Why travel independently?

Traveling has made us more conscious and in more ways than one. We have grown personally and spiritually thanks to the challenges that presented themselves to us and the people we met along the way. It has opened our minds and opened our hearts. It has built our confidence and it has humbled us. It has deepened our connections to nature, to other people and to ourselves.

We want to do more though.

As traveling has deepened our own connection to nature and other cultures, we're thinking about how we can give back to the places and communities we visit. We have become conscious about our responsibilities as travelers as well as first world citizens with passports that allow us roam this world freely.

We realize that tourism - as well as individual travel - creates its own set of problems: Mainstream tourism corrupts every place it enters; any kind of joy-riding has a carbon footprint and even some independent travelers who should know better have a "Not my problem - I'll be gone tomorrow" attitude when it comes to minimizing their impact and cleaning up their own mess.

We would like to cultivate an attitude of gratitude and personal responsibility in our community, raise the awareness about the problems we create and help people to be the change they want to see in the world.

A little less conversation, a little more conservation

Environmentalism has gained a lot of popularity recently, especially with how much media attention the climate change debate received. We are happy to see so many people being emotionally invested in the issue and sad that it translates into so little real change. We know that some of them won't make it past paying lip service to the issue. Yet we feel that a lot of them really want to make a difference but don't feel empowered to do so or know where to begin.

We have learned that the most and longest lasting awareness about environmental issues is gained from personal, hands-on experiences. Whether it is volunteering for clean-up events, working on organic farms, building sustainable shelters or just trying to save limited resources while traveling remote areas or on a budget.
If we put ourselves into situations where power, heat and water don't just come out of the wall, where food is not harvested from the supermarket shelf and the trash we produce doesn't just magically vanish into a bottomless bin, where everything we really need fits into a backpack or the trunk of a car, we begin to look at our (mostly) urban life from a different perspective. We realize that our throwaway consumerist lifestyle is not sustainable and no amount of virtue-signalling or externalizing responsibility by pointing fingers at our governments is going to solve the issues. We have learned from personal experience that individual action is where it's at. And we do realize that this is hard while being stuck in the hyper-rationalized urban hive mind, almost completely disconnected from nature, other people and ourselves - think a little too long about where the rat race is leading and you'll get under the wheels.

That's why we not only want to inspire people to travel and do so independently but also to combine their travels (which a lot of us will do anyway) with participating in environmental or cultural projects. We would like to build the tools for our community to connect through those events world-wide, funnel and convert that energy into individual action and real-life change, make friends across the globe fighting for the same goal, document and share their work to inspire even more people to take action. For this purpose we're planning to collaborate with different organizations that host environmental or social events, offer opportunities to volunteer or work abroad. Read more and let us know what you think.