In 2008, I was a junior sales rep at NDTV. My salary was ₹28,000 a month, plus ₹9,000 for conveyance. I had a job, a limited budget and a dream of travelling through Europe.
So I planned my first backpacking trip.
A travel agent who was also one of my clients helped me put the route together. He knew Switzerland particularly well. I booked hostels and worked out a journey through the Czech Republic, Austria, Germany and finally Switzerland. I had eighteen days.
Getting the paperwork together was its own adventure. I needed a letter from work for my visa application, and my boss’s boss kept delaying it. I was the most junior person around, so my holiday didn’t seem especially urgent to anyone else. After days of following up, I finally got the letter. By then, the flight I wanted had become more expensive. The itinerary changed, and my eighteen-day trip became twenty days.
I went anyway.
I travelled with a backpack and the kind of food that could survive one: Maggi and ready-to-eat packets. I stayed in hostels, cooked in shared kitchens and sometimes shared food with the people I met there. I drank water from bathroom taps because it was safe, free and one less thing to buy.
I remember paying €12 for a pizza—the only restaurant meal of the trip. That amount might sound small now. On my salary, every euro demanded a moment of thought.
The route took me through old European streets, Austrian towns such as Salzburg and Innsbruck, Munich, and then six days in Switzerland. I don’t remember every train or hostel after all these years. I remember the excitement of waking up somewhere new and knowing I had worked out how to get there.
Switzerland took my heart. I also learnt something small there that stayed with me. In a shop, the woman at the counter must have thanked me ten times in two or three minutes. I came away thinking about my Ps and Qs—the simple habit of saying please and thank you, and making another person feel welcome. Switzerland deserves a story of its own.
While I was still there, an email arrived from my boss. I was supposed to be back in the office that day.
I can laugh about it now. At the time, I was a junior employee somewhere in Switzerland, two days beyond the original plan, with a backpack and probably another packet of Maggi. I’m glad I took those days.
I’ve returned to Europe many times since. That first trip remains special because it showed me I didn’t have to wait for a bigger salary or a perfect plan to begin travelling. In 2008, I found a way to go. The twenty years of journeys that followed began there.