Contigo Hasta el Fin del Mundo
What Two Years of Travel Taught Me About Staying Still
TL;DR: I sold everything, bought a backpack, and spent two years trying to find myself. Found something better instead.
Somewhere in the Japanese Alps, I’m sitting alone at a family restaurant, eating the best beef of my life, and realizing I have no one to turn to and say “Are you seeing this?”
The Hida beef is perfect: Wagyu’s sophisticated cousin, marbling so precise it looks like abstract art. The setting is perfect. The solitude I’d craved is finally here. And yet.
This was a perfect experience. And it felt incomplete.
That moment – chopsticks hovering, steam rising – is where I need to start. You can’t write the thesis statement of a journey while you’re still in it. And I was very much still in it.
Act 1: The Departure
Many months earlier, I’d sold everything I owned and bought a backpack.
I wrote dispatches from airport lounges in Indonesia, survived a typhoon in Hakone, dodged scooters in Hanoi, and became an unwitting expert in the subtle art of squat toilet navigation. I called the series Moral Compass – real-time reflections from the road. This really meant processing the chaos of a world in transition while getting scammed for “environmental fees” in the Philippines.
The official story was exploration. Sabbatical. A chance to see the world while my knees still cooperated.
But let me be honest about what actually pushed me out the door. My company was dying. The kind of slow-motion collapse where everyone pretends things are fine while frantically applying elsewhere. And there was a deadline: the Australian work and holiday visa cuts off at age 30. I was 29. Now or never for that particular door.
TMT – The Travel Mate, girlfriend at the time, fiancée by the end – with her unwavering bias towards action put it plainly:
“Look, Julián… either we do this now, or we don’t do it ever. I’ve had it with being miserable during gloomy Berlin winters that seem to last 6 months. Fuck Greymany.”
She was right. We could always come back later. And if we didn’t leave now, we never would.
Plus – and this is the part I was almost embarrassed to admit – I wanted to run an experiment. Could I fund a nomadic lifestyle through investing and trading alone? No salary. No employer. Just me, a laptop, and the market. The trip wasn’t just about seeing the world. It was about testing whether I could make money work for me instead of the other way around.
So we liquidated. Donated. Sold the furniture to strangers on eBay Kleinanzeigen who haggled like their lives depended on it. Packed our bags. Bought a one-way ticket.
Then came the NPCs: well-meaning friends and family running pre-programmed dialogue trees about career gaps, CV concerns, the plan for when you get back. Nobody ever asks what the plan is for while you're gone. That's the interesting part.
I smiled. Nodded. Gave non-answers that satisfied no one.
And I should be honest about what made this possible – savings from corporate work, no mortgage, passports that open doors, a partner willing to join, German unemployment as a safety net. Not everyone can run this experiment. Any honest accounting of “what I learned” has to include “what I had that let me learn it.”
The truth? I didn’t have a plan. Plans felt like the thing I was running from.
I wanted to see which parts of my life I’d chosen and which I’d just inherited. Then I wanted to find out if I could tell the difference.
Act 2: The Road
The first months were exactly what the brochure promised. Australia, then northward – five months across Asia. Temples. Street food. The joy of getting lost in a city where you can’t read the signs.
But somewhere around month four, the novelty stopped working.
The “Law of Diminishing Temples” – the point where novelty itself becomes routine, and the twentieth shrine looks exactly like the nineteenth. That’s what I started calling it. The novelty that once felt electric began to feel routine.
I was on a hedonic treadmill with better scenery.
New experiences slow down time – but only if you’re coming from routine. For the perpetually novel, routine becomes the scarce resource. I found myself craving boring days. The luxury of nothing happening. The ability to know that when I woke up, I would still be there tomorrow.
Then came the mini solo detour.
Which brings me back to that family restaurant in the Japanese Alps.
TMT was elsewhere that week. Solo time. Space to think.
The waitress waved me to a high chair seat at the bar. I ordered the Hida beef.
So I sat there, savoring each bite in that particular silence of eating alone in a foreign country. The beef was incredible. The setting was beautiful. And it felt incomplete. Because I had no witness. No one to turn to.
You need the alone time to hear yourself think. You need the witness to make sure you’re not just talking to yourself.
The “Traveller’s Paradox” – the tension between the freedom of movement and the meaning of staying – wasn’t really about places at all. It was about rhythm.
The rhythm between alone and together. Between motion and stillness. Between what I called Roam vs. Home – the insights you can only find by yourself and the meaning you can only create with others.
I finished the beef. Paid the bill. And somewhere between that restaurant and rejoining TMT later that week, the pieces started fitting together.
We were in Melbourne, pet-sitting a psychotic ginger cat named Sarge – though TMT quickly rechristened him “gatollina” because the way he tucked his paws while sitting reminded her of a chicken. Her mind works in mysterious ways. We had a penthouse borrowed near the MCG, a flight to Vietnam booked, and five months of Asia stretching ahead of us.
One morning we walked to Victoria Market. TMT wanted to make spare ribs – slow-cooked, aluminum foil, the whole production. I watched her navigate the butcher stalls, haggling over cuts, asking questions about marbling, and it hit me: she looked like she’d been doing this her whole life. Like she belonged there. Like she belonged anywhere.
That evening, eating those ribs in a stranger’s kitchen with a cat who’d later bite through her laptop screen, I had the thought for the first time: I want to marry this woman.
Not because of the ribs. Because of what the ribs represented. We’d left behind six years of building a life in Berlin – the careers, the apartment, the friends – and here we were, making ourselves at home in a borrowed penthouse on the other side of the world. And it was easy. Wherever she was, I could feel at home.
That feeling repeated itself across three continents. The sense that we could live here – and here kept changing, but the ease didn’t.
