On 24 July 2011, I leapt into complete uncertainty: I packed my bicycle onto a bus to Bratislava, from where I began rolling through the Carpathians, then across the Balkans, further east to Japan, north to Siberia, and even further south to Timor-Leste – wherever the Road led me.
The first year was extremely hard. I was surviving on 150 euros a month (the rent from my apartment) plus the occasional sale of kilometres that friends “bought” from me. My equipment was poor and caused endless trouble: a thirty-year-old bicycle with only eight gears, a summer tent in which I slept at –10 °C, a sleeping mat with so many holes it could no longer be patched – I’d wake up on the ground and have to get up in the night to re-inflate it; the stove kept breaking until it finally exploded and I couldn’t afford a new one… And yes, I had a travel companion, a romantic partner, but things never worked between us, and after eight months he left me for good. At that time only a handful of friends followed me, most of them doubting what I was doing, and the media weren’t interested in such a story. I was almost completely alone in the fight to make my dream come true.
The beginning of 2012 was the critical moment of my journey: first my partner left me, and a few months later my tenant disappeared, leaving me with a 600-euro debt for unpaid bills. It’s hard to describe the feeling of being completely alone in a foreign country where you know no one, with no money, and on top of that being a woman from the Balkans carrying every possible fear and prejudice about the world of men (in which we undeniably live). When the second blow came – losing even that little money – I was in southern Russia. Thanks to my rudimentary Russian, I managed to get a job selling kvass on the street. From there I was supposed to go to a farm in Ukraine as a volunteer – working for free food and lodging until I found a new tenant, paid off the debt and saved at least something for the journey ahead. Then, completely unexpectedly, help arrived from readers and bloggers on the B92 portal where I was posting. Having followed my journey and seen everything I was going through yet refusing to give up, they self-organised and collected about 800 euros in donations. For me that meant many more months on the road.
Not long afterwards, Milan Novković, another B92 blogger, launched the portal Q-sphere, and its editor Višnja Pokorni offered me paid travel-writing work. The site hadn’t even properly launched yet, but they paid me in advance for every article I sent, whether it was published or not. For the first time I had enough money to travel without constant worry. That lasted more than a year, until the end of 2013. Then Milan sold the site for a very good price, which meant the end of our collaboration – but so that the change wouldn’t hit me too hard, he gave me $2,000 as severance pay! With that money I lived for the next eight months in Nepal, working on my first book from the journey – Roll Me Around the World (Zakotrljaj me oko sveta).
Every writer has their own rhythm; some write with difficulty, some easily, but it is always serious work that above all demands complete dedication and great discipline. After three years of constant movement, I now had to sit at a desk every day from morning until who-knows-when, until I had written the planned number of pages – a process that took more than six months. As someone who had already published with respected houses (Matica srpska, Narodna knjiga), as a former literature professor and passionate reader, I cared deeply that whatever I published also had literary value.
In May 2014 I finished the manuscript. I printed the book at my own expense as a self-published edition so that sales would finance the continuation of my journey. It was sold mainly through Facebook. In the meantime I had worked hard on that social network to reach as many people as possible. Almost every day I posted new texts and photos, trying to make them interesting and different from clichéd travel posts, answering every comment and message no matter how many there were. After a full day of cycling, I would spend (and still do) several more hours writing, editing and uploading – usually from inside the tent, typing on my lap until the battery died or I collapsed from exhaustion. The next day I would look for somewhere to charge it, constantly practising patience because of bad Wi-Fi, an old laptop and outdated software… The result of all that effort was that in the first month of pre-sales I sold almost half the print run just through Facebook.
In August I flew to Belgrade (my bicycle stayed in Irkutsk – it’s still there). Tamara Zidar, who had been organising the monthly Putospektiva gatherings of travellers for a year or two, offered to arrange free talks for me across the region. The idea was that I would speak about the journey and sell the book. Many Croatian travel writers were already doing this, while in Serbia it was still unknown.
In the autumn of 2014 I gave 28 talks in Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia and Montenegro, selling out two editions of the book. I never dreamed so many people were following me: every venue was packed, and in Belgrade and Novi Sad I spoke in front of five hundred people. From complete solitude – half-wild because of the extreme conditions – I suddenly found myself in the centre of attention. Journalists started contacting me, asking for interviews, inviting me on TV and radio shows. Everyone knew about me, everyone wanted to hear me, to talk to me after the event, to get a signature… overnight I had become famous. A shock – a positive one, of course – accompanied by constant disbelief that it was really happening.
