacks for the trip, which felt like a lot, but also not that much when I considered it was supposed to last me a full year. 

When I got home, I was excited to be reunited with a lot of my old clothes. But honestly, I don’t find myself wearing many of them anymore. 

Sure, there’s a great leather jacket that I’ve missed or my favorite pair of overalls. But other than that, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I owned way more than I needed. I felt the urge to purge. 

So I Marie Kondo’d the hell out of my room.

I purged nearly a quarter of the stuff I had in storage… and it still felt like I was surrounded by things. I purged some more, took a ton of bags to Goodwill, and finally got to a point where I felt like I would genuinely use everything I owned. 

Practical skills are important (and fun!)

Something about budget travel encouraged me to learn practical skills like never before.

I was out of my comfort zone, away from my family and friends, and oftentimes in an area with a language barrier. I was learning new things every day.

Learning new skills while traveling just becomes part of the adventure. Changing a tire on my car at home might be cumbersome (a task my dad thinks I should know but I never actually want to learn), but changing a tire after shredding it while on my Australia road trip in a free campervan is completely different. It’s actually fun because it’s all part of the story. 

I learned how to change a tire, how to milk a cow, and how to sail a boat (among other things). 

While milking cows or sailing boats aren’t things I’ll likely encounter in my day-to-day life, it does feel empowering knowing how to do them. Traveling was a good impetus for me to learn these new skills because I don’t think I would have done it at home. 

For example, I live in San Francisco, a world-renowned sailing city, yet I never considered learning to sail until I was on my trip. For some reason, the thought of learning to sail in Indonesia seemed way cooler than learning to sail in San Francisco. 

Now I feel like my world has opened up a bit. A lot of the skills and hobbies I picked up because they would be “cool travel stories” are also things I can do back home. 

I don’t have to travel the world if I want to discover new hobbies or skills. Most of the time, I can do it in my own backyard. 

Constant travel drains me

During my time in Australia and New Zealand, my partner and I did a lot of work exchanges. We would live in one place for some time while we worked for our accommodation. These stays were anywhere from 2 weeks to 2 months. 

I like staying somewhere for a few weeks at a time while traveling. It lets me settle in and get over the initial adjustment period when I go to a new place. Plus, it allows for some down days between all the activity days. 

But then we went to Southeast Asia and began the more hectic portion of our trip. There was so much to see, and we had only allowed ourselves 3 months to backpack around. 

From March until July, we didn’t stay in one place longer than 6 days. 

That’s 4 whole months spent constantly moving, constantly sightseeing, and constantly meeting new people. Maybe I could have done this at the beginning of our trip, but we were coming into it half-drained from being on the road for 8 months already. 

By July, I was honestly ready for my trip to be done. I was so exhausted and drained from constantly moving every 3-4 days. I’m usually quite the extrovert, but my social battery was at an all-time low. 

Slow travel is definitely my preferred way to go. 

Freedom of movement is a privilege

When I was in Fiji, I visited a K-8 school on a very small island. It was the primary school for most of the children who live in the Yasawa Islands, an island chain about 3 hours off the main island in Fiji. 

One of the teachers there said something that stuck with me: “Many of our students will not get the chance to leave Fiji and go out to see the world. You bring the world to us.” 

This touched on a feeling I’d been thinking about for so much of our trip — about how lucky I am to get to visit the places that I do. 

Yes, I worked my way through most of my travels, and it wasn’t always easy. But I have a powerful passport, English-speaking skills, and a safe home to come back to. I am lucky. 

Why is it that when I move from the United States to another country, I’m considered an expat — but when someone from a low-income country moves to a wealthier country, they’re considered an immigrant? Why do these two terms have very different connotations?

I thought about how easy it is for me to leave home for fun, but how difficult it is for so many people around the world who have to leave home because of crises. I thought about people in Syria, Ukraine, and Sudan. 

I thought about communities who have been forced to leave home and cannot return. I thought about the Rohingya refugees being denied citizenship in Myanmar, a homeland that does not accept them. I thought about people in Palestine who are denied the right to return to their ancestral homes. 

There is a privilege in being able to travel. There is also the privilege of being able to return home. 

Be kind to travelers — both people who have left home by choice, and especially those who didn’t have one. Being away from home is hard. Not having the option to return is even harder. 

I’m still learning what home truly means

I know it is possible to have multiple definitions of home. What interests me, and ultimately still confuses me, is how these homes are defined. 

After living there for just 6 months, Australia began to feel like a new version of home. I got used to the gum trees, driving on the “wrong side” of the road, and ordering a flat white instead of a latte. 

Returning to London, where I lived at both age 12 and age 19, also felt a little like a homecoming. 

I visited the old apartment where I lived with my family in middle school and the campus where I studied abroad in college. I walked to the neighborhood grocery store by heart. I got the same breakfast order at the cafe on the corner. 

I’ve heard some people say that for them, home is not a place but a person. Home is their partner, their family, or their community. 

I do agree with this some of the time. I think community plays a huge role in defining a home. But for me, home is absolutely place-based. 

Relationships with everyday life are what make a place home to me – the local grocery store, the neighborhood park, the types of trees, the food. 

My home will always be the San Francisco Bay Area. I’ve lived here my whole (relatively short) life so far. But it’s nice to know that I also have small pieces of home in Australia, London, and every place I’ve lived and become familiar with. 

The urge to travel doesn’t end

Before I left on this trip, I felt antsy. I was living in San Francisco and constantly dreaming about faraway places. 

I thought I could purge this restlessness from my system with one big trip. I wanted to pack so much travel into one year that it exhausted me. I wanted to tire myself out enough to force me to stay in one place for a while. 

This worked at first. When I got home after my year of travel, the first few weeks back were like a breath of fresh air. I felt so happy to be in a familiar location again, to put down my backpack, and have my own bed. 

Now I’ve been home for 2 months, and I already want to travel again. It doesn’t go away. I can’t purge it, because purging it would be changing something fundamental about myself. 

Travel resets me. It teaches me a lot about the world, but it teaches me an equal amount about myself. 

One of my favorite quotes is from the French book The Little Prince: “I have friends to discover and a great many things to understand.”

It perfectly sums up so much of what I love about traveling: meeting new people, mastering new skills, and learning from other cultures.  

But there is a second half of that quote, and it’s equally important: “One only understands the things that one tames.” In this instance, to tame doesn’t mean to domesticate something wild. It means to understand and become familiar with. 

For me, travel is about much more than just seeing new places. It’s about trying to understand and become familiar with a place — to tame it, to borrow words from the prince.

This is why I slow travel. This is why I stay someplace for weeks, even months at a time. I am constantly trying to create new homes and new relationships in different parts of the world. For me, that’s when the most meaningful travel experiences occur. 

My year of travel might be over, but not for long. I’m sure I’ll be back on the road soon. For I have friends to discover and a great many things to understand. 

🎙️ Listen to the Podcast: Hear more about my travels on Episode 5 of the Travel Lemming Podcast on YouTube! Betty and I chat about Lombok, Indonesia – one of my favorite places from my trip (the segment starts at 20:10). You can also tune in on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

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I’d love to hear about your own travel reflections. What has travel taught you? Leave a comment below to let me know. 

Want to learn more about my one-year trip around the world? Take a look at this piece I wrote on everything I spent during 2-weeks in Vietnam.