My name is Martin and I´ve been T1D for 27 years. I love traveling since I was a little boy and finally last year I made my biggest dream come true – 1 year travel holiday. I arranged sabbatical leave and I went backpacking for one year in Asia with my friend. We traveled from Central Asia to up to Japan in the East and up to the remote Indonesian Maluku islands to the South, we visited 11 countries, traveled 130 000 km and spent 366 days of living our dream.

All that I managed with insulin pump #Minimed640g and CGM glucose sensors Enlite. Initially, I planned to come every 3 months back home for a new supply of insulin, cannulas, sensors, and other stuff but in the end, my friends were coming to join us for a couple of weeks of traveling and they brought me each time fresh supply of everything. I visited my doctor only once in the year, after 7 months of traveling. It was the best year of my life and I really enjoyed and managed without any severe complications on the road.

I went on that trip already with some experience. Before I’d traveled to 19 countries, camped in the Great Arabian Desert and Mojave desert, in the Alps, regularly spend weekends on MTB trips and in the winter skiing in the Alps. All these little experiences step by step helped me to plan and get ready on the year trip well. The crucial experience for such a trip when having diabetes is PLANNING and making back up plan for critical situations. E.g. One day my insulin pump simply claimed “not working accurately” and switched off. I had a backup insulin pump and I switched to it immediately and the company providing service delivered a new pump to Vietnam in a few days.

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