Harsh Realities of Being a Full-time Travel Vlogger
Police officers with like assault rifles, big guns, basically came running at me. So I've been traveling the world for four years, and my full time job is making travel videos for YouTube and for social media. But I feel like there is a massive disconnect between what my life is really like, and what my viewers, or people in general think what my life is like. My job is making travel videos, so you see the highlights of my life, you see the epic sunsets, you see the amazing surfs, you see the best views and the travel stories.
And all of that is real. But what you don't see is the stuff that is not so fun to show on social media. You don't see the burnouts from me being overworked and not getting enough sleep..
You don't see the bad stuff like me almost getting shot on a European country’s border by the cops. You definitely don't see the boring stuff, like me figuring out how the videos and how the traveling is going to work, or me and missing a bunch of buses and sometimes flights. To be clear, I love what I do and I don't want to be doing anything else, but I think a lot of people just don't understand what we do on a day-to-day basis as travel filmmakers or travel content creators. So in this video, I'm going to recap a full year of my life as I was on the road mostly making travel films, and fill in the blanks between what happens between the videos that you see. It's going to be a raw, and a long video, but stick around till the end, because the end of the year is when the crazy stuff really happened.
I also get a lot of questions about like, how much does doing this full-time cost? So at the end, I also try to do a brief breakdown of the costs of doing what I do and traveling full time. This video is brought to you by our sponsor, Taptap Send. More on them later on the video. So, I'm going to recap everything that happened in 2023 from January to December. Now, I know the end of 2024 is a really late time to do it, but I think a full year is a good example of how it works. So at the beginning of 2023, or actually the end of 2022, I hired an assistant video editor, hired someone full time basically to help me with my job.
And that is the best investment I ever made. Until that point, I was editing everything by myself, scripting everything by myself, obviously filming everything by myself as I'm travelling solo, and doing all the admin work, reaching out to sponsors, handling boring emails. I love editing and I love filming and I love scripting, but the rest of the business stuff is not something that's enjoyable. Testing out thumbnails, writing and copy-pasting descriptions, all of that stuff that can be automated can be handled by someone who doesn't need to be creative. That stuff I didn't look forward to. So hiring someone made all of that easier.
But hiring someone also meant that I had to train them, and that was a big investment. So that's basically all I did for January 2024, I was training my guy, and it took a lot of time to train my guy because, you know, I could have just edited those videos faster, but in the end, it was definitely worth it. Other big reason I brought him on was because I was starting to make shorts, or vertical content.
So that's YouTube shorts, Instagram Reels, TikTok. Good thing is, you can reuse the same short vertical content across all platforms. And I had a plethora of like old content to choose from and to make shorts from. At the start of January, I also upgraded my main set up, I got this new camera, Canon R6, and the lens that I'm using right now, which is like a low aperture, really solid lens and a few other stuff. So let's go to February. That's when the videos start.
My friend Luke Damant, Australian travel vlogger, came to Bangladesh. I had known him for a while and we'd been planning this for a while, so I was with him for a couple of weeks. I wasn't filming that much myself throughout the process, so he was mainly the one filming and I was showing him around, but I was still in his content, so it's like a win-win for both of us. And I started using the new camera. We went to Sylhet, I think, in the second week of February.. and that's when I filmed something that I didn't release for a long time, because when I was using a new camera, I had the microphone plugged in like the headphone jack in my camera, and the audio was just garbage for a full day of recording.
and I didn't even release that video till a few months ago, like 20 months after I filmed it, because I messed up the audio for the first half of the video. But that's a part of, you know, like getting a new camera. I'm hesitant usually to try out new cameras or new gear for an important project because.. there's a learning curve and you always mess up when you're trying to use new stuff.
So after Luke left, I did a fan meet up with hundreds of my fans, or viewers in Dhaka, and made a video about that in my Bangla channel because it was kind of exciting. A lot of like, news stations showed up, interviewed me. It was a pretty fun experience, but didn’t put this out on the English channel obvoiusly, because all of that was in Bangla and mainly for a Bangladeshi audience. And in January, February, you know, while I was doing this, I was also applying for visas because I have a Bangladeshi passport.
To go through with my travel plans that I had for the rest of the year, I needed a visa from the Philippines, and I also need a visa for Schengen countries so I can travel around Europe, which I was doing through the Italian Embassy, and just that visa process took, I want to say, two and a half months or something like that. I spent maybe ten working days just going back and forth between embassies, submitting documents, picking up my passport and all that stuff. So in the middle of March, I went from Bangladesh all the way to the Philippines, here in Manila.
And I was in Manila for like two weeks, actually, and I was filming every single day from sunrise till sunset, maybe not sunrise, maybe 9 a.m. till sunset. And I made a lot of videos, and I was doing very much a Luke Damant or Dale Philip style of videos, where I was going out and filming, just me interacting with my surroundings, and I picked the Philippines to do that because my second biggest viewer base outside of Bangladesh, anywhere in the world still to this day is from the Philippines, And it was the Philippines before I had even been to the Philippines, before I'd made any videos targeting Filipinos. I think maybe it's because I look Filipino.
Whatever the reason is, I figured Philippines would be a good place to try out this kind of raw vlogging content. So I went around all day, like filming for hours, filming 2 or 3 YouTube videos in a day, trying out different street foods, trying out the markets, going to the fancy areas, going to the not-so-fancy areas, just interacting with people. Then after like two weeks of filming in the Philippines, I went from Manila all the way to the southeast of Philippines here in Siargao. And that is where I spent the next six weeks.
So once I arrived in Siargao, I actually took a week off.. just to enjoy life, just to force myself to not work. Because before that, from November 2022 to like end of March, I'd spent the 4 to 5 months basically working, maybe 14 hours or something like that, a day, from waking up to the moment I go to bed. I was just working non-stop. I mean, I enjoy working, but that was a lot.
