Hitchhiking to Mordor

Since we weren't brave (or suicidal) enough to try to cross Siberia or even Ukraine in winter, first we were naturally headed south, to Turkey. With European passports, we were allowed to stay there 3 months without visas. The plan was to spend winter there (and in Iran and maybe also Georgia) and to continue east in spring, when we would decide it is warm enough we might not freeze to death.

I have hitchhiked in Turkey two or three times before, and Vojta once. It has always been the best country for traveling. Drivers have always stopped very quickly for us, they have been very patient - they have made a lot of effort to understand our broken pseudo-Turkish, and they have been incredibly hospitable. On my past journeys, we were invited for tea and a Turkish-English dictionary chat, for a meal or even for sleeping in somebody's house so many times that we never felt we had not enough social contact or a poor diet. I sometimes felt that even if our backpacks and all the money were stolen, in Turkey people just wouldn't let us be hungry or cold.

This time, though, we were starting our trip a couple of months after a military coup, in the middle of the purges among Turkish journalists, writers, professors (and soccer referees (!)), short after some terrorist attacks and in a growing tension between the government and the Kurdish separatists (or pretty much anyone whom the government designated as a Kurdish separatist).

I somehow couldn't believe that Turkey, this country I liked so much, could have lost its mind overnight and could suddenly be teaming with crazy cops arresting random hitchhikers at will. Vojta wasn't much worried either. Some of our other friends were, though. They were asking whether we were sure we wanted to cross that country. With every new terrorist attack (that happened pretty much every two weeks), a wave of purges or a government's decision to toughen the regime they were questioning our plan (and eventually our sanity) more and more. 

I was still more afraid of cold (it was kind of more material at the freezing beginning of November) than of a dictatorship, and Vojta seemed not to care at all, so we didn't change our mind. 

A slow start and a secret gathering of people going to China

When we started thumbing on a particularly cold Monday evening, the plan was clear: 

1. speed through Europe before we turn to snowpeople, and get to Turkey as soon as possible

2. ...
3. profit.

The first part showed not as easy as such, though. We were waiting on a Prague motorway petrol station for three hours, wearing our winter clothes prepared for later, jogging few meters back and forth to make our limbs a little bit warmer and staring at our backpacks covered in hoarfrost. 

When we had drunk all our tea, another hitchhiker showed up. His name was Faker and he was going from the UK home to China. Of course, there is no better place for a gathering of people hitchhiking in November to China than on the Czech D1 motorway in Prague. (Yep, it goes east.) He had been hitchhiking someplace downtown for 2 days already, with no success. Here it seemed equally vain but he was apparently very happy to have met us. 

After another hour or two, we gave up and went home, with our new colleague along. My boyfriend wasn't particularly glad we were still in Prague and there was more of us, but he was nice and didn't kick us out (it would be a sad goodbye). 

We found out that Faker was thinking of going through Pakistan or Afghanistan. I wished our friends could hear him. Compared to this, our horribly dangerous plan to go to Turkey seemed suddenly something like an afternoon walk to the park.

The next morning, we sent Faker ahead to reduce the number of hitchhikers on the road and to scare the drivers less. It probably worked because when we got back to the gas station, he was already gone.

Soon we had our portion of luck too and got to the east of the country, and then to Austria. Here, it was a bit less cold. And it was raining. The weather had probably decided to test thoroughly whether we were 100% sure this trip was a good idea.

Well, we didn't run away.

However, when we crawled into our tiny tent (big enough for one human and one dog, but light to carry, you know...) in a wet Vienna city park that night, I felt very little victorious for somebody who had finally started making something like a plan of their life happen. (Omg, have I really dreamt for 15 years about living in a tent with no shower and no wifi? And what if we fall ill? What if we get a cabin fever? What if something happens to my family when I am in the middle of nowhere? What if I miss my boyfriend too much?) And yep, there was a couple of what-have-I-dones when a stronger gust of wind or rain woke me up.

In the morning, the testing went on - we waited in the rain the whole day. I was happy we at least had all the time in the world. We eventually made it to the next petrol station after Vienna, direction Hungary, and the next day the curse seemed finally broken. However, it was still cold. I couldn't care less about the Turkish president and all his politics - I just wanted to get south.

