A few months ago two years of travel slipped into three years of travel and I quietly celebrated my latest long term travel anniversary.
Long term travel anniversaries are a private affair as the date really only means something to yourself, the traveller. I celebrated my first travel-versary by hiking around the blue and green lakes in Rotorua as I warmed up my legs to tackle the Tongariro Northern Circuit. My second was spent dabbing sweat off my forehead in Sanur where my boyfriend and I looked after a pair of spritely dogs for a muggy three months during Bali’s rainy season. And this most recent I spent under lockdown in Tbilisi.
For obvious reasons, I’m not travelling right now and have instead stayed put for the past year. Heading back to the United Kingdom would have required separating from my non-British boyfriend and that was not something we wanted to do.
When I boarded my one-way flight from London to Hanoi three years ago, I was petrified that my long term travel wouldn’t work out and I’d have to go back to the 9-5 life. There’s nothing wrong with that type of lifestyle, it just wasn’t gelling with me. Each time another year (or even month) passes by and I’m still overseas, working remotely and waking up to this alternative way of living, I feel a rush of adrenaline that, thus far, the leap to nomadic living has worked out.
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Musings After 3+ Years of Long Term Travel
At the risk of sounding whimsical, these are a couple of my thoughts, feelings, learnings, and so on about long term travel. When you spend 10+ hours on a bus traversing the length of Thailand or end up sleeping in a forest in New Zealand with no mobile phone reception for three days, what can I say? That’s a lot of time for musing and reflecting.
Long term travel isn’t only for the rich
If there’s one crucial lesson that I’ve learned from multiple years on the road, this is it. Actually, you don’t need to be rich to travel.
Of course, if you want to visit expensive countries, sleep in 5-star hotels, take flights everywhere, and eat steak for each dinner, yeah, you’ll need to start saving your pennies. But, if you’re happy to travel to budget friendly destinations, sleep in hostels (and I’m talking about the nice ones, not hovels), ride night buses and buy mysterious meals from kind ladies with roadside bunsen burners, you’ll be alright.
If you want to travel long term but it’s impossible for you to save money to travel, you should be able find a way to work from the road. That might be freelancing digital nomad style. But if you don’t have a skill that you can turn into a remote business then there are still other options. You can teach a foreign language or find casual seasonal work on farms or in bars. If you’re creative you might be able to produce and sell handmade jewellery or artwork as you travel or work as a musician. Long term travel is slower which means you can dwell in one place while you save up for your next bus ticket.
Although it takes some motivation and I’m sadly aware that travel is easier for privileged British folk like myself, I do feel that there is a way for most people to travel indefinitely or at least longer term.
I left London with a modest pot of savings and worked the whole time since I left, cycling through several different remote jobs as I built up my freelance writing portfolio. I’ve also taken casual work with my New Zealand working holiday visa and participated in work exchanges via Workaway. Working holiday visas are a godsend for anyone longing for long term travel or to experience life overseas. Work exchange programmes are an equally lucrative avenue to explore, especially if you’re not eligible for a working holiday visa.
Travel is a privilege
You can’t talk about travel without the awkward but important topic of privilege awareness popping up.
As the owner of both a passport and a laptop, I’m well aware that I’m in a privileged position, especially when you throw in the fact that I’m a native English speaker which unjustly opens so many doors. I didn’t grow up with wealth, I had my fair share of financial woes during my 20s, I travel on a frugal budget, I fund my own travel, and I face regular reminders that travelling as a woman carries its challenges. But still, I recognise that I’m in a far more privileged position than many others that I can live like this.
There are many destinations that I would love to visit but they are out of my price bracket and may always be so. Other places are difficult on account of my gender although not impossible. But rather than wailing about these places being out of my grasp, I appreciate that as I have one of the top 10 most powerful passports in the world, I always have many travel other options available to me. While travelling I meet people for whom domestic travel isn’t even a remote possibility, never mind international travel.
Slow travel is The Best
Better than all the rest…
I guess you might say that I’ve been ‘travelling for three years’ but this isn’t really accurate. I’ve not literally travelled the whole time. For many of the 36+ months that I’ve been travelling/living abroad, whatever, I’ve often stayed put in one place for a few months. I spent several months in Kuala Lumpur, Hoi An, Sanur, and the Bay of Islands. Obviously, I halted my travel plans during the pandemic and chose to lay low in Tbilisi for the past year or so.
