Traveling solo: on fear, hitchhiking, New Zealand and living life to the full – Eva Schrollová

She gutted salmon in Alaska, taught skiing in Japan and regularly convinces someone that she's good enough to clean their house. Eva Schrollová has been on the road for ten years – and mostly completely alone.

At 19, instead of going to university, she left for America, where she looked after a woman with severe depression – while barely speaking any English. For five more years she kept taking university entrance exams because, as she puts it, "I still believed I'd be normal." In the end she gave up, accepted the title of traveler and has been holding all her romantic ideas about travel up against reality ever since.

In the podcast she talks about why she loves traveling alone and living everything to the full, what she's afraid of and which rules she sticks to when she hitchhikes or heads into the mountains on her own. She's also open about what this kind of life takes from her – time with family and friends, hobbies you can't take with you, and a lot of energy. We also get to Te Araroa: Eva first walked the entire South Island, out of season of course, because otherwise it wouldn't have been punk enough. Then, with no bikepacking experience, she rode the North Island by bike, and when she ran out of land, she hitched a ride on a sailboat and crossed the Pacific.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why traveling alone feels more intense to her and whether she misses having someone to share sunsets with.
• What she'd tell women who want to set off alone but are afraid.
• Why she ran away from New Zealand as soon as she started putting down roots there.
• Who offered her a roof over her head in America – and what some of them occasionally offered on top of that.
• How Te Araroa gave her the feeling of giving up on something for the first time in her life.
• How you hitch a ride on a sailboat and why the whole thing looked like a scam at first.

Tune in to this honest episode with Eva – we bet it'll give you the courage to set off alone, even if it's "just" a weekend in Barcelona. And if you don't want to miss future episodes, don't forget to follow our podcast on your favorite platform.