Carl Tomich

How I Got Started

I started playing music at 14. A year later I left school to do my first TAFE course in graphic design, then moved into a music performance course. Drums first. Then guitar. Then somehow I became the lead singer in a few bands in Perth, Western Australia.

The music was honestly pretty terrible, but putting myself out there felt cool. We played grunge rock to hundreds of empty bars. It was humiliating and hilarious at the same time.

Growing up in that scene, we still got to do some genuinely random, cool gigs. We played with a band called The Dee Dee Dums (who later became Tame Impala). We supported a Nirvana tribute show with members of Eskimo Joe, Jebediah and Little Birdy. We even played a show with Birds of Tokyo.

None of it turned into a real career, but it hard‑wired something into me early: I liked creative chaos more than stable normality.

At 20 I moved to Melbourne to chase music properly. I studied audio and film engineering at RMIT. I fell into the DJ and events scene and became a DJ myself. For several years that was my full‑time job. I also booked bands at venues and lived inside nightlife culture.

At 25 I picked up a camera and started filming properly for the first time. In 2011 I moved to Berlin. I busked on the streets with a guitar, filmed music videos, scraped by doing creative work, and lived a very unstable but very alive kind of life.

Eventually I moved back to Australia and did what you’re supposed to do. I got a normal job. I paid rent. I built routines. On paper my life was fine. In reality it slowly started to feel smaller and more repetitive every year.

It wasn’t because I hated Australia. I think I had just outlived it. Rules came in. Red tape came in. The live music scene got worse. Everything got more expensive. Traffic got worse. Rent went up. The quality of life started to feel stale and boring.

Around the same time, I started taking filmmaking seriously again. I bought a camera. I started a YouTube channel. I started filming travel, daily life, and my own attempts to build online income streams.

None of it was glamorous. Most of it barely worked at first. But for the first time in years I felt like I was building something instead of just maintaining a life I didn’t really want anymore.

In my late thirties I left Australia again and moved to Vietnam. Not because I thought moving overseas would magically fix my life, but because I couldn’t ignore the feeling anymore that if I didn’t try something different now, I probably never would.

Where I Am Now

These days my life is fluid and location‑independent. I’ve been based mostly in Hanoi, Vietnam, and I’m about to head to Europe next: Albania, Montenegro, then Croatia. I don’t really feel like I’m permanently moving anywhere. I’m still working out where I actually belong.

My day‑to‑day life looks roughly the same wherever I am. I train. I edit videos in cafés or apartments. I film whatever city I’m in. I write travel guides based on places I’ve actually spent real time in. I review gear I actually use to make a living.

I make money from a mix of YouTube ad revenue, stock footage, affiliate links, freelance editing, and gear reviews. Some months are good. Some months are bad. I’m not rich. I’m not broke. I’m not financially free.

I’m just trying to build something that gives me more control over my time and more say in what my life actually looks like from one year to the next.

A lot of my content looks like travel content on the surface, but that’s not really what I’m interested in. I’m more interested in what happens to people when they leave their old life behind and realise nobody is coming to tell them what to do anymore.

The loneliness. The discipline problems. The money anxiety. The identity crisis. The weird mix of freedom and responsibility that comes with trying to design your own life.

I don’t sell courses. I don’t promise freedom. I don’t think travel fixes your problems. It just changes the background they happen against.

This site exists mostly as a public record of me trying to build a life that feels honest, creative, and sustainable without lying to myself or anyone else about how messy and uncertain that process actually is.

If you’re here because you want perfect travel tips or a blueprint for escaping your job, you’ll probably be disappointed.

If you’re here because something in your own life feels a bit off and you’re trying to figure out what to do about it, you might find some of this useful.

At the very least, you’ll get honest travel guides, honest gear reviews, and honest writing from someone who’s still very much in the middle of figuring his own life out.