So I just wanted to take a break. So I was staying at this guesthouse the whole time I was in Siargao, next to this Mad Monkey hostel. And mad monkeys are usually like crazy party hostels, but this one is not really that crazy. But there was a cafe where I could get nice food, and nice coffee and stuff, and like work every day.
So basically my routine the whole time I was in Siargao for like six and a half weeks, was every day I'd wake up, I’d get brunch or breakfast or whatever it is, and I spent like 8 to 10 hours.. Yeah, something like 8 to 10 hours at the Mad Monkey place. Just working, editting. Usually at seven-eight is when people would start drinking, and start having like happy hour free shots and stuff at the bar.
That's when I would like move from there to my guest house, which is right next to Mad Monkey, and just like edit a bit more from there, shower. And then usually at night I would go out with people, if I'm not going, I would just like chill somewhere. And I would also do a lot of surfing ny the way. Now in this time, in these six weeks, is when I actually started editing and releasing all the videos from the Philippines. And there was a lot of work, you know, I think I filmed like 14 long videos, which ended up being maybe 50 long Facebook videos. My English channel, this channel
hit new highs that I had never seen before. Every video that I was releasing in Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, everything was just, maybe not Instagram so much, But the other three, they were going so viral. So it was just like a really great time, but it was a lot of work. It was a lot of uploads because I had to be uploading in multiple languages to, I had, I think, 4 Youtube channels at the time, 2 Facebook pages, 2 TikToks, 2 Instagrams. So that month in Siargao was like the best month business wise, financially.
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It was exhausting, like working so much and then going out, which is like not something I was forced to do obviously. I remember I got really sick two times in Siargao, like so sick I had to take antibiotics one time for this cough that just wouldn't go away. Another time I was like in bed for like 4 or 5 days. But that's probably when I was like partying so much honestly, on top of working.
And before I left Siargao, it was time to film again. That's when I filmed the Siargao video that ended up going pretty viral as well, that was a solid video. And I love that place Siargao, I still do, so I felt like I needed to do it justice with a proper video. So I made like a nice old cinematic video with like, beautiful highlights of Siargao, with my friend Roel, who became a really close friend of mine after I basically saved him after he got into like a motorcycle crash for not wearing his helmet, and I had to get him from the hospital on like a Saturday night, Sunday morning at 2 a.m. Okay, after Siargao, it was time to go somewhere else. So I flew from the island of Siargao to Cebu right here, and arrived there pretty late and spent one night in Cebu.
I stayed in a Mad Monkey there too. So I spent a night there, and it was very hard to sleep there because that hostel, although I had a private room, was literally on this very busy street with very loud tuktuks and stuff. The next morning I woke up and took a four hour bus to Moalboal.
Okay, so Moalboal was an interesting place, because most people stay in Moalboal for like, you know, 2 to 3 days and then they go out somewhere else. But I stayed there for 12 days, and that was because I found this cafe that had like internet download and upload speeds, co-working space, basically that was 500 Mbps. Up until that point in Siargao I was working with the Mad Monkey WiFi, which is, I think like 20-10 or something like that, sometimes even worse.
It was like impossible to upload a lot of stuff, that I needed to upload, videos that I had already edited. So basically used that chance to stay in Moalboal for a while, work every single day till the evening, till the very end. And at night I was going to this place called Hangover Hostel, because they had like, you know, fun activities, karaoke night, like every single night. And I became really good friends with the staff.
I became really good friends with.. the couple that owns it, and the manager, this girl named Queen, and we had such a good time. And the other staff too, and the dogs, it was like such a good time.
I was with them like the whole time. So one of the things I did by making that Moalboal video was going canyoneering, that canyoneering thing was fun, but there was like a jump there where I like, tried to do a spin when jumping from like 10m or 30ft, and landed on my face. My neck hurt for the next six weeks. I couldn't do anything that was intense exercise or moving my neck. That was like a bad injury actually. Like I was laughing it off at the time, but that like, messed up my neck for a while.
So don't try something like that. Then with Michael, I went on that like scooter ride to a casino peak, I believe it was called, that beautiful mountain, which is so beautiful. It's like way more beautiful than the Chocolate Hills, which I saw later. And on the way back, you know what I didn't get to show in the video, was my friend just learned to ride a scooter, and I didn't even know how to ride a scooter at that point.
The way down was very sketchy. We're basically off roading for hours on these hills and mountains. You know Moalboal is famous for the Sardine walls, where you can go snorkeling or diving, and I didn't even know how to scuba dive at that point. But I went snorkeling there one day and I got the worst footage of my life. Thankfully, Roel, the guy who, like, drove me around, Siargao and the guy was saved in Siargao from the scooter accident, He had some amazing footage from Moaloal when he was there, and he shared that with me, and I was able to use that in my videos.
We're not always using footage that we filmed ourselves, if we don't get the best footage. I mean, ideally you want to use everything by yourself, that makes it your work as much as possible, but sometimes it's useful to use stock footage, or your friend's footage asking for permission, of course, and doing the the legal way, if that allows you to tell a better story with your videos. After I was done with Moalboal, after I was done uploading everything, I decided it was time to go from Moalboal to, Siquijor.
