J'ai parcouru le monde avec 14 kg sur le dos — Voici ce que cela m'a appris sur la vie
The decision to leave everything behind
Minimalist travel was never my plan. I am not the type of person who just drops everything and goes…
I am the type of person who plans, prepares, stresses about it — and then drops everything and goes.
For years, I had been working for Centres Jeunesse, Quebec’s youth protection system. It was one of the hardest, most meaningful jobs I’ve ever had. But somewhere between the late nights, the paperwork, and the weight of other people’s pain, something in me was quietly pulling toward the horizon.
I had always traveled. Since I was a baby, I traveled every year to Tunisia with my parents. In my early twenties, I fell in love with scuba diving and started following the underwater world wherever it led. Travel was already in my blood. But this time, I wanted something different. Not a vacation. A circumnavigation. A full stop before a new chapter.
What made it possible was something most people in Quebec don’t know they have: deferred leaves. It’s a clause in the collective agreement for government employees — a contract you sign with your employer to work at a reduced salary for a set period, in exchange for an extended leave at that same reduced salary. I chose a two-year contract: 18 months working at 75% of my salary, followed by 6 months off — also at 75%. I wasn’t gambling with my life. I was engineering the conditions for it to change.
Preparing for departure
Seven months. Around the world. A few goals: visit my family in Tunisia, avoid snow that winter, get to India, and complete my Divemaster certification. Beyond that — I would figure it out as I went.
The preparation took months. Not just logistics, but the emotional work of stepping out of a life you’ve carefully built.
But I remember the moment I signed that leave form. Something settled.
What 14kg actually looks like
A few t-shirts. Two pairs of shorts. Two pairs of pants. Two dresses. Seven pairs of underwear. Bathing suits. A microfiber towel. A merino wool long-sleeve. A sweater. A coat. Sneakers. Flip flops. Toiletries — including bar shampoo and conditioner.
That’s it. That’s minimalist travel.
I packed and unpacked that bag more times than I can count, rolling clothes, checking that everything matched everything else. My logic was simple: if I need something, I can buy it. I also made a decision that felt radical at the time — no phone, no laptop. Just an iPod touch for music and apps. I wanted to be present.
What I discovered is that 14kg is more than enough. Not once during that entire trip did I feel like I was missing something. In fact, it’s almost too much. The less you carry, the lighter you move through the world — not just physically, but mentally. Every object you own is a small weight on your attention. When you travel with almost nothing, your mind clears in ways you didn’t know were possible.
Minimalist travel vs one-week vacation — what the difference really feels like
Most of us know travel as a week somewhere. You land, you rush, you photograph, you leave. You return home exhausted, already nostalgic for a place you never really inhabited.
This trip taught me the difference between visiting a place and living in it.
In Iceland, I had four days. I saw waterfalls and walked through Reykjavík and slept early, still raw from the emotions of leaving. It was beautiful — but I was a tourist. In India, I had a month. In Indonesia, three months. The difference is not quantitative. It’s qualitative. When you stay long enough, a place stops performing for you. The novelty wears off and what’s left is real life — the rhythms, the relationships, the unguarded moments that never make it onto postcards.
Slow travel is not a luxury. It’s a different way of paying attention.
Meaningful encounters — the people who changed me
Goa, India.
I had found a Workaway placement at a small, private boutique hotel in South Goa, owned by a man named Vikram — writer, photographer, artist, devoted Leonard Cohen fan. When I arrived, his team of six or seven young men greeted me as if I were a guest of honour. They took my bags. They brought me to my room. They refused to let me wash a single dish.
Only one of them, Alex, (first guy on the photo) spoke English. But kindness doesn’t need translation. We became friends — riding to the market on his scooter, laughing about nothing, sharing food. Life was slow in the jungle. The beach was nearby. I rested in ways I hadn’t rested in years.
Vikram and I had long conversations that I still think about. He told me two things that stayed with me like seeds.
The first: don’t have children too early. Have them when you’re in your forties, when you’ve lived enough to truly receive them. He said it simply, without judgment. I am 37 today, no children, and this question follows me everywhere. I think of Vikram often.
The second: the blood that travels through your veins carries your ancestors. They live in you. And sometimes, you carry things that aren’t yours.
I haven’t stopped thinking about that either.
Hampi, India.
I arrived by night bus — those wonderfully chaotic Indian sleeper buses with bunk beds, where you don’t so much sleep as survive. I got off at dawn into what looked like an abandoned film set: crumbling stone buildings, enormous boulders everywhere, not a soul in sight. It felt like the Flintstones.
I eventually found my way to the river, crossed it in a giant circular canoe, and landed in the village on the other side. That’s where I met Can — half Indian, half Turkish — at a rooftop hostel. We decided to explore the temples together the next day.
