In the previous issue, we got to meet Ela Zdešar, a young adventurer and traveller who likes to set out on a journey on her own, with a backpack and an urge to explore. We learned about her endeavours so far, but this time she’ll tell us more about how she got bitten by the travel bug and how she managed to convince her parents to let her journey all on her own.
Oh, yes, of course. It’s always unavoidable (laughs). In Norway, wind whipped my face almost every day, it rained for two days straight, and it took me another three days until I managed to dry my clothes and shoes. If I was lucky enough, I wasn’t cold once a week during the night which I spent in a tent. I even lay awake throughout one night, just waiting for the windy storm to carry away my tent, as the winds reached 40kmph. On the first day of my trip I set up tent on a beautiful little peninsula overlooking a huge lake that turned into a small island overnight due to flooding (my extended family found that to be the funniest thing anyone ever did and they keep reminding me of it on every occasion). And then there’s the “evening walk of the century” when I didn’t do my homework on a famous mountain that I wanted to climb – in the end, I walked for six hours altogether amounting to 1800m of difference in altitude, going up and down. It’s like going for a relaxing evening walk at 6 p.m. up a two-thousander, climbing up a very steep slope on your way up. I once forgot to take out a lighter and a gas cylinder for cooking from my backpack at the airport, and on Tenerife, I got completely lost using buses. In Hungary, I even came down with a fever with a temperature reading of 40 degrees Celsius. I was barely able to get back home. But every situation could be resolved, even if it meant walking barefoot across frozen water to reach the other side; using thermos bottles instead of a hot-water bottle that I filled with water boiled over a burner and then putting the thermos deep into the sleeping bag; asking locals on a bus if they could help me out, inadvertently sparking off an intense Spanish debate that included everyone on the bus, including the driver; standing outside in the cold to beat the fever...
My courage comes from my dreams and goals, from the determination of reaching them. This is what I’ve always wanted, and I never fear going anywhere alone. It does happen sometimes, though, that it finally hits me a few hours before departure why everyone keeps asking me “Are you really not afraid?” all the time. That’s when I really start cursing and questioning my own sanity. It’s always necessary to break out of your comfort zone in order to truly be free, and it’s really, really hard. I would say it’s the hardest part of a journey, no matter how long it might be. Most people at home didn’t believe I could make it on my own because I had never wanted to go into town by myself. It was even hard for me take the bus to an already known place. I felt uncomfortable calling information and asking a stranger where to go. But when you travel so far from home, everything changes and nothing’s as it is back home. I never had any trouble talking to strangers and I even started talking to people I didn’t know out of curiosity. Even going grocery shopping or into town wasn’t difficult. I don’t know why, but when you distance yourself from everything you know physically, there’s something that changes in you mentally and things start working differently. When I’m having a hard time, I imagine myself going back home and leaving my dreams behind just because I’m afraid. But I’ve never turned back home. Some people do find this kind of bizarre, going somewhere all by yourself. You don’t know where you’re going, you don’t know anyone, and you have no idea what it’s like where you’re going. Photos are one thing, but reality is something completely different. It happens every single time that achieving dreams is worth all the money and the time as well as those couple of minutes of you being afraid because the dreams become even better in reality.
Well, of course I had been expressing my explicit goals and wishes to my parents since I was little, so they didn’t have much say in the matter (laughs). I knew I had to wait until I turned eighteen, after which they agreed that I was old enough to travel on my own. Of course, my mom changed her mind regarding my “maturity” a couple of times as my departure was nearing, and I was months behind in my organisation. I happen to be lucky enough that my parents used to travel a lot, so they understand my urge to travel as well, and they also know that travelling is important for personal development of every human being – it helps us see things in another perspective, something that’s hard to achieve at home. I never had many friends, but I know a lot of people who say to me: “Oh, how much I’d like to come with you!” And then: “But I don’t have enough money.” “My parents won’t let me” and “I don’t have enough time”. Unlike most people, I’m not going to sit here and wait until someone finally agrees to come with me but will rather set out on my own and that’s perfectly fine by me.
Feelings are formed when we travel and, even though we quickly forget them, they soon rise to the surface again when we come across a similar situation, bringing lots of memories with them. Wonder, astonishment, inner peace, courage, despair, anger, loneliness, sometimes fear, pride, complete freedom, happiness. Of course, there are also thousands of photos on the phone as well as on the camera. The only message I get daily is that there’s not enough space on the phone (laughs). I also try to write a journal, but it’s often hard to do that after a whole day of hard work or having walked for seven hours straight with a backpack weighing 22 kilos. I always bring my close relatives postcards, and sometimes I buy something small for myself, too, like a bracelet when I was visiting Tenerife or a real knitted hat made out of wool when I was in Norway. I also have plans to start collecting backpack patches because I really like them.
