People usually ask about the number first — 86 countries, three eight-thousanders — and I understand why; it's the headline. But the number was never the point, and I want to explain what actually was, because it changes how I'd suggest reading everything else on this site.
How it started
The first real trip abroad wasn't glamorous or well planned — it was underprepared in almost every way a trip can be underprepared, and it worked out fine anyway, which taught me an early and slightly dangerous lesson: that things tend to work out. It took a few harder trips later to learn the more useful, less dangerous version of that lesson — that things tend to work out when you've built in enough margin for them to, and that margin is what most of the actual planning on this site is about.
The Atlas Mountains moment
The site's name comes from a specific afternoon in the Atlas Mountains, on what was meant to be an easy acclimatization walk before a longer trek, that turned into the first time I understood the difference between traveling somewhere and actually climbing something. The physical demand, the elevation, the specific kind of focus that terrain requires — it was a different category of experience than anything I'd done before, and it's the moment "travel" started splitting into two separate interests for me: the culture-and-place interest that had always been there, and a new, more physical, more demanding interest in altitude and expedition-style travel that eventually led to three eight-thousand-meter summits.
Why I write guides differently
Most travel content is written to rank for a keyword, assembled from other people's blog posts and official tourism board copy, by someone who may never have actually been to the place being described in detail. I've read guides for destinations I know well that get basic, checkable facts wrong — a closed trail described as open, a permit process that changed years ago, a "hidden gem" that's been in every guidebook for a decade. Every guide on this site is written from a trip I've actually taken, with real costs from that trip, not aggregated averages from other sources. That's a slower way to build a site — it means the destination list here is short and will stay short relative to sites built by aggregating other people's content — but it means what's here is trustworthy in a way I can actually stand behind.
What "86 countries" actually means to me
It's not a checklist, and I actively resist treating it as one — I've turned down opportunities to add a "new country" via a technical border crossing or an airport layover that wouldn't count as actually experiencing the place, because the number matters to me only as a byproduct of genuine travel, not as a target in itself. When people ask which of the 86 was my favorite, I don't have a clean answer, because the question assumes a ranking that doesn't reflect how differently each place mattered — some for the landscape, some for a single conversation, some for how they changed how I think about a completely unrelated part of life.
The three eight-thousanders, in context
Each of the three summits taught something different, which I wrote about at length in what three eight-thousanders taught me about fear — briefly: the first taught me that fear is loud and not always useful information: the second taught me to separate useful fear from noise; the third taught me that the fear never fully goes away, and that the skill is learning to move alongside it rather than waiting for it to disappear. None of the three summits were the "point" of those expeditions in the way an outside observer might assume — the acclimatization weeks, the team dynamics, the slow accumulation of altitude experience mattered as much or more than the summit day itself, which is often the least interesting part of the story to actually tell.
What this site deliberately isn't
It isn't a sponsored-content farm — any affiliate relationship on this site is disclosed on the affiliate disclosure page, and recommendations are made because I'd make them regardless of commission, not the other way around. It isn't trying to cover every destination in the world — the guides here are deliberately limited to places I've actually spent meaningful time, which means slower growth but higher trust. And it isn't trying to sell a particular aesthetic of travel — the site covers budget guesthouses and expedition-grade gear with the same seriousness, because both are real parts of how I actually travel, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest to what this site is supposed to be.
The role of failure in this whole story
It would be dishonest to write an "about" page that only covers the trips that went well. Plenty didn't — a trek cut short by weather and poor planning on my part, a business idea related to travel that failed outright before this site existed, relationships strained by long absences that took real work to repair. I don't dwell on these publicly in detail, but I don't pretend they didn't happen either, and they've shaped the practical, unglamorous focus of this site as much as any success has — a lot of what's written here exists specifically because I got it wrong first and wanted to save someone else the same mistake.
How I actually spend time when not traveling
Between trips, most of the actual work of this site happens — writing guides from notes taken during a trip while the details are still fresh, researching upcoming destinations, and doing the unglamorous logistics of managing a growing personal project. I mention this because the image of a full-time perpetual traveler is a bit of a myth even for people who travel as much as I do — meaningful stretches of time are spent at home, planning the next trip and processing the last one, which is honestly where a lot of the actual thinking behind these guides gets done.
Why the site started now, after years of traveling first
I traveled for years before starting to write any of this down publicly, and that sequencing was deliberate rather than accidental — I wanted a real base of firsthand experience across multiple regions and travel styles before publishing guidance, rather than starting a travel site alongside a first few trips and building an audience on comparatively thin experience. Whether that was the right call is for readers to judge, but it's why the destination list here, while short, is deep rather than broad — three fully-developed guides rather than twenty superficial ones.
