Vanlife in Portugal with a Stranger
- Ilse
- Sep 9, 2023
- 8 min read
Updated: Jun 13
A story about saying yes to crazy ideas, trusting the universe — and trusting strangers
Remember when you would ask your parents how many days it is until the weekend, or until a playdate? That is what this summer in Portugal felt like.
We got so lost in the present moment that we not only lost track of what day it was, but also of whether something had happened yesterday or three days before.
Time went missing and I loved it.
As a child I knew three times: today, tomorrow and a place in time where my dreams lived eternally. One of my more recent dreams had been trying seriously out ‘vanlife,’ the increasingly popular lifestyle of travelling and living from your car. What is vanlife truly like? And where to start with vanlife?
I had had some ‘vanlife’ experiences during my exchange semester on O‘ahu, Hawai‘i the year before. And if you are wondering how to start doing vanlife, I can recommend trying it out for short trips with a borrowed van or via a car or vanlife rental.
Once a friend of mine let me sleep in her van for a night while she camped with a tent. After that, I went on a longweekend solo camping trip with the second handed Jeep that I shared with a friend, living from peanut butter jelly sandwiches since I did not have a fridge. The most extensive vanlife experience was when another friend of mine went travelling and let me borrow her van for a week to roadtrip across the island with a Dutch friend who came to visit.
But although these trips made me fall in love with the idea of vanlife, all of these trips were just short enough to not really experience what it was like to actually live from a car or van — after several days I was thrilled to eat something else than soggy bread with peanut butter and warm strawberry jam.
This summer in Portugal was different. In the nearly four weeks that we were on the road, time disappeared.
I was reminded of what a funny concept time can be when you do not pay attention to it, but instead focus on everything outside of it. This is also one of the main practical lessons I learned from Zen meditation: focus on being present and you silence your mind.
The past and future are strategies of your mind to function and remain in control. That is why the mind habitually denies or resists the Now, as Eckhart Tolle also explains in The Power of Now. He also contends that time is an illusion.
Time isn’t precious at all, because it is an illusion.What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time — past and future — the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is. (Eckhart Tolle 2010, 49)
Indeed, that summer in Portugal, my experience of time was that it literally does not exist when you act like it doesn’t.
So on the fifth day on the road, it felt like I had been living in a van in Portugal for five weeks already. I was not only living a dream of mine, it also felt like I had entered the place in time where my dreams live.
So how had I ended up here? It’s a bit of a crazy story.
I had been wanting to travel to Portugal for months. At the time, two of my friends were living in Portugal in their Volkswagen T3 bus and they had invited me to come and join them for some time — checkout my friend's cinematic vanlife youtube videos here!
For months, the idea of trying out vanlife in Portugal lived in my heart and on my vision boards — one on my wall and one as my phone’s background. With fieldwork and writing a thesis, it was only in the summer that I started actually planning to join them.
Ideally, I would have my own van so that we could freely move around instead of being dependent on campgrounds for a tent. I looked into renting a van and after asking around, my cousin and his girlfriend were willing to lend me their Volkswagen T5 for nearly four weeks. I was thrilled!
To cover the gas costs, split driving time and keep myself company, I tried to find a driving companion. But two weeks into most people’s summer holidays, I was quite late. The friends I asked had plans already. Being determinant to pursue this dream, I made a Bumble BFF account. Although I matched with some kind and adventurous souls, no one was available so last minute.
My last resort was the carpool app Blablacar where I received some carpool requests. However, it was difficult to estimate how much I would manage to drive each day and so it did not feel good to commit to any of them.
At this point, I was seriously considering going way over my budget and going by myself.
Just as I had committed to that idea, less than a week before leaving, there was a hiccup with the insurance.
More costs.
This would be too much.
I asked myself what felt like the right thing to do, but my entire body was clouded by an uncertainty that left me indecisive. Being out of other ideas, I did a tarot card reading.
Am I supposed to go to Portugal? Card: screaming yes.
Am I supposed to go do vanlife in Portugal? Big yes.
Not seeing how to make this happen, I had been considering dropping the idea of travelling in a van and visiting my friends and doing a surf camp instead. Am I supposed to go to a surf camp in Portugal or France? A clear no.
Finally, I drew an advice card. The card’s message was crystal clear and turned out to be spot on: have patience, your determination and hard work will pay off and financial success will come your way.
