A Quick Note on “Piracy” My primary goal for this book is to share my knowledge and to make your life better. Honestly. My secondary goal is to profit from it. If you bought this book from me: Thank you for supporting my work! Your purchase motivates me to continue to produce life changing books and articles. Every sale means something to me, both financially and personally. Please feel free to share this book with your friends. If you did not buy this book: I hope that you enjoy the book and that it makes a big difference in your life. If you get a lot out of it, and can afford it, please consider paying for the book retroactively by going to tynan.net/lifenomadic.
Part One A New Perspective
INTRODUCTION “For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilization, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.” Robert Louis Stevenson
“Travelling is like flirting with life. It’s like saying, I would stay and love you, but I have to go; this is my station.” Lisa St. Aubin De Teran
“It’s the police! They’re surrounding us.” Oh. Of course. I felt a little bit silly for the beaming smile and “bonjour” I gave the first guy as he passed us in the narrow, halfflooded tunnel. It was a clever strategy: send an un-uniformed officer past us, so that when we see four more officers waiting ahead of us, we have nowhere to run. Not that running was actually a possibility. The cloudy spring water we had been sloshing through for the past few hours impeded our speed just as much as the massive bundles of copper cables, once Paris’s first telephone system, which now snake through the tunnels like overgrown vines.
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These weren’t just any police, either. I’d heard the legends of the Cataflics, the Catacomb Police, whose only job was to keep trespassers out of the catacombs. Now we stood face to face with them. Without saying a word, they escorted us out to the abandoned train tunnel from which we had entered. When we arrived eight hours earlier, slivers of light still reached the middle of the tunnel. Now the only light came from the menacing headlamps on the officers’ helmets. To be honest, I barely cared that we were being caught. Exploring the catacombs was a once in a lifetime opportunity that was worth any slap on the wrist we might receive. Three hundred kilometers of underground tunnels and caverns weave through Paris’s underground, but less than one kilometer is open to the public. Such limited access didn’t satisfy our thirst for exploration, so we took matters into our own hands: we broke into the catacombs. It was spectacular. We walked through a German bunker from World War II which still housed rusting machinery from the war. We sat and ate baguettes in a giant cavern that played host to the underground party scene of Paris during the sixties. Detritus from the parties still carpeted the ground. We saw an obscure gravestone of a monk who had died in the catacombs after sneaking down to gorge himself on wine. And, of course, we crawled through foot-deep seas of human bones, now splintered and caked with mud. “They want to bring you to the police station,” Clement, our guide, translated, “because they know that if they give you a fine, you’ll just leave the country without paying it.”
INTRODUCTION
The absurdity of the situation struck me. I’d never even been to Europe until a few days ago, and now the French Police were going to arrest me. If I was still in Austin with my friends and family, I would probably be grocery shopping right now. Or maybe watching the latest episode of The Office at a friend’s house. As we walked along the old train tracks to the paddy wagon, a thought struck me. “This is my life.” Life Nomadic Eight months later, the memories of Paris have yielded to newer adventures. Thanks to my best friend and frequent travel companion, Todd, and his mastery of the French language, we were released without any sort of penalty. I think he managed to convey that we were more interested in French history than vandalism. Now I’m in Panama, enjoying warm, sunny weather in the midde of winter. From my apartment in downtown Panama City, I can look across the street and see the waves of the Pacific lapping up against the shore. In a few hours I’ll take a fifteen minute walk to one of my favorite restaurants in the world, Casa Vegetariana. For dinner I always eat the same thing: a mountain of brown rice, vegetables, beans, and fruit, with a glass of the best fresh squeezed orange juice in the world to wash it all down. Three weeks from now I’ll be gone. All of my worldly possessions will be crammed into a tiny backpack and I’ll be exploring the Dominican Republic and Haiti. From there I’ll take a ship across
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the Atlantic to Europe, a two week voyage that will afford me the time do some much needed editing. After that, who knows? Right now I’m considering Scandinavia, Northern Africa, or India. I am a modern day nomad, part of a tiny sliver of the population who have discovered that traveling the world is a more exciting and satisfying alternative to the Standard American Life. By leveraging technology, we have separated our obligations and commitments from fixed locations. As we travel around the world we work, play, and learn. Incredibly, living this way isn’t expensive. My total costs, including food, flights, rent, and entertainment amount to less than the average mortgage payment in the United States. My low monthly costs don’t reflect the lifestyle you might associate with them. I live better than I did in the United States and I want for nothing. In this book I will share the secrets of living this amazing lifestyle. You will learn how to live in five star cruise ships, all meals included, for $25 a day. You will understand how to book international flights at forty percent off or more, sometimes as cheap as $16 per flight, including taxes. You’ll live in furnished apartments in world-class cities for $17 per day. Most importantly, you’ll see the world and experience everything it has to offer. Welcome to Life Nomadic.