In a few more days two Turkish businessmen gave us a ride in Bulgaria - we were finally going to Istanbul. Mehmet and Bulent (these were their names) invited us for a meal, made us a hotspot so that we could try to contact Couchsurfers, and when they learned we were traveling with only little money, even bought us subway tickets in Istanbul before we even noticed the subway. The good old Turkish hospitality seemed totally unchanged.

Snow, frost and Snow (by Orhan Pamuk)

From Istanbul, we were speeding still more east. We wanted to see the ruins of the ancient Armenian city of Ani, on the very eastern border of Turkey, before the place would become unbearably cold (which might happen very soon). I also really wanted to see the city of Kars which happened to be just next to Ani.

If you have been to Turkey, have you ever been to Kars? (And have you ever heard about it?)

In Snow, one of my favorite novels, by Orhan Pamuk, it is described as the end of civilization, a once prospering border city that turned into a decaying godforsaken hole in the middle of nowhere that nobody cares about anymore. There is some kind of poetry in it. For some reason, I'm attracted by ruins and abandoned and forlorn places. (Whereas the top tourist destinations make me feel lost.) And the fact that a novel I like is set in a particular place is a definite reason to want to go there.

So, I needed to go there.

Mentioning Kars to our Turkish drivers had a similar effect on them as mentioning Turkey to my Czech friends. They always gave us a sympathetic or suspicious look as if we had said we were going to Mordor, and told us "çok uzak!" (very far), or "çok soğuk!" (too cold). Sometimes they even told us it was dangerous, probably because it was far and cold.

But when you have been hitchhiking a few thousand kilometers for almost two weeks to see a place, you just don't back out, do you.

As we were travelling along the Black Sea cost, the stories about the dreaded cold seemed more like horror fairytales told by southerners who take on their down jackets and gloves every time the temperature drops below 30°C.

As for the new dangers of Turkey, the most suspicious thing was that we hadn't been offered free food for a week. Still no cops who would wish to arrest us, and the only person with gun we had seen so far was a friendly shepherd who dropped by our camp to say hi when we were camping (probably) on his property. He didn't even kick us out. (And then Kolya the truck driver invited us home when we had expressed our doubts about putting up our tent on the top of his truck filled with cement, so everything was normal again.) For quite a long time, we didn't meet anybody we would share a language with, and our Turkish was too poor for even a little complex conversation, so we didn't happen to discuss politics. We were only learning about new terrorist attacks and new arrests when we turned our slow internet on.

As for my other fears, everything was still ok. Also, traveling with Vojta was easier than I had expected. Last time, I was the only one to speak with drivers - Vojta only learned two words in Turkish which he then randomly mixed together, and stubbornly refused to try harder. This time, he was sedulously studying the language every day with an app, and was very quickly able to communicate.

Hitchhiking on the north coast was easy, even though a bit slow because we had to find our way through many lively cities and towns on the way. This changed as we were approaching Georgia. The coast was suddenly less crowded and sometimes it seemed that no one was going our way. Not far before the border we turned east to the mountains - and prepared for cold.

No cold was coming, though. In the mountain town of Artvin where we were camping behind a sport hall there still was no less than minus 4°C at night. 

However, that didn't change the fact that still nobody was going our way, and if so, it was only a couple of miles, which seemed like nothing on the mountain serpentines. We were becoming a bit nervous because we had managed to find a Couchsurfer to host us in Kars that day. Finally, a truck overloaded with wood stopped for us. (We had been in doubt whether to wave at it since its speed was some 40 km/h, but it was the only car that appeared in a couple of minutes.)

The truck slowed down to 20 km/h, climbed to the altitude of the tallest Czech mountain (there was snow) and broke down. After some time, the driver managed to repair it and we went on. In whole, we had made some 100 km in 4 hours. From time to time, the driver was stopping to repair the truck. We eventually learned that he was going up to Kars, but we found an excuse to get off earlier because we were worried we would show up at the Couchsurfer's house in the middle of the night. It was late in the afternoon and we found ourselves on a snowy field near the town of Arhadan (which looked as desolate as the field). The famous cold had finally reached us.

