Why I'm leaving Switzerland for Latin America

I live in Switzerland. A safe, stable, comfortable country, with high salaries and a quality of life that a lot of people envy. And yet, I have decided to leave.

Destination: Latin America. Peru, to be precise. With a fairly simple challenge: to leave with 10,000 dollars in my pocket and see how far I can get with that.

Not to break a record. Not because I hate Switzerland. But because I want to put myself back into the unknown.

I need challenges

I think you learn an enormous amount when you deliberately step outside what you know. When everything is planned, organised and comfortable, it is fairly easy to keep living in exactly the same way for years. And that is not really what I am looking for.

I like discovering things. I like travelling. I like freedom. And above all, I like slightly stupid challenges that later become the best memories of my life.

I have already walked almost 2,000 kilometres across Europe. I have covered nearly 10,000 kilometres by car in the United States. I went up to northern Europe by train to see the northern lights.

Every time, it is the same thing. Before you leave, you don't know exactly what is going to happen. You meet people you would never have met otherwise. You end up in situations you had absolutely not planned for. You have to find solutions. And you come back different.

So of course… I want more.

Why Peru?

The first reason is very simple: my girlfriend lives in Peru. So that is where this new adventure is going to start.

But that is not the only reason. I love Latin America. There is a particular energy there. The cities are alive, people go out, talk, improvise, start things.

And Lima, with all its flaws, is a city I find full of opportunities. It is a gigantic metropolis, set between the Pacific and the desert, with more than ten million inhabitants, neighbourhoods completely different from one another and an economy in permanent motion.

Play the video: Lima off the map, another reality | Bitcoin Perú #1

And above all, the relationship to money there is completely different from the one I know in Switzerland. With the same capital, you can have far more room to manoeuvre. Housing, eating out, getting around, launching a small project or simply living day to day generally costs far less than in Switzerland.

And that changes an enormous amount when your goal is precisely not to earn the highest possible salary, but to get back something else: time.

Why only 10,000 dollars?

I could probably leave with more. But that is exactly the point, it is not the goal. I want to see what it is possible to build with a limited amount.

10,000 dollars is not nothing. But it is clearly not enough to spend several years doing nothing either.

I am going to have to manage my budget. Find income. Develop my projects. Make choices. Perhaps get some things wrong. And adapt.

That is precisely what makes the project interesting. If I left with enough money never to have to think about my spending, a large part of the challenge would disappear.

Leaving comfort behind

Switzerland is probably one of the best places in the world to live comfortably. But comfort also has a trap. When everything works, it becomes very hard to justify leaving.

Why leave a good salary? Why leave a system that works? Why go and live somewhere more chaotic, more uncertain and sometimes less practical?

Because life is not only about optimising your comfort. At least, not for me.

I want to build projects. To travel. To meet people. To discover other ways of living. To learn even more Spanish. To understand another economy. To test Bitcoin on the ground. To discover Latin America from the inside rather than by spending three weeks in a hotel.

And above all, I want to have stories to tell.

I don't know how it is going to go

And that is probably the part I prefer. I don't know exactly what my life will look like in six months. I don't know whether my 10,000 dollars will last a year, two years or a lot less. I don't know which projects will work. I don't know where this adventure will take me after Peru.

And I don't want to pretend that I do.

This notebook is there precisely to document all of it. The budget. The wins. The mistakes. Bitcoin. The travels. The encounters. The projects. And everything that happens in between.

I am leaving with 10,000 dollars, a few ideas and a lot of drive. Let's see how I manage.

Back to the notebook