I invited my parents to the conference and, talking to them, I finally revealed to them that during all my journeys I’d travelled almost exclusively by hitchhiking. My dad, sticking to his principles, which didn’t agree with my way of travelling or living in general, refused to come, while my mom took a seat in the third row and waited for the conference to begin.
In the meanwhile, I tried to come up with a plan to approach Shale, who was talking to Maja, my acquaintance from the university, and one of the fellow presenters. I chose the right moment, sneaked up on them, greeted Maja and turned to Shale:
“Tomislav, pleased to meet you.”
“Hi, I’m Shale.”
“I know, I rang on your intercom a few months ago.”
“That was you?” he was surprised, but in a good mood, “haha, sorry, dude, I had some problems with my girlfriend, and, also, I found it a bit unusual to go grab a beer with a stranger.”
“No worries” I forgave him instantly, “we’ll have another chance to do it.”
“We can do it after the conference.”
“Sure.”
He was my favourite writer again.
I sat and listened to the lecturers talking about their adventures, stating the most beautiful and most memorable places they’d been to, explaining why and how they’d been travelling. Even though everyone was talking about the same thing, travelling, each of them had a particular style. They flew in planes, went on foot, sailed, visited places other people hadn’t. They described their journeys in books, newspaper articles, reports, on blogs, in documentaries, or they caught the colours of the world through the lenses of their cameras. In that way, they financed their lifestyle and their adventures.
I listened, I learnt and thought about it. It wouldn’t be a bad thing to do what they’d been doing: travel and, at the same time, earn some money. Instead of going abroad and paying off my debt by doing a monotonous job, after finishing university, maybe I could do what I adored – travel and be paid for it.
It was my turn to talk. I got up and talked about my experiences with CouchSurfing, both as a host and as a guest. I mentioned a couple of stories from the road and in ten minutes I tried to depict my way of travelling and show how affordable it actually was. By the interested expression on the faces of the people in the audience and by the questions they asked at the end of my presentation I concluded I had managed to do it.
That night, just like every other night I had spent in my parent’s home, I went out on the balcony, leaned on the railing and thought about the day that was behind me.
On one hand, I gave a presentation along with some of the famous Croatian travellers and I sensed that I could be doing the same thing, I could turn my passion – travelling – into a source of income. True, it took them years of experience to stand out of the mass of people who did a similar thing, and start selling books, earn money from writing reports, shoot documentaries, sell photos. I didn’t have that much time, or talent to do such things.
On other hand, that day I realized that I was different from them in one thing. I had, what economics would call the competence advantage. All those travel writers, photographers and directors travelled using, more or less, conventional methods for which they, usually, needed a lot of money. I didn’t need much money for travelling and that was exactly what people could find interesting: they could find out more about a way of travelling in which you don’t need a lot of money, find out how to hitchhike, sleep on other people’s couches, play guitar on the street, volunteer, etc.
Everyone wants to travel, but no one has the money. In other words, everyone would want to know how it’s possible to travel without spending money.
The idea was born.
However, in order to put the idea into practice, I needed a channel to reach people. Television, newspapers, radio – no one was crazy enough to give money to a nameless kid who suddenly decided to travel and document the whole thing. Anyway, I was sure that many people had already approached them with similar ideas. I needed a direct way to reach my audience, and if possible, for free.
The Internet!
Everyone is online these days. People read internet portals instead of newspapers, blogs instead of books, download movies instead of renting them, hang out in the world of social networks instead of having a cup of coffee in the real world.
“My travel-writing texts were published because I had a different tactic from other travel writers,” Shale told me that day. “I offered free texts to magazines, and in exchange I’d include a few words about the sponsor, a photo of their logo on a T-shirt and stuff like that. Others criticized me for doing that because people used to earn money from their texts, not from sponsorship.”
I got back to the room and turned on my computer. I visited Shale’s Facebook page and explored it a bit. In the past few months, the man had gathered a couple thousand followers, and FB was an excellent platform from which to launch short stories, photos, videos.
Facebook and I, in fact, had one thing in common: we were dedicated to many things at the same time, but never to one thing completely. I liked that. I wasn’t a writer or a photographer, but when I posted a few photos from my first journey around Europe and left a brief description, a few friends confessed to me that they felt as if they were travelling with me.
I looked at my marketing book, which I should’ve already started reading more thoroughly, and simply put it into the drawer so it wouldn’t distract me in my biggest marketing project – creating my Facebook page.
First, I had to come up with a name.
It needed to be something everyone would understand, in English, with a story related to it. Something easy to remember.
Of course, I laughed, remembering the name I was given in a park in Berlin. Thomas Love. And since the page was supposed to be about my adventures, the solution was logical: Thomas Love’s adventures. It even had a double meaning. It could mean Tomislav’s adventures, since the pronunciation was similar to the way my name is pronounced; and it could also mean Thomas loves adventures, if you disregarded the apostrophe.