Pandemics aside, I’ve realised that I do not enjoy continuous travel and have no desire to squeeze the ‘top 10 things to do in X’ into one day or to repack my backpack every night (because, lazy). Even though I travel overland wherever feasibly possible, that still impacts the environment and I don’t want that kind of carbon conscience. I love lingering in places where I can figure out what there is beneath the glossy tourist exterior and become a repeat visitor at small cafes in back alleys.
It’s totally different when you’re using your limited annual leave to travel or take a holiday, but when with long term travel you’re generally not in a rush to get anywhere. Especially when you need to work from the road to fund your next bus, slow travel is the only way to manage it without facing burn-out.
The unexpected can happen
When you are travelling long term or nomadding around the world things don’t always go to plan. Obviously, 2020 is a glowing example of things going wrong across the board whether or not you’re a long term traveller. The global pandemic halted my plans to trot around Europe last summer licking gelato and hopping around castles.
Rather than getting upset about it, I just used the lockdown time to focus on work and make the most out of living in Georgia. My business has yo-yoed over the past year but I’ve generally had plenty of work booked in to keep me busy and cover my essentials (shotis puri and saperavi, mmm).
Other unexpected things can happen with both short and long term travel. Transport gets cancelled at the last minute, weather and natural disasters can disrupt plans, you can get sick on the road, you can be disappointed by places you were excited to visit and blown away by ones you didn’t expect to love. Even seasoned travellers will miss their home comforts from time to time, encounter loneliness or homesickness and get struck down by travel fatigue. As with every other element in life, travel has its lows.
My New Zealand camper van literally fell to pieces as I sped down a highway (right before I planned to sell it, no less). I’ve had to abandon many a plan due to monsoon season storms and there have been a couple of emergency hospital trips and even a bout of surprise surgery. I waved goodbye to AUD $485 after a last-minute change of heart meant that I didn’t move to Australia where I had a working holiday visa waiting for me.
But on the bright side, all of these situations resolved themselves in the end and added an interesting twist on the experience. When you travel for an extended period I think you can expect to become more adaptable and learn to take things on the chin more. And, the many, many highs of travel hugely outweigh those low or frustrating moments.
Solo travel is scary (as is everything else in life)
Solo long term travel has its scary moments, but so does group travel and travelling as a couple (I’ve experienced all three and personally feel like solo travelling is the least scary). Even if you don’t travel, you will still have your fair share of scary, stressful and difficult moments throughout your adult life. Moving to a new city in your home country, starting a new job and launching a business are also scary experiences and I imagine that buying a house or having a baby is terrifying. Everything that will ultimately change your life in some way is scary but that’s all part of the adventure.
There are a lot of travel horror stories floating around the internet and any aspiring traveller will have someone try to send them into a panic about the thought of solo travel. Yes, long term solo travel does have its risks. And though it pains me to say it, it’s more challenging for solo female travellers as we are burdened with the task of taking even more personal safety measures than male travellers.
Looking back, I’ve had a fortunate experience while travelling. I’ve managed to breeze through three years without getting robbed at gunpoint, fall off any cliffs or die of a horrific tropical disease. But there have been situations where I haven’t felt as safe as I would have liked to. Although in fairness, nothing has compared with the fear of checking my bank account while working as a publicity assistant at a London publishing house.
You can get robbed anywhere in the world, even your hometown. We don’t have petrifying tropical diseases in the UK but there are plenty of other illnesses that I’m equally anxious about developing. It doesn’t matter where I am in the world I will always feel tense while in a taxi on my own and I wouldn’t consider walking around at night with my keys clenched between my fists – regardless of where I am. So I might as well do these things somewhere exotic.
Travel doesn’t need to change you
There is a cultural obsession with how travel changes us. I pondered over this a lot during my first year of solo travel around Southeast Asia and New Zealand. Was I changing? And if so, was it for better or for worse? Was I ‘finding myself’? Did I really care?
Travel hasn’t changed me as a person, but it has made me feel more at ease with who I am. In some ways, I feel like I’ve reverted back to what I was like as a child.
Back then, I disliked big cities, big crowds and big pressure. I loved nature walks, hanging out with my cat and riding my bike. Since travelling long term, I’ve sought out rural destinations, avoided busy places, adopted a cat, and travelled as much as possible via bicycle (or motorbike). Embarrassed about my label ‘shy’ I spent my late teens and twenties trying to be anything but. Now I’m happy to retreat into my shell and embrace the fact that yes, I am shy and also that I’m not so good at handling pressure.
