So the net cost for the tip was about $22k. I paid for the vast majority of
this with one month's consultancy beforehand. That's crazy when you think
about it, one month's consultancy in return for a year traveling.
And I certainly didn't hold back with the budget, I met a lot of people
doing it for much cheaper. Where there's a will, there's a way.
One consulting gig, $22,000. I really need to get on this level! Was a fantastic read, especially since I have a lot of respect for Alex due to some of his great work.
That Mark Twain quote really hit home. I recently decided that I need to do the same thing actually. I'm sick of the USA, of the people here, their attitudes, etc.. (I am in LA). Ready to get out and experience the rest of the world. I leave for Sweden on Feb 24th! My first time out of the country!
It's not exactly height of the tourist season which can help with prices. If he's from LA, the fact that it's cold and there'll probably be snow might well be a feature for him.
Indeed. It's convenient for me. I'll certainly freeze my ass off, but I am looking forward to experiencing some intense winter. Plus, I'll be doing some consulting work for a long time client of mine on site, which will be refreshing.
I'm primarily excited for a taste of new culture, a break from the shitstorm that I feel like my life is right now, and hopefully a new outlook on life.
You are literally the opposite of me - I've travelled all over the place, and if my job wasn't keeping me tied in the UK right now I'd move to LA tomorrow.
Have fun in Sweden, be prepared for a high prices though!
Sweden’s cheap if you compare it to its neighbour Norway! Housing seems cheap compared to the UK too there, but then I guess that’s what happens if you have 1/6th the population in 3 times the land area.
When I was in Deadhorse Alaska (near Prudhoe Bay) ran into a couple of argentinians who had driven up. About as far north as one can drive... and they went south to patagonia to start their trip, too.
Always wanted to do that.
Great thing about traveling in alaska-- you can just pull over to the side of the road and sleep. Spent weeks doing that, and the only "incident" was when an Alaskan Pipeline worker woke me up (it was noon! I my clock was thrown off by the 24 hour sunlight) to make sure I was ok. (I was relatively near the pipeline at that point, and they patrol it.)
Thanks for sharing your experience, I'm enjoying reading it!
I remember seeing a lot of Canadian plates while I was hitchhiking down to Ushuaia on the other end. I think that route has a siren call to a certain type of person. Some of them looked very relieved at that final border crossing :)
Sigh, I frequently regret my wasted youth. Now that I'm a husband and father of two wonderful kids, I wonder if I can transpose and apply what this guy did to my family situation? Maybe take a nice 3 month working vacation (work-cation?) during the summer.
If any of you younger whippersnappers are reading this blog post, GO OUT AND DO THIS!!! You'll most likely regret not doing it when you're older.
I don't have kids, but have travelled quite a bit. I have come across some fairly adventurous parents travelling with kids and staying in hostels. It is not the norm, but it is possible. If you really want to do it, I would start with something like 4 weeks in Costa Rica, and stay in places that are ~$20/night. That is long enough that you will have to do laundry, buy groceries, and learn to live as a family of backpackers. If the family can handle that, then you could go to more adventurous places.
My mother and stepfather traveled around the world over a year in their fifties. They bought a ticket that let them take any flight west for about $2k, sold their house, put all their stuff into storage, took care of insurance and little details, and left.
I have two sisters, a step-sister, and a step-brother.
We moved to St Anton am Arlberg (Awesome ski resort in the Alps) with a 15 month old & mortgage. Ski by day, work remote by night, best six months in a long time. So good, we are doing another ski season in Japan for 2012/13 (and we have a 2nd kid now).
One of the great things about IT is that you can be geographically free. Leave the hustle & bustle, get in touch with nature/family/yourself/beer and you will never regret it.
I've traveled a fair amount and I don't get the degree of fascination. It's essentially a form of entertainment.
I've learned more about almost any place from books and media than just passing through, seeing the sites, and meeting some people. "Traveling" is really not as enlightening as people try to pretend. Living somewhere a couple years is another matter.