The values behind the recommendations on this site
Three things guide every recommendation here: would I actually tell a friend this, without a financial relationship changing the answer; is the information current and specific enough to actually be useful, rather than generic enough to apply to anywhere; and does it respect the reader's time and money as much as I'd want my own respected reading someone else's advice. These aren't marketing language — they're the actual filter every paragraph on this site passes through before publishing, and it's why some pages here take longer to write than a typical travel blog post, because getting a specific cost or route detail right takes more effort than writing something generically plausible.
A word on the destinations not yet covered
Readers sometimes ask why a particular popular destination isn't covered yet, and the honest answer is almost always the same: I haven't been there in enough depth to write about it the way I write about Nepal, Morocco, and Peru. More guides are actively in progress, following trips already taken or planned, and the list will grow — but it will grow at the pace of real travel and real writing, not at the pace of what would be fastest for search visibility. That trade-off is a deliberate one, and I'd rather a smaller site people trust completely than a larger one people have reason to doubt.
How the site's design reflects the philosophy
The deliberate choice to keep this site's destination list short rather than broad, to write long, detailed guides rather than quick surface-level posts, and to disclose affiliate relationships plainly rather than obscuring them are all direct expressions of the same underlying value: that trust, once spent carelessly, is very hard to rebuild, and every design decision on this site — from the content depth to the navigation structure — was made with that trade-off in mind rather than optimizing purely for growth or search visibility.
On being a single-person operation, and what that means for readers
Everything on this site — the writing, the photography, the technical upkeep — is done by one person, which has real trade-offs worth being upfront about. Growth is slower than a team-run publication could achieve, and the destination coverage will always be limited by how much a single person can actually visit and document firsthand. In exchange, every piece of content maintains a consistent voice, a consistent standard of firsthand verification, and a level of personal accountability that's harder to maintain at scale — when something on this site is wrong, there's one person responsible for it, not an editorial team diffusing that responsibility.
What I've learned about writing for readers rather than for algorithms
It would be dishonest to claim complete indifference to how content performs in search results — visibility matters for a site trying to actually reach the people it's meant to help. But the guiding question for every piece of content here has been "would this genuinely help someone planning this specific trip" rather than "what structure and length will rank best," and where those two questions have produced different answers, I've consistently chosen the former, even when it's meant a page that's harder to optimize for a specific keyword than a more formulaic alternative would have been.
A final thought on why any of this matters
Travel, done well, is one of the more reliable ways I know to genuinely change how a person sees the world and their place in it — not through some vague, feel-good sense of "broadening horizons," but through the specific, concrete experience of navigating unfamiliar systems, meeting people whose lives look nothing like your own, and occasionally being genuinely, productively uncomfortable. If this site helps even a small number of people have a better, safer, more genuine version of that experience than they'd have had without it, it's done what it set out to do —
The Closest Call
People ask about "the scariest moment" expecting an avalanche story, and there was one of those too, but the one that actually still shows up in my head is quieter and stupider. It was on the descent from Broad Peak, above Camp 3, in a whiteout that rolled in faster than the forecast had suggested it would. Visibility dropped to maybe ten meters. The fixed rope I'd been following ended at an anchor I didn't recognize — turned out a section had been reset earlier that season and I had an old GPS track loaded instead of checking with my guide first, a small laziness that almost cost me everything. I unclipped to look for the next anchor, took maybe six steps toward what I was sure was the route, and my client partner, Marek, grabbed my harness from behind and didn't let go. He'd seen what I hadn't: the slope fell away into a serac field a few meters past where I was walking, and the whiteout had erased the visual cue that would normally have stopped me on my own.
We sat down right there, clipped back into the last known anchor, and waited forty minutes for a gap in the cloud. Nobody said much. What I took from it wasn't a lesson about ropes or weather — I already knew those — it was about the specific danger of confidence built from two prior successful eight-thousanders. I'd started trusting my own read of a mountain over the explicit protocol of checking anchors and consulting my partner, and that gap between "experienced" and "immune" is exactly where people die up there. I don't tell this story for drama. I tell it because every serious climber I respect has one just like it, and the ones who keep climbing are the ones who let it actually change something rather than filing it away as an exciting anecdote for dinner parties.
