I’m now back in the UK, and my travelling days are over, for now.

The last ten months have been the best time I’ve had either ever, or at least since the first couple years of university (I’m undecided). Now begins the hard work of figuring out what to do next.

Homecoming ¶

Since getting back, I’ve had a few wins. After turning Central America upside-down in my hunt for a grinder, I finally tasted the coffee I picked way back in Santa Catalina:

I also managed to repair the phone I’ve been lugging around since Costa Rica, though the Cuba pool phone (flickering away on the left) seems beyond help, and I’m struggling to find anyone who fixes e-readers:

I also had a sizeable collection of reading material waiting for me when I got back:

Photo by the author

My passport has seen better days, but there’s something very satisfying about flicking through my pages of entry and exit stamps:

Photo by the author

But, more generally, how does it feel to be back?

I expected that there would be some adjustment required after ten months of adventure, excitement and freedom, but I didn’t quite appreciate how immediately grim I would feel upon my return: a day or two after getting back, I felt about the same as I had before I set off. The whole first two weeks or so were pretty miserable.

Part of it was just desensitisation. For example, I spent my first weekend back with my brother and we walked the Malverns. I used to enjoy hillwalking in the Lake District, but these hills left me cold. Then again, I was hacking my way to the top of a mountain within spitting distance of the most inhospitable jungle in the world and watching the sun rise from the crater rim of an active volcano within just the past six months. I expect I was too jaded to enjoy much about the UK so soon, and promisingly enough I spent the following weekend in Snowdonia and enjoyed it much more, so I think this is largely sorting itself out as time passes.

The bigger problem is that I’ve just spent the best part of a year in Latin America, which could not possibly be more different in culture to the UK. Unfortunately, I’m now acutely aware that most of those differences are things that I much prefer. My first week back was spent banging my head against various administrative walls trying to arrange medical appointments, diving and mountain leader training and more. Britain, as a system, is absolutely rigid, but where this might work for somewhere like Germany where they are known for their efficiency, Britain is also a place where nothing fucking works. My first week back was like being at the Mexican border, but for days, and it doesn’t seem to be letting up any time soon.

The biggest problem, though, is that I’ve painted myself into a bit of a corner by coming back. I had already bought myself a few treats to celebrate coming home which burnt up a bit of money, but then everything ended up 2–3× more expensive than I’d expected: a routine £25 dental appointment became a £70 filling; a £200 graphics card upgrade for my PC (that I expected to be a simple one-day replacement) became a £580 full upgrade because of compatibility issues (and the process somehow dragged on for a whole week); and a weekend trip to Birmingham cost me £45 in trains alone (and, in total, cost me more than some entire weeks during the trip).

And then there’s the impact of mindset. I got rid of my flat a few months before I left and moved back in with my parents, but I knew it was only temporary. Now I’m back, with no flat, and a potentially limitless stay here. The vibe is markedly different: I know it’s not true, but it’s hard to shake the niggling feeling that I’ve made no progress in the last eight years when I’m facing waking up in my childhood bedroom again indefinitely. I’m also in quite an isolating place: I have no friends in my hometown town any more; there’s next to no social opportunities to meet people (and certainly none that are free); and I don’t have access to a car until the end of the month so I’m dependent on lifts to get almost anywhere. After ten months of self-reliance, constant varied socialising and creative problem solving, coming back to such restrictions, a complete dearth of a social life and an inability to solve any of my problems creatively is killing me.

The sheer cost of everything here has already constrained my plans to travel around and meet up with friends, and I think I can write off Interrailing at the start of next year as a non-starter. I immediately started job-hunting, which is always a fairly demoralising activity, and tried to limit my spending as much as possible, but everything seems to be choosing now as the time to finally give up: just the other day it was my external hard drive, and now I need to spend £50 on a new one and probably spend at least a day seeing how much I can salvage from my backups. I’ve registered for Universal Credit and Jobseekers Allowance, which should serve to take some of the pressure off once they actually start coming in, but the entire benefits system is designed to be as demeaning and inconvenient as possible so that’s hardly going to be a fun experience (and the demand for unreasonably frequent in-person meetings to make sure I’m not skiving will be tricky to satisfy).

I’m busy with things over September, but October and onwards are currently empty. If I start to hear back from some of the jobs I’ve applied for soon, then hopefully something will be going somewhere by then. Otherwise, if I’m still facing being stuck in the Midlands with nothing to do except attend awkwardly-scheduled Jobcentre appointments, I think I’ll probably just find a Workaway somewhere where I can continue looking for work, keep my costs as low as possible, but at least have a bit more to do whilst I’m looking. Perhaps somewhere in Eastern or Central Europe…

But enough about the unsatisfying present, and back to reminiscing about better days.

Objectives ¶

I set out on my adventures with ten specific objectives. So, how did I do?

Develop a sustainable travel rhythm that I can continue indefinitely ¶

Had I not managed this, I expect it would have been a pretty unpleasant ten months. As things were, I pretty quickly got into the groove of travelling and stayed there. That’s not to say there weren’t small niggles that grew over time, like a small stone in one’s boot at the start of a long walk. Mainly, the lack of a fixed address and reliable postal service meant that I wasn’t able to order specific things online, such as a replacement e-reader, and was limited to what I could find locally. Also, I did miss pubs.

One thing I hadn’t counted on, though, was the impact of having an set end date to my travels. The moment I hit the half-way mark, even though I still had five months to go (still longer than any trip I’d been on previously) there was still a distinct shift in perspective between being in the ‘first half’ and the ‘second half’ of the trip. I think this is universal: people I met who were half-way through a three-week trip would describe the same sense.

