ABOUT SIBU
Hi, I’m Sibu! A global citizen, foodie, and explorer of everything this world has to offer.
If you’re here to:
- Get real, on-the-ground guides to the places I’ve visited: from classics to destinations most people never think to explore
- Learn how to take advantage of free international travel opportunities
- Plan a temporary or permanent move abroad
- Travel smart by stretching both your money and your mind
- Find a remote job to travel the world
Then you’ve come to the right place.
I’m here to make travel and adventure more accessible for you. How? Let me take you back to where it all started. This journey spans 20+ years on the road.
I’ve worked and studied abroad, navigated visa challenges, job hunts, and tight budgets. Along the way, I’ve discovered ways to travel for free, to move abroad, to travel well without spending much, and now I want to share everything I’ve learned with you, along with the guides and stories from the places I’ve explored along the way.
- Lived in 9 countries and 13 different cities
- Visited over 100 countries, about a fifth of them in Africa
- More than 10 of those countries have been entirely for free through travel opportunities, which I share here
- Picked up a few languages (currently working on #6!)
- Been traveling full-time and working remotely since 2020
- Solo traveler most of the time
- Hold a master’s degree in Human Rights and International Conflict, and a degree in Economics and International Trade, so I’m very aware of global issues
- Co-founded The Hybrid Tours, a travel company focused on humanitarianism and ethical travel
Call me cheesy, but I do believe the world would be a better place if we could all travel more. I’m here to help you take that first step: whether it’s a trip abroad, a move across the globe, getting a scholarship, finding the best flights, gaining the confidence to go on your own or finding a remote job that lets you see more of the world.
Here I am as a 17-year-old, being dropped off at a Chinese language school in Guangzhou, China. It’s early 2006. I have no phone, no resources, not even a dictionary to rely on. I don’t speak a word of Chinese and people rarely spoke English then. And I set off to live on my own, not having the slightest clue what I was doing, just taking advantage of the opportunities out there. That was a one-way ticket. This is how the journey begins.
I was born and (mostly) raised in Costa Rica, kindergarten, high school, you name it – and graduated at 17. I didn’t get into the degree I wanted through Costa Rica’s public university system. I had no idea back then that you could study in Europe for free (something I talk about a lot now), and studying in North America would have cost an arm and a leg. So I found affordable degree programs in China, and that was that. I went.
Seven Years in China
I studied Chinese for a year and a half and picked it up fast. Fast enough that I was working as an interpreter within 3 months, opened my own export company while I was still a student at the age of 19, worked as an English teacher on the side, and eventually earned a degree in Economics and International Trade: full time, on top of everything else. Funny enough, that degree has opened doors for me in more places than I ever expected. Check my blog on how to study in China for free.
I ended up staying in China for seven years. It’s the one place where I really feel like I grew up. I moved there without even knowing how to boil water (genuinely useless at basic life things) and it forced me to figure life out. Within a year, my dad could no longer cover my expenses, so I hustled through a string of different jobs. And instead of spending what I earned on partying or shopping like most of my peers, I spent it on travel. Mongolia, overland through Malaysia and a chunk of Southeast Asia, all over China itself: I used those seven years to see as much as I possibly could.
Finding My Way to Human Rights
Eventually I’d had enough of China, and since I’m half Polish (even though I wasn’t raised speaking a word of it) I decided to move to Poland to connect with that side of my heritage. I lived there for two years: one in Wrocław, one in Kraków, studying Polish. From there I moved to London on a whim. Almost two years there. I had never been more depressed. The racism, going up the career ladder, the competition… It was all exhausting. But it introduced me to something I didn’t even know was a career path: the world of development and human rights.
That door opened when I got the chance to go to Nicaragua for nine months as a team leader on a sustainable development project: unpaid, on the ground, managing two teams of 15 people each, essentially 24/7. It was exhausting and incredible in equal measure, and it’s where my real interest in human rights began.
Going back to the UK after that experience gave me a full-blown reverse culture shock. I remember sitting at a bar in Shoreditch, having just spent £14 on a single drink, surrounded by people having the most menial and shallow talks, and thinking: I can’t do this. I left the UK again within ten days and moved to Germany on a whim, with a 10kg suitcase, meaning to try it for a month. I ended up staying for four years. I’d always wanted to learn German. I moved there on my own but if I’m honest, the real reason I stayed for so long had less to do with the language and more to do with someone.
The Trips That Changed Everything
It was around this time that I started creating content, at first just for myself. A few years before the pandemic, I quit my job to start a master’s degree: a hybrid program based in one of the UK’s top universities. Funnily enough, this was cheaper to do while living in Germany. That degree is what really pulled me into the world of human rights properly. And during that same stretch, two trips changed everything.
The first was Jordan. It was my first time in Southwest Asia/the Middle East, and it completely shattered every prejudice and assumption I’d absorbed about the region without even realizing it. I thought I was well-traveled. I wasn’t nearly as open as I believed. The second was Bosnia & Herzegovina, organized by a classmate. We learned history directly from people who had lived it: meeting genocide and war survivors, since Bosnia’s history is recent enough that the people who survived it are still here to tell it themselves. Learning history through storytelling, mixed with the food, the culture, the people… that trip fundamentally changed how I see the world, the travel industry and how I think stories should be told.
