Homeless into the New Year
By Evi Goossens — travel storyteller & creative freelancer
Koh Tao, Thailand, December 2023
Reading time: 5 minutes
There you are, standing with an overstuffed backpack on a strange island halfway across the world. Once you step away from the rushed routines of daily life in the Netherlands, you find yourself teetering on the edge of homelessness.
Your parents hold their breath as you board your first solo flight to spend the holidays far away. Luckily, Koh Tao in Thailand feels incredibly safe. Nothing can go wrong, you tell yourself. Yet, on January 1st, 2024, you face a real problem: just one more night in a cool hostel room before you’re effectively out on the streets. How did it come to this?
As a backpacker, you learn to go with the flow. Travel rarely goes as planned, and you can’t always anticipate what will happen. The beauty of this life is that it opens you up to spontaneity and adventure. In the Netherlands, you check and double-check your busy schedule before committing to anything. On the road, you live more in the moment.
That morning was no different. With a pounding headache from the night before, you sit in a tiny breakfast café and realize that every accommodation on the island—and every boat to the mainland—is fully booked. You can almost feel the coarse sand against your skin and imagine a future backache, because it seems like you’ll be sleeping on a hard beach bed.
Living with uncertainty is never easy, but embracing it—being open to adventure and spontaneity—is a completely different experience. This situation could have been avoided, yet it taught a valuable lesson.
Sometimes we make mistakes. Sometimes life is unpredictable. And that’s okay. It’s good to stumble occasionally, to discover your resilience and problem-solving skills. And it’s even better to leave space in your schedule for spontaneous adventures. In the end, this backpacker was given a bed by a generous hostel owner.
We should step out of our comfort zones more often, embrace adventure, and trust in the goodness of people. That is the lesson travel teaches us.
