About

I'm Abhi Pandya. I'm 23, I just wrapped up my master's at UT Austin McCombs, and I've never been great at staying in one place for very long. So far that restlessness has turned into 30-something countries, more than 10 of them backpacked with everything I needed on my back. And the end goal is easy to say and a little crazy to actually do: every country in the world. I'm dead serious about it.

But how I get there matters just as much as getting there. There's a difference between being a vacationer and being a traveler, and I think about that distinction a lot. I'm not trying to check landmarks off a list or stay somewhere comfortable just because it's familiar. I want the version of a place that most tourists never see. A few years ago in Vietnam, I spent two days moving through a cave system. Not the quick tour, an actual multi-day underground trip. That's the kind of thing I'm chasing: the stuff that takes a little more effort, a little more willingness to say yes to something unusual, and that never makes it onto a highlight reel.

Even when I'm home, I need to be doing something active or I go a little stir-crazy. I've been hiking since I was a kid, I climb, I'm into extreme sports, and I just got my scuba certification, which basically opened up a whole second world to explore that happens to be underwater. Staying lean and fit isn't separate from the travel either. It's what makes it possible to move the way I do.

Here's the other thing: I'm not trying to spend a lot to do this. Some of the best nights of any trip have been the cheapest ones, a family-run inn instead of the place with the reservation list, a walk-in counter instead of the spot everyone's heard of. You don't need a big budget to travel well. You need to be willing to go a little further off the route.

So that's what this blog is. If you feel that same pull to actually experience the world instead of photographing it from a safe distance, you're in the right place. I'll write about the trips, the food worth going out of your way for, the trails, the dives, and whatever else ends up being worth talking about. No fluff, no sponsored roundups of the same fifteen tourist spots. Just what it actually looks like to go somewhere and mean it.