Fortunately we got a ride quite quickly and reached a Kars suburb just before dark. There was snow. (Orhan Pamuk's novel didn't lie in this.)

We dropped by a petrol station for bathroom and were immediately offered tea by the owner.

So far, Kars didn't feel much like Mordor.

We were drinking tea, maintaining a dictionary conversation (We come from the Czech Republic. We hitchhike Turkey. Turkey beautiful. Yes. Here cold. No problem. Czech Republic cold.). Our vocabulary gained a new word: snow. Meanwhile we found out that our Couchsurfing host actually was in another city that day and couldn't host us. This meant we were going to have an opportunity to get a bit more familiar, or even intimate, with the Kars cold at night and to fully enjoy it. (Thank God(/s) it was only November.)

We thanked the gas station guy for the tea and started looking for the city center. (It wasn't particularly difficult since the city wasn't too big.) The streets were covered in frozen snow and the air was acrid and full of coal mist. There were the same gloomy teahouses and the same cheese stores as in the book. So far so good. (At some point in Pamuk's novel, the roads out are blocked with snow and nobody can leave, so I hoped our experience wouldn't follow the book too much.) 

Downtown we bought bread, cheese and an English-Turkish paperback dictionary for 1,5 TL which made our life easier for the rest of our stay in Turkey (it has no battery that can go dead). We also found the historical center near the river. It was rather empty since it was outside the modern center, and mostly falling apart. (We actually didn't see any new buildings or construction sites anywhere in the city, which was quite unusual.) 

There was a couple of ruins "under preservation status" (the status probably consisted in the sign saying so). There was not a single shop selling kitschy stuff to tourists, which is very rare on places like this. Probably there really are only few people who come here just to wander around and look at the old Armenian and Russian houses. There also were no bars, barriers or booths for selling tickets, so we were free to explore anything we wanted. From the city castle (except for visitors of a restaurant on top, we were the only people there) the coal smog looked even romantic. 

We cooked our pasta there and went then camping to the historical baths on the river bank because we hoped it might be warmer in there (it was -9°C at the moment). In the baths, there was a huge frozen poo in the middle, so I immediately lost my doubts whether camping in there wasn't too rude. We put up our tent in the cleanest corner and tried to pretend the poo on the other side didn't exist. 

Hospitality at the edge of the world

The next morning, there were still no people (except some guys taking pictures of themselves on the bridge for two hours) and the area still looked romantic.

However, we quite early left for Ani. It was just 40 kilometers from Kars, but at the end of the world, so we were not sure if there would be cars to hitchhike. And our Couchsurfing contact seemed to be back in the city and agreed to meet us in the evening. 

We were lucky, though, and got there quite easily. 

I won't describe Ani much - I will just tell you it's one of the most amazing ancient sites I've ever seen, and the two weeks of hitchhiking in there were totally worth it. Plus, it's not touristy (even though there is a lonely booth for selling tickets with a lonely guy in it). And there are horses (living) and svastikas (on walls). That's it for spoilers - if you are into ancient ruins, go see it yourself. 

The place was so magical that we started caring about the way back to Kars only about one hour before nightfall. Behind Ani, which is a small village plus the ruins, there is a huge hole and behind that hole there is Armenia.

So, there were no cars going anywhere and we spent the remaining hour of daylight walking on the empty road. There was internet signal, though, so meanwhile, we were exchanging messages with Ayhan, our Couchsurfing host, and were telling him that we were only 40 minus the walked distance km from Kars.

After the night fell and we peppersprayed a couple of dogs who wanted to eat us, we arrived to a village and met a guy on the road. He was kind of disturbed by our presence and our plan to hitchhike all the two cars passing per hour. I won't reproduce our pantomime conversation in whole, but the meaning was a bit like this:

- WTF are you morons doing here?

- Hello. Here very beautiful. We go to Kars. We hitchhiking. No problem.

- Well, it IS a problem. It's dangerous and it's freezing in here and there are no cars and no buses here, only dogs and wolfs. You should take a taxi.

- No taxi, no money, no problem.

