Ugnė grew up in Anykščiai with her grandmother while her mother worked abroad – her furthest trip at that time was just a bus ride to Palanga. In a town where everyone knows each other, her family story soon became known to those around her. Even as a child, Ugnė heard about her father, who was not part of her life, and soon this became a reason for bullying at school. The harshest words came not only from peers but also from adults.
Over time, the foreign words became her own voice. Ugnė practiced karate for many years, and sports became an important part of her life. However, five training sessions a week were no longer enough – she started waking up an hour earlier to go for a run before school, while increasingly restricting her food intake. For a long time, she felt that everyone felt this way – that not loving yourself was simply the norm: “The more you eat, the more you hate yourself for eating. That feeds my feeling that I don’t deserve to be here,” she confessed on the LNK show “Bus visko.”
She was pulled out of this cycle by an old childhood dream. As a teenager, after seeing images from a karate camp in Thailand, Ugnė carried the thought of going there for many years – until one day she decided not to wonder if she could, but just to try. That trip changed everything. She returned from Thailand transformed. “A completely different person – brave, happy, curious, alive again,” Ugnė recalls today. It was then that she realized traveling was not just a hobby but part of who she is: “It turns out my inner desire, my inner nature, is who I am. I want to explore, I want to see, I want to know,” she says.
Since then, her travels have increasingly strayed from tourist routes. In Mauritania, Ugnė secretly boarded a freight train across the Sahara, called the “desert snake” by locals – on open iron rails, people travel alongside animals and bundles, enduring scorching heat by day and temperatures dropping to zero at night.
But not all of Ugnė’s journeys are so tough – sometimes the most unexpected discovery lies not in the desert but in the ocean. For a long time, she believed the Maldives were a luxury resort only to dream about: private pools over the ocean, nights costing hundreds of euros. But in Sri Lanka, out of curiosity, she checked flight prices and realized she could fly there for just thirty euros. It turns out that among the luxurious private islands, there are others where the Maldivians themselves live, and nights cost from 50 euros.
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Sometimes travel reveals a very different – darker – side of oneself. In Bali, which many imagine as a safe holiday paradise, she had to endure one of her scariest nights: one evening while returning on a scooter, she noticed she was being followed – and what started as suspicion soon turned into a fight for her safety.
Today Ugnė still dreams of visiting every country in the world. But the more she sees, the less important the number itself becomes. Travel has become a way for her to understand the world, other people, and herself. Perhaps that is why her greatest journey was not to the farthest corner of the world, but back to herself.
More about Ugnė’s childhood, her struggle with an eating disorder, the life-changing trip to Thailand, the dangerous night in Bali, the unexpectedly cheap trip to the Maldives, and the words she waited more than a decade to hear from her grandmother will be revealed on the show “Bus visko” – Saturday evening at 5:30 PM on LNK.
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