Siquijor is basically this tiny island, this is Cebu, this is Siquijor. The problem with trying to go to Siquijor is that there's often no direct ferries.. from Cebu to Siquijor, so you have to go to this other town called Dumaguete, go to another place to get a ferry, and then take a ferry from there to Siquijor, and then take a bus to wherever you need to go, because it's a big island, like you have to go around all of it. And that journey was, I think from 11 p.m.. It was supposed to be 7 a.m., ended up being 11 a.m.,
and I think there were like 3 or 4 buses and tuktuks, each like an hour to like 1.5 hours long and multiple ferries, while it was like pouring rain, it was so rough. I think I arrived at Siquijor or at 1 p.m., I was staying at a guesthouse, and I slept straight for like 16 hours or something like that after that.
I was so tired after that journey and not sleeping for two days. So in Siquijor, I didn't do too much, I definitely didn't make any videos. But what I did do is two very important things. I learned to ride a scooter and finally, for the first time in my life, because I spent so much time in Asia, maybe a year, traveling without ever learning to ride a scooter, because I do dumb stuff and I feel like I would do dumb stuff with the scooter and crash my scooter.
Thankfully, I haven't crashed it yet, in the one and a half years since I have learned to ride a scooter, but that's because I'm very careful with what I do on a scooter, and Siquijor was the perfect place to learn because it had really wide, flat roads and not a lot of traffic, barely any traffic. What I also learned was to do scuba diving, and I got my Open Water license. What I’ve learned about safety standards in the Philippines, They don't really follow a lot of safety standards, even for Asian standards. So be careful.
So make the extra effort actually trying to like follow safety protocol and stuff because a lot of people often wont. More on that later. So I was staying at a guesthouse the whole time I was getting certified to scuba dive, And then I went to this hostel, this really cool hostel actually, called Fable Hostel, it was not a party house or anything, but like a nice social hostel. And then, all of a sudden I realized I only had like ten days or like a week left in the Philippines, and I had barely seen anything in the Philippines! I'd only been to Siquijor, Siargao, Manila, which most people don't even visit, and Moalboal, that was it. So now it’s time to rush.
So then I took a ferry from Siquijor over here north all the way to Bohol. A lot of people do this loop when they’re traveling this part of the Philippines, people start from Cebu because that's the first major, the only major airport, I believe, in that region. And then you go to Moalboal, and then you go south to Siquijor, Sometimes people go straight to Bohol, but I went to Siquijor then I took the ferry to Bohol, and at Bohol I arrived basically at this ferry port, which was a two hour, or like a 1.5 hour scooter ride away from where I was trying to go over here, this place basically, in the middle of the jungle.
And I was driving my scooter and I just learned to drive a scooter for the first time a week ago, so I was not a good scooter driver at this point, And I was carrying my bag, you know, I have 30 kilos or like over 60 pounds of backpacks, in these two backpacks. And what I learned is it's much harder to turn with your heavy backpacks. And I almost crashed my scooter when I was going too fast, and I was trying to make a turn, and I just couldn't do it with the weight, So I had to go really slow, and because I was going really slow in this like one way with all the traffic, it got dark by the time I got to my place, and then it was really sketchy to drive on these hills with no lights, with cars coming against you, that was stressful. So I got to Bohol, I stayed in this hostel, I got a private room, but it didn't really matter because there was like a big window in my private room.
So my electronics and drones and computer was not really secure in that private place. I filmed the Chocolate Hills, which wasn't that exciting. The Tarsier monkeys stuff was like actually really sick. So I made a short video in Bohol, mainly for a sponsor honestly, because my sponsor wanted this video out, and I just had to make something, even if it was like a short video. Then I like drove the scooter back, and even when I was driving the scooter back, I’ve always miscalculated how long it'll take me to do something.
Again, driving the scooter back to the port to drop it off took a lot longer, than I thought it was going to take, and the ferry that I was taking back to Cebu City, where I had my flight, was actually delayed for like 30 minutes for some reason, I don't know why. So I went from this ferry right here all the way up here to the port. And then I went to the airport, which is on this little island over here. So I arrived at the port in Cebu City, which is like, I think, a 30 minute drive away from the airport where my flight was, an hour before my flight was boarding.
So I just got off with my bags and everyone was offering to take me somewhere, And I told this guy, “Hey, this airport is 30 minutes away. If you take me there in 15 minutes somehow, I'll give you double the price that it says on Grab.” And he was like, okay, let's do it. And he was like a rocket for the rest of the way. It was crazy! We were like zooming through these back roads and whatever, which is probably not very safe.
But I got to the airport 45 minutes before my flight, ran in to my desk in the Filipino tropical heat, sweating all over, and 45 minutes before my flight was leaving, they let me board, they let me check-in my luggage.. Only in the Philippines. From here, I took a flight all the way, to one of the more popular place in the Philippines, Coron. Now Coron and El Nido and Palawan, all of that is like probably the more scenic parts of the Philippines.
No matter what kind of trip people make to the Philippines, people go to El Nido, people go to Palawan. I myself did not even go to El Nido. It was starting to rain and El Nido is famous for these beautiful sunny beaches and these gorgeous sunsets, it wasn't even sunny anymore by the time I got there. But Coron was cool for other things than sunsets and that's why I went there. On the first day I went on like a hike, sunset hike that I showed in my video, and the next day was really cool stuff.
We went on these like wreck dives through, like the remains of the battleships of World War Two. By the way, this is why I say Philippines is not the safest place to go diving. You need to go through special training to go through wrecks, and they're not supposed to take you there. And I wasn't even personally that comfortable doing it, but they were like, nah, nah, nah, you can do it, come with us, whatever. And they just took us through these wrecks. I literally hit my head against something in one of these wrecks because we're in, like, this dark room with nothing, but the flashlight of the guy who was leading us.
That could have been really bad. I also cut my hand while we were like, going up from a wreck up to the surface, but that was my fault. I touched like a rope or something, and underwater, you know nothing, you're not supposed to touch anything, things could be sharp. The next dive, we did the last dive for the day. That was the really weird one.
