Through this blog, I aim to offer you stories of adventure, destination-specific travel advice, tips/tools to backpacking, research on happiness, and inspiration to get out, travel the world, and become a blissful backpacker.

Hi, I’m Jivko, a 27-year-old blissful backpacker. I love to travel and meditate. I have had a fascination with the study of happiness for quite a while now. The combination of this curiosity and a strong desire for exploring the unknown has led me to travel around the world in search of answers towards what happiness really is. 3 years down the line, I have backpacked through 28 countries, some solo and some with friends. I have gained the experience and confidence when it comes to travel backpacking. Now I am ready to begin sharing my answers that I have gathered with all of you.

One of the most eye-opening answers that I have found is that moral emotions such as gratitude, compassion, and altruism are the main ingredients to your own personal happiness. The only way to confirm this was to see it for myself. One way to practice these emotions was by constantly being mindful of them. & what better way to practice mindfulness than to meditate. This is when I made meditation into one of my biggest hobbies and a passion that I have been practicing every day since I started traveling. I can honestly say that the results have been worthwhile. Not only do feel a lot more content with my life, but it has shown me so many other benefits that I never would have expected to see. Some that have made traveling so much more enjoyable.

With the practice of mindfulness and experience of traveling, I came up with a style of travel that allows the backpacker to fully dive into a country and its culture. Unlocking the full potential of exploration through a country. I call this style blissful backpacking.  Which you can read about right here: The Art of Blissful Backpacking. This whole website will be based around this concept. That is why it is best to know and understand what it really means and how it can be practiced. The guides, tips, and tools that I provide to you contain the methods, activities, and experiences that I believe makeup what a blissful backpacker is.

I have a goal to become a person in this world who can create positive changes to it and inspire others to do the same. As crazy as it might sound,  I want to create conditions for world peace.  In order for me to achieve that, I feel that I need to seek more knowledge, live among different cultures, learn from complete strangers, and then be capable of teaching others to do the same.

My Mission 
Since graduating college, I began a journey to find answers to a simple question – “What is happiness”? It was something that had always fascinated me because there was no right answer to it. We all strive for it and share it in common with the rest of humanity; to get rid of suffering and find happiness in our lives. Some could even say that it is every person’s ultimate goal in life. Yet there isn’t much research and studies done on happiness when you compare it to the amounts of research done on depression. So how come something like this is so overlooked? Even though I had done research on it, It was all through what others before me had discovered. I knew that nothing would compare to actually going out and gathering the knowledge myself. I decided that the best way for me to attain these answers was to travel and hear what the world has to say.