- OMG

- We friend Kars. We sleep in tent. No problem.

- You are crazy. Come for tea.

(To have a more precise picture, you can add some repetitions in your head and erase some more grammar.)

He kind of didn't let us go on, so we ended up in a house with two ladies and three little girls who were doing their homework. We were offered tea and Ayhan decided to drive all the bloody 40 km (minus the walked distance) to pick us up. Meanwhile, we were talking through our new dictionary with our hosts. The oldest girl was very smart and would always very quickly find the keyword her family wanted to tell us. We would then imagine the rest and answer with another keyword. It always took a long time, so we didn't run out of topics and there was no awkward silence (only an intellectual silence) before Ayhan came.

Ayhan actually is an archaeologist and a professor at the Kars university, and has himself done some of the excavations in Ani. He arrived with a girl called Emine. They took us to their cozy flat at the university campus, prepared dinner for us and then we spent the evening talking about excavations all around Turkey and old Russian buildings in Kars. The next day, they drove us to a good hitchhiking spot behind Kars and we managed to get back to the coast a day before snow came and blocked the mountain roads almost like in Pamuk's book.

We were still neither frozen, nor in jail.

The Planning

How does one end up hitchhiking from Europe to Mongolia?

At first, I was talking about it for a long time and was doing nothing to make it happen because I was doing my studies for ages. My original idea was to cycle to China, but I’m slow. So, when I did a little bit of math, I realized that it would take me a couple of years. And that seemed a bit too long. (Also, I’m rather bad at repairing bikes, so my bike would probably fall apart before I would leave Europe). 

Also, I didn’t want to go alone because that would be sometimes boring (and I would have a cabin fever). My boyfriend Huan would never voluntarily leave his country for more than a month (except for a UFO attack or so), so I was looking for a travel buddy. In some countries on my way people tend to find penises very important, so it might be good to have at least one per group. I didn’t have any, so I was looking for people who happened to have one. I gradually found two traveling partners, who then always found a girlfriend and changed their mind. 

Then after a short hitchhiking trip with Vojta, a friend of mine, we found out that we might not necessarily want to kill each other even during a long trip, se we decided to go together. Vojta is the most cynical and nihilistic person in the world, but he usually keeps his word. (And he promissed to learn Farsi for traveling in Iran even though normally he complains he is horrible at languages, so that was a good sign.)

We were still thinking about going by bike, but we eventually agreed to hitchhike. Also, my cousin was by the time hitchhiking to Japan and told me that Mongolia was nice. So I decided I wanted to go to Mongolia instead of just China. Vojta wanted to go everywhere, so making the trip longer sounded like a plan. (Vojta then found a girlfriend too, which made me kind of worried about the journey, but he didn’t back out.) 

If you wish to travel like this, it is still helpful (but not necessary, I think) to earn some money before. The biggest black hole for money was the insurance, the vaccination (I’m not hardcore enough to blow this off) and the visas (Yep. The dream about roaming around free like the wind ends in the very moment one reads the visa conditions for pretty much any country). So, I stopped telling people I was self-employed, almost a business person, and found a regular job. 

Then for about half a year we were mostly talking about the journey and doing nothing (at least me, because I had a thesis to write and parties to attend). We decided to start in autumn, which was kind of a stupid idea, but it was still better than ending up in Mongolia in winter. Vojta would go anytime, and I still needed to graduate and do my side-jobs and go to bars and play role-playing games and to do my full-time job for at least a year because I had promised that.

In spring I started to feel guilty because I had still done nothing, so I at least googled the visa requirements and prices of vaccinations, which both made me almost faint. As for visas, going to Mordor would be easier than entering most of the Central Asian countries legally by land (the strategy of most of the governments obviously is to force any foreigner spend a yearly income of an ordinary citizen of a country to allow them entering that country). Also, we found out that we couldn’t apply for any of the most difficult visas from home because they are all valid for 3 months, whereas we would need the first of them in some 4 months after the start of the journey (I don’t count the visa for Iran because it seems – at least from the internet – that it’s not as hard to get).

