After he graduated from a fancy private high school, Tal Dooreck Aloni was living it up on a yacht off the coast of southern France with friends, all expenses paid, when he realized he wanted to do something different with his life.
“I looked around and I wasn’t happy,” he recalled in a phone meeting with The Times of Israel. “So the next day, on my 18th birthday, I told my friends I was going to leave the yacht, and started traveling through southern France on my own.”
With that, the charismatic young man from a well-off family in Miami set off on a life-changing journey that would see him visit more than 30 countries with a unique challenge: to experience the world and pay for his journeys through barter.
Benefiting from his good looks, private school education, natural charm, a US passport and an attitude that required him to eschew planning and embrace serendipity, Dooreck Aloni made friends everywhere he went, supporting himself by making videos as he traveled from Turkey to Dubai to India to Malaysia to Vietnam and East Asia with the motto, “the best plan is no plan.”
“I traveled for a year, and I never paid for a single hotel,” said Dooreck Aloni, now studying at Reichman University in Herzliya. “I did things that literally everybody told me were impossible.”
Dooreck Aloni had a charmed life growing up in an upscale Jewish community in South Florida. His father, a successful doctor from New York, and his mother, a professor from Israel, sent him to one of the top-rated private schools in the state.
“I was always hustling, doing different jobs like photography for real estate, working at an art gallery, selling kite surfing equipment as a professional kite surfer,” he noted.
But while his friends were busy applying to Ivy League schools for college, he had a feeling deep down inside that the career path neatly laid out ahead of him wasn’t what he wanted — at least not yet.
Tal Dooreck Aloni at a mountain at Amalo, Georgia, in 2024. ‘A week later, I was riding a horse down that same road after filming videos for a local hotel.’ (Courtesy)
Bartering for services
Shortly after he left his friends on the yacht to travel solo in France, Dooreck Aloni was unexpectedly forced to come to Israel for medical treatments for about a month. When he was cleared to travel, he headed to Greece to join family members vacationing there. When the group was looking to rent some expensive ATVs for a tour, Tal suggested a different approach.
“While I was touring in France, I had convinced a scooter shop to let me use a scooter in exchange for making some promotional videos for them. Now, I went to the ATV shop and was able to get them to do the same. Then I went to another ATV shop, and then another, until I got four ATVs for the family in exchange for making videos and taking pictures. And then I realized, this kind of thing works.”
He joined World Packers, an app where travelers can barter services for food and accommodations. He found a few gigs around Greece and then flew to Turkey for his next job. There, he took his next daring leap of faith.
Tal Dooreck Aloni in Georgia, 2024. ‘I rode 400 km across the country on horseback with six strangers. A day later, I found myself helping local herders move their horses across the seasons.’ (Courtesy)
“In Turkey, I made a challenge to travel the world with none of my money,” he said. “I was bored staying at hotels and having everything planned out for me. Now, I would have to figure out every day where to eat, where to sleep, and what to do with zero dollars. So I cut my credit card and took all the cash out of my wallet and gave it to charity.”
The next morning, he went around to six different hotels, offering to make videos in exchange for a place to sleep. They all said no. But at the seventh hotel, he got a yes.
“So I made them a video, and they gave me a room, breakfast, and lunch. Then for dinner, I went to a restaurant, and made them a video for dinner and $10. Then the next restaurant paid me $30 for a video. I used the money to take cheap local buses all around Turkey.”
Dooreck Aloni was on an isolated mountain in the Muslim country when Hamas launched its attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, killing more than 1,200 people and kidnapping 251.
“I didn’t know what to do with myself,” he said. “My family was in Israel at the time, and they told me to get out of Turkey immediately, but I couldn’t. While I was stuck there, I started going by Talal, an Arab name, instead of Tal, and changed my name on social media in case anyone tried to identify me. I had sort of an identity crisis, not being able to tell anyone who I am.”
A family in Indonesia, 2024. ‘While hitchhiking, I got invited to dinner by a group of locals who were drinking together. I didn’t speak the language, but they welcomed me like family.’ (Courtesy)
Gallivanting around the world
Learning while doing, Dooreck Aloni figured out how to use AI tools to reduce the time it took him to create videos to just minutes.
He told stories of incredible, incomprehensible experiences along the way. In one, a chance encounter with two Indian women on the way to a video shoot for a boat company led to a four-day adventure that included a tiger safari and helicopter rides. That incident, in turn, led to a chance introduction to one of the wealthiest men in India, who welcomed him into his home and let him stay as a guest for several weeks.