> "Traveling" is really not as enlightening as people try to pretend
I strongly protest about this. I travel extensively, in a similar way to the OP (live where I choose for how long I can on a visa). My life, and especially my view on my home country, has vastly expanded. I have friends all over the world, I can speak a couple of languages and a smattering of many others which has lead to expanding our business because I can communicate sufficiently, and more critically, understand their particular needs. I wonder if you stayed in fancy hotels all the time? Have you spent a few nights in a Casa Particular in Cuba, or camped out in South Africa with local farmers?
"Essentially a form of entertainment". Wow, what an understatement about what this great world and the people in it can teach us.
Reading down a bit more, maybe you're referring to the travelling-salesman effect, a few days or hours in one place, all you are seeing are hotel lobbys and airports. This isn't travelling: it's commuting.
I'm gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you there.
I'm nuts about Japanese culture. Did a lot of reading when I was a little weeaboo, even took a few semesters of Japanese language in college. It's all tremendously exciting and rewarding. But, when I landed in Osaka last year, it was a whole new ballgame watching, meeting, and talking to these people, conversing in their language, eating their food, seeing their homes and shops and shrines.
The reading prepared me for the experience. But it did not replace the experience. It's profoundly enlightening to go out, make yourself a foreigner in a new land and come to grips with a people, language, and culture who are not your own.
It may have helped that I took an unorthodox approach to vacationing, and minimized "sightseeing" and visiting tourist spots, instead just choosing to spend time in the city or in one of the outlying towns, observing and interacting with the natives.
I've traveled a fair amount as well (~30 countries, almost all the US states), and I guess I agree with you. I don't really find it "enlightening" but it can be very different and fun compared to what you can do while staying in the same place.
>just passing through, seeing the sites, and meeting some people.
Is what most people do because they are very short of time, due to the fact that the time they have is vacation time from their full time job. This forces them into a particular mode. But for many people, this is still very rewarding.
>"Traveling" is really not as enlightening as people try to pretend.
I think there's a big difference between spending 3 hours and 3 days somewhere. There's also a big difference between spending 3 days and 3 months somewhere. And then even further, you could spend 3 year somewhere.
I know in 3 months we don't get the same level of experience as spending 3 years, and we may well find a place where we want to spend 3 years at a time.
Everything in life involves tradeoffs, especially travel. I won't knock someone who spends 3 hours in a place I spend 3 months, anymore than I would want to be knocked by someone who spent 3 years there.
But I strongly disagree that you can books and media can replace travel. Sure you can learn a lot, but the experience of living somewhere or even visiting is a lot different than seeing it portrayed by others.
I contend that mostly what you're getting out of your three days or three months somewhere is a blast of novelty. It's not making you any smarter or better, which is what a lot of people try to claim.
Learning "how things are done" in other very different places does tend to make you smarter. In several ways, including but not limited to:
- you are forced to solve new problems imposed by your surroundings, which makes you a better problem-solver generally
- you become exposed to and aware of different ways that other cultures solve problems, which widens your own tool set
- you become more aware of some of your own default cultural/political/technological assumptions, and thus better able to set some of those biases aside when you face problems for which they aren't appropriate.
A weekend package tour won't give you much of that, but living for a few weeks or months someplace significantly different than your home country often will.
- you become aware of inner resources you weren't aware existed when you're exposed to situations you're unfamiliar with, developing a greater sense of self-confidence and self-respect
> I contend that mostly what you're getting out of your three days or three months somewhere is a blast of novelty. It's not making you any smarter or better
Given the endless research literature on challenges and cognitive capabilities, and especially the inverse correlation between novelty and mental decline in the elderly, I would be chary of making such claims.
Ever heard the phrase 'you get out what you put in'?
Travel can give you most of the benefits most people claim it does without you actively trying because of how it forcibly takes you out of your comfort zone. But if you show up just expecting it to change you, or even worse; challenge it to, then you won't get anywhere near as much out of it.
I expect that your own experiences are more a reflection of your attitude towards it than what most enthusiastic travelers (including myself) claim it does.
Have you ever had your passport stolen in a country where you don't speak the language? Been stuck on a bus for 10 hours in the middle of nowhere where the only food looks like it can walk? Had to get from your hotel to the airport at 2am without having a taxi service to call? Everytime I go through something like this it empowers me and that will to survive goes straight into my business. Sales down this month? Whatever, we'll figure it out. Critical service down? Eh, I'll do an all nighter and write personal apologies to customers with salutations in their language. Before I travelled I was a youthful know-it-all. Years later I'm a much more youthful, stable, interested-in-all-perspectives adult who has the confidence to take on almost anything because business just isn't that hard compared to living on $1 a day with fresh water 10 kilometers away.
