Mika Soren

In 2019 I told my boss, my landlord, and my mother I'd be gone for three months.

That was five years ago. I'm currently writing this from a cafe in Lisbon that's so photogenic it's embarrassing. (The coffee costs €1.20. I've had four. I have absolutely no plans to leave.)

I'm Mika. I grew up in Melbourne to Finnish parents who never fully stopped missing Finland, which means I grew up eating rye bread and being told that complaining is a sign of weakness. I spent six years as a frontend developer at a small agency, building websites for clients I'd never meet.

It was fine. Good money. Respectable LinkedIn profile. Soul-crushingly boring.

So I booked a ticket to Bangkok for what was supposed to be a sabbatical. A reset. A "let's see what happens."

Reader, I never unpacked.

How a "three-month break" became a life

The first few months I was just... traveling. Normal tourist stuff. Temples. Pad thai. Deeply regretting my footwear choices in 38-degree heat. (I brought leather boots. LEATHER BOOTS. To Thailand. In May. I don't want to talk about it.)

Then a startup in Sydney emailed me. They had a broken React build. Could I help?

I fixed it from a guesthouse in Chiang Mai with the ceiling fan on full blast and wifi that somehow outperformed my old office. They paid me. They came back the next month. And the month after that. Somewhere between Chiang Mai and my third visa extension, "extended holiday" quietly became "this is just my life now."

The work takes me to places I'd never have chosen from a highlight reel. I spent a month in Tbilisi because the timezone worked for my clients and the wine cost less than a bus ticket. Three weeks in a village outside Oaxaca because a friend had a spare room and the weather was perfect and I had no particular reason to be anywhere else.

I move slowly. Two to four weeks somewhere before I move on. It means I find the coffee shop that only locals know about, the restaurant with no English menu, the street that doesn't appear on any "best of" list. (It also means I've accidentally renewed three leases. But that's a different story.)

Why I started writing this

The honest answer: I was furious at travel content.

Everything I read was either glossy Instagram stuff (perfect outfits, golden hour lighting, captions about "seeking adventure") or copy-paste listicles written by someone who'd clearly scraped Wikipedia and called it research.

Nobody was writing the version I actually wanted. The one where the "charming local restaurant" was sixty cents cheaper around the corner. The one where the famous viewpoint was packed at 7am but completely empty at 5. The one with specific, honest, actually useful information for someone who was going to BE somewhere for longer than a weekend.

So I wrote it myself.

How I travel, for context

26-litre backpack. Laptop. One pair of shoes that goes with everything (I have LEARNED MY LESSON on the boots situation). I stay in hostels when I want to be around people and mid-range Airbnbs when I need to actually work. I eat from markets and side-street spots and only end up at tourist restaurants when I've made a wrong turn.

I've spent time across most of Southeast Asia, Japan, South Korea, India, Nepal, most of Europe, Morocco, Turkey, Kenya, Tanzania, Colombia, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and a handful of places I still haven't figured out how to bring up casually. I'm working on it.

What to expect here

I'm not going to tell you everywhere is amazing and every experience changed my life. Some places are genuinely overrated. Some experiences are genuinely just okay. Some hostels are just noisy and bad and I will tell you that.

What I'll do is give you the specific details that actually help, be honest when something didn't work, and write the way I'd text you if you were about to go somewhere I've been.

Now stop reading the about page and go find something useful.