I spent the entire night posting photos from my previous journeys and leaving descriptions in Croatian and English. At the same time, I was experiencing everything once again and thinking about how it would be nice to go back on the road. Maybe I should? After all, if I was working on becoming a travel writer, I should travel, shouldn’t I? Perhaps that could be my first business move.
I took my shabby map of Europe and made a fast decision – Spain. I should’ve explored it better the first time, so this could be my new chance. I’d pick the date the following day and go.
Feeling genuinely happy, I fell asleep.
Day 794.
The CS presentation, a beer with Shale (who was in the studio with me and who’d suggested to the TV editors that they invite me as a guest) and the creation of my FB page, those were the main reasons for me sitting in front of Daniela and answering her questions. If it hadn’t been for that day I’d still have my journeys, but no one would have heard about them.
I used to wonder why I cared so much about people hearing about my journeys. Shouldn’t I just travel and keep it to myself, ignore the Internet, media appearances, sponsors? Wouldn’t I, in that way, be a truer traveller? A real traveller, whose ego isn’t boosted when he sees an article about himself on an Internet portal; one who doesn’t post photos on their Facebook page looking forward to every ‘like’; who’s cool and who doesn’t care about superficial and trivial things.
However, in the end, I always manage to convince myself that I have done the right thing. Even if I disregarded the biggest reason why I even started considering promoting my journeys – that huge debt, I was proud of the path I’d chosen.
My stories, published online and shared with those interested in them, had touched at least one person. And if I managed to make someone stop for a while, try to change something in his or her life, start travelling, I’d be extremely happy because of it. I k
new what it felt like to be on the other side. I had been on an entirely different life path, but I’d changed the course of my life because of the stories I heard from other people. They showed me a better life path, a real one, a more exciting one. Reading different texts online, hanging out with Nina, talking to many CSers: it all had a great influence on my life.
And now, in a slightly different way, without entering into people’s living rooms, I was doing the same thing. I was inspiring people to fantasize. And I was quite proud of myself.
I was finally living my life the way I wanted to live it and I was presenting it in public without any difficulty. The very fact that I was capable of publicizing my life convinced me that I was leading a good one; and that I shouldn’t be ashamed of my actions. It was simply me. And I liked who I was, whether the others liked it or not – but judging by all the ‘likes’, it appeared that I wasn’t the only one liking me.
Naturally, there was always that thin line I should have in mind, simply in order not to start loving myself too much.
“People slowly started joining my Facebook page,” I was answering Daniela, “and some of them even showed interest in joining me on my journeys. So, one day, it occurred to me that I could make it possible for them to experience a similar journey; that’s why I organized a hitchhiking race from Zagreb to Istanbul...”
Day 611.
“Shale was a guest the other day on Dobro jutro, Hrvatska[16], maybe you should send them an e-mail,” Tea suggested me one afternoon, in a local pub, after her day at the office.
The first thing I did after my return from Andalusia was visit the travel agency that offered me a sponsorship while I was in Spain; maybe I could even make a deal with them. As soon as Maja and Tea the owner, invited me for a beer, I knew that we’d get along well. We made a general agreement: we would promote ourselves on our Facebook pages. Once I was on a new adventure, they would give me their T-shirt and a travel insurance policy, in exchange for a few photos with the T-shirt with their logo on the back.
Fair enough.
The other thing I did was register myself on forum.hr, the biggest and the most visited Croatian online forum in order to find a way to use it for self-promotion. It was widely read and registration was free – exactly what I needed. However, I needed some kind of approach. If I was to push people into liking my FB page or browsing through photos from my journeys, it could backfire. I knew that I would get on people’s nerves and that, out of principle, they wouldn’t give me a thumbs up.
I scrolled down to the sub-forum Tourism and spent a few days exploring it. The essence of the forum was that it was made of people who had registered many years before, as soon someone new showed up and started being smart, they would cut them out quickly, in the same way as when a person joins any new group and starts acting smart. They were lucky if they didn’t get beaten up. As far as the forum was concerned, they would get virtually beaten up, but it wasn’t any less painful.
I started a new topic called “travelling on an extremely-tight budget” in which I asked other members what their ways of travelling cheaply were. I described my way of travelling, ending the post with an inconspicuous signature – a link to my FB page.
I pressed ENTER and crossed my fingers.
When the second person who left a comment responded that he had taken a look at my page and my photos and concluded that I had a similar style to that of a guy from the movie Into The Wild, I knew that I’d hit the right spot.