You know, with open water license, you're not really supposed to go under 18 meters. So there's this, Barracuda Lake, where it's like a weird thing, There's, like, cold water, I think, or normal water for the first 10-15 meters, And then there's, like, I think really hot water, like 41°C or something, or 39°C for like another 15-20 meters. So you have to go below that to be in a place where it's not boiling.
So you go in without a wetsuit, but it's still like really hot, like Jacuzzi water for that layer in the middle, And you can sweat a lot and have problems with the heat basically. We have to go all the way down to like 35-40 meters to be at like a normal temperature water. And I was uncertified to do that, because I wasn't trained to do that.
But the guys were like, nah, that's fine, it's fine, we're just going to be over you. And they were. There like multiple dive masters watching what we're doing, but they took us all the way.. to the bottom, which you're not really supposed to do if you're doing things safely.
But we went there, came back up, then went back to my hostel in Coron, went to the airport, which is like up on the island here, and flew all the way back to Manila. Now, I didn't want to be in Manila for three days, but I just had to do it because I mistimed some stuff. In those three days I wasn't doing much except for just like editing for my hostel, you know. Then I went to another continent. So I left Manila, I think I had a stopover somewhere in the Middle East in one of the Gulf countries, then I went to Italy, to Milan for the first time. I had been to Italy before, but never to northern Italy, so I was pretty excited.
My family was supposed to be visiting me in Milan, so my plan was basically I would go like a few days before them, like four days before them, and just get used to the city. And then when they would come, we'd see Milan and see a bunch of other stuff. But when I got there, I realized hostels in Milan where like 80 to 100 USD a night, which was just ridiculous! That was insane.
Covid changed everything. Before Covid, you could get the same hostels in Europe for like $30-$40 a night, Now they were like literally $80-$90 in the summer, especially with a lot of Australians coming in, paying whatever people ask for. Sometimes it's literally cheaper to get like a private room in a guest house than to get a bunk bed in a hostel. So I went to Milan, and I made the video from Milan that you might have seen. And I met actually one of my really good friends now, Brian, this really cool guy, which you'll probably see in my videos in the future. The next day, what I decided was that I don't want to pay $100 for like a s___ bunk bed in Milan, and a really good friend of mine, Leo that I met in Istanbul three years ago, when he was an exchange student there and I was staying there for like a few months, He lived in Torino or Turin, which is like this city, I think 1.5 hour, 2 hours or maybe 1 hour train ride away from Milan.
So I decided I'm just going to go stay there, because there, there were really nice hostels, with like nice beds and nice co-working space for like $30-$40 a night. And my friend was there, so he would show me the good stuff. And so he came every day and we're like just chilling in the town, going to the best spots for sunset.
I mean, summer in Europe is the best time ever, honestly. The best place to be in the world, I think, summer in Europe. And then we went to this rave, this techno rave at a pool and had a lot of fun. Like, not.. it was not like people swimming in the pool, it was like, a sports complex, let's say that's used for like events. And then from Torino, I basically went back to Milan, met up with my family again, and my mom had been to Europe with me before, but it was the first time in Europe for my dad and my sister, and I really wanted to show them Europe, and show them some of the highlights of Europe. So it was a happy time.
I think we were in Milan together for like two days maybe. So we had Interrail tickets, you know, we bought it a long time in advance so we could take trains around Europe. Boy, that is a lot more complicated than I thought it would be. How you take trains changes, depending on, like which country you're taking it from, which country you're taking it to. So the first trains we were trying to take was to Switzerland.
And we found out that in Italy you can’t just do it online. You can't reserve seats online even if you have like an Interrail pass, which four of us did. So we had to go to the station, wait in line, figure everything out, For that one we actually got it sorted.
So I came to Milan in the middle of June. So we figure out the trains, we take the trains, we go all the way up to Switzerland over here, and I think we have to go to this place called Spiez, and then go to Interlaken, then go to Lauterbrunnen, which is one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen in my life. I made a video from there and from Interlaken and everything, that was gorgeous.
I think it was like 70 waterfalls in that little valley. It was very expensive obviously, because it was Switzerland, I think we were paying, maybe $200 a night for each of our rooms, where like two of us were staying. But it's Switzerland in the summer, that's what you have to pay. The next day, we did that $250 trip.
We paid less actually, it cost $250 normally to go to Jungfraujoch, which is the highest train station in Europe. We did the early morning pass, which is the smartest thing to do. Because it costs $70 less per person and you have a lot less tourists.
I think at 10 a.m. is when the big tour groups, massive tour groups, from like China or other parts of East Asia, India, they start coming in and they kind of like take over the scene. It's hard to enjoy it with that many people. So we did the smart thing, going in in the morning. Coolest thing, one of the coolest things I've seen in my life.
I really relish that vacation because my dad really wanted to go to Switzerland his whole life. That's kind of like top of his bucket list, and I got to do that with my family. And that was like the last family vacation we ever got to take I guess. And then from there, we went to Interlaken for a day. Actually, we went to like this place called Harder Kulm, which is like up on the mountains. But after that, from there we went to Munich.
But we had to change a couple of trains, So we had to take a train to Zurich, and then, we went to Munich. So I kind of ruined my family's Munich trip. Like I made a video about getting this MacBook. One of the reasons I switched to this MacBook, because the Dell that I had before that, which was not a cheap one, when I got it in 2020, it cost me 2500 dollars, had all kinds of problems, like with battery life, with the hard disk..