All your examples look strange only if you're living in a wealthy place. I can recall having to do all these without having to set foot on a plane, except one: whenever I go somewhere, I bother to learn at least a little of the local language.
Thus highlighting a benefit to traveling if you're not familiar with the realities of different countries. I was shocked to find out that some relatively affluent countries still don't have street addresses.
Yes, you're right. I grew up in a very comfortable country where bureaucracy, transport, communications etc were not problematic. When I go home I'm no longer bothered by 'first world problems' and it's just made me a happier person.
No way. I spent six months in Japan last year, on two three-month tourist visas. Within the first three months, I had learned immense, immense amounts about Japan, myself, and the rest of the world (via housemates and acquaintances). That trip taught me more than any other similar period in my life.
It's not making you any smarter or better, which is what a lot of people try to claim.
The best quote on travel I've read is, "travel doesn't make you interesting, it makes you interested." The few people I've met who thought it made 'better' were the same sorts of desperate saps that name-drop their college all the time. But these schmucks say nothing about going to college, just as the other schmucks say nothing about the validity of travel. You can't judge the world on the basis insecure people.
I'm 6 years in and still learning. I guess it's beyond travel at this point, but it's still an amazing country.
That said, I spent roughly 3-4 months back and forth staying in NY in 2010 and it was also an eye opening experience.
The key is to try and live like a local (as much as your persona permits) - and then address why you feel uncomfortable when you do, yet everyone else around you does not.
Well, yes, if you've never traveled at all, and especially never traveled outside the west, I would guess that's rather eye-opening.
I'm addressing the people who endlessly hit up new places and try to pretend it means something. It's just novelty seeking, as best I can tell, which is to some extent a trait of immaturity.
I suspect that the problem here is simply that you are wrong.
I'm not sure why, but you're consistently trying to be condescending about those who value travel. What do you gain by categorizing and marginalizing others? Living somewhere is okay, but merely traveling through is just "novelty seeking"? As if "novelty seeking" cannot itself be an activity that leads to personal growth?
Hey now, though he's not saying it well, he's got a point. I've been on some extensive travels and sometimes everything starts to blend together. I sit in a cafe and can't remember which city I'm in. It's really the people you meet that stand out, but the sample size per city is still quite small. It's easy to claim that you get exposed to a different culture, but if you only get to know a few dozen people then you might have found a similar culture back home in a different neighborhood.
I think the key is the attitude change that is often stimulated by, but not necessarily caused by travel. You could get the same thing by waking up one morning and realizing you'd like to meet some folks from the other side of town and learn what they think about life, work, love, etc.
Disclaimer: I travel for work. Meeting up with CouchSurfers keeps me sane.
I was a bit off-put at first by the fact that the gorgeous photos in this post were not taken by Alex. I then realized that it was the photographer that inspired Alex to take his trip in the first place.
There's also something to be said for staying "behind your eyes" instead of "behind the glass." It's easier to be "in the moment" when you don't have to worry about documenting everything for posterity.
The main thing to think about is this: do you want a one-time, round-the-world experience, or do you want this as a lifestyle, say working 6-8 months a year and traveling the rest?
If you are like me and want the latter, then become a contractor and specialise in something that pays well (for me, J2EE - not a great technology, but Big Corp Inc. pays well for these skills).
The OP seems to suggest a work/travel approach, but to be honest I found that can be tough to sustain. To be maximally productive, it's really helpful to have comfortable and familiar surroundings, very solid internet, etc. I tend to do just-for-fun coding on trips instead, since I found trying to get setup in new places to be stressful.
The only problem I've found is that contracting gigs don't pay well and usually want you onsite. I've got 12+ years as a JEE dev and make a decent salary at a big corp but all of the contracting companies out there only want to pay you $50-$55/hr which isn't even close enough to being enough.
Are there any books or something about how this contracting thing works? I'm just about to start my career in programming, and I don't really have a hang of the business side of things -- not hoping for a quick change to contracting, but I'd like to start to understand how it works.