The People Who Actually Taught Me How to Travel
I didn't figure any of this out alone, and I think travel writers underclaim their debts more than any other kind of writer. The first was a Polish backpacker named Tomek I met in a hostel kitchen in Chiang Mai in 2011, when I was 23 and traveling with a spreadsheet-level anxiety about every dollar. He'd been on the road for four years by then, mostly through work exchanges and genuinely absurd frugality, and he was the one who told me, over instant noodles, that the goal wasn't to spend as little as possible — it was to spend deliberately, so the money that mattered went toward the things that actually mattered to me. That one distinction reshaped how I've budgeted every trip since, and it's the whole philosophy behind how I write about money on this site.
The second was Pasang Sherpa, who guided me on my first serious high-altitude attempt, a training peak in the Khumbu before I'd earned the right to think about an 8,000er. Pasang had summited Everest eleven times and treated the mountain with a kind of unhurried respect that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with facts — he'd turn us around from a clean, sunny slope because the snow pack sounded wrong underfoot, and he was right often enough that I stopped questioning it. He taught me that the best mountaineers I've met are almost boring in how undramatic their decision-making is; the drama is for people who got unlucky or careless. The third influence is less a person than a pattern — dozens of solo female travelers I've crossed paths with over the years who move through logistics I'd never have thought to worry about with a matter-of-factness that quietly corrected a lot of my own complacency about what "easy travel" even means.
What This Has Actually Cost My Family
I'll be straightforward about this because I think travel content dodges it constantly: this life has cost my parents real worry, for years, in a way I only fully registered once I had nieces and nephews of my own to be anxious about. I missed my cousin's wedding in 2017 because I was three weeks into a Bolivia-to-Argentina route with no flexible way back without losing a non-refundable expedition deposit for the trip after it. I missed my grandmother's funeral in 2019 because I was at Manaslu base camp with no signal for eleven days and didn't get the message until I was already home. Both of those still sit with me, and no amount of good photos from those trips balances that ledger — I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
What's changed, slowly, is the communication infrastructure and, more importantly, the conversation with my parents about it. I now carry a Garmin inReach on anything remote, which means my mother gets a scheduled check-in message even from a glacier, and that alone has done more for her peace of mind than any reassurance I ever gave her in person. We also just talk about it more directly now than we used to — she asks real questions about the route and the risk instead of both of us pretending it's fine, and I answer honestly instead of downplaying things to protect her, which it turns out was the wrong instinct the whole time. My dad, who was skeptical of this entire path for the first decade, now asks better logistical questions about my expeditions than most people I climb with. It took a long time and I don't think it's fully resolved — I still feel the tension every time I book something that will take me off-grid for two weeks during a birthday or holiday.
How I Actually Afford This (No Sponsorship Fairy Involved)
I get versions of "how do you afford this" constantly, usually phrased politely, and I think the honest answer is more useful than the vague one most travel accounts give. From 2009 to 2017 I worked as a backend developer, first in Warsaw and then remotely for a German fintech company, and I lived well below what that salary allowed — a shared flat, no car, cooking most meals, one big trip a year instead of frequent small ones. In 2016 I sold a small apartment I'd inherited a share of and used part of that money, deliberately, to fund my first 8,000-meter attempt rather than putting it toward a down payment on somewhere to live, which is a trade-off I'd make again but don't pretend is available to everyone. I kept freelance contracting part-time for years after leaving full-time work, taking three- and four-month remote contracts between expeditions specifically to fund the next one.
This site itself didn't generate meaningful income until year three, and even now it covers a meaningful chunk of routine travel costs rather than the expedition-scale ones — I'm honest about that on the contact page when brands ask about the site's actual reach. The eight-thousanders were funded by a mix of savings, one inheritance, several years of contract work specifically banked for that purpose, and, for Manaslu, splitting logistics costs with two climbing partners on a smaller local operator rather than a premium Western one. I did not have a trust fund, a sponsor, or a viral moment that paid for any of this. What I had was an unusually high tolerance for a cheap, unglamorous life between trips, and I think that's the actual answer most "how do you afford it" questions are looking for and rarely get.
What I'd Tell the Version of Me Who Started This
If I could sit down with 23-year-old me in that Chiang Mai hostel kitchen, the first thing I'd say is to stop optimizing for the number of countries and start optimizing for the number of days spent somewhere I actually understood. I spent my twenties collecting stamps in a way that, looking back, taught me embarrassingly little — a 36-hour stop in a capital city to say I'd "done" a country is not travel, it's a transaction with your own ego, and I did far too many of those between 2010 and 2014. I'd also tell him to stop booking every guided group tour out of anxiety about doing things wrong; most of what I paid guides for in my first few years, I could have handled myself with an afternoon of research and a bit of nerve, and the money saved would have bought me an extra month on the road each year.