So we prepared mentally for a visa hell and started paying shitloads of money for vaccination. Then I was too occupied by my thesis, so I just bought a backpack and besides that was doing still nothing, whereas Vojta was sometimes sending me pictures of cool-looking places usually someplace in Armenia where we won’t be able to go in winter because it will be too cold there. If he didn’t send me anything for a week, I started to worry that he was going to back off, and the closer the agreed start of the trip approached, the more paranoid I was. 

Two months before the planned start I had to tell my boss that I was going to quit, and at that moment it became kind of serious. Are we really going? All the “big plans” I’ve ever came up with eventually failed to materialize. Is the trip really gonna happen?

I also realized that (besides that I still didn’t have the thesis done), I hadn’t arranged pretty much anything except for the vaccinations. But I still had too much work to do on my thesis (and at the back of my mind I still kind of expected Vojta to be kidnapped by aliens, a huge meteorite to fall on Europe or something else to happen that would prevent the trip from happening), so I really started preparing only when I finally graduated – about one month before the time we planned to go. 

I bought some stuff (way more than I originally planned, but I was too scared of the 3 or 4 months of cold and heavy rains we will have to survive), I took up a first-aid course, I found a person who translated some basic hitchhiking sentences to Persian for me, I opened a new bank account to be able to withdraw money in other countries without an exorbitant additional fee, I was trying to heal my injured arms so that I would be ok by the time we start the trip, I bought several tablets that would enable me to access internet, write this and use offline maps – and always returned them because they always were somehow broken (it seems it is nearly impossible in today’s world to buy a device that would be able to do all of these 3 things, have a battery and wouldn’t cost a zillion). 

I also cut my hair short in order to make their washing easier and to look the least feminine possible and the most unattractive to random perverts (it seemed to work for Kateřina Mandulová in Russia, it didn’t work for Viktorka Hlaváčková in eastern Europe much - they are both solo travellers, though - so let’s see). 

In the meantime, I was sometimes hit by a sudden sadness that I would miss my boyfriend, or I was, on the other hand, afraid that he would give me some ultimatum (like I either stay, or he breaks up with me). However, he stayed as patient and supportive as always. Also (quite surprisingly) my family wasn’t freaking out much and nobody was seriously trying to convince me not to go anywhere and to do something more conventional instead.

Eventually I moved out of my room (a friend of mine will live there the next year) and put all my stuff to my mother’s house instead. The agreed day of departure was quickly approaching, Vojta had been probably sitting on his ready backpack in his empty flat for a couple of weeks already, sending me more pictures of cool places, whereas I was chaotically preparing 100 things at once. On the last day, I started squeezing the infinite pile of absolutely necessary stuff into my microscopic backpack, and I succeeded with some 4 hours delay. I said goodbye (for the second time) to my boyfriend and when it was already dark and freezing outside, we finally started hitchhiking. We caught no ride that day and eventually returned home, along with a Chinese guy on his hitchhiking trip to China whom we had met on the petrol station. The day after we were more successful, so the trip finally started.

The Equipment

Many of the cool travelers whose blogs I’ve seen have a detailed section where they describe the stuff they carry, with brands, price and weight at best, so I will try too:

• a horribly expensive new backpack (45 l) of a loud color (why does most of the outdoor stuff for short people have so flashy colours that you just cannot hide them in the shrubs if you need to?)
• a horribly expensive thick sleeping bag to minus zillion degrees (hopefully)
• a new tablet that enables you to write stuff and access internet (that’s pretty much it)
• solid boots
• my mum’s old skiing pants
• my cousin’s GPS messenger
• my old skiing jacket with only few holes
• my friend’s fancy old camera
• my boyfriend’s functional towel
• a 1951 army cooking pan from a flea market
• an army raincoat
• 2 magical T-shirts and a pair of pants that NEVER stink (add 100 points to the skill “civilization”)
• my larping costum garment (more or less might suit the dress-code in Iran)
• sleeping bag linings
• a new waterproof jacket and pants from my mum
• a new small down jacket
• my boyfriend’s old cell phone
• a headlamp
• 2 camping mats
• a water filter
• some other random stuff (such as socks) I find unnecessary to describe

We also have some other stuff that Vojta carries (because he is way taller and heavier and doesn't have injured shoulders):

• my cousin’s tent, big enough for one human and 100 ants (it survived his hitchhiking trip from Europe to Japan, so it must survive this one too)
• a gasoline cooker
• a power bank
• medicines

Why are we doing this?

