Meet the real-life Into the Wild guy

Campbell Walker, 23, from Sydney, has booked a one-way ticket to Nepal and will travel around Asia and the Middle East with three friends and his girlfriend. Source: Supplied

HAVE you ever dreamed of quitting your job, selling all your stuff and booking a one-way ticket to the other side of the world?

Many young would-be adventurers have daydreamed about this ultimate travel fantasy, but far fewer people have actually bitten the bullet and done it.

Campbell Walker, a 23-year-old guy from Sydney, is set to become one of these valiant few.

He's selling all of his possessions - except about 100 essential items - quitting his job in publishing and has bought a one-way ticket to Nepal.

Along with his girlfriend and two best mates, he plans to travel indefinitely, starting in western China, Mongolia and through the Middle East.

He's saving $10,000 - which includes a buffer of a few thousand dollars - and plans to live on $15 a day.

Campbell says the daily grind of work-sleep-eat-repeat isn't how he wants to spend the rest of his life.

"Time is extremely finite. It's the one resource you can't buy or exchange," he told news.com.au.

"You're only as good as what you did yesterday. If I wrote down everything that I wanted to do yesterday, and everything that I actually did, there would be a massive difference.

"All I did was go to work, come home and eat three meals in between."

Cam on a previous overseas adventure. Source: Supplied

"Work and sleep takes up about 90 per cent of my time. In the end you're only left with about 10 per cent of your day to do the things you actually like doing and have a wonderful time.

"I love music, travel, and meeting interesting people."

Campbell's light bulb moment came after he returned from a recent trip to Central America.

He had just landed his dream job back in Australia and had two months travelling ahead of him. "I saw those two months as an opportunity to treat the world as my playground," he said.

Along the way, Campbell was offered a job and place to live permanently in Guatemala, but turned it down.

He returned home and launched himself into a demanding role with long hours.

"I actually quite like my job but I was really coming to grips with just being a cog in the wheel.

I felt like I had lost my freedom. I became really quite critical against not just work, but the whole concept of work, capitalism, consumerism, the working world and all those things.

You reflect on whether working 50, 60, 70 hours a week is really going to give you anything in the long run."

Cam and his girlfriend. Source: Supplied

"I want to cut my ties, particularly with Sydney as a city. Sydney used to be far less competitive. People's opinions are as monochromatic as the clothes they wear and the cars they drive.

"I also had a brush with my own mortality and I got my priorities in order. It made me realise what's important.

"I wrote down the 10 things in life that I love so much, and asked myself if there was a way I could combine them into one lifestyle."

With the help of his friends - an artist and a documentary director - Cam will produce a documentary series about his adventure.

"We want to get inside the heads of people who have gone AWOL — particularly artists and musicians around the world."

"My girlfriend is coming with me. She's just as fed up with the gravity of Western living. Neither of us, nor our friends see an exciting future in sticking round and rotting.

"The best we could hope for, if we all stayed, is a good night out. That's a pretty contagious thought in my opinion.

Cam and his mate Bart, who will be travelling with him across Asia and the Middle East. Source: Supplied

Campbell's parents have mixed views on his decision to go AWOL.

"My mum is generally supportive. She's actually on the verge of doing something similar.

But my values are conflicted with my Dad's.

"When I told him [about my plan], he came back at me with a list of reasons that I should stay in both my job and the workforce during my twenties.

But will there be anything about his current life that he'll miss?

"It will be the small, comfortable things. I could find myself living in some half-built house just stinging to be back home in a warm bed watching some series on my laptop.

"But if that's the biggest luxury that I'm idolising, it's not worth staying for.

"If you're not feeling happy you can't keep doing the same thing. If you don't quite know what you want to do, then do something wild and irrational and bizarre."

Have a story you'd like to share? Get in touch at rebecca.sullivan@news.com.au or on Twitter @beck_sullivan.

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