The hard disk literally just stopped working, in Switzerland when I was there, and I started panicking because all my work I have, you know, all these sponsored videos that are due in a week or two, there’s deadlines to meet, there’s work I have to delegate. In the middle of my trip I had to figure out, okay, what am I going to do with my laptop? So I was in Munich, and I couldn't really show my family the city, because the whole time I was running around between places about who's going to fix my laptop. I finally found someone, this guy at his apartment basically. Basically, he had to order like a replacement hard disk from Amazon and then replaced the whole thing. In the middle, I did see Munich a little.
I did get to reconnect with one of my best friends, Manu, who I met in Sri Lanka in 2022. But like this was mostly what I did, fixing my laptop. This is where we found out that Interrail also doesn't work the way we want to. So we had these Interrail tickets, right? We thought we could just get the train from there to Paris where we had hotels booked. No, you had to reserve these seats from Munich to Paris months in advance, in the summer, because they're, like, so popular. There was no way we're going to get four seats, for the direct train from Munich to Paris.
My sister, my dad, and my mom, they ended up paying like $1,000 for these last minute flights from Munich to Paris because they had to get to Paris one way or the other. Flixbus would have been the other way, but it would've been very long, and my family gets like motion sickness, my sister especially, from buses, so that was not an option. She would just be really sick, so they had to get last minute flights, spend $1000, despite having these Interrail passes, which was just frustrating. I couldn't even go with them because I had to fix my laptop, and I finally found someone who would actually fix my laptop. And he said it would take like an extra day.
So I stayed an extra day, I booked a hostel actually, but I ended up crashing at a friend's place. And this is a hostel that I paid $80 for, for the night. So I didn't go directly from Munich to Paris. What I had to do is at 3 a.m., I had to go from Munich to Stuttgart, here this random city in Baden-Württemberg in Germany. So wait there, for like half an hour in Stuttgart, and then take a fast train all the way to Paris.
So I came to Paris a day after my parents, and I kind of ruined my parent's trip in Paris too, because they're not very good at English, and they're not very good at navigating in Europe, so they needed me as a full-time guide to show them around the whole time. I was unable to do that because now that my laptop was fixed, I had to back up all my footage because I had moved it to a new hard disk, because now the footage was only on my hard drive. It was not online, backed up on Google Drive, and if my laptop got stolen, I was screwed. So I had to go to a co-working space, I think pay like $30 a day, and I had to go there, I think two days maybe, And I had to upload like 2.5TB, 2500GB of footage and back it up on Google Drive and sync. So that was a whole process.
But I got to show my parents a little bit more of Paris, than I did of Munich at least. I took them around the Eiffel Tower, My family went to the Mona Lisa to see the Mona Lisa and stuff, not my mom, because she had been there with me before, we had been to Paris once like a few years ago. Oh, and then there's like one day I went out to meet up with my friend. This was during the riots, remember? Like Paris was on fire in June last year, because this police officer shot this like, this person of color, this kid in a car because he wasn't stopping driving or something like that.
There were cars on fire at night. It was like a wild time. They shut down all the metro lines, which is one of the reasons I ended up crashing at my friend's place. And when I was going back to my friend's place, we literally saw cars being burned on the streets.
It was like a crazy time to be out in Paris. Next day, I go meet up with my family again, and this time we take a flight to Venice. So we had to go back to Italy because my family's round trip was to Milan and back, and we figured for the last stop, we'd go fly into Venice over here.
Now, we didn't stay in Venice because that can get very expensive. What we did was, we stayed in this place called Venice Mestre, which is like a train chain ride away from Venice, but way less expensive than Venice. And then during a day trip, me and the whole family, we went to Venice with the bus, not the train. We explored the city and I made a video for Venice, which is really one of the coolest places ever.
So I'd been to Venice before in 2018 so this was my second time in Venice, that was, I think, my third or fourth time in Paris, probably my second time in Munich. So most of these places, except for Switzerland I've been to before. So from Venice, using our Interrail pass, we also went on a day trip to the historic city of Florence, where I made a video. Then after I was done with Venice basically, this is, I think end of June, start of July, at this point, I went all the way to Milan with my family, using like my Interrail pass, and I dropped them off at the airport, said goodbye to them, and then I was going back to Venice again On the way back, I actually went to this really, really cool place. So Verona is the city where Shakespeare's famous play Romeo and Juliet was actually based in. So I had like an hour or two there, or maybe three hours.
And I just like explored the buildings that inspired Romeo and Juliet, and all of that.. And it was like a pretty cool, nice city, you know. Then I went back to Venice. So next morning from Venice, I took the train to Belluno, And there I met up with Oriana (Ori), and I made the whole video about the Dolomites for the next couple of days. Oriana I actually knew from the Philippines, where I'd been like a month or two ago, and she was Italian. I met up with my friend somewhere around here, the train station.
Then we stayed in this town, I believe called Belluno. This is like not actually in the Dolomites, which is in South Tyrol region of Italy, but right on the edge of it. And we spent the next three days, going to see some the most insane places I've seen in my life. You know Seceda, that scene you saw when I was like, running down the grass fields and there's like literally a drop off, maybe a kilometer drop-off, and just clouds on one side and a mist and just like green fields going down the other side. That is so insane.
I've never seen anything like that, in my life. That was just something else. Tre Cime de Lavaredo or Three Peaks was also really cool, but then it was time to leave..
and I decided after that and this was, I think, early July at this point that I want to go to Ljubljana. So Ljubljana has always been one of my favorite places in the Balkans, like along with Serbia, which is probably my other favorite place and which I love even more, because Belgrade is like home to me. But Ljubljana is like part of the Schengen zone, so I always needed a visa so I could never spend enough time there. So this time I decided I'm going to spend a few weeks in Ljubljana just relaxing there, because I love the people from Slovenia, They are so nice, so friendly.
