Let me clear something up before we go one step further, because it’s the thing that stops most people from ever starting. Zero-waste travel does not mean you fit a whole trip’s worth of trash into one tiny jar and post about it. That version is a fantasy, and honestly, it’s a little exhausting. Real…
The first time I heard a hotel call itself “eco,” I was in my early twenties, still working flexible jobs and squirreling away tip money so I could keep traveling. The word sounded good. It also, I slowly learned, could mean almost nothing. A little card on the bathroom sink asking me to reuse my…
I want to start with a confession, because I think it clears the air. For years, I believed “sustainable travel” was a thing other people did. The ones with the reusable everything, the perfect capsule wardrobe, the moral high ground. Meanwhile I was the woman who left her gray office desk in New York, worked…
Let me start with something honest. For years I thought “eco-friendly travel” was a thing other people did. The kind of people who had special water bottles, remembered their tote bags, and somehow always knew which train to take. I was sitting at a gray desk in New York back then, dreaming about the world…
The first time I traveled through Europe, I did it all wrong, and I mean that in the best possible way. I was young, broke, and backpacking solo with a route that changed every three days. I saw a lot of train stations and not a lot of anything else. It took me years, a…
The first time I chose quiet over busy on a trip, I almost felt guilty about it. I was backpacking solo across Europe, running on cheap train tickets and adrenaline, ticking off cities like they were homework. Then one afternoon I got off at a small stop by accident, sat on a stone wall while…
The first time someone told me to smear warm grey mud all over my body and just sit in it, I laughed. It sounded like the opposite of a treat. But here is the thing I have learned after years of chasing slightly odd, wonderfully human experiences around the world: the moments that make you…
The first time I understood what a forest could do for a tired mind, I was hiking in China, somewhere quiet and green, far from the noise of the life I had built back home. I had spent years at a gray desk in New York City, convinced that rest was something you earned once…
The first time I understood a sauna was not a fancy spa but a way of living, I was far from the Nordics. I was in Thailand, teaching English, cooling off after a hot afternoon, thinking about how every culture I’d passed through had its own ritual for slowing down. Later, reading and planning and…