Travelling on a shoestring budget will take a toll on you. Travelling on a shoestring budget and alone can hurt you, but it's alright, and there’s ways to avoid it.
When you travel with a small budget the best thing to do is Couchsurf and hitchhike, use your money for food. With these ways of travelling you’ll find people you’d never meet otherwise, and see places didn’t know existed. But, even with all that you’ll get depressed.
You’ll get a ride hitchhiking and love meeting a stranger who’d pick up a person on the side of the road. Then they drop you off and you realize you will probably never see them again.
You’ll Couchsurf and make friends with like-minded people who teach you culture and language. But every time you leave it will feel like you’re leaving a new home, and it’ll feel horrible.
You’ll find places you love, people whose company you love, make routines over the days you’re there, but then travel onwards, because that’s what you’re doing, travelling.
After some time doing this it will bring you down. But you can’t let it.
If you never left that last city, that last home, you never would have found the next one. Even when you’re alone in the rain with nowhere to go, you’re more free than most would dare to be. Don’t think of people you’ll never see again as a sad thought, think of it as being a bright interesting blip in someone’s life. Better for being short and powerful.
Being alone you can’t share your experiences with someone else, you don’t have anyone to complain to, to share the pain with, to enjoy time with, to feel the same with you. But you will learn so much more about yourself, about how much you can do on your own, how self-reliant you can be.
Talk to everyone you see, someone alone on a bench in a park? Say hello, even if you barely speak the language. See a homeless man on the side of the road? Say hello. Go to Couchsurfing meetups, talk to other hitchhikers on the road, speak to everyone you see. You’ll never know who may become your new friend, or give you a new home.
It’s just good to be prepared to feel sad and not be blind-sighted. Maybe you won’t feel depressed, maybe you’ll find people to join you, or maybe all those Couchsurfing meetups and hitchhiking rides are all you need and you prefer being alone. But at least for me, the long-days of hitchhiking, beautiful but stressful, and leaving wonderful people and homes day after day, week after week, took its toll on me.
For the people who feel the same, travelling alone, and with no more money than they can carry for food, the bad times will pass and the good times will always come back again.
The sun will always rise after that long night alone.