The Hakone Disaster is what I call it now, though at the time I had other names for it.
Picture this: a mountain town in Japan, famous for hot springs and scenic views. We’d planned it as a romantic spa town pit stop. Instead, we got a typhoon.
Está cayendo la del pulpo. It’s raining octopuses. The kind of rain that doesn’t just fall but attacks. The famous views were walls of gray. We spent the day trapped in a damp room, watching weather alerts in a language we couldn’t read, eating convenience store onigiri and wondering why we’d bothered.
I was furious. This wasn’t in the itinerary.
And then, the next morning: blue sky. Clear air. The mountains emerged like they’d been hiding a secret just for us. The kind of day that only happens after a storm – everything washed clean, the light sharper for having been withheld.
It was the best day of the trip. We stayed longer, snagged a last-minute ryokan deal, private onsen and all.
Rain is the antidote to FOMO. If every day were perfect, none of them would be. Constraints aren’t bugs in the system – they’re features. The disaster made the revelation possible.
I started noticing this pattern everywhere. The flight delay that forced an unexpected encounter. The closed restaurant that led to a family’s backyard chicken inasal roast. The unexpected wasn’t happening despite the friction – it was happening because of it.
Freedom without friction is meaningless.
And while I’m giving credit: TMT is the reason we could afford any of this.
Not just emotionally – financially. She discovered Trusted House Sitters, built us a killer profile, and turned us into professional pet-sitters across three continents. In expensive countries like Australia and the US, we’d stay in people’s homes for weeks, taking care of their pets while they traveled. Free accommodation. Living like locals. Plus: dogs.
The trading experiment worked. The house-sitting strategy worked. And I couldn’t have done either without her.
The final numbers: €48k total for 1.5 years, two people, three continents. That includes everything – flights, food, visas, the occasional splurge on Hida beef and truffle hunting in Tasmania (we slept in the car to make that one hit harder). Less than what most pay for rent alone, except we got the world.
Contigo hasta el fin del mundo, as they say. With you until the end of the world.
Act 3: The Return
The unglamorous truth about why we came back: the visa ran out. That’s it. No epiphany. Bureaucracy decided we were done with Australia, so we were done.
From Australia we pushed through New Zealand – camper van, farm stays, the works – then faced a choice: back over Eurasia or east through the Americas? We opted for the latter. Chasing cheap flights, completing the 360°, we landed back in Europe.
My father once told me the most powerful force in the universe is inertia. He’s right. At some point the cheap flights started pointing homeward. The currency of novelty was depleting. Moving forward had become automatic – but inertia works both ways. Eventually the forces of momentum and budget airlines deposited us back where we started.
The return wasn’t a decision. It was a slow running-out of forward momentum. Maybe that’s how most journeys end: not with revelation, but with logistics.
South America is for the next adventure – assuming I don’t let inertia win again.
I wasn’t the same person who’d left.
The question wasn’t why did I come back?
The question was who came back?
Some people call it “post-travel depression.” It’s not depression. It’s that the old templates don’t fit anymore. You’ve seen too many ways to live and now you have to pick one.
I’d spent two years searching for the perfect place – the one city to rule them all. It doesn’t exist. What exists is base camp. A place you settle for now, knowing you’ll move it later when the terrain changes or your needs do.
Remember Age of Empires? The way the map starts black, and you can only reveal terrain by moving your unit through it? That’s what these two years felt like – a prolonged scouting mission, revealing terrain I couldn’t see from home. Nothing like seeing places for yourself to realize the world the news describes isn’t a real place. Now, standing still, I can finally look at the whole map.
Act 4: The Synthesis
The Greeks had two words for time: chronos (clock time, the seconds ticking toward death) and kairos (soul time, when everything aligns and time seems to stop).
Travel happens in kairos. Those ichi-go ichi-e moments – “one time, one meeting” – unrepeatable encounters that brand themselves into memory. The middle-aged Korean man on a night out in Seoul calling me “Chuuliah’? That’s girl name!” before erupting in heavy belly laughter. The sandfly at sunset that made you scream unpublishable things mid-sentence.
But you can’t live in kairos forever. Routine is chronos. The daily practice. The boring work of building something that lasts.
I needed both. The kairos moments to remind me I’m alive. The chronos structure to actually build a life.
There’s an agricultural concept called fallow periods – times when you let a field rest, grow nothing on purpose, so the soil can regenerate. Two years of travel was my fallow period. I wasn’t producing. I wasn’t building. I was letting the soil recover.
Whether anything grows remains to be seen.
And the biggest bet? December 2025. I bought a ring. Bent the knee. She said yes.
I started this journey with a girlfriend. I finished it with a fiancée.
Part of me wants to frame it analytically – we’d run the experiment, the data was clear, the partnership was proven. That’s comfortable. The kind of thing a finance-brain guy says to avoid admitting he has feelings.
But that would be dishonest.
The truth is I proposed because I was in love. Nine years of it.
We haven’t faced the real tests yet – the ones without exit doors. But I stopped needing proof somewhere between pet-sitting an orange menace of a cat and dining alone in the Alps. Some things you just know.
I sold everything and bought a backpack.
Two years later, I’m ready to buy furniture again. Scouting for a base camp. Some days it feels like freedom. Some days it feels like I’m just back where I started with better stories.
Contigo hasta el fin del mundo.
The end of the world hasn’t come yet. But when it does, I know who I’ll be standing next to.
And somehow, that feels like the biggest adventure of all.
We say yes. Me, inertia, the cat, the menace, the home, the flop and the what not 🫶🏼
Another impressive article where you open your heart (not just your brain). However, if I had to select my top personal favorite across the entire text, it's the Law of Diminishing Temples.