E.g., what kind/level of J2EE expertise do you need to become a solo contractor for Big Corp Inc.?
As a contractor, do you work on a project in a company office for X months and then leave? Or do you work from home? Etc.
1. Worked for around eight years as an employee at a few places, including a couple of startups. Ended up with a lot of Java experience.
2. Realised I wanted to restructure my life to work less (but still make good money) and travel/have fun.
3. Spoke to various people and found that contracting through a consulting company (not recruiters, but a team of like-minded programmers) was the way to go, rather than pounding the pavement to look for contracts. The company takes its cut, but I still end up with $80-$95/hr, and they find the work for me.
As for experience: Big Corp Inc. wants contractors who can get up to speed very quickly. You tend to get pigeonholed based on technology, so if you get the assignment as a "J2EE guy" and you don't have a lot of experience, then you look pretty dumb. Spend time working as a normal employee first and really become a good programmer.
As for work duration: generally, the contracts are open-ended and I am terminated when a project gets cancelled or whatever.
I specify up front that I will spend the bulk of my time working from home and that I am taking holidays from time x to time y. The company that subcontracts me out is based in Silicon Valley, as is Big Corp and friends, and I live in western Canada, so this isn't usually an issue. I fly down once in while to hang out.
So to sum up: get experience - learn to be a good programmer who has a reputation for getting things done; learn what big companies want in terms of technology; find a company with good connections who will contract you out, possibly as a team with other people; be up front about your lifestyle but work hard to integrate with their project schedules.
I think there are plenty of software consulting groups around, particularly in the Valley. Google is your friend on this one, or if you're a local, just ask around.
I was referred to the company I now work with most, but I found the last bunch of guys I was with via Craigslist.
I did the work/travel thing for 14 months and found it ok. I wouldn't want to commit to more than 15-20 hours work per week whilst travelling though.
My plan for the next trip is to travel in between contracts and then settle down for a few months at a time whilst working. Hopefully that will allow more focus.
Edit: Actually I like gexla' idea above - pick a comfortable home base to work in and travel to nearby areas/countries in between contracts.
I disagree with the age comment. If you don't want the baggage of life, then don't let the baggage build up. You can do this at any age.
I made this comment in another post also, but I will repeat it here. If you need to continue working, it's difficult to do contract work while on the move. I suggest setting up a home base in a region that you can concentrate on. For example, setup a home base in SE Asia, knock out some projects and then travel to the nearby areas while between projects. When you are happy that you have seen everything that you want to see in that region, then setup a home base in another region and repeat. With this strategy you could extend your "around the world trip" to as long as you like.
I think it's also worthwhile pointing out that a lot of the cost of these kinds of long trips don't grow a whole lot in comparison to relatively shorter trips. Flights are, in my experience, the largest single expense, and so will cost the same whether you stay for a few weeks at each stop or a few months.
It also depends on how much you pay for two residences. if you keep your rent/mortgage @ home that's another major monthly expense. If you find a sublet/AirBnB or something this still applies.
One of the best times to travel is between leases, if you can stand to 'move' twice. Once to storage, go travel, once from storage to a new place.
Much of the cost of airfare can be diffused with airline miles. If you've got good credit you can pretty easily rack up a few hundred thousand miles without leaving the ground. Sites like FlyerTalk.com are a great resource for this sort of thing. I haven't paid for the airfare of any of my recent trips to Japan and Europe---it's all been done with miles, in premium cabins.
Costs twice as much, and they tire much faster. Some of the seedier risks I've taken when traveling alone I wouldn't take when traveling with a girlfriend, let alone kids. The risk-free premium is quite high, and jacks up the prices quite a bit.
I'd say traveling with family doesn't have to be boring or as expensive as people presume. But it is qualitatively different from traveling in your twenties.
Full price flights once they're 2yo. Before that, they won't remember much. Travel overseas before they're born then domestically until they're about 8.
If you really want to stay travelling for a long time and you want to stay for extended periods in places which don't have amazing internet you should consider getting some other skills. Going from national capital to major population centre is all well and good but you will only see amount of the planet that way. Consider welding, electrical or diesel engine repair as skills you can get employed with pretty much anywhere. Sure, you may not make a consultants salary but those sorts of skills generally pay more than enough to live on comfortably practically everywhere in the world.