I love the food because it's basically Balkan food, like burek and stuff like Serbia. I made a whole video about Slovenia I think 5 or 6 years ago, I wasn't even in Slovenia, I was just in L.A., interviewing a friend of mine from Slovenia about how to travel Slovenia, because I love that place so much.
So I went for two weeks. So here was the problem.. It was still like a beautiful town and friendly people whenever I met them, but I realized when I went there that it was not the best time to visit Ljubljana because, the summer is when all the universities shut down, so, like a large part of the young population just leaves town, and they go to their hometowns, or they go to the seaside, like a lot of people like to do in Europe and especially in the Balkans. So a lot of like venues just closed down for the summer, in contrast to what happens to a lot of places, that open up for the summer when there are more people. So it was like not much going on in Ljubljana for some reason in the summer. But even though there were not a lot of locals, which is my favorite part of being in a city like Ljubljana, there were a lot of tourists, and hostel prices were really expensive.
I was paying like €45- €50 a night for sharing a room with four people, and I wasn't able to get a lot of work done because, you know, I like working late at night and stuff and you can't really work at a hostel at 3 a.m. without like, having this light source on your bed that is messing with other people's sleep, and I don't like doing that. So I stayed there for 10-12 days, I think, And then in mid-July I just decided I would rather just go to another city where I can get a private apartment for €50 a night. So from Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, I went to Zagreb, which is right east over here. And I spent, I believe, I think five nights, 5 or 6 nights over there. So I went to Zagreb, which is the capital of Croatia, city I'd been to before, before Covid which I really liked.
It's a lot like Belgrade, the culture, the people is very similar. The food is again the same. It's the Balkans. The nightlife is very similar. I got to meet up with Kim, one of my friends that I met in Macedonia like six years ago, and then Colombia the year after that.. and she lives in Zagreb, so she showed me around and stuff. So when I was in Zagreb, they had what was called the storm of the century.
It's like a major storm came out of nowhere, killed several people, uprooted all the trees. I went out to get like a pljeskavica or a kebab, and it was just like trees and signposts everywhere, and a crane collapsed. So that was crazy while I was there, and then it just, like, went away. So now I was trying to figure out where to go next. I wanted to meet up with my friends, and how I was going to do it was going to be the tricky question. So I found this really cheap flight in the middle of July that took me from Zagreb all the way to Germany, all the way here in this random airport, called like Baden Baden.
And even my German friends did not know there was an airport in Baden Baden, when I posted that, like on my private Instagram story, people were like, we had no idea that there is an airport here. I went there because from there I wanted to meet up with a friend of mine I met in Sri Lanka two years ago, who had her own place and everything, like a place to sleep. And she lived in.. I don't pronounce this well, but I call it Freiburg.
It's like this really pretty town near Switzerland, and I had no idea, honestly, how beautiful this town was going to be. It's like a really pretty town, It's like a university town. There's a lot happening, not that I went out or anything, but it's like right on the edge of the Black Forest and it's just gorgeous. Like, I would recommend going there if you want to be in a nice little German town in the middle of nature, without a lot of noise, like cars aren't allowed in the center of the city, so you have to like take a bicycle or take a tram.
So I spend two nights there, basically just catching up with my friend and all. Then I was going to try to go to Brussels, to meet up with one of my really close friends, this guy I met in, Guatemala in 2019, Maybe you remember the videos from there right before Covid, and then he came to visit me in Los Angeles in 2020. So in 2022, actually, the year before that, in the summer, he came to visit me in Serbia, when I was in Belgrade for three months, and he brought two of his friends from Belgium, from Antwerp, with him, and they became really good friends of mine. So I was going to go visit all of them. But I realized on the way from Freiburg to Brussels is this little country, called Luxembourg. And I started researching what I could make a video about for this country, right.
And the moment I saw that this country has the highest GDP per capita in the world, I was like, okay, this is going to be a good video. This is going to be a viral video just because of this title. “A Day in the richest country in the world” and the English video did okay, did well, but the Bangla video for this, it got 12 million views so far on Facebook, it is my most viewed long video on YouTube on my Bangla channel. I think it has like 3.5 million views and just keeps racking up views.
So it's like very important as a travel filmmaker to not just like, you know, make a video, of whatever you see, but to also think about what is something that people will click on. And when I heard about Luxembourg, I was like, I have to do this. And when I heard about Luxembourg, I was like, I have to do this.
Now for the most part, the last month or so, I was basically just editing, and I hadn't filmed something new, but it just takes so long to edit. Then I went to Brussels for a stay with my good friend that I mentioned earlier, Vince, for I think two nights. After that we headed to Antwerp where he is actually from. So from Brussels I took like the 30 minute train to Antwerp basically, stayed with Hans and Mando, my two good friends, at their place for six days and this is like end of July, peak summer in like northwestern Europe, and it was p___ rain every day.
It was like 15 degrees every single day. There was one day when the weather was nice, then Mando was playing at this like private house party, he's like a DJ. That’s the one day we got to enjoy. Except for that, it was terrible, and I was getting bored in Antwerp, even though I was supposed to stay there longer, So I had booked this flight basically, from Brussels to Stockholm to go see another one of my best friends. But I was getting bored in Antwerp, so what did I decide to do? I decided I'm going to go to the Netherlands, since I'm so close to the Netherlands. And Roel, remember the guy who gave me the footage in mobile and who I saved in Siargao, so he was, living in Arnhem and there was like a festival where, like really cool DJ, big Dutch DJ was playing - Reinier Zonneveld and we went to go see him at his festival.
