About this website

In 2001 I put a website online with a simple request: let me stay for a day. For three years people took me in, about nine hundred of them on five continents, and I wrote about every stay. At the time I thought that was the adventure. Looking back, it was the moment my life stopped having a fixed address.

Remember, this was before Couchsurfing even existed!

I came to Phnom Penh in 2010 and never really left. In all those years I’ve found out that leaving is the easy part. Anyone can buy a ticket. What costs you is the staying: in a city you picked on a whim, and in a life that stopped fitting somewhere between the third country and the fourth fresh start.

After long enough, the romance wears off. The place you swore you loved turns into an ordinary Tuesday, your income goes up and down, and I started to notice that nobody posts about this part. I decided to write about it anyway.

So this site isn’t always about destinations. It’s about what a life on the move does to you over time: money that never arrives on the same day twice, cultural signals you misread for years before you catch on, the particular loneliness of always being the one who just got here, and the quiet panic of starting over in your forties in a way of life that was designed for twenty-somethings.

I write long pieces, because not all questions have short answers. If you’re after packing lists or ten quick tips, there are faster and far more cheerful places for that. What you’ll find here is the version I would have liked to read twenty years ago, including the parts that didn’t work out.

If something here rings true, or you think I’ve got it wrong, you can reach me through the contact page.

Ramon