I'd also push him harder on languages. I traveled through a dozen Spanish-speaking countries over several years with barely functional Spanish, relying on English and goodwill, and I know now how much of those places I simply didn't access because of it — conversations that stayed shallow, jokes I missed, help I couldn't properly ask for. The version of me now spends real time with Duolingo and a phrasebook before any region I'll be in for more than two weeks, and it's paid back tenfold every time. Last thing I'd say, and the one that took longest to learn: the expensive gear and the impressive itinerary matter far less than being the kind of traveler people are glad to have shown up — curious, low-maintenance, quick to laugh at your own mistakes. Nobody remembers your itinerary. People remember whether you were decent company.
The Year I Nearly Sold the Backpack for a Mortgage
In late 2021 I tore something in my left knee on a technical scramble in the Julian Alps — nothing heroic, just a bad step on wet rock during a route I'd done a dozen times before, the kind of injury that happens specifically because you've stopped paying attention to something you've gotten good at. Eight months of physio followed, most of it in Kraków, most of it profoundly boring, and somewhere around month four I did something I'd never seriously considered before: I looked at apartments. Not vacation rentals, not a home base to store gear between trips — an actual mortgage, the kind with a thirty-year amortization schedule, in a neighborhood with a good bakery and a tram stop. I got as far as a viewing and a conversation with a broker about my freelance income being "non-standard" for lending purposes, which in hindsight was the universe being unusually direct with me.
What pulled me back wasn't a single dramatic realization — it was smaller and stupider than that. I was going through old trip notes to write what became the first version of the Nepal permit guide, and I found an email from a reader named Aurelia who'd used an early, much rougher version of my Toubkal notes to plan a trip with her sixteen-year-old daughter, the first big trip either of them had taken without her husband. She'd written three paragraphs about a specific sunset above the Neltner refuge and how her daughter had gone quiet in a way she said she'd never seen before. I sat with that email for a long time. It didn't solve the knee, and it didn't make the mortgage math any less tempting, but it reminded me what the actual product of twelve years on the road had been — not the summits, not the country count, but a small, real, ongoing effect on people I mostly never meet. I pulled out of the apartment deal a week later, finished physio, and went back to the mountains with a knee brace I still occasionally curse at. I don't think the mortgage-shaped part of my brain has fully gone quiet even now, if I'm honest, it resurfaces every few years, usually around a birthday, but I know now what actually answers it, and it isn't a spreadsheet.
What the Camera Has Meant to Me at Different Points
My first real trip, the underprepared one I mention elsewhere on this page, was documented on a twelve-dollar disposable camera I bought at a pharmacy because I didn't own anything better, and I still have the prints — badly exposed, half of them of my own thumb, one genuinely beautiful shot of a market in Marrakech that I got by pure accident. For years after that I carried a camera the way a nervous student carries a calculator into an exam: as proof, mostly for myself, that a thing had actually happened. I have hard drives full of photos from my twenties that exist purely because I felt some obligation to document rather than because I wanted to look at them again, and looking back, I think that instinct actually got between me and a fair number of experiences — I was thinking about the shot instead of the place a lot more often than I'd like to admit.
That shifted hard during the eight-thousander years, partly for practical reasons and partly for something closer to philosophical ones. At altitude, a camera is genuinely a liability, cold batteries die in minutes, gloved hands fumble dials, and every gram you're carrying above Camp 2 has to justify itself against oxygen and food. I went from a bulky DSLR kit on my first attempt to a single small mirrorless body and one fixed lens by the third, and that constraint, forced on me by weight limits, taught me to be far more deliberate about what actually deserved a frame. These days the camera comes out for maybe a tenth of what it once would have, a specific light, a specific face, a moment I already know I'll want to hold onto rather than everything indiscriminately, and every photo that ends up in a guide on this site is one I chose to take, not one I took on reflex because that's just what you do in a new place. I think that's made me both a better photographer and, more importantly, a better traveler, which is a trade I'd take every time.
What's next for this site
More destination guides, written the same way as the first three — from trips actually taken, not assembled from research alone — plus the deeper thematic guides across planning, gear, insurance, and high-altitude travel that make up the rest of this site. If there's a destination or topic you'd like covered, or a genuine fit for a collaboration around the specific focus of this site, the contact page goes straight to me.