In the Netherlands the weather was even worse. It was like even colder, and it was raining so hard, we're all like in ponchos, you know. But in the Netherlands, no one seems to care about the rain, because they just live with it the whole year, so the festival went on as expected. And I was staying in Utrecht, actually, because I wanted to see that city, I'd never been there before, and I was meeting up with like a good friend of mine from Nijmegen that I knew from before. But I should have stayed in Arnhem. I don't know why I didn't do that, I had to like take trains in the morning, come back at night to Utrecht.
So basically I was staying in Utrecht, Arnhem was over here and then I went to Rotterdam for a day. I just spent the night at a hostel and met up with two of my friends that I knew from the Philippines. Then after that I basically went back to, not even Antwerp I think, I went to Brussels all the way, stayed with another friend that I knew from Serbia. She's German and works for the UN,
but she had like a spare bed in her apartment. So I went, and just crashed at her place for the night, didn’t really do much. Then I took the flight from Brussels all the way to Stockholm. Stockholm is on my favorite cities, by the way, and it's largely because one of my best friends, Adam, that I travel with so much, that I traveled with later in the year, even. He's from there. I met him in Montenegro six years ago. I was in Stockholm in 2019 for four weeks because I love the place, in the summer at least.
You know it gets really cold in the winter from what I hear. So I went there to meet up with him. I didn't film anything there. I just hung out with him as much as possible, went out a couple of times, went to a rave, had a good time. Even in August it was starting to get cold. But basically from Stockholm I think on 14th August, I found a really cheap Ryanair flight all the way to Niš in Serbia.
So I took that flight, spent like a day there, and then I went to Kosovo. This was a very tricky part, you know. So Serbia and Kosovo are basically in this frozen conflict where they don't agree about the borders of their countries. Serbia officially still thinks Kosovo is a part of Serbia, so does half the countries in the UN.
But the other half thinks Kosovo is like is its own state, and it is a de facto state. If you're looking at who is controlling the area in the ground, it is the Kosovo government is controlling the area, but the northern parts of Kosovo still are like, there's villages with only Serbians or like Serbs in there, and there's a lot of conflict. There is like some, almost war that broke out actually, not when I was there, but like a few months after that.
It was crazy. So crossing that border is really tricky. If you go into Kosovo from any other way than through Serbia, then you can’t go into Serbia from that way.
Serbia then thinks you entered Serbia illegally, basically, I had to go from Niš into Kosovo, I don't think they even stamped my passport. And then I spent like four days there in Kosovo, and that was, I think, the cheapest country in the Balkans that I had ever been to. I was trying to make this video in Kosovo, but I got so sick when I was going from Stockholm to Kosovo, I couldn't do anything for three days, I had a fever. Then on the last day, I went out and filmed that like $10 challenge video in Pristina, Kosovo, which did really well I think, in every platform, in every language, and everything.
One important milestone that day was that while I was filming that video, my other channel, my Bangla YouTube channel, hit a million subs. And that was after seven years of YouTube. So I kind of forgot because I was so busy filming, but then I started getting all these like, congratulations texts, it was a fun time, I kind of mentioned that in my video as well. After Kosovo, I went to Belgrade, and at this point I think it was like 18th August. So I took the eight hour bus to Belgrade from Pristina, and I spend a full 40 days in Belgrade and now I was finally catching up with the edits. So Belgrade is like the only place that's like home to me, in the last four and a half years since I've been traveling.
In 2023, I spent two months there, in 2022, I actually spent three and a half months there, I like, rented out an apartment for like three months and in 2021, I also spent like two and a half months there. So like I basically go there a lot because my friends from Serbia live in Belgrade, foreign friends, expats also live in Belgrade, and it's always just feels like a familiar place to go back to. It's really fun in the summer, but it also gets cold in the winter, so it's important to go there in the summer. I was working all day at this cafe where people actually like drink in the evening, but like during the day, people are just working or chilling. And after, like a year, I think I was finally caught up with the edits of all the videos I had filmed, and it was time to film new stuff again.
So on September 29th, I left Belgrade again, and I went to Germany again, to Munich, but not directly to Munich, because there's an airport called Memmingen, which is like an hour and a half from Munich. So from there I went to Munich to meet up with one of my best friends, Manu, who I mentioned earlier. I stayed at his place because it was Oktoberfest, and two of his like really close friends from university were there, they are all Spanish by the way, and we all went to Oktoberfest and spent a whole day there. Man, that was rough.
I don't like beer that much, and that was all you do there. The craziest thing about Oktoberfest is you wake up at 8 a.m., before that, 7:30, to like, wait in line for when they open up the gates, so you can like do a one kilometer, like half a mile sprint to go get a table, and you have to hold on to that table for the rest of the day, or you don't get to sit. So you have to like, start drinking beer in the morning and stay in to however long you want to, I think I stayed like 9 a.m. to 10 p.m., and then just left my friends because it was too much. After that, I think I spent like another night in Munich, and then I was going to Katowice to meet up with my friend in Poland, but to go to Poland, you kind of have to go through another country. So I figured I'm going to go through Austria, but I was going to spend a night in Vienna, meet up with some friends and then go to Katowice. But..
I got so sick, so sick at Oktoberfest. I think it's called, like, Wiesn-Grippe or something, there's like a term for it, people getting sick. Because imagine thousands of people drinking beer in a tent. People show up sick and stuff, and it spreads like wildfire. So everyone I knew, all my friends that I was with at Oktoberfest got so sick. So this is Munich, this is Vienna.
On the way, I stopped by Salzburg, because it’s supposed to be one of the most beautiful towns or cities in the Alps, and it really was. But I was so sick, I was like, on ibuprofens every three hours. On ibuprofens I put my backpacks in like luggage storage, walked around seeing everything, did like an audio guide, walking tour of the city, got on the train, went to Vienna, I was like dying, coughing in my room in the hostel, spent a night there. My friend wanted to meet up, but I really didn't have the energy. That was rough man. So from Vienna I went to Katowice, and I was still kind of recovering when I went there.
