Long-term travelers feeling lost after coming home from a big trip, unite! Overwhelmed, disoriented, underwhelmed, disappointed — all at once. Join the crowd (and make yourself at home).
It was summer 2016, and I had just come back from my first solo-backpacking trip in Asia. I was lounging on the couch in my grandparents’ house when I opened an article that instantly healed a part of me.
‘The Hardest Part Of Traveling No One Talks About’ was the title of the article,1 which was shared on Facebook by a random friend (that I may or may not have had a crush on for a tiny bit). I was nineteen years old and I had just returned from what I still consider to be my ultimate solo-trip. I spent a month in Hong Kong, and tasted what peak freedom feels like. Hiking amid a thunderstorm, almost overcoming my fear of unnecessarily large spiders, a spontaneous 5-day trip to Shenzhen (China)…it all felt new and wild and adventurous. Being a student at the time meant that I was traveling on an extremely tight budget: somehow I managed to spend only €1,000 in those four weeks,2 which included €600 flights! It all worked out great and the frugality definitely contributed to the uniqueness of the experience.
Like that one night I went on a magical date with a Canadian guy I had met while watching the Hong Kong Light Show (which I visited religiously every evening). We spent the whole night chatting until it was time for him to catch his flight home. After a heartfelt goodbye at around 1:30 AM, I realised I had missed the last train toward Tsim Sha Tsui, where my hostel was. Instead of taking a cab, I decided to spend the rest of the night inside a 7-Eleven store (like a real homeless person), until 5 AM when the trains started running again. Nowadays, it would definitely be a no-brainer to just book an Uber, but I guess low-budget travel makes you do crazy things every once in a while.
Anyway. Back to my grandparents’ couch. I opened the article and started bawling my eyes out as I was reading it. For the first time since returning home, I actually felt understood. The article so eloquently described that raw and rough feeling of coming home after a life-changing trip. The stark contrast between the happiness and excitement you feel when seeing your loved ones, sleeping in your own bed, and eating familiar-tasting food, and the disappointment you feel because life goes back to normal in the blink of an eye. Soon enough the thrill will wear off and your whole trip feels like nothing but a fever dream. You easily fall back into old habits, feeling perhaps even emptier than before.
Some people will easily manage to return to ‘normal life’, and enjoy it. For some of us it really was just a trip, and nothing more. A great holiday to reminisce about and reflect on. Maybe even something you’d do again in a couple of years. Either way a great story to share on a drunken night out with friends, when you order another Thai beer and joke about missing your hungover days, sipping fresh coconuts the morning after an eventful full-moon party. The trip itself then morphs into a new shape, created by those small moments that allow us to share the travel memories and anecdotes we passively carry in the back of our minds.
But for some of us that first big trip symbolizes something else: the start of a continuous struggle and internal unrest (is it ‘wanderlust’?3). We might never feel at home again in our own house. Like we don’t fit into our family and friends’ circles the same way anymore. In some cases the travel bug has bitten us so aggressively that it contaminates every single vein in our bodies. We seem to not find peace again, unless we are in a state of movement, exploration, and adventure. Only then do we feel like we get the most out of life.
And that is so hard. Having traveled to over sixty countries by now, like many others I know that returning home is not an easy task. Of course we must recognize the privilege of having traveled in the first place. Yet we can also acknowledge how strange it is to experience a certain form of detachment afterwards.
Luckily, we are most definitely not alone in that feeling. Many other travelers experience this too.4 So perhaps a good solution is to befriend like-minded people once you’re back home. To read articles like the one I shared (I re-read it about once a year as it just gives me so much peace of mind). Organize meet-ups to share crazy travel stories that are so cool they seem unreal. Cry over short-lived travel romances that must’ve lasted in an ideal world (but realistically wouldn’t have survived real-life dating for a day).
Although it sounds somewhat cliché, all I can say from my experience is: the travel bug is real and it never leaves. It is strong and will persist.
Perhaps the only remedy is to just pack your bags again whenever it gets too itchy?
Anyhow, want to share your experience?
1 The article was written by Kellie Donnelly. I couldn’t find when it was originally published, probably sometime between 2014-2016.
2 According to this website, €1,000 in 2016 is the equivalent of €1,333 today.
3 Not sure how I feel about that 2012 Jennifer Aniston + Paul Rudd movie anymore, but here’s the trailer to save you some time searching.
4 See for example Anna Mazurek: The Hardest Part of Travel, Nomadic Matt: The Culture Shock of Coming Home and Post-Vacation Depression: Why It’s Often Hard to Come Home, and Storrey Lance: The Hardest Part of Traveling.
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