Why the hell not!

Well, one might imagine quite a lot of reasons why not, so I will try to explain here why yes and to convince my dear readers I haven’t lost my mind. I will speak for myself because Vojta, my hitchhiking partner, also knows how to write. Plus, he hasn’t explained it to me either.

When people do things, they usually do them to achieve an aim. But, well, does everything need to have an aim? Are there things you don’t do for some aim because they are the aim themselves? For me, such a journey used to be an aim like that. It was mostly because I started thinking about it a long time ago, when I was a kid, a kind of punk, hated my society (especially the fact that you need to wake up early to go to school) and wanted to become a homeless or a shepherd when I would grow up (circle the most appropriate option). However, when I grew old I stopped hating my society (I now appreciate it quite a lot, actually), stopped getting up early and realized that I sucked horribly as a shepherd (if you’re a city person, try to make a herd of sheep enter a truck – you may realize that too). And I started thinking about reasons why hitchhiking with a tiny budget to a different continent through some completely unknown countries might (or might not) be a good idea. (Eventually I foud out it still was a good one.)

To start, why hitchhiking? Why not going by air, buses, trains, my own car, my own tractor – except the fact that it costs money?

First of all, flying is cheating! It’s like a teleport, it’s not traveling. It’s your money traveling, not you.

Nope, in fact, I just enjoy more the journey than the destination. I don’t like the moment when you appear in a different part of the world in a couple of hours out of nowhere – I enjoy much more the slow progress you make when you hitchhike, cycle or walk. I like unexpected things and I let them happen. (When an unexpected thing happens in the air, chances are high it’s a bad one, though). And I don’t like flying because it uses up way too much resources from the environment.

Moreover, when you hitchhike, you meet all sorts of people. I can imagine it might be a negative thing if you don’t like people – but if you like them or do not necessarily hate them, they can tell you a lot of things. About their countries, their families, their ways of life, their communities… You can experience different ways of thinking. As a hitchhiker, you aren’t on business terms with people – you aren’t their customer – they are not selling you anything – and your conversation might be much more genuine than if you are a tourist. (Money is cool but I don’t wish it to be the only means of my interaction with others). Also, unexpected things can happen very easily – and they are often positive. You are invited for a visit, people suggest you interesting places to see or you completely change your plans because somebody offers you to stay at their place for a couple of days or goes hiking with you. Besides that, you peep out of your usual social bubble and might find something interesting, strange or disturbing outside – and it makes you think about the world in a different way than usual.

Second, why from Europe to Mongolia through Central Asia? There is nothing!

The answer is – that’s exactly why. As for Mongolia, I know that there used to be some guys on horses who attacked other guys with fewer horses and that people live in yurts in there. That’s pretty much it. As for the Central Asian countries, I can (almost) find them on the map, I know the names of their capitals and I’ve been told at school that some of them had oil. There are in fact very little things I know about them as an ordinary European. However, people also live in there, don’t they?  So there must be at least something, right?

I don’t need to see the most important monuments in the world and the whole UNESCO heritage list (Vojta says there indeed are some UNESCO sites in Central Asia, but I don't really care). I’m more interested in how people live at different places and what they think (even though it might be difficult to understand if they tell it to you in a language you know four words of, or it may be downright upsetting). There just are things in the world that you can’t google. 

Also, a very simple reason is that if you start your journey from the Czech Republic - where I happen to come from - there is no huge ocean between you and Mongolia. And that's quite important because hitchhiking boats might be a pain in the neck. It requires a lot of effort to persuade people, and I'm a bit too shy for that.

Third, why with little money?

When I was first thinking about this trip, it was simple – I just had no money. Then I happened to work and earn some, but I sticked to the original idea because I just found it more interesting. It is in part connected to what I said before about hitchhiking. On this journey, I don’t want to do business with people. Also, I find it safer – I prefer not to become a walking wallet that anyone might want to scam or to steal from. Sure, it can still very well happen but if you use as little paid services as possible and start many of your interactions by “sorry, I travel without money”, you can discourage some scammers from dealing with you straight away. 