I think I spent 2 or 3 nights at the Airbnb in Katowice, it was just rough, it was like.. really rough. But I met up with a friend that I know from Krakow. Then from there I went to Berlin.
And now in Berlin, I was staying with my friend Annalena. I met her in Montenegro, sorry, in Sarajevo, in Bosnia in 2021, she's actually in one of the videos in the end credits. So I went and crashed on her couch for three nights and, just met up with a lot of other friends, while I was trying to get some work done, honestly didn’t get that much work done in Berlin because that was like a weekend.
And I believe at this point this would have been the first week of October. It was like cold and rainy already in Germany. So from Berlin I went to Romania to film my series on Romania, and this would have been the first week of October at this point. I didn't go straight to Romania, I went to Munich without any sleep for like a eight-ten hour layover, then I flew all the way here to Bucharest, really cool city.
So I spent, I want to say, less than two weeks in Romania total, and I had a lot of videos in mind that I wanted to film because I had been to Romania in 2019 before Covid, and I was like, this is a place I need to come back to film. This is my first chance to do it. This is the first time I was getting a Schengen visa since Covid, because I had applied for the Schengen visa while I was in Turkey, way back in, 2021, and I got rejected. Now that I had it, I had to make the most out of it.
Having a Schengen Visa allowed me access to go to Romania, that was their official policy for Bangladeshi citizens. So I went there, I filmed that video in Bucharest that ended up going so viral. It's one of my most viewed videos on the English YouTube channel with a Romanian audience. Months later, when I posted the videos on TikTok, it went viral on TikTok.
and I ended up being on Romanian news, like I was on the news. This woman, I forgot her name but the reporter, she messaged me, and she interviewed me, Maybe you’ll remember, but in 2022, in Albania, the same thing happened, Stuff went so viral on Instagram and TikTok, that I was invited to Euronews Albania. Something very similar happened in Bucharest, in Romania as well. So from there I went to Transylvania, because I've been to Transylvania before, and I was like, okay, now I got to like actually make a video out of it.
And I was in this whole region basically, Brasov was my base. So that's where I started, that's where I ended. But from there, I took a bus down to like Bran, to film in Bran Castle, Dracula's castle. Went back to Brasov, and then I missed the bus, because buses in Romania are so hard, trains can be hard too, because they don't always say like which train your platform is on, they just do like an announcement in Romanian, which kind of sounds close to Italian, and if you ask people, they'll tell you, but there's like no screen telling you where to go.
Buses are even worse because sometimes they don't even pick you up. Someone who speaks Romanian has to call the bus. Even if you have a ticket, you have to like, tell them like, hey, there's one person waiting at the bus stop, can you please stop on the side of the street? So I missed a bus one day, got stuck in Brasov for an extra day. And it was like, really cold in Transylvania at this point, it was like -5 degrees sometimes. I had to film only when the weather allowed it.
So I had a a few days left in Transylvania, so what I ended up doing is I went to Sibiu to film a little bit. It's all in film, but there's one day when I spent like 14 hours on a train. So I went to Sigisoara in the morning.. Cool stuff. That's where actually Count Dracula or like, Vlad the Impaler was born and was from. Then I made it back to Brasov, and then it was time to go back to Bucharest again. And then I filmed that video about Romania's communism, which is fascinating, you know, like, I find the story of Ceaușescu and how he was brought down insane.
It is crazy because, its like kind of what happened with our government in Bangladesh later, like, this year, six months ago, although she's alive, she wasn’t executed or something. So I was in Bucharest, for that video I went to all the communist spots, basically the buildings and everything, and I went to Târgoviște, took a two hour train to go there, because that's the place where he was executed. There's a museum there, and I showed up based on the Google Maps hours, and I got there and it wasn’t open. Google maps didn't really work in Eastern Europe, and a lot of other places, the hours could definitely be wrong. So then I went back to Bucharest.
Then I was going to a festival, Amsterdam Dance Event in the Netherlands. So I flew out from Romania all the way to Belgium, because that was the cheapest airport to get to, Amsterdam flights were a lot, took an express train all the way to Amsterdam, and then I filmed that at ADE Amsterdam Dance event vlog basically, where I like went out a couple of times in Amsterdam, tried different Dutch food with my Dutch friends, hung out with them and everything. So from Amsterdam I went to Brussels where I spent the night.
And now this was like already like end of October at this point, like last week of October, and I had such a backlog of footage, you know, like a lot of videos from Romania, one from Amsterdam, I had a flight from.. and these are like all really cheap flights that I booked on, like Ryanair, I had a flight from Brussels all the way to Greece, to like, Thessaloniki, I was going to go around Greece. Then I had a flight from there to Cyprus and I was going to film something about the history of Cyprus, which is a fascinating place. Then from there, I was going to go to Belgrade, but I just realized that was way too much. I had already like 5 or 6 long videos that I wanted to edit, that would have been too much work.
So on the day of the flight, I decided to, like, not get on my flight to Greece. I decided I'm just going to like, chill for a few more days, catch up on the edits, because that's something you have to consider when you're working, you can’t just like film, film, film and not have time to edit, and then you just get stuck in a weird place where you can't do anything new for your sponsors and stuff. So it was a last minute decision, but I decided to not go to Greece. I spent the night in Brussels, so I was just meeting up with a friend that I knew from the Philippines as well. So from there I wanted to get to Prague, because I met this really cool Czech guy at ADE that I wanted to visit.
From Brussels, I was trying to get to Prague, you know, but there's no direct way to get there, So I ended up in Le
2024-11-25 16:05