But how much patience could I still afford? I had tried everything and I was supposed to drive away in three days…
To put an end to the restlessness in my body I decided not to go. I found peace in that decision — any decision — and surrendered to the deep faith that everything happens the way it is supposed to.
If I am not supposed to go, I cannot do anything to make it happen. If I am supposed to go, there will be a way.
A few hours later my friend in Portugal texts me: “a friend of ours wants to join you! He wants to drive with you and camp with you. Should I give you his number?”
My heartbeat increased. Just when I had found peace in staying where I was, a door had opened. Spending the summer driving around in Portugal with a van, doing vanlife and splitting not only driving costs, but all the costs. And with a complete stranger.
It was definitely an adventure I would be crazy enough to sign up for…
Should I?
It was an opportunity that had almost magically presented itself. But I do not believe in magic. Magic is just that which we cannot (yet) understand or fail to see. For the universe, or God as some might call it, everything is possible.
I know that and still I did not trust that knowledge in that week.
After having worn out all of the possibilities I could think of, I felt pressured by time and assumed my dream of vanlife in Portugal this summer would have no chance of survival.
Only when I fully surrendered back to the knowledge that whatever is supposed to happen will, the universe could work its ‘magic’. It did not matter when I made that decision because the universe does not abide by time. So, when I, three days upon leaving, decided to trust blindly in whatever outcome, the universe created a way I had not envisioned.
After some back and forth texting with my friends’ friend, both of us took the leap and said yes. We were doing it.
Two and a half days later we first met in front of the train station in Utrecht, the Netherlands. The stranger I had now first shook hands with had come by train all the way from Austria.
In the 11 hours we spent driving, I learned that what inspired him to say yes to this crazy last-minute adventure were the videos from Yes Theory. I also learned that for him this was a similar trust exercise as for me. After all, we were both about to spend nearly a month sleeping in the same tiny bed, living in the same tiny space.
We spent the next three days on the road and slept in places that revealed themselves only in the morning when we would see them in the light after arriving in the dark the night before — we used the app Park4Night to find vanlife parking spots near us.
We listened to all the music genres in our playlists. We navigated through villages for freshly baked breads from French boulangeries and to avoid toll roads. We spontaneously took highway exits when seeing a body of water with the potential for a bath — something I later learned to appreciate a lot after living in a van for a while.
Within days we had created our ways of living in the small space that was our home for the weeks. And funnily enough, it was exactly the small space that led us to be our authentic selves right from the start — it would have been way to tiring to pretend to be someone else when you are quite literally living in each other’s pockets.
After three days of driving, we arrived in Portugal and hugged our mutual friends. Then, as if we had been travelling together for years, the four of us synchronized our rhythms of living in the form of no routine at all and always leaving late.
We talked, we laughed, we played.
We spent our days entirely outside and planning our days based on the weather, our willingness to climb, and the surf forecast on the coast.
Soon it felt like the four of us had been camping and driving in Portugal since the remembrance of time — or perhaps, more accurately, since the forgetting of it.
All of a sudden, without realizing, I found myself living the experiences and feelings portrayed on my vision boards. Without thinking, I was living in the place in time where my dreams live and I was living my dream.
In this ‘dreamtime,’ life remained eternal as long as we did not count the days.
When I first wrote this story, I thought that maybe we deliberately lost track of the days in Portugal because we knew there would be too little of them anyway.
But now, I am realizing that for me it actually never felt like there was too little time because all of it was lived to the fullest.
So perhaps that is the final lesson I take with me: there is no time to lose when you are consciously alive in the present at all times.
Today and ‘dreamtime’ were never separate — and now that I come to think of it, as a child I also never saw them as such. So once again the lesson is one of relearning. Dreamtime exists, and only can exist, today.
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Hopefully, my words find you again in the future — subscribe to the newsletter to make sure they do or follow me on instagram (@iam_allovertheplace) to follow my life as a slow travelling storyteller!
Some helpful resources for when you are starting out with vanlife:
As I rented the van from a family member, we got our car insurance via PaulCamper which was super easy and I would highly recommend!
If you do not have internet set-up for your vanlife journey yet and are looking for reliable e-sims, here are some common options: Drimsim, Airalo, and Yesim. Best is to compare prices for the plan and country-coverage you are looking for!
Looking for a vanlife rental near you? A friend of mine has used RentACar to find their rental van.
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