The elders of the forum initiated a discussion about my travelling style, I replied, humbly, trying not to brag about my actions or claim that my style was better than someone else’s. After all, it wasn’t my style, it was the style of a bunch of people; all I did was present it to the general public through the Internet. I endured a couple of virtual attacks by people who accused me of abusing the generosity of my hosts, but the best part was that I didn’t have to defend myself alone, other members, seeing that I wasn’t trying to impose my story blatantly and that I wasn’t assaulting other travelling styles, sided with me.
The number of ‘likes’ on FB kept on growing every day.
The third step was contacting my high-school friend who worked as a journalist for 24sata[17]. She arranged an interview with their newspaper: they took a photo of me with my guitar, backpack and a road map and I ended up on the front cover.
I was quite satisfied with what I’d done: there were now over one thousand people following my adventures. And more importantly, I did it all for free. The messages of support kept on arriving, as did messages in which people expressed their wish to join me on my next journey. Honestly, it was something I didn’t want to do. It was one thing to travel on your own, but a whole different thing to take someone with you, especially a stranger.
I found out about the fourth step only this morning when Tea suggested that I contact the people from HRT’s[18] morning show.
“Do you think they would invite me?” I asked feeling a bit scared.
“There’s only one way to find out,” she encouraged me.
I finished my beer and went straight home to type an e-mail.
Dear Sir or Madam,
I am writing to you to put forward a suggestion for a report which you could do in your “Dobro jutro, Hrvatska” show.
My name is Tomislav, I am a graduate student at the Faculty of Economics in Zagreb, and when I do not have any exams to study for, I travel in a quite special way, on a budget of couple of dollars a day. I get around by hitchhiking, I sleep in my tent or at other people’s places whom I come across CouchSurfing; I play guitar on the street and similar things.
During my last year of studies I went on a couple of journeys, visited twenty countries and more than fifty cities and covered more than twelve thousand kilometres using my thumb.
I also have a page on Facebook with more than one thousand three hundred followers, where I put stories and photos from my journeys.
I stood for a moment to see what I’d written.
It was missing something. When I tell them where I’ve been and what I’ve done I should also add something about my future plans, a new project, something that will occupy the viewers’ attention.
I know.
I am organizing a hitchhiking race, the first one in our area, where everyone who wants to can apply and the application and the participation will be completely free.
I took a road map of Europe out of the closet and chose the route I found the most interesting.
The race will take place from Zagreb to Istanbul, through Belgrade, Skopje, Thessaloniki and Xanthi. I believe your audience will be interested in the event and it could maybe even encourage them to join it and be a part of a big, adventurous journey.
I’m available for any possible questions.
Regards,
Tomislav Perko
That could be a hit – two birds with one stone. My being on the television show would bring me a great deal of media attention, and I would also make it possible for the people who wanted to join me to actually do so.
The following day there was a reply in my inbox.
Dear Tomislav,
The way you travel is very interesting, but in order to talk in more detail about your experiences and a possible collaboration, I suggest that you send us a number in which we could contact you.
We do reports on travelling on Mondays and we can make arrangements to host you in our show. In any case, we will keep in touch.
Kind regards, B.
That was it. I was going to be on television.
Day 617.
My early morning interview went very well, and after that I was richer by a couple of hundred ‘likes’ on Facebook; I also received tons of messages and e-mails from people interested in the adventure to Istanbul. I replied to all of them telling them to stay tuned to my Facebook page so they could see all the information in time, and that the beginning of the race was planned for the beginning of October, after the university exam session.
All I had to do now was organize the whole thing.
“I hope you won’t have to use them,” Tea joked, promising travel insurance policies for all the race participants.
“Fuck, I didn’t even think about it,” I was worried. “What if something happens to someone during the race? Even though the journey will be free, since the participants would hitchhike and couchsurf, if something bad happens, we know who’ll be responsible.”
That thought bothered me for the rest of the day until I decided to stop thinking about it. Think positive. That was the lesson the Road had taught me. I hoped it wouldn’t let me down when I needed it most.
During the following weeks I received a bunch of e-mails, which I stored for the day when I would make everything public. There were more than thirty people interested in the race. That wasn’t exactly the best news ever: where would I find a place to stay for so many people in those cities? Where would so many people hitchhike on all those roads and highways?
Every day I wrote requests to CS communities in the cities we would be passing through. The responses were great. When I explained to them what we were planning to do, that a bunch of people would participate in a hitchhiking race from Zagreb to Istanbul, they were very excited and ready to help. We found four or five hosts in every city, but only one in Skopje.
Finally, one evening, I sat down and put it all on a paper. I had to explain the rules of the race. So, I sat down and started writing:
Since the date of the beginning of the race is coming closer it’s high time I gave you the detailed information about the whole project of the hitchhiking race from Zagreb to Istanbul so that each and every one of you can prepare yourselves!
1000 Days of Spring: Travelogue of a hitchhiker Page 15