Sure long term travel might change you as a person but it’s not the end game or purpose. But it might change your perspective on what you want from your life. As for finding yourself, that phrase just cringes me right out.
Sometimes it’s good to plan
I do quite to travel off the cuff and not plan too much. Obviously, I do some light research before I travel somewhere but I don’t create schedules or prep too much. Looking back though I wish I had planned some stages in my journey better.
As a long term traveller, I stay put in the same place for weeks to months (or, in light of 2020, nest in one place for over a whole year, commit to buying my own blender, and adopt a street cat!). Sometimes staying longer term means that I have a looser grasp on time and end up forgetting to check out some of the places that in hindsight I would have adored. I never feel compelled to visit all the top attractions, especially if there will be crowds, but I do like to see places that appeal to me personally.
Take, for example, Bali. Collectively, I’ve spent around four months on the island without seeing a single waterfall. The island has some of the most beautiful waterfalls in the entire region. I (like any normal person) love frolicking in waterfalls, and now I’m kicking myself for not managing my time better and for braving the crowds. Although I suppose that just means I get to go back one day… swings and roundabouts.
Home is a concept
“I’m not homeless. I’m just houseless.”
When I watched Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland (which is amazing, by the way) I related so much to this line. Since I don’t own or rent any property back in the UK, whichever hostel bed, Airbnb, night bus seat, or airport floor I’m sleeping on tonight is ‘home’ and the feeling is only liberating.
When I boarded that one way flight out of London I felt in my heart that my time living in the UK had come to an end. I no longer consider my birth country my ‘home’ and I always grimace when I’m asked about my plans to ‘go home’ in the same way I do when the topic of ‘settling down’ crops up. Not that I’m not excited to catch up with family, friends and places that I will always love. I just don’t see myself sticking around in the UK long term and sliding back into my old ways. I don’t feel the need to pinpoint one specific place as home.
Having met many other nomadic types and expats who have similar feelings, it’s affirming to be around others who share this sentiment. Not that you have to think like this when you travel perpetually, many people do still consider their birth country as home and that’s totally fine too. One of the attractive things about long term travel is that no two people want the same lifestyle and you have the freedom to make your own decision about what the concept of home really means to you.
Friendships and long term travel
I absolutely, hand on my heart, love my long term travel lifestyle and I adore travelling both solo and with my boyfriend. Since starting my long term travel life, I’m lucky that I have never felt lonely (to be honest, I’ve always really liked being alone and now I have the space to prioritise personal time over socialising) and have been fortunate to make some incredible friends along the way. But I really notice the absence of long term friendships. I miss the consistency of friendship.
It makes me sad that I haven’t seen some of the people I love the most in over three years. Some of my loveliest travel memories are from when friends flew out to visit me in New Zealand and times that I’ve crossed paths with familiar faces from England. WhatsApp makes things easier but it’s obviously a phone call is not the same and I miss those in-person conversations talking about nothing with the people I’m most comfortable with.
One of the more sobering realisations about long term travel is that many, or even most, long distance friendships will crumble. At the very most, they may revert to sporadic updates (usually when a conventional milestone happens, such as someone is getting married, having a baby, or buying a house). But what I really love is speaking to my closest friends on a regular basis and having normal chats that reach beyond all the headline stuff.
The other side to this is that it’s also challenging to meet wonderful people on the road and to have to say goodbye after only a few days, weeks or months of spending time together. Of course, the silver lining is that there are a lot of places I’m motivated to travel to purely to see certain faces again.
Travel blogging is a time eater
I started my first travel blog a few months into my travels with the purpose of it being my portfolio to find freelance writing gigs. The OG All About The Après was a disaster and has long been laid to pixellated rest with its uncompressed graphics and even more typos than you’ll find on the site today. This one has a long way to go before I will consider feeling remotely happy with it.
Running a travel blog while long term travelling (and possibly a freelance business) is so time-consuming and I honestly am amazed by anyone who manages to maintain a consistent travel blog alongside actually travelling and another job. I’m a patchy blogger with hopes to start posting more regularly at some point but until then it will be ad hoc scribbles and vague travel tips (when I actually remember to take notes about places I visit).
Alright, so that’s a few stray thoughts and roving reflections on long term travel. Fingers crossed that this time next year I’ll still be living and reflecting on this vagabond life. And hopefully, considering the current situation, vaccinated!
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