Food for thought if you want to spend a lifetime on the road instead of just a year.
Or you could just try to work on gigs that pay well for 3-4 month a year in a place that has awesome internets and dont work while being in places that dont have decent connections. Better than getting into real employment situations anyway.
Most interesting part of the article: "So the net cost for the tip was about $22k. I paid for the vast majority of this with one month's consultancy beforehand."
I'm currently working 6 8-hour days per week at $100 per hour. That's $20k per month. That's about the going rate for a competent back-end developer. It doesn't require any unusual skills or knowledge, just self-discipline and a professional attitude.
That also doesn't give you a cash pile of $20k at the end of it, after you pay your current rent, pay taxes (higher as a contractor), buy food, etc. I'd estimate the cash pile to be maybe $10k? So his income from that one month was probably more like $30-$40k.
If you are outside of the US for more than 330 days in a 12 month period then you qualify for the foreign earned income exclusion: http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/international/article/0,.... It does not matter if you are earning money from a US company during that time. I actually did this one year by performing remote work for a US company while traveling around South America.
So, with a little planning, you can dodge at least the income tax portion.
Depends where you live, in the UK I pay a flat 20% (after income and expenses). My monthly costs in London add up to about $2k. So that leaves me about $15k. Not quite as much as the OP but give me a couple more years of experience and I'll be able to put my rates up.
Or telecommuting. I freelance remotely and make upwards of $100 an hour. It seems like a lot until you remember:
-- No job-related health insurance.
-- As a contractor, I pay almost twice as much employment taxes as full-time employees in the US.
-- Business is sometimes sporadic
-- your next paycheck is not guaranteed.
However, all that is perfectly acceptable to me since in the end, I'm my own boss. There are only a few kinds of job offers I'd consider at this point since I'm very happy with being a freelancer. But don't take the $100 figure at face value -- add in taxes, business cycle, time needed for marketing and accounting, etc, and it's not as much as it seems.
> As a contractor, I pay almost twice as much employment taxes as full-time employees in the US.
As a small business owner in the UK I have free healthcare and pay slightly less tax than I would as an employee. I pay minimal NI contributions (about 40 GBP per month, I think), 20% corporate tax on earnings (after subtracting expenses and a token 7.5k salary) and zero tax on up to 35k of dividends per year.
Yeah, yeah, rub it in. In all seriousness, the taxation of contractors is a big problem here in the US. And you'll love this: it's only the first 100,000 USD of contractor income that is taxed at double the rate of regular employees The doctor's lobby is powerful here and wanted to ensure that the majority of their income is not taxed as such a high rate since many (most?) physicians outside of hospitals here are technically independent contractors.
Not impossible but not easy, exactly. If you take a year to plan it out I think you could set that aside, working in tech, but it's obviously not for everyone.
I've heard of daily rates of up to £2000 ($3000) in some very specialized areas of finance systems, so $22K in a month seems achievable if you have the right skills.
If this is your first backpacking adventure, I highly recommend not starting in mainland China. It is an order of magnitude more difficult a place to travel than other places.
The article makes it pretty clear that he's plenty experienced.
I agree with the thought though. Rural China is one of the most difficult places to get around I've been to. Outside the cities, most people are just not used to encountering others that can't speak or read, so you have to supply the skills to fumble around and communicate. And Mandarin is a fiendishly difficult language for the native English speaker, so it's tough to pick a few phrases to get around.
I found it very easy and I speak zero Chinese. Plus, it's very cheap, which makes a lot of things (e.g. finding a reasonable hotel for the night) pretty easy. Also safe.
This is frankly impossible. Either you were only in foreign tourist areas, or are a really experienced traveller. I speak a decent amount of Chinese, have lived and travelled extensively in China, and I still find China way more taxing than a country like Cambodia. I don't speak a lick of Khmer, but it is still a traveller's paradise compared to China.
I'm really at a loss to know what you found so difficult.
I did two things that I didn't usually do.
I got people at the hostels I stayed in to write down instructions for me (e.g. tell them to write down "I would like a haircut/I would like to buy a 2nd class sleeper at 22:30 from Xi'an to Chengdu" and stuff like that).