After three intense months in which I met more people than in my entire previous life, at the end of 2014 I flew back to Asia and continued the journey. I had saved enough money to be carefree for a while, and I also sold the rights to Laguna, the biggest Serbian publisher with the widest bookstore network. I gave them the manuscript of the travelogue Across the Himalayas and the Gobi, which had previously existed only on the blog, describing my two greatest adventures: crossing the Thorung La pass (5,416 m) and the Gobi Desert. Authors in Serbia usually receive about 10 % royalties, and with small print runs that wouldn’t take me far, but I did it so my books would also reach people who are not on social media.
I kept rolling for another year and a half, and at the end of 2015 I stopped in Vietnam, rented a small room in Hanoi and started working on a new travel novel. Again I spent a full six months writing, sitting at the desk all day every day, feeling an extra obligation to myself and my readers that the new book had to be even better than the previous ones.
The travel novel Nomad came out in spring 2016. I returned to Serbia for two or three months and this time organised 40 talks myself. It’s enormous work: finding a venue and local organiser in every city, advertising the event, shipping books to other countries, coordinating dates, arranging my own transport… Then travelling to a different city every day, rushing to local TV and radio stations, giving interviews, speaking for 2–3 hours at the talk and giving my absolute maximum each time, afterwards meeting many followers personally, filming a bit more, doing another “quick” interview, and finally spending quality time with the organisers and hosts. Almost every day for two months. Exhausting, wonderful, overwhelming.
In autumn 2016 I continued where I had left off, now on a proper long-distance touring bicycle. Through a crowdfunding campaign I raised the money to buy it; half the amount was donated by Djak sport equipment shop.
At the beginning of 2017 I decided to work as an English teacher in China to earn money for the next stage, because my budget had thinned considerably after Japan. I taught at a state primary school so I would have a long summer break. I planned to cycle the Pamir Highway – the famous “Roof of the World” route in Central Asia – which had been snowed in when I first reached Kyrgyzstan in 2012. However, on the very day of departure I injured my back, and upon arriving in Kyrgyzstan I was diagnosed with two herniated discs. The Pamir was off, and since I continued teaching in China in the autumn as well, I focused on exercises to rehabilitate my spine. Already in Kyrgyzstan, where I spent the summer, I discovered that hiking helped me a lot, so I began thinking about how to include longer treks in my journey.
In May 2018 I quit the job and travelled to North Korea on a cycling tour. I had wanted to do that for a long time, but since you can only visit in an organised tourist group and the tours are extremely expensive, I could only afford it with my Chinese teaching salary. After the tour I crossed into South Korea, where I first spent three months writing a new book and then a month cycling around the country.
In October 2018 I finally said goodbye to Asia. I returned to Serbia, this time with the bicycle in my luggage. I planned to move to the Latin American continent by the end of the year. Before that I needed to earn money for the next leg. I published the book North Korea – A Journey Through Kim Jong-un’s Country and (again by myself) organised almost 60 talks in two months. The response from followers and the media was incredible; I found myself in a whirlwind of huge energy that I both gave and received. Everything accelerated, so I postponed Latin America until the following winter. The high point was my appearance on the well-known TV show Život priča. For the first time in all these years I had seventy minutes entirely to myself in front of a million viewers, to explain my motives and to show people what it looks like when the road becomes your home and travelling becomes your way of life.
I began 2019 with talks across Europe for the Serbian diaspora. In May and June I walked the Camino de Santiago in Spain, covering about 1,000 km with a backpack. Every day I posted reports, photos and videos because I was walking for charity – raising money for children from the Belgrade Svratište shelter.
Exactly on the eighth anniversary of the start of my greatest life adventure, I bought a one-way ticket to Latin America for the last day of 2019. The moment I clicked “Pay” on Skyscanner and received confirmation that the money had gone through, I was seized by a fear I hadn’t felt since 2011. I froze, just as I had eight years earlier when I tried to imagine how big planet Earth really is. It took me several days to get used to the fact that my decision was now final.
Once again I leapt into the unknown – alone, without enough money in the account, again dependent on rent from the apartment, book sales, the blog subscription I introduced at the beginning of 2020, a small number of Patreons, and the occasional purchase of kilometres. I live on the road, sleep in a tent, and have no idea what lies ten metres ahead or what will happen in the next five minutes. That is real adventure; it gives you the feeling of being alive in every single moment, that every minute you and no one else are in control of your life, that you make decisions, that you choose. It’s a powerful feeling whose price is the renunciation of certainty and comfort.
The lifestyle I have chosen is certainly not easy, but for me it is worth it; it fulfils me, and I believe the books I write leave a mark. I haven’t become materially rich, I have no savings, I survive day to day like most of you, but I am happy and immensely rich in friends, experiences and adventures. After all these years, I think I no longer even know how to live any other way.
