The Unexpected Task

After 80 days of travelling in by now 11 countries we have faced all kinds of challenges from the general language barrier (basically everywhere) over hostels losing our booking (Nukus) to moving bus stations (Trabzon). These are all things that you would expect to encounter while travelling and we would just consider as "part of the plot". However, there are challenges that no one really talks about that are actually a lot more common to encounter than bus stations moving, especially one: travel fatigue.

As you probably have noticed by now, dear readers, this will be a more serious blog post than usual. So what is travel fatigue and how did we recognise it? This all started in Uzbekistan, around one month into our adventure. We started just feeling a bit off: We were constantly more tired and just less excited about everything. At that point, we blamed the long train journey from Aktau to Nukus for this. We took the afternoon off and went to bed early. But this did not solve the issue. On our next stops, we just kept losing motivation to explore halfway through the day and were really tired, even though we ate and slept enough. The whole concept confused us. In Europe, we had been walking around for twelve hours and did not mind at all, now half a day felt like too much. As the proper Ravenclaws we are, we started doing some research and came across the term travel fatigue, something a lot of travellers struggle with but no one talks about. It's basically your body being overwhelmed and exhausted from the constant flow of new impressions, such as sights and food (with unknown bacteria for the body). A missing routine and no clear sleeping pattern add to this as well. The results are fatigue, exhaustion, dampened moods and less motivation. Our research not only showed us that we were not the only ones struggling with this, it also gave us some tips on how to deal with it. Firstly get some routine back into your life and reduce intensity. Then, take a few more breaks, and do more things that you would do in your usual life (watch the news e.g.).

We started implementing all of these tips and started feeling a lot better within a few days. But, we wouldn't be us if we did not start to increase our pace again as soon as we had the energy to do so. After running around all day in Tashkent, two days of adventurous hiking in Chimgan and a border crossing, we were back to being tired, The lesson: travel fatigue is not some kind of disease that you can just be cured of and then all is fine again. If you travel long term, in a similar pace to ours (max. 3-4 days in one place), you have to constantly make sure that you don't overwhelm yourself. By now we have gotten a lot better at it. We know the signs of upcoming travel fatigue and we just take everything a lot more chill. It's not uncommon for us to spend a couple of hours in a hostel during the day and we rather see one sight less of a city than cut back on sleep. Generally, we started prioritising the things we really want to do over the things we ought to do according to the internet or a travel guide. This helps a lot.

Why are we telling you all of this? We wanted to show you that travelling also has its daily challenges. This does not mean that we do not love what we are doing at the moment. Nothing could be further from the truth. We love every single day and at no point did we regret starting this journey or consider ending the trip earlier than planned. Actually, the opposite is happening, we are probably going to travel longer than we originally planned. But we want to give you and our future self the whole picture, not just the shiny instagrammable version.