Another reason is that I would like to try living in a bit different way than I do at home. We are so much used to buying everything for money that we can’t even imagine trying to do stuff without it. And people tend so much to think that it is impossible to travel if you are not rich that I would like to show the contrary. 

If you don’t pay for things, you must be more inventive to get them in a different way (a simple example: you need water. You either can buy it, or you might try asking locals whether there is a source nearby, whether the tap water is suitable for drinking and whether they can give you some… Foreign languages and pantomime exercise included.). 

It also may be much less comfortable. You may end up camping in a city park or in a house ruin when it’s freezing outside, you are hitchhiking in rain, you try to take a “shower” with a bottle of cold water, you travel 200 km in a completely packed tiny car with your backpack on your knees… But it might be worth it. You end up thinking a bit outside the box, you find out that some things you found impossible are actually very well possible, that you are able to endure quite a lot and you may find that doing things is kind of more intense like this than if you do them in the “ordinary” way. (Besides, you’re more prepared for a zombie apocalypse. No doubt.)  

 Fourth, why for several months?

Is a 2 weeks’ holiday not enough? Do I not have a career to build, taxes to pay, mortgage to repay, kids to make and family to sustain?

Mongolia is far away from Czechia. That’s why.
And I’m lucky enough my family can sustain itself at the moment (and my boyfriend is a really tolerant person). I’m also lucky enough to live in a rich (some Western-Europeans and my fellow countrymen might be surprised I’m saying this) Eastern-European country where an average income allows you to live comfortably if you only sustain yourself, and to put some money aside if you’re a bit modest and don’t drink much beer. As for taxes and all the other stuff you must pay in exchange for living in civilization, in my country there are ways how to legally suspend all of them if you don’t work and are abroad. 

The rest is a question of preference in our part of the world. I can imagine my career may suffer but it’s still worth for me. I'm not working on finding a cure for cancer, nor am I a firefighter, so I doubt the world will suffer from my absence in the economy system. I even think I will be more useful to humanity by reducing my carbon footprint, by finding out what is the life in other countries like and by sharing my experience with those who would be interested.

To achieve this, I want to roam around, I don’t wish to be pressed by time like in the “normal” life. On every trip, there were moments when I thought it would be great to go to some more places, a bit further – but I needed to go back to school or work. I wish to have enough time to be led by chance and to experience what it is like to be on the road. If I want to try living in a different way than I’m used to, it requires a bit more time than an average holiday. I’d like to find out how long I need to travel in a hobo way before I realize that I want to go home and to live in a civilized way again. (This has never happened to me yet, but my longest trip has been one month long.) And most important, there are many countries I don’t know and many things I want to learn. A couple of months is not enough either, but it’s better than 2 weeks.

Finally – am I not afraid? Is it not horribly dangerous?

I indeed am afraid. But not as much that it could stop me. I am lucky enough I haven’t been traumatized by anything real so far, so I’m mostly afraid of the unknown. (I suppose that’s what most people are afraid of, though.) Sure, there are bad things that can happen, such as car crashes, accidents, running into assholes... But these things can happen when I stay at home, too. We try to be reasonable and don’t do things that really might be risky – such as going to war zones or unstable areas, going to the middle of a desert with no water, telling cops they are morons and telling customs officers their country’s leaders are damn dictators. We wish to get home safe and are doing the best to make it. I suppose that the only objectively risky thing we are doing is using cars in countries where the traffic rules are equal to what is physically possible, where seat belts are used as a fashion accessory you usually fasten on the back of your seat so that it looks more cool and where the turn signal is a swearword. (Driving our own car totally wouldn’t help since the locals know way better how to get around in this mess.) At the same time, the fact that we are hitchhiking helps us because people can sometimes warn us against a danger or tell us what to be aware of.

I wanted to add some wise summary here, but it all sounded terribly general and shallow, and I erased it. So, let’s just say here that I want to roam around in a hobo way in order to learn stuff because I think learning stuff is cool.