INTRODUCTION
What is a Modern Nomad? “Be indifferent to where you live.” Miyamoto Musashi
We’ve come a long way from the herding-yaks-through-thesteppes days of nomadic life. Nomads have been roaming the earth for somewhere around ten thousand years, but only recently crossed a critical threshold. Until now, being a nomad has meant isolating oneself from modern culture. From the early years of nomadic tribes to the more recent phenomenon of self-outcasting adventurers disappearing from society, an element of sacrifice has been bundled with the glory of mobility and freedom. A modern nomad is a different breed. Instead of isolating himself from society, he does the opposite. He goes and experiences more of the world than he ever could ever experience staying in one place, but is still able to stay connected with people far away from him. A modern nomad isn’t someone who has no home; he’s someone who has many homes. Maybe you want to divide your time up between four countries in a year, following spring or summer around the globe. Perhaps breezing through one hundred countries in a year would make you happy. Or maybe you just want to live a simpler life in your hometown, but be ready and able to leave as soon as an opportunity grabs your interest. You’ll have plenty of time to figure out what sort of nomadic lifestyle you want to live. To get you started with a few ideas, I’ll share with you what it means to me.
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Flexibility How many times have you started off a sentence with, “I’d love to, but I have to…”? A million times. Me too. I strive to cut that phrase, and the underlying causes for it, out of my life. If a friend is planning a trip to India and invites me to come along, I want as few barriers in my way as possible. I may not go, but if I don’t it’s because I have a good reason, not because life’s obligations are getting in my way. I have no mortgage, no bills, and very little stuff to store when I leave. If I decide that I’m sick of black sand beaches and would rather go skiing in the Alps, I can pack and be ready to leave in 30 minutes with few or no expenses constraining my decision. Flexibility of movement isn’t the only type of flexibility that’s important, though. Most days I spend time studying new languages, so that I can have conversations with as many different people in the world as possible. I focus on languages spoken in many countries, big countries, or countries that I just love (like Japan). I eat an extremely healthy diet and maintain an active lifestyle so that no activity is beyond my reach. I want to be able to go on a week-long hike through the Napali Coast of Hawaii just as easily as I can lounge on a sleeper train on a three-day trip across Vietnam. Our world offers an amazing and limitless wealth of experiences and knowledge , laid out for your personal consumption, and it’s important to be ready and willing to take advantage of what it has to offer. 1
1 By the way, not many of these are within your city. Think about what you’re missing out on if you don’t leave.
INTRODUCTION
On the other hand, it’s important to remember that the ability to travel doesn’t carry with it the obligation to travel. There’s nothing wrong with spending time in your hometown with your friends and family. But don’t blame me if, once you’ve had a taste of the nomadic life, you become too antsy to stay there for long. Deep Experience I am leaving the town to the invaders: increasingly numerous, mediocre, dirty, badly behaved, shameless tourists. Brigitte Bardot
I’m not content to be a spectator in life or in my travels. I don’t want to see a new culture, I want to be a part of it. Living like the locals, speaking in the local language, and visiting the sites the locals think are important are all strategies to achieve this goal. When traveling it’s easy to get stuck on the well beaten trails frequented by backpackers, tourists, and vacationers. There’s nothing wrong with spending time on these trails (who’s going to go to Peru without seeing Macchu Picchu?), but don’t live on them. Live where the locals live, eat where they eat, make friends with them, and take their advice. Before visiting a new country, I try to at the very least read the Wikipedia entry on it to get a sense of what the country is like and how it got that way. The GDP figure gives a good sense of how much money locals are living on. High Quality of Life It’s possible to travel the world for even less than I do. You can stay in the grimiest hostels, which always seem to be 24 hour
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parties, and eat nothing but ramen noodles. Some people do this and enjoy it quite a bit. That’s not for me, though. I’ll stay in a hostel here and there, but I prefer to rent clean apartments with wireless internet in the best areas of town. I love eating high quality fresh food, and will always pay for it, even when doing so costs a lot of money. And unless I’m spending a weekend with a Kuna Indian tribe, I want hot water. Living as a nomad should raise your quality of living, not lower it. The key concept to understand is that a high quality of living doesn’t mean spending a lot of money. Flash almost always costs money; substance is often a bargain. Cutting Edge Technology Just because I can be found in some of the most remote areas of the world, like the Darien Gap between Panama and Colombia, doesn’t mean that I’m not going to keep up with cutting edge technology. We live in an exciting time, and it’s important to me to stay part of the internet age. I carry a laptop, photojournalist-grade digital camera, and HD video camera with me at all times. My watch and phone both have GPS receivers in them to help me navigate and avoid getting lost. I’m never far from the internet. At the same time, a lot of technology is garbage and I’m happy to walk away from it. I don’t need a 42 inch plasma screen to see an edited version of the world – I’ll see the real thing with my own eyes. There’s a gadget or gizmo for just about any task these days, and despite previous tendencies to buy them all, I’m now much happier to have fewer, but very high quality electronics.
REDEFINING REALITY Of journeying the benefits are many: the freshness it bringeth to the heart, the seeing and hearing of marvelous things, the delight of beholding new cities, the meeting of unknown friends, and the learning of high manners. Sadi Gulistan
My favorite restaurant in Austin, Texas serves lunch until 2pm and begins serving dinner at 6:30pm, which leaves a quiet four hour period between meals to work. They’re technically closed then, but eating almost every meal at the same restaurant grants the customer a certain amount of leeway. I was working on programming a piece of software, called a multivariate testing tool, which I was convinced would make me rich . Every day, seven days a week, I had the same routine at the restaurant. I’d eat lunch, work hard for four hours, eat dinner, and usually go hang out with my friends. 1
One afternoon, frustrated with a programming problem I couldn’t seem to solve, I leaned back in my wooden dining chair and stared out the window. For no apparent reason, a thought crossed my mind: Why do I live in Austin? It’s a great city, of course, and all of my friends 1
It didn’t.
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were there, but why was I there? My work was portable. I could be anywhere. I added up the years I’d lived in Austin. Twelve. That was a lot of time to be in one place. I thought about all of the cities in the world that I’d never seen and, if I stayed in Austin, maybe wouldn’t ever see. The thought froze me in my tracks. It occurred to me that if I chose to, I could move anywhere. I had friends and family in Boston – maybe I should live there for a while, just for a change of scenery? Or maybe Los Angeles, where I lived for a year and still had a lot of good friends? What about somewhere totally new? Maybe New York or Chicago? I’d been to both cities a few times and liked them. Why was I constraining myself to the United States, I asked myself. It’s a great country, but plenty of people live in other countries happily. I hadn’t done much international traveling, just a trip to Japan, a trip to Taiwan, and a few quick jaunts around the Caribbean. There was a lot left to see. And then a final epiphany hit me. I didn’t have to choose just one country – I could live nowhere and everywhere at once, as a modern day nomad. As soon as I had the idea, I knew that it was the answer.
REDEFINING REALITY
You Don’t Have to Do What Other People Are Doing “Two roads diverge in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” Robert Frost
“If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.” Jim Rohn
Perhaps the most important thing I’ve learned in my life is that doing anything because other people are doing it is a terrible idea. It’s like letting other people run your life by default, all while maintaining the tenuous illusion that you’re in control. If you want to live an extraordinary life, nomad or not, you’ll eventually have to start considering all possibilities, not just the ones made convenient by society. Ninety nine percent of the world is off the beaten path, both literally and metaphorically. It takes effort to get off the beaten path. Modern life is set up to keep you on it. For a practical example, think about five random people you know. How different are their lives? Do they all have a car, an apartment or a house, and a bit of credit card debt? Do they spend their time watching TV and movies, eating at fast food and mid priced restaurant chains? Do they spend vacations in Florida or Mexico, with the once every five years weeklong trip to Europe?
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I don’t even mean to criticize that lifestyle all that much. Compared to most of the world , it’s a pretty deluxe life . It’s comfortable and safe. 2
What I am trying to say, what I want to shout out from the rooftops, is that there is a lot more to life than that. The world is a spectacular and complex place, and most of the joys and wonders of it aren’t in your neighborhood. When you finally get off the beaten path, you’ll find two things. First, you’ll reconnect with the sense of discovery and exploration that you had when you were a child. The act of blazing new trails and taking full responsibility for your life is exhilarating. You gain a new quiet confidence from knowing that you’re capable of driving your life, not just riding along in it. Second, you’ll find that it’s not as hard or scary as you expected. My first real experience with this was in college. I went to school at the University of Texas and I hated it. The school was fine, but I wasn’t. None of the things I dreamed of doing in life were dependent on a degree. I was there by default, because society and parents told me that going to college is what you do when you graduate from high school. I was scared to drop out. Staying the course was the easy decision, but it was also the kind of decision that slowly rots the soul from the inside. The path of convenient compromises is a dangerous one.
2 To be totally honest, I’m not convinced it’s much better than third world living in many ways. As I rode on an otherwise foreigner-free train through the belly of Cambodia, stopping occasionally at villages where the average citizen lived in a stick hut and probably made less than $1000 a year, I couldn’t help but notice that they all seemed much happier than any cross section of America I’ve ever seen.
REDEFINING REALITY
Even though I knew it would devastate my parents, I finally mustered the courage to drop out. I knew that it was the right choice for me, even if I didn’t know exactly where it would lead. Maybe more accurately, I knew that staying was wrong. I’ve never regretted the decision, and have never once found myself in a position where I wished I had a degree. I broke free from the beaten path and began the march to my own drummer, and it was wonderful. Once you take one scary leap like that, the next one becomes a lot easier, and the next one easier still. Soon it becomes second nature to follow your own dreams rather than other people’s expectations, and doing anything else is seen for the absurdity that it really is. People will always warn you of the dangers of veering off the beaten path, but in their warnings you can see the fear that you might prove their worst nightmare true: that living your life on your own terms is not totally impossible. It’s a possibility that most people would rather not confront. The stakes are too high. If It Seems Too Good to Be True, It May Still Be True Shortly after dropping out of school, I became a professional gambler. Once you’re off the beaten path, there’s a lot out there to explore. Back in the day it was unbelievably easy to make hundreds of dollars an hour with virtually no risk. If you’re the kind of person to whom that sounds too good to be true, you’re in good company.
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Almost none of my friends or family believed me. Rumors spread about the massive losses I must be concealing. Even after I bought a Mercedes – in cash– my mother told me that if I just took a moment to add up all my winnings and losses, I would surely find that I had lost a lot of money. I had the utopian idea that all of my friends would do this too, and that we would all have money and be able to do whatever we wanted all the time. But no one was interested. Finally, after arguing with one friend, he let me use his credit card. I guaranteed that I would pay him back for any losses, but if we won he could keep the winnings. In front of his own eyes I signed up for an account, deposited $1000, made $250 more within half an hour, and cashed out. A week later he got the check, having made $250 from thin air. This particular friend is a genius who later went to a prestigious school to become a lawyer. Did he jump on the opportunity and use it to pay for law school? No. It was too good to be true, so he came up with a bizarre and illogical explanation for the whole thing and never made another dollar from it. Meanwhile, it funded my life for years. The same attitude surrounds Life Nomadic. When people probe about my life and I explain my perpetual state of travel, their eyes glaze over and they invariably say, “Wow. I wish I could do that too.” It’s an autopilot response. It never actually crosses their mind as a real possibility. When I start to explain in vain how they can do it too, they come up with a million reasons why they can’t do it. It’s too good to be true.
REDEFINING REALITY
Consider for a moment where that attitude leads. If we approach any amazing opportunity with suspicion and disbelief, how many amazing opportunities will we take in our lives? None? Think about your heroes in life. Which attitude do they have? Where would they be if they disregarded anything that seemed too good to be true? That doesn’t mean to blindly accept everything as gospel. If a Prince of Nigeria sends you an e-mail, unsolicited, offering a couple hundred million dollars, it’s probably a scam. The key is to use your own judgment and research things for yourself, rather than mechanically writing them off just because other people have done so. If you’re going to spend the time to read the rest of this book, make sure that you can accept that sometimes things that sound too good to be true aren’t. I don’t exaggerate, I don’t lie, and I don’t mislead. Everything in this book is true and attainable by you. You May As Well Try Like me, maybe you have some friends with credit card debt, or maybe you have some debt yourself. When people tell me they’re in debt, I always ask them if they regret their purchases. If they could turn back the hands of time, erase the purchase from their history and escape from debt, would they? The vast majority of them would do it in a heartbeat. They talk about how worthless their purchases were and how they would give them up in a second to be out of debt.
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Then there’s the small remaining minority who also don’t like being in debt, but wouldn’t give back what they purchased, even if it meant being out of debt. Can you guess what that second group spent money on? Experiences. Usually travel. No one ever regrets spending money on travel, and I think the reason why is obvious. Possessions come and go, but experiences change us as people. They make us better, whether it’s the gift of great memories and stories or lessons learned through mistakes. Think about trips you’ve been on. Would you erase them from your experience if you could get the cost of them back? A recent study at San Francisco State University confirmed my informal observations. They found that when people spent money on experiences, it made them happier on average. The reason, they concluded, was that experiences connected people and “made them feel alive”. So, in a way, money can buy happiness after all, as long as it’s spent on experiences. And unlike material possessions, our consumption of experiences is limited by our time. Even better, some of the best experiences don’t cost a dime. I can’t promise you that your step into the world of nomads will be successful. It may not be. I can help by sharing with you, in an honest and straightforward manner, the things I’ve learned through my own experience and through learning from other people, but there are variables neither of us can control. Who knows? Maybe you’ll spend a couple months abroad and decide that you’re too homesick to continue. I’d suggest to you, though, that you won’t regret giving it a shot even if it doesn’t work out. The worst that can happen is that you
REDEFINING REALITY
come back a better person, with new perspective you couldn’t have gotten any other way. In the following chapters I will outline everything you need to virtually ensure your success and happiness as a nomad. I bring up this point only to encourage the voice in the back of your head, the one that says, “maybe I should try this”, and causes your stomach to feel like it’s on a roller coaster. Listen to the voice.
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THE NOMADIC EXPERIENCE The end is never as satisfying as the journey. To have achieved everything but to have done so without integrity and excitement is to have achieved nothing. Unknown Source
Freedom is a condition of mind, and the best way to secure it is to breed it. Elbert Hubbard
We had only three days in Barcelona, and I was staying in. Not only that, I was glued to my laptop getting work done. There asn’t even a rainstorm to blame my homebody behavior on. The sun was shining and the city was an unexplored treasure trove of adventure, culture, and sights. “This is why I’m able to do this,” I reminded myself. “If I didn’t take time out to work, I wouldn’t be able to afford to travel all the time.” Being a nomad requires you to simultaneously have a rock solid and stable inner life and a flexible and unpredictable outer life. This is true for both your emotional state as well as your discipline. At times you’ll find yourself stranded in some airport or train station for a few days, with no one around you who can speak your language, let alone a friend. You’ll be waiting in long lines to try
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to rebook your flight, and later you’ll wander out into a foreign city in search of somewhere to sleep. That’s not to say that a nomadic life is lonely or even one of happy solitude. On the contrary, you’ll make tons of friends all over the world. You will, however, find yourself in a much more varied selection of situations, some of which will require a lot of emotional fortitude. Unless you’re independently wealthy, you’ll need to work while you travel. On the plus side, you’ll find plenty of dead time to get work done. Some of my more productive sessions are during airport layovers, flights, or train rides. The flip side of mobile work is that it takes a lot more discipline than working in an office, especially when confronted daily by the treasures of the world. Offices intentionally minimize distraction. They corral a group of peers there who, just by their presence, will hold you accountable and make you feel guilty if you don’t work. When you work on the go, it’s the exact opposite. Even if you’re spending months at a time in a city, there will always be more to see or do. You’ll generally be working alone and on your computer, meaning that blogs, news, and other time-wasting sites are just another source of distraction a couple clicks away. At first you may find it difficult to work. Our brains have been trained to believe that traveling equals being on vacation, which equals not working. This is a link that must be broken. If this scares you, don’t let it. Becoming more emotionally resilient and disciplined is almost involuntary when you become a nomad. If you already have these skills, then you’re all set. If you don’t, there’s probably no better way to build them.
INTRODUCTION
The Subtle Benefits of Being a Nomad Fresh off a seven month trip around the world I was flying back to Austin, Texas. I loved traveling, but was still excited to see everyone back home. Best of all, everyone thought that I was coming home months later, so I had the opportunity to surprise them all. I spent the day setting up elaborate scenarios to surprise my friends, like convincing the manager at a restaurant to allow me to be my friend’s waiter1. At the end of the day, after everyone had gone to bed, I realized something. Nothing had changed. My friends were all the same, in just about the same jobs and relationships they were in before. The restaurants I used to eat at were still standing and still serving the same great food. The contrast was stark. I had learned languages, seen the world, gotten into countless adventures, but Austin was still the same. It was as if I could see the fork in the road in my life. If I had stayed, the months would have passed and not much would have happened in my life, either. I took the other path, and had crammed a lifetime of experience into just seven months. And I was aching to go do it again. Traveling puts so many decisions and human interactions in front of you that you have no choice but to grow as a person. You learn to rely on yourself and get empirical proof that you can handle anything that’s thrown your way. 1 It was so far out of his reality that I could possibly be back that he stared me in the eye and ordered for about thirty seconds before jolting back and realizing that it was me.
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It’s easy to have amazing experiences when you travel. The new and exciting lurk around every corner. The backdrop of your life has changed from the predictable and boring to the exciting and unexpected. Grocery shopping in Taiwan brings you to the bottom floor of the world’s tallest building. Walking to dinner in Japan marches you past groups of people dressed up like cats from space, who are singing some unintelligible J-pop song. Going to the post office in Paris is like walking through a history museum. Daily life involves intimate interaction with the near invisible nuances of each place you’re in. You learn the minutia of the country that can only be discovered through firsthand experience. And then there’s the language. Without even trying your proficiency in any language you can “get by with” will skyrocket. I hadn’t hired a tutor or taken classes, but as I left Panama after living there for two months, it occurred to me that I could understand pretty much everything anyone said to me in Spanish. It had become second nature. As babies we learn about the world by soaking it in passively. Traveling allows us to do the same in our adulthood. It’s Not Vacation If some people didn’t tell you, you’d never know they’d been away on a vacation. Kin Hubbard
Despite placing travel next to godliness, I hate vacation. Vacations are the fast food version of travel. They’re artificial, consumed in a hurry, and ultimately unsatisfying.
INTRODUCTION
That’s not to say they aren’t fun. They can be, but fun without substance is unfulfilling. Taking a vacation is like taking a break from your real life. For seven days or so you get to be in a fantasy version of a life that doesn’t in any way resemble yours. A couple dozen piña coladas later and you’re back to your regular life, counting down the days to your next vacation. I refuse to accept that this is how we are supposed to be living. If you need breaks from your life like that, I’d suggest that you examine your regular life more closely. We’re not meant to spend the majority of our best hours, the daylight while we’re young, slaving away doing something we don’t want to do. It’s no coincidence that this standard modern lifestyle stresses and depresses nearly everyone in it. There’s this misconception that luxury is sitting on the beach doing nothing. It’s not. Luxury is having the ability and lack of encumbrances to do whatever you want to do. In that way, a minimalist nomad has the ultimate luxury. He has his time and his choice and can make of them whatever he pleases. Wayne Dyer says, “You can never have enough of what you don’t want.” Be careful what you chase.
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Minimalism To simplify complications is the first essential of success. George Earle Buckle
It’s not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential. Bruce Lee
Give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with its necessaries. John L. Motley
It had been fifteen minutes since I posted the ad, but each time I poked my head out the window I was answered with an empty street glaring back at me. Maybe my plan wasn’t going to work. Just as I wondered if anyone would ever come, the first car timidly pulled up to my house. The stranger got out, double checked the address, and cautiously walked up to the door. It was a strange ad - I didn’t blame him for his hesitation. But before long, the floodgates were unleashed. Pickup trucks had backed up onto my lawn, the owners darting through my house, piling their arms high with my stuff, and bringing it all outside. It was a frenzy. No one even knew or cared that I owned the house. To them I appeared to be a fellow vulture, and they had to get the goods before I did. The intensity and diligence of some of the freeloaders made me wonder if they did this professionally. The title of my ad on Craigslist was, “Come to my house and take everything I own for free.” I had two conflicting thoughts running through my head as people hauled away everything I owned.
INTRODUCTION
First, I realized that no one really cared about what they were taking. In one corner of my bedroom I had put a stack of plates that I had once treasured. They were off white, shaped somewhere between a circle and a square, and had real gold around the edges. I had fallen in love with them when I found a great deal on them online. I waited for a week for the package to arrive, and wasted no time in replacing my old plates with them. The new owner of the plates glanced at them, and in a five second span decided that since they were free, he may as well add them to his pile of loot. All of that consideration I had given them seemed lost. Even more jarring than that first thought was the overwhelming feeling that I was doing these people a disservice. I felt a twinge of guilt, as if I was deceiving them. As each load was taken from my house, I felt a burden lifted. No longer would I have to keep track of those items or deal with them in the future. Their utility was gone, but so was the responsibility associated with them. The looters seemed oblivious to the freedom they were inadvertently paying me in return for my stuff. When the last person took a broom and two blazers I never wore, my house was empty. All traces of my life there had vanished. Though I’d gotten rid of two thirds of my stuff, I never wanted for any of it at my new condo. I loved the empty shelves and closets, and the lack of clutter. Tidying up was a trivial task. I have a theory on hotels. Have you ever noticed how you can “go on vacation” in your own city, just by staying in a hotel? The funny part about it is that it works. It’s relaxing. A hotel has nothing that you don’t have in your own home, yet it’s still occasionally worth it to pay a hundred or two dollars to sleep there.
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Why is that? I think that it’s because hotels have no stuff in them. There’s no distraction, clutter, or mess to clean up. It’s a vacation in minimalism-land. My parents moved that same year, and I was conscripted to help them2. I think I probably officially became a minimalist sometime during the third day of lugging mostly useless stuff from one house to another3. Just as I initially had no real predisposition to be a nomad, I also had no real disposition to be a minimalist. In fact, a non-fiction book in which I’m a character, introduces me by saying: “[Tynan] was our fourth roommate… In his spare time -- which was basically all his time -- he explored caves, recorded extremely catchy rap songs, and surfed the Internet for unusual items to buy and then never use.”4 If one of your defining characteristics is that you buy things that you never use, you’re probably not a minimalist, and I certainly wasn’t. Once I started down the path of minimalism, the momentum kept moving me further in that direction. In less than a year I sold most of what remained and I moved into the smallest RV I 2 I was so sick of moving that I tried to hire a day laborer to help them in my stead. I felt like it was a great deal for them since they would get someone stronger than me. They took slight offense to me not wanting to help. 3 In the interest of full disclosure, three large Tupperware tubs, which they still store for me today, held my mementos from my childhood. I’m more sentimental than a minimalist should be. 4
From The Game by Neil Strauss. I go by the name “Herbal” in the book.
INTRODUCTION
could find that had a shower and a full sized bed. I didn’t even park it in an RV park. I had become addicted to the freedom and peace of mind that accompanies minimalism. Each possession I got rid of was another possession I never had to keep track of, put away, or consider upgrading. Other people’s life choices seemed to be dictated in a large part by the needs of their pile of stuff, but mine were increasingly based solely on my desires. There’s no way to become a minimalist without just jumping in head first. And there’s just no way to become a nomad without being a minimalist. If you have stuff lingering back home then you have roots and you will never feel the true freedom of being a nomad. It’s a leap of faith that you’ll have to take. Remember that all success and most happiness comes from pushing your comfort zone and taking risks. This is one of those situations. A friend of mine sold everything to travel. After the better part of a year, he decided not to be a nomad anymore. But he’s still a minimalist and will never go back. Mentally prepare yourself now, because in a few chapters I’m going to outline a step by step plan to get rid of everything you own in two weeks. It’s drastic, and it’s outside of your comfort zone, but that’s where the best part of life is.
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Confronting Fears We must travel in the direction of our fear. Berryman, John
The more I traveled the more I realized that fear makes strangers of people who should be friends. - Maclaine, Shirley
When I first set off to be a nomad, I knew that I would need to insure my belongings. I had about $5000 worth of gear, and I considered it an absolute certainty that all or most of it would be stolen. After all, I was going to be gone for a year, some of it in third world countries. The insurance agent quoted me three hundred dollars for a year. Sign me up! I gave them a full list of the countries I’d be visiting. How could they possibly see that list and not realize that they would have to replace each of my prized possessions? I laughed at the stupid bet they were placing. It turns out that I was the foolish one. I traveled with a friend and neither of was robbed once. Neither of us was attacked or threatened at any point in the trip. And we were asking for it, by the way. Knowing that we were fully insured, we wouldn’t think twice about walking around “dangerous” cities at night with our cameras out. There were three failed pick pocketing attempts, two of which were in a first world country. That’s it.
INTRODUCTION
The simple fact is that the world just isn’t as dangerous as it seems. The more safety I’ve found in dangerous places, the more I’ve pushed it. I’ve rarely felt uncomfortable. Recently a friend and I traveled to the Darien Gap in Panama, which is known to be extremely dangerous. It’s supposedly infested with guerillas and drug dealers. When we reached Yavisa, the last town before the Gap, we were stopped by the police and brought into their barracks. They wrote down all of our information just in case we went missing, and warned us not to cross the bridge that led to the jungle. “They will kill you.” We had just driven four hours to be in that jungle. There was just no way were going to turn back now. At first I was scared. I walked as quietly as possible, deluded into thinking that I could somehow spot the trained guerilla before he spotted me. The narrow path led deeper and deeper into the jungle, until finally I saw something. It looked like some sort of jungle outpost. We cautiously approached it. It was someone’s house, and it had a bright orange hammock hanging from the logs that formed the roof. People don’t sit out on brightly colored hammocks in areas where there’s guerilla warfare going on. We continued on through the jungle until the path stopped and we couldn’t make it any farther. No guerillas, no danger. Just huts every once in a while that housed friendly people who were surprised to see white people hiking through their jungle. Are there dangerous things in the Darien Gap? Sure. But as I’ve found is always the case, the danger was overstated.
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Another time we were jogging at night through Panama City. We were new to the city and didn’t really know our way around, so we’d jog in new directions each night and use our GPS watches to keep track of how far we’d gone. We turned down an alley lined with decrepit buildings, and all of a sudden we were mobbed by people who lived there running up to us. Did they rob us? No, they told us that it was dangerous and pointed us in a different route. The world is packed full of people, and the overwhelming majority of them are good honest people who want you to enjoy their country. This goes double if you seem like you are actually interested in participating in their culture, and not steamrolling over it with your Western values. A friend of mine lived in