The next milestone, then, is to embark on an open-ended trip.

Develop sustainable travel financing so that I can continue indefinitely ¶

This was more of a mixed bag. I managed to make my short-term savings last till the end of the trip with a good amount to spare, didn’t have to dip into my long-term savings and even managed to arrange some contract work whilst I was travelling, but not enough to allow me to continue indefinitely.

That said, I never looked for local work. I spent around £11,000 in total (though some months were more expensive than others; I spent more freely and volunteered less in the second half of the trip). If we even that out to £1,000/mo, I think I could have stemmed the bleed enough with a low-wage bar or hospitality job and more limited spending to allow me time to find more higher-paying work.

Part of my problem now is that I’ve made the mistake of coming back to the UK, to a town with no such jobs going and a country with a sky-high cost of living. I’m very fortunate: I have a place I can stay rent-free, and my costs are otherwise low. However, travelling within the UK is prohibitively expensive so I can’t easily seek work further afield. Even getting off this island requires an initial outlay, and a sizeable one if I wanted to get far enough away to find a lower cost of living.

Learn Spanish ¶

I intentionally didn’t specify a level of Spanish, allowing me to interpret success here more creatively. However, I did end up doing the BriCO that I mentioned listed fluent Spanish amongst its requirements, so in that regard I think I succeeded.

My Spanish level ended up hard to gauge. I could follow along and contribute fairly easily to complex political discussions, but would routinely have to ask people to repeat basic questions where I wasn’t able to narrow down the scope of what they might be asking based on context. I still struggled with slang when messaging Latinos, but I was also starting to pick up more idiomatic phrases to replace my Spanglish direct translations.

Learn to Surf ¶

Done! Though I didn’t end up surfing afterwards quite as much as I’d hoped.

Learn to Dive ¶

Also done!

Learn to Dance Salsa ¶

I won’t be impressing anyone any time soon, but I think I can now class myself as aware of how to do very basic salsa.

Use Workaway to Find Volunteer Stays ¶

I ended up doing five volunteerstays through Workaway (six if you count El Ranchito), and I had a great time with all of them. I renewed my membership when I got back without a second thought, and I think the site may well offer a path out of (or at least, to amelioration of) my current predicament.

Use BeWelcome to Find Hospitality Exchanges ¶

I did try contacting a few people as I went, but never got any replies.

Specifically, Visit Costa Rica, Cuba and Chiapas ¶

Done, done and done, and a jolly good time was had in each.

Spend Time in the US ¶

I certainly didn’t spend anywhere near as much time in the States as I had been expecting, but I did have some time in Arizona and briefly visited Noo Yoik.

Finances ¶

No use avoiding it; let’s assess the damage of the trip.

Unsurprisingly, I spent a lot more than I earned, outside of the welcome delayed paycheck in the second month and an unexpected tax rebate in the third-to-last. However, that came off of the most expensive month of the trip, and it doesn’t really even out.

Let’s look at the trip as a whole:

So, taking into account the money I earned, I spent around £5,800, or an average of £580/mo. That starts to make working a hospitality job look that much more appealing, though it’s not without some caveats. For example, looking at the first chart shows that the rate of income was not consistent: I got very lucky with a well-paying role for a few months at the start of 2023, but otherwise was only doing a handful of hours here and there. However, this was also the result of me not really seeking work out: I did contact the travel app. guys, but other than that it was pre-existing clients getting in touch about projects.

Transportation was far and away the biggest single type of expense, although this primarily comprised of flights (~£1,350), followed by buses (~£600), though this conflates couple-dollar colectivos with far-more-expensive international coaches and shuttles) and then taxis (~£300). Dining was the next-largest segment, at ~£1,500 (compared to only around ~£500 for groceries; I barely cooked for myself), followed by accommodation at ~£1,000. All of the remaining large segments were for specific activities such as my diving courses and the Cuba brigade. With a more frugal itinerary that avoided those big-ticket items, involved more food preparation and less drinking and didn’t have need of quite so many flights, I expect it would be entirely possible to substantially reduce costs.

Ignoring the major outlier of the tax rebate recieved towards the end of the trip, you can make out a few patterns in the data: big blocks of red where I was doing a big move from place to place; the absence and emergence of strips of yellow as I moved between accommodation-providing volunteerstays and periods of hostelling; and the periods of higher and lower weekly expenditure. The latter can perhaps be seen more clearly in this chart of weekly averages per month:

Overall, I had an average weekly spend of £216.76.

However, this all ignores the change in value of my investments over the ten months. On first impressions, I did very well: they increased by almost 15%, and this despite me having changed everything to ethical funds shortly before setting off (even when it meant selling things at a loss). However, I’ve somehow managed to do excellently in the least helpful way possible: almost all of this increase is my pension, which I’m several decades away from accessing. My Stocks & Shares ISA, on the other hand, only increased by, um, 1.7% (with inflation currently at 6.4%). Still, good on distant future Ben.

Conclusion ¶

This trip has been, almost certainly, the best thing I’ve ever done. Eventually, though, it had to come to an end. Whilst my long-term goal now is to top it, my immediate needs are to refill my coffers and re-establish myself somewhere.

I can’t shake the sense that I’ve done myself a mischief by coming back, but the more rational part of my brain knows that stringing along low-paying hospitality jobs whilst staying in Central America would have only postponed the inevitable, and I probably would have found myself in the same position with a bigger career gap and less funds to cushion the landing.