Another thing I did was have the number of somebody who spoke English and Chinese and call them up when I really needed some translation (e.g. with a bus station attendant telling me that their tickets are all sold out for that day).
That's it. Those are the only two things I did in China that I didn't do in Cambodia (or Shanghai/Beijing). Most stuff you buy you can buy just with gestures and a couple of words. Taxis can take you where you want to go with a point to a place on the map. What else is there?
I was in China recently. Met 2 girls who were traveling for the first time. They were planning to spend 6 months in Asia. They made some newbie mistakes in China, but otherwise had no serious problems. China was harder when I went 15 years ago.
They wanted to hop on trains at the last minute, but tickets sell out quickly. They ended up spending a lot more for air travel. They didn't get a guide book; therefore, they wasted a lot of time on logistics and wandering aimlessly around a city. They tried to get into hostels but these are sometimes booked up. They had no backup plan and went looking for a cheap motel. They are vegetarians and didn't know how to ask for "no meat". They ended up eating whatever they could scrounge from grocery stores. I'm a vegetarian and had some terrific meals. They will survive though.
I'm absolutely doing this. After reading your first article, I got super excited about the idea and started planning for it right away. I just graduated college and started working (design & ruby dev), so I don't have enough yet, but I'm putting money into a savings account every month so that I can have enough by the time I'm ready.
Anything you write about this is really fantastic and helpful, so thank you : ) I'll certainly let you know how it's going once I get out there. You have inspired at least one young programmer, so thanks for that!
Good luck. Berlin is one of the greatest cities. If you get homesick, the Sony Center in Potsdamer Platz, shows american movies in english. Be sure to check the times of the Fernsehturm in Alexander platz- we were there 3 months and because we didn't make a specific plan to do so, never got a chance to go up the tower.
Also, if you go to Checkpoint Charlie, the Museum there is pretty good, and big, but during peak hours it is extremely crowded and this detracts from the experience. Worth trying to go in off hours for that one.
Also the DDR Museum is really great, as is the Berlin City Museum. Especially if you've an interest in the soviet era.
Great post. Anything to get programmers traveling a lot more. We need to get out there and see the real world, a world other than silicon valley, understand problems and spot potential opportunities. Only by making peoples lives easier by solving problems can we build more meaningful businesses else we will keep getting more of "me too" features built to share what you are thinking while on the pot.
It always amazes me that there are people who make their money freelancing or working remotely who don't travel regularly. I'm currently working at a big corporation, but I'm currently spending my free time working on learning web related stuff so I can hopefully pick up freelance work to try to support myself while traveling in the future.
Visas are a big issue for many people in the world. I'm an Indian and frankly my biggest headache about traveling internationally is getting a visa. I can't imagine how big a hassle would it be to arrange 20+ visas (for a decent round the world trip). Each application would require financial proofs, ticket proofs, hotel proofs and what not.
I'd also suggest a book to read on the plane: http://www.alaindebotton.com/the_art_of_travel.asp. A good read to explore some of the common, but not often openly discussed, feelings and responses people have to travelling.
Also, CouchSurfing is a great way to find free places to stay and meet intersting folks. I've been on the site ~5 years, and the experiences have been nothing short of amazing..dare I say, a lifechanger
It's possible to travel for a lot less. If you are on a tight budget. I traveled for 6 month in India, Nepal and Thailand 2 years ago for less than 6k.
Does anyone have any thoughts on the ergonomics of travelling and programming? I've come to rely on a very specific setup to avoid the symptoms of RSI. I find that coffee shops and the like tend to encourage the worst kind of posture for this.
I suppose one compromise could be to deck out your own vehicle with an ideal setup and travel in that; but then you're more limited in where you can go.
Rather than doing one around the world trip, setup one "home base" and focus on seeing that region. For example, I live in the Philippines and I can get tickets to anywhere in SE Asia are very cheap. I can work hard for a period to bust out some projects and then take time off to travel to another area in the region for a week or longer. Then go back to "home base" and repeat the process.
The author seemed to be working on his own projects during his trip. Doing contract work on the road is far more difficult, so the "home base" strategy also works better if you have to continue contract work while abroad.
