Words and art by: Bhavya Vemulapalli

My semester abroad assured me that I don’t write because I’m a journalist.

I write because the stranger’s kindness keeps me alive and thriving. 

I secured a scholarship to complete a global media semester exchange at the Monash Malaysia campus for Semester One last year. 

Looking back, I couldn’t have imagined my global experience in any other way. I was lucky enough to secure my dream internship at Al Jazeera by cold messaging the Asia-Pacific Editor on LinkedIn. It was the perfect opportunity to immerse myself in the nuances of Southeast Asian (SEA) politics. 

It’s been a year since returning to monotony and it’s taken me a while to make peace with the fact that it’ll take time for me to be able to solo-travel again. It seems like work and life keep getting in the way. 

Two years, two master’s in journalism and international relations, two newsrooms (The Age and Al Jazeera), six countries, unlimited kindness and uncertainty later, my semester abroad in Malaysia taught me the importance of being a kind stranger. I’m passionate about travelling and conversing with strangers. We may not speak the same language, but where there’s kindness, there’s communication. 

Despite travelling alone, I wasn’t lonely. I found solace in strangers and lived and felt love through them. A random person gave me his petrol as my bike stopped in Vietnam. A junkie in Cambodia let me pet his dog and dropped me at the hostel safely at night when there was not enough signal on my phone. These encounters made me realise that strangers are my kindness pill. The more consistent I was with these pills, the better I healed. 

In 2023 I turned 23. Around the same time I was awarded my first global byline in Al Jazeera, which was a big deal for me professionally. My personal adventures that year were equally memorable. I went solo scuba diving in Thailand with a school started by a mother for her daughter. I befriended a girl at a Veterans’ bar and ended up roaming Pattaya with her and her friends. I even got a tattoo on the beachside at midnight on my birthday. Everything felt unreal! From a shop owner asking me to pay later for shampoo change in Cambodia to sharing hostels and Airbnbs with worldly strangers across SEA, one thing I learned is that I’m never alone. 

Packing my life in a suitcase every other year as a digital nomad is daunting but the stories keep me moving. I’ll never shut up about this semester abroad because the 12-year-old l ‘misfit’ me, who read her way through childhood, should know her life is unfolding just as her favourite protagonists’ did. Unlike her, they are still trapped between her tiny boarding school library book pages. 

I grew up reading Telugu language political literature from Ma’s home library in a small city called Vijayawada in Andhra Pradesh, India. The books I read were a product of a literary collaboration between Progress Publishers in Moscow and Visalandhra Publishing House in Vijayawada. As a result, until the 2010s, generations of Telugu readers grew up on a staple of Soviet children’s literature. 

These influences serve as both a reason for politics at the dinner table and the driving force behind my desire to travel in search of stories. Finding my way through journalism, filmmaking and diplomacy majors, I’m always homesick for places I’ve never been. As a nomad, the people are always home for me. 

As my diving instructor, Ivo Louwaard from Thailand said, “What is fear? Your thoughts. What are your thoughts? They’re not real. So what’s fear again? — Nothing!” 

Several things might stop you. But when it comes to travelling abroad, dive in headfirst.