A tuk-tuk driver named Hussein stopped for us on the road. We negotiated, decided we didn’t need a ride, and he said: no matter — I’m going that way anyway to pick up three pilgrims. Hop on.
We did. And what followed was one of the most unexpected days of my life.
The three men — devout Indians who had come to Hampi on pilgrimage — insisted we join them. Can and I spent the entire day moving from temple to temple, praying alongside strangers who had decided, without hesitation, to include us. Hussein drove us everywhere, narrating, translating, laughing. This is my definition of minimalist travel.
At the end of the day, Hussein and I bought a long fabric cord and cut it in half. He tied his half around his wrist. I tied mine around my ankle. Call me Baba Hussein, he said. Baba — brother in Hindi.
I still wear that anklet. Eight years later.
Sri Lanka.
My friend Chloé came to meet me in Sri Lanka for New Year’s. Three weeks together on that extraordinary island — the south, the temples, the coast. One evening, in a small surfer town, we climbed to the rooftop bar of a hostel and read on the menu that the place had been opened by three Australian friends who had followed a dream.
Chloé and I looked at each other.
The year before, back in Montreal, the three of us — Chloé, our friend Nadia, and I — had tried to buy a triplex together. The prices were too high, the buildings needed too much work, the laws too complicated. It hadn’t worked. But the desire hadn’t gone away.
We were our best selves near the sea, in the heat, surrounded by culture. We knew that.
We called Nadia, who was in Colombia kitesurfing. Are you guys asking me, she said, if I want to move to Mexico by the beach and spend my days making piña coladas for people?
We all burst out laughing.
That. That feeling right there. That was the sign.
The longest day of my life: March 29, 2018
After three months in Indonesia — where I completed my Divemaster certification and met people who felt like home — it was time to go.
I left Bali with a heavy heart. It had been home.
My first stop was Beijing — a seven-hour flight, followed by an eight-hour layover. I am, if nothing else, an opportunist. When else would I be in China?
I had planned ahead. Found a tour company that specializes in Great Wall visits for transit passengers. They sent an official letter for customs. The agent at the airport didn’t speak English and wasn’t impressed by my letter. He frowned. I insisted. He called a colleague. The colleague let me through.
My guide was waiting. We drove to the Great Wall. I stood on it, in the cold, somewhere between disbelief and awe, and thought: I am a person who visits the Great Wall of China during a layover. Who is this person?
Then back to the airport. Eleven hours to Vancouver. Three-hour layover. Six hours to Mexico City. Arrived late at night.
In traveling time alone, it was 35 hours. But March 29th itself? That day lasted over 40 hours.
Back home — and nothing feels the same
Mexico felt like home before I’d even properly arrived. I had been curious about this country since high school, when my Spanish class watched Frida — the colours, the music, the clothes, Selma Hayek in full Diego Rivera defiance. Something had been pulled toward it ever since.
I met my girlfriends in La Ventana — Chloé’s little coastal town in Baja California Sur, a place we had all been before and already loved. Two weeks of sea and singing and diving and bare feet and sombreros. We looked at land. We dreamed out loud. Mexico, te amo.
Then I flew back to Montreal.
I remember sitting in the taxi from the airport. Everything was so grey. So straight. Straight roads, square buildings, clean cuts. No texture. No colour. No sazón.
I loved Montreal. I loved my people there. But the feeling of not wanting to be there was loud. The city that had always been home suddenly felt like a coat that no longer fit.
I went back to work. Back to the kids — who I had missed deeply. On my first evening back I told them about everything, and for once, the room was alive in a way it rarely was. They listened. They asked questions. It was one of the most beautiful evenings I’d had with them.
But the knowing was there. I was back. And it was temporary.
What I brought home that weighed more than my backpack
Shortly after my return, I was recruited to work with the Cree of James Bay as a clinical advisor for a mobile clinic — back among Indigenous communities, back in nature, back in a slower rhythm. I stayed for just over a year.
Then Chloé told me she needed someone to manage the rental of her house in La Ventana — a place I already loved deeply. Four units. No children, no mortgage, nothing holding me in place.
I was thirty years old. I said yes.
The 14kg bag had been the beginning of something I didn’t have words for yet. What I brought home from that trip couldn’t be weighed or packed or left behind. It was a different relationship with enough. A trust in slowness. A belief that the world is full of people willing to be generous if you let them.
And a certainty — quiet but unshakeable — that the life I was supposed to be living was somewhere warm, somewhere slow, somewhere the sea was close enough to hear.
I just had to be willing to go.
Want to know more about who I am and where I come from? Read mon histoire.
