Australia to Poland without flights!
Tag: pay-as-you-feel
Upcoming events in Melbourne!
Dear friends of Drop the Tension,
We are is delighted to announce two upcoming events we’ve been planning for the short time we will spend in Melbourne! We would like to ask you a big favour? Can you please share these events in your networks, inviting friends who might be interested in attending them?
The first one will touch on a place which has captured our attention the most during our overland trip from Melbourne to Poland — Palm Island. During the second event we will try to share what we found to be one of the most important social phenomenons we encountered while travelling — the impact people make while visiting distant places.
Feel free to come to both events and please help us spread the word by sharing our facebook events and inviting your friends over! See you there 
Details below: Continue Reading →
Our first podcast! :)
We had the pleasure of recording our first podcast!
During our overland&sea travel from Australia to Europe we had a chance to shortly speak on radio and give a couple of interviews for local newspapers, but this is the first time we had an opportunity to share our ideas about dropping the tension and following your passion in a proper podcast for the California – based Learn Educate Discover!
Happy listening and if you like what we say – feel free to share the message 🙂
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We made it: Australia to Poland NO FLIGHTS!
Today we are writing to you from POLAND!!!!!!!!! We have made it the whole 25,000km from Wendy’s Melbourne, Australia, to where we sit now in lounge room of Jurek’s mother in Katowice, Poland, without taking a single flight! Around 15,000km of the way, we hitch-hiked. Project Drop the tension was cooked up while hitch-hiking east coast Australia – why don’t we keep going to Poland? we thought. We wanted to travel to get ideas and inspiration from different cultures for ways to live our own lives and decided that might be interesting for other people too. Wanting to travel consciously, our idea was broadly to explore cultures of sharing along our flight-less way: to meet people from a range of diverse backgrounds taking local action for more a human-friendly world. 1 year, 2 months and 10 days later, we’ve made it! We have officially completed our conscious overland journey crossing halfway round the globe, visiting 15 different nations. WOW!
We made it to PL!
It’s surreal for us to be here and have our clothes folded away in drawers (!); we imagine it will take some time to adjust back into living life in one place. No doubt we will have many more ideas, reflections and perhaps conclusions to share with you in the coming weeks and months as we fully churn all the experiences that have gotten us to where we are now. But for now, we wanted to mark the achievement by looking at some of the huge contrasts we’ve had along our way:
Continue Reading →
Unexpected art of Minsk
For the last 10 days we’ve been in Minsk, Belarus. Being here reminds me of how Poland was early in the ’90s, when the plastic, colourful world of empty satisfaction from buying stuff you don’t need hadn’t yet replaced the grim, grey world of pissed-off, grumpy people drowning in mud, being so frustrated with lack of opportunities. For most of the time, the weather here has been more grey than you can imagine, with low hanging clouds, freezing drizzle, dense fog… in such weather, you have to keep the lights on inside your house even though the daylight still lasts 10 hours. People here don’t have perspectives either. They need to work very hard for really little money and grim, concrete-paneled communist blocks are still being built and partly covered with pale pink or green paint. If you ask someone a question and don’t articulate your words clearly enough, the reaction more often than not, will be What?! And, stuck deep in this kind of environment, which only lurks, waiting to bring up the worst moods from the gloomiest parts of your psyche, we discovered some amazing art. But first, look at a couple of pictures to get the atmosphere.
Continue Reading →
Saint Petersburg pay-as-you-feel: Addis Coffee
“My name is Marina,” laughs the girl in dungarees, standing behind a table covered with small jars containing spices. She switches back to Russian. “My friends and I were experimenting at home with different methods of making coffee and then we decided we needed more guests!”
Marina is a founding member of the collective behind Addis Coffee, a Saint Petersburg coffee workshop running on a pay-as-you-feel donation system. The workshop is ‘underground’ St Pete literally, being located in a series of rooms that were once a bomb shelter. Marina and the team have renovated the space, so it now feels very homely with blanket covered couches, board games and a guitar they welcome musical guests to use.
Marina at the Arabic Coffee station.
Lombok Backpackers
Thanks to our friends in Adventurous Sumbawa, we connected with another wonderful group on the neighbouring island of Lombok. Lombok Backpackers are a group of locals passionate about the natural beauty of their island home (click the link to their facebook). In the provincial capital Mataram they have their ‘Base Camp’. Base Camp is a open-house set up for travellers to stay as long as they need for free. There are just a few basic rule: no drugs or alcohol in the house, clean your room when you leave and help keep communal spaces clean. In the evenings, the travellers and locals gather in the outdoor area to swap their adventure stories of the day, share food and make music.
We asked the owner of the house, what made him want to create this place? He replied “I’ve always loved trekking and snorkelling and having my friends around. So I thought to make a place where this can all come together.”
Music and maps: Lombok Base Camp
Summing up Indonesia – part 2
Our second month in Indonesia was completely different. We left behind the isolated communities living slow-paced lives on the beaches and in the mountains of the distant east, barely touched by the global world and its brutal economies (if you missed that part of our travel, click here). Now we were getting to the core, to the heart of the country alike the Roman Empire bonding vast lands and most diverse cultures – and I imagine going from borderlands on the shores of Black Sea to Rome in the year 100 A.D. would look similar. We got close to the place most Indonesians from the East will never afford to travel to, but if they have electricity they often see it on the TV full of whitened faces and straightened hair – Java.
But let’s start from the beginning.
Lombok
15 ways to become less money dependent
Recently my sister said on Facebook “I want to live in a world where money doesn’t mean a thing.” Some of her friends said “me too!”, others “dream on!”
Well, such world does exist. Not far from Nimbin, New South Wales, we met a lovely, down-to-earth couple living on their permaculture farm, without money. They said they do use some, but try to limit it as much as possible, and it has a very positive impact on their lives.
That’s pretty advanced though. It’s a long way and not everybody would be comfortable with getting to this stage. But what most of us don’t realize is that you can stay being who you are, stay cool, while getting to be less tied to your wallet. And I guarantee it’ll make you happy! Here’s a few tips on what to start with.
Continue Reading →
How it all began…
We’re a couple of two; Wendy, an Australian, 24 years old and Jurek (pron. yoo-rek, as in ‘you reckon’), a 28 year old Pole. We haven’t always been the people we are now. We haven’t always done the kind of things we now find ourselves doing. Because, like most people, we’ve been too scared. Yet here we are! And we’ve decided it’s a journey worth sharing. Turns out living the life you only let yourself dream about starts with one small step… Drop the tension!
Melbourne – our starting point