I spent three weeks with Anbu, as he and his wife hosted me in the Czech Republic on my third workaway. They live on a farm with chickens, horses, and alpacas (!!) that doubles as a hotel called Mezi Jeleny. They run frequent horse rides and alpaca walks for guests, children’s camps, ski seasons, and cooking classes. While I met a range of characters at Mezi Jeleny – including a man who ran the same 17-kilometer loop for 24 hours straight during his stay – Anbu was among my favorites to get to know. 

Anbu was born and raised in southeast India, and when he was young he spent about two years traveling across his country, admiring the landscapes and gaining valuable life lessons. India is an amazing country to spend time in, as it has so many different landscapes and cultures. In India, you can travel through snow, sea, desert, mountains, mangrove forests, history, and modernity. India is so vast that while traveling from the south to the north, you’ll come across hundreds of languages and just as many different types of local foods. Anbu doesn’t understand a word of the language spoken in the state right next to his. The one thing in common, though, is that the people in India are more friendly than many of the people in Western civilization. Even though they don’t have a lot of money, they seem happier and fulfilled.

Anbu is one hell of an adventurer, and I loved his wild stories. During one conversation, he randomly says to me, “Did I ever tell you about the Death Pass?” There is a section of the Himalayan mountains that is so dangerous they say if you pass through, you’ll pass your death once in your life. “So I did that four times,” Anbu says. This stretch of mountain is extremely high and prone to landslides. Every time Anbu completed this trek, he faced some sort of danger. He explained to me that his last time on the Pass was on his honeymoon with his wife – the bus started falling over the side of the road and so everyone had to jump out the windows: “Everyone was thinking that we are done, no chance of survival, but we survived!” Miraculously, not one person was seriously injured. It’s common to see cars that got pulled under the mud so deep they’re impossible to remove but a little part of the car is still poking out – that’s the only reason anyone knows it’s there. Anbu continuously sought out this danger because he’s an adrenaline addict, and because the view of the landscapes there cannot be described in words. 

Because of his adventurous nature, Anbu learned important survival skills. He started freestyle rock climbing when he was 14 or 15 years old, which taught him how to read weather patterns through soil, sand, and crops – and to trust his instincts. He knows where to find food, he knows how to read the sky. He can curate drinkable water out of any water source. He knows the basics of mushroom foraging, how to escape a rip current, how to survive the swamps. He can find his way back while getting lost in a forest or the mountains with no map and no cell phone – like the time he got lost for two days in the Himalayas with a Buddhist monk, but they made it back okay. The monk never did contact him again after that, though. 

Another thing that makes Anbu unique, and so interesting, is his desire to pivot paths and always learn something new. He studied marine technology and has licensing in the field, but never worked in it. He just studied it because he liked it. He also learned Morse code. He went into the filmmaking industry, and stayed there for 14 years. He loved everything about the industry, so he wanted to learn it all. He had stints in graphics, cinematography, production, directing, and acting. He worked on a few bigger-name movies in India, but since he was mostly a freelancer, the movies won’t have his name in them. Anbu cares more about the work itself than the name, though. After meeting his wife, they moved to rural Czech where they now live their days on a farm. It was another dream of Anbu’s to live rural, sustainably, and organically.

Anbu is a unique person who lives a unique life, and these are the types of people I strive to learn from. His life story made me feel validated in what I chose to do in my early 20s – which is to travel, learn as much as possible, and find what I love to do. Anbu helped me to understand that it’s okay to have a multitude of different interests and passions, and that I do have time in my life for each one of them. A degree, a bank balance, a job…these are not what should be valued; what should be valued is yourself. It’s important to live your life the way you want to, not how society expects you to live. If there’s a will, there’s a way, and:

“I never say that I wasted my life, because I have done the things that I love to do.” – Anbu

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