I have the same interests and concerns. The older I get, the more injuries and problems I develop. Currently, I need my Kinesis Classic keyboard, my Logitech mouse, my eye-level monitor, and my excellent Steelcase chair.
I believe that I could get by with a less ergonomic system if I limited myself to part-time work (say, four to six hours per day) and had ample time to walk around. I've found nothing better for back/neck problems than a good 15 - 30 minute walk, focusing on posture. Also, I would find something like a more powerful iPad, on a stand, with a nice Bluetooth keyboard to be much, much more valuable than a laptop, and it should still be very space efficient.
Traveling around the world is my dream. Unfortunately in the corporate world the most I am able to take off at a time is a three week vacation per year. My wife and I have taken three week trips to South Korea, Greece, Italy and several shorter trips. If I did not work for the man and was able to get work as a contractor, I would jump on the next plane out of here.
My wife and I do a similar thing. Take a large 3 week trip a year. Although I like the idea of traveling for a year or longer, I do believe I would miss several things, my bed is at the top of that list.
I've been very inspired by Alex's first post and although I've been planing to do something like this in the feature I was a bit scared about it, well, who wouldn't? :) But now that's gone and I am already "drawing" a plan.
My favorite was staying in a $10 / night hut in Thailand, next to a resort that probably cost $100 / night. It was near enough that I could use their wifi.
We've been full-time nomads for 4 years, and are in the middle of our second year of travel outside the USA. This article is a good overview for a particular type of travel, which I tend to perceive as vacation travel.
Its great to take a year off, and see all those countries on $22k, and if you're considering doing that, I highly recommend doing something like what he's doing!
For us, we chose to make international living more of a lifestyle. We are running our startup this way. When we added our third co-founder, it became three of us traveling this way. It is working out pretty well. We use AirBnB or local real estate agents to book accommodations. We stay in a country for 3-6 months depending on their visa length.
We work a sort of regular schedule, so we're not out seeing tourist sites every day. But that's what we do on the weekends.
At the end of the day, living like this, all over the world, is cheaper than it would have been if we'd just stayed on the West Coast of the USA. Well, cheaper financially.
One way we keep things cheap is by trying to focus on inexpensive countries. Our time in europe was great, but even there we stayed in berlin (which since the wall came down still has reasonably priced rents), and a small UK town. Mostly we're focusing on less developed / expensive countries which is also the more interesting ones.
We book maybe 1-2 flights a year. We are careful about this. We got a nice 7 day "vacation" in Venice when we were able to save $300 by booking a layover thru that part of Italy on our repositioning trip. Taking your time on your flights lets you maximize flexibility and gives you great opportunities like Venice. Keeping major international flights to a minimum keeps our expenses low.
All three of us live out of big suitcases. We were trying the "one bag one world" thing and living out of a 55 Liter backpack. This was ok in terms of size, but airlines have decided that refusing to take bags, even if they're carryon size, is a revenue opportunity, so rather than fight them, or deal with the hassle, we've switched to a 2 bag solution- one carry on for the expensive electronics and one checked bag for the clothes etc. (so 2 bags each, though the carry ons tend to be rather small.)
I really need to do a blog post about this. Actually, I have a dozen blog posts, but I need the blog first. And the blog is not coming until the MVP is done.
Anyway, traveling around the world for a year-- totally good idea, not that unreasonably expensive, and if you want to make a lifestyle out of it, you can do it, by increasing the amount of time you spend in each country to bring the costs down.
Only downside of living this way: there's some impact on productivity due to the travel. So, we lose probably 4-6 weeks a year of productive time because of it. For instance, we didn't get a damn thing done in Venice. Some of those "lost" weeks are the most fun too.
What are you waiting for to write those posts? I'd love to read how you manage to change your country of residence, and about all the small things that you have to consider.
And the blog is not coming until the MVP is done - I'm guessing they're not waiting but prioritising effort on their startup and the Minimum Viable Product.
We're basically, Engineer, Designer, Writer. The Writer is the newest person and a recent college grad, what her role eventually becomes isn't clear (marketing? design?) For some reason this makes me think of the TV show Castle with him showing up with a bullet proof vest that says "writer".
The next stage of growth is hiring independant contractors for specific jobs that need to be done, and when we start wanting to have full time employees, they can be located anywhere. People want to telecommute and we like the sort of github style management policy.