I’m not particularly attracted by Slovenia’s neighbouring countries, maybe because they’re too close (laughs) and I’ve visited them so many times. The country I like the most so far is Norway. The Lofoten Islands are described as the most beautiful part of whole Scandinavia on almost all lists and in almost all books and I totally understand why. I would really like to go back there, but right now I have plans to visit as many unknown places as possible and not revisit much the ones I’ve already been to.
Not always. It really depends on the situation and the people I’m with. I generally prefer travelling alone and I’m still getting used to life with strangers. But I do believe you truly get to know someone and befriend that person after you’ve spent some time together. It’s much harder when you’re travelling and changing destinations each day. In Norway, where I walked all alone, I didn’t meet anyone for the first three weeks, but in the second, unexpected part of the journey, when I completely changed my plans and joined a non-profit organisation called “In the Same Boat”, which travelled along the coast of Norway in a sailing boat, I somehow got along really great with other volunteers who were there with me. I just couldn’t imagine anymore, continuing on foot all alone. Together, we picked up a ton of large bags of plastic waste at beaches from sunrise to sunset and transported them with a ship to ports and sailing further north almost every day and many nights as well. We watched films all in one bed in the prow, cooked, did the laundry, worked up a good sweat from the exertion, and were running busy on empty stomachs all day because there wasn’t enough time for lunch, consciously losing to experienced sailors at card games in the evening, helped out journalists with photos and videos, drank tea on deck and talked about our experiences and the places we’d visited. We’ve kept in touch ever since and we’re good friends. I really miss them.
After finishing secondary school and completing my 15-month journey, I would like to attend painting courses at an academy of art somewhere abroad, with animation, photography and filming as optional subjects. I would like to travel somewhere north, to the Netherlands, Norway, Scotland, Switzerland. Currently I’ve got my eyes set on the Academy of Fine Arts in Finland. The reason I want to travel abroad is mostly because I’ve realised what I’m capable of when I leave my old self at home. I was independent and free, and I know that I could achieve greater progress mentally as well as in my work abroad than I could if I stayed at home for three or four years.
If you’re going to wait for that perfect moment to pack your bags and set out in the open world without fear, fully prepared and in perfect physical shape, during your prime years, using the best equipment, without time constraints and with loads of money, let me tell you something – that perfect moment will never arrive. I never set out under optimal conditions either, far from it. But that’s precisely the point – travel is an adventure. We don’t look for perfection, but for things we’ll remember and learn from. Travels where things didn’t go as planned, the ones when you forgot to pack something, or trips where you didn’t have enough money with you or where you got lost, those are the ones that will always stand out the most in your memory. That’s when you’ll learn how to be proud of yourself for being able to resolve a situation and will remember all the silly things you inadvertently did and laugh about it for a long time after. Fear is perfectly understandable and the reason we feel it is so that we’re careful. But if something seems so scary to you, and it stands between you and your dreams, then you’ll never achieve those dreams. Even I, never enough confident or enough social, spent some time travelling the world solo; I sailed the rough Norwegian seas, lived on a fifteen-metre sailing boat for two weeks with people from all over Europe I met for the first time, picked up plastic waste with an environmental organisation and visited many interesting beaches that I otherwise could never set foot on, walked on foot across one of the most beautiful parts of Scandinavia, camped out in the open all by myself each night for three weeks, helped animals and milked goats in an animal shelter in Hungary, swam in a sea with black sand and walked a really long distance through a rainforest on foot, past cacti, aloe veras and banana plantations across the highest mountain in the chain of islands, all the way down to the sea and back up, got lost by bus and had a long conversation with the locals about which route is the right one on Tenerife, met new friends, gained new opportunities, got new ideas, conquered many fears and gained new perspectives and guidelines in life.
Dreams are there so we can achieve them and never, and I mean never, wait for them to come true on their own.
I was amazed by Ela’s thoughts and they really got me thinking. We live in cities and are confined to daily routine, wondering about our purpose in life. Most people stay in one place their whole lives and perceive people who live without bonding with any particular place as weird and unusual. They bubble-wrap themselves and forget to live. Immigrants and people from other parts of the world are just foreigners with a different culture and weird traditions to them. Before humans discovered agriculture and started raising livestock, they moved around, explored, learned and created things – they never settled in one place. And people from across the river weren’t thieves or intruders, but friends, travellers, people whom they partnered with and traded skills with, allies.
Have we forgotten something? Isn’t our purpose to travel, explore, socialise and connect with others, make our dreams a reality and exist in the moment?
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