I’d already started a small public Instagram before all this, mostly followed by friends and family, just meant to show my travels around Europe. But once I started posting about Jordan and Bosnia – not just what things looked like, but what I was actually learning, that’s when people started paying real attention.
And then the pandemic hit. I’d say it was the worst period of my life (or was that London? They’re both at the very top). I lost my savings, my investments, everything. I was locked down in Germany and needed some way to decompress, so I started talking through Instagram stories, just to have an outlet to rant. Fun fact: I’d broken up with my long-term partner DAYS before the pandemic struck, didn’t get the chance to move out in time, and ended up stuck under the same roof as my ex for the entire first three-month lockdown.
When you’re going through a breakup, you meet up with friends. You vent. You obviously don’t see your ex, let alone continue living with him. But it was a global pandemic, and speaking to strangers on the other side of the screen was the way to go. I didn’t talk about what I was specifically going through, but it felt like I was talking to someone. I feel like that’s around the time my being on camera fright just vanished.
I’ve been journaling since the year 2000, and looking back at what I wrote in Germany even a year or two before the pandemic struck, it’s clear I wasn’t happy – not really. I loved my friends, traveling, working on my German and my degree. But I was deeply unhappy with the German system itself: the expectation that immigrants erase who they are to “integrate,” the reality that even with citizenship, you’re never actually seen as German. It was exhausting. And the relationship wasn’t right either. I’d unconsciously stayed because he (and the relationship itself) looked good on paper, because I was over 30 and felt like I was supposed to stop moving. I was genuinely miserable. In hindsight, the pandemic was life forcing the reset I wasn’t willing to choose for myself.
How I Started Traveling Full-Time
Once the first lockdown ended, I packed up what little I owned, put it in storage for €27 a month, and started house-sitting, which let me focus on just feeding myself while I got back on my feet. I was also deep into writing my master’s thesis, and even in a genuinely low place mentally, I knew finishing it was the one thing I needed to do for me. So I turned the house-sits into writing retreats. I left my ex’s place in June 2020, right as Europe slowly reopened, and spent that summer house-sitting my way through Slovenia, Croatia, Austria, Poland, and Germany, while writing my thesis the whole time, in what was honestly a uniquely safe window to be traveling since almost no one else was. If you’re curious about housesitting, check this out.
That summer was a whirlwind of emotions. I had nothing to my name except my brains. We’d just finished the first lockdown, and I had grieving and healing to do. But that summer was genuinely wonderful. I felt free. I wasn’t tied down to anything or anyone. I was done with dealing with people’s expectations. I started becoming clearer with what I wanted out of life. And without even meaning to, even caught feelings for someone. And although distance was not on our side, it made me feel things I hadn’t felt in years, and gave me a better outlook of what I should also look for in a partner.
Officially Becoming a Full-time Traveler
By October, a second lockdown was coming, and I knew I couldn’t face being stuck alone in a German apartment with roommates for months, unemployed, in a terrible job market. So I left. My dad is a Polish refugee who fled to the US in the 1970s and eventually became a citizen, which means I inherited US citizenship through him despite not being born there. My brother in California wanted to help out and offered his couch and his address: use it, get a remote job, figure the rest out. So I did. I left most of what I owned in that same storage unit in Berlin (Two suitcases, a keyboard and a few boxes full of books) and moved to the States. That was the real, unplanned start of my full-time travel life, and I haven’t stopped since.
“Haven’t stopped” means I’ve leaned hard into minimalism, house-sitting, and remote work. These are the exact tools I now share here to make full-time travel actually sustainable. I spent about a year in the US, house-sitting my way around the country while landing a remote job (you’ll find all my remote-work guides linked here). From there, I started going deliberately further off the beaten path: Syria, Afghanistan, places that kept dismantling whatever assumptions I still had left. I’ve made a conscious choice to lean into more challenging destinations while I’m still young enough to. At this point I’ve visited over 100 countries, roughly a fifth of them in Africa. I slow travel. I usually spend weeks in each country and my specialty is overlanding: traveling by land, mostly public transportation, where I usually pick one region and stay three months before moving on.
Why I Started A Travel Company
Somewhere along the way I also realized that most travel, even the kind I was doing, wasn’t immersive enough, and didn’t leave room for the communities that actually mattered. I finished my master’s degree in Human Rights and International Conflict, and between that degree and my background in economics, my education shapes how I see every single place I visit: through a more decolonial lens, which is something I try to bring into everything I share on social media.
So if you’ve made it this far, welcome. This is what Go Global with Sibu actually means: you can go global through my stories, my videos, the tips I share, and even through my travel company. Because I’ve also come to believe travel has never been more accessible than it is right now… but it has also never been as shallow as it is now.
Go Global with Sibu
I think about that 17-year-old who couldn't even boil water, dropped off in a city where she didn't speak the language, with nothing but a one-way ticket and no plan. Everything since: the seven years in China, the human rights degree, losing everything in a pandemic, house-sitting my way back to myself, the 100+ countries, has just been that same instinct, over and over: say yes, figure it out on the ground, keep going. That's still exactly what I'm doing. And if any part of this resonates with you, I'd love for you to come along and go global, too.