Tal Dooreck Aloni on his skateboard on the island of Siargao in the Philippines, 2024. ‘I didn’t have a bed for the night, but I had my camera. Not knowing where I’d sleep — that was freedom.’ (Courtesy)
“He had the biggest house I’ve ever seen in my life, and I’m from Miami,” Dooreck Aloni said. “At one point, he said to me, ‘Tal, I see that you are young and traveling, and it makes me so happy to see. What’s your dream?’ I told him my dream would be for my parents to come visit me in India, and he said, ‘I’m going to make your dream come true.’ I asked why he would do that for a stranger, and he said, ‘Because this is life, and anything is possible.’ He flew in my parents, and I ended up touring the country for two weeks with them, one of the craziest experiences of my life.”
It also provided a sort of vindication for his unorthodox journey.
“When I first told my parents I wanted to travel, they said no, it was too dangerous. They said they were worried I would get into bad situations, meet bad people. I said, ‘I know there are bad people in the world, but I hope to meet the good ones.’”
A new mission
After about a year of traveling, Dooreck Aloni called an end to his adventure in June 2024 and came back home to Miami, only to find his next journey awaiting him.
“We were at Shabbat dinner, and I was telling a guy about my story, and he said, ‘Listen, there’s an Amazon tribe in Ecuador that tourists rarely see. It would be amazing if you could reach them.’ So the next morning at 6 AM, I was on a flight to Ecuador with no plans and no money.”
An unlikely series of chance meetings with hotel workers and their friends led him to a tribesman who took him on a 22-hour boat journey to the middle of the jungle with the Waorinis, an indigenous tribe located in the Amazonian region of Ecuador.
“He originally asked for $4,000 for the trip, but I got him down to $200, and then I spent the next day making videos for eight different restaurants to raise the cash,” Dooreck Aloni said.
The experience was beyond anything he had seen.
“I found myself wearing only a leaf, hunting for monkeys in the middle of the jungle, communicating with no translator,” he recalled. “I slept on the floor outside, and we would fish for our meals using tree branches.”
Dooreck Aloni decided he wanted to help the tribesmen out, and, after a call on a satellite phone to his parents, he organized a fundraiser online for the tribe, raising more than $8,000 in 24 hours. He used that money to buy two boatloads worth of supplies for the tribe in a nearby town.
At that point, his mission evolved.
“I realized that helping people is what really makes me happy,” he reflected. “I decided that my challenge would be not only to travel with no money but to travel by helping people.” He documents the latter parts of his journey on his YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok pages.
On his 19th birthday, a year after he started his journey, Dooreck Aloni was in Aspen, Colorado, when a 29-year-old girl at a bar said that her dream was to visit Cuba.
“I said, ‘I’m going to make your dream come true, but with one rule: We have to help the people there.’ We raised $3,000 and medicine and food supplies.”
Now, he is studying business and entrepreneurship at Reichman University in Herzliya, still traveling every chance he gets as he figures out his next move.
“I do feel a bit lost right now sitting in classes,” he shared. “I just got back from five days in Jordan, where I skateboarded from the top of the country to the bottom and lived with Bedouins, milking camels. It is hard making the switch.”
Meanwhile, he wants to share his story with as many people as possible and inspire them to dream big.
Tal Dooreck Aloni, 2024. ‘Hitchhiking alone through the Sahara to reach Mauritania and ride the world’s longest train — no plan, just a camera and a dream.’ (Courtesy)
“I think anyone can do it. It’s a matter of changing your mentality,” he said. “At one point, in the Western Sahara, I met two homeless people who were deaf and mute. In sign language, I was able to convince them to hitchhike with me through the Sahara Desert for four days to understand that they weren’t bound by their circumstances.”
For all his enthusiasm, Dooreck Aloni is cognizant that his genetic and familial blessings have aided him on his journeys, although he perhaps takes in stride his privilege to be rescued from true financial peril by his parents, his superior education and the ability, as a male, to walk alone in relative safety.
“I know I had all these advantages as a white American with successful parents, but I left that all behind to start at the same level as everyone else,” he concluded.
“I faced a lot of challenges along this path, and thousands of hotels said no to me, but I always knew it would work out, and that I would find a solution. The most important thing is to believe in yourself.”
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