I imagine that once a year we'd all get together in the same place for an annual meeting. Its also quite possible that we'll end up getting outside investors and have to start living in the Bay Area or something like that.
Regarding security, my advice is to always have two bags. The main bag has all your clothes, toiletries, etc. All the stuff you would be sad but not devastated to lose. In the other, smaller bag goes the Macbook, camera, and everything else that would be terrible to lose. Also, consider thin dry bags (I think mine are Sea to Summit) to keep out moisture and sand, two things which are inevitable on any adventure. :-)
Having toted an SLR everywhere, I'll admit that unless you're an avid photographer, you will probably be happier and less anxious with a quality point-and-shoot. I gave an awful lot of impromptu classes on photography to people with SLRs that had kit lenses (not much better than a good P&S) and wildly inappropriate settings (much worse than a P&S).
Dan Gilbert's TED talk covers people having miserable experiences and synthesising happiness to make them feel good. That makes it not reliable, travel could be an instance of that.
It should be possible through behavioural studies and observation to prove whether there is any substance to "Travel is fatal to bigotry" or "You can't fail to come away from traveling inspired with a fresh perspective", and whether that makes any difference to anything.
"Traveling opens your eyes to some of the real problems people face", does it? "gives you the opportunity to come up with solutions to tackle those" and do people use that opportunity?
$22k and 1 year is a lot of opportunity cost. This is argued by someone who travelled easily from a powerful country, with an iPod and laptop, to surf, party and program while meeting Ruby programmers, and claiming travel is a way to "get out of the echo chamber"(!) From someone who talks about how possible it would be to turn it into a fulltime lifestyle doing the same consulting he did to pay for it in the first place, and after all that singing the praises, doesn't do so.
Is it really so downvotable to question how much is hype, and how much substance?
Something I learned is that there are many things in life you cannot predict or plan for, and that the more you expose yourself to unfamiliar situations, the more likely you are to encounter interesting situations and outcomes. On your travels you might encounter the person who becomes your next business partner, your future intimate partner, your dream job, a sense of perspective about one or more things (one which you may have never realised you lacked), a particularly amusing/terrifying/depresssing/interesting situation, etc.
It is incredibly difficult, I should think, to quantify and measure any of this. However, I'm fairly certain very few exciting or interesting things, or things with growth potential, happen to people who spend all day at home and/or in the office compared to those who go off to explore the world.
And yes, you may also discover nothing of interest, and then you'll have "wasted" your time. So, how risk aversive are you? How important is it to you that you need new experiences - how sure are you of this if you haven't had those experiences? Tricky question. My philosophy has become "let's find out rather than theorize" and it's always been the right choice.
I will say that I think there's too much emphasis on travelling internationally to acquire these experiences. I suspect the type of people taking these trips and developing these exciting experiences and assuming it's about international travel might not do much travelling in their local environment and confuse the international environment as being the source of the new experiences, rather than their effort at exploring new environments.
I also think it's a bit naive to accept Mark Twain's observations about his world as necessarily applying directly today's world; the population of the US in 1861 when Twain started travelling was around 26 million: the diversity and interestingness of a given location was very different from what you have today (quite literally, any given place will have 150 years of additional history and I can guarantee it'll be far more interesting than the 150 years preceeding 1861!).
That being said, I don't think it's a stretch to imagine you're more likely to have interesting and unusual experiences in cultures or locales vastly different from what you're used to than otherwise.
There might be an opportunity cost but life is short. On your death bed you're more likely to fondly remember the time you had that delicious cheese in Paris, or lived with that little family in the Himalayas. Certainly more fondly than the nine months toiling away in a cubicle.
In short give it try and find out. But don't bother if you can't summon a positive attitude, you'll just waste your time.
So here's a guy who lives in California, which used to be part of the Wild West. He wants to broaden his horizon by visiting some other countries. Then he comes back from his trip and writes:
"the world isn't the wild west that some people seem to think it is"
That Mark Twain quote really hit home. I recently decided that I need to do the same thing actually. I'm sick of the USA, of the people here, their attitudes, etc.. (I am in LA). Ready to get out and experience the rest of the world. I leave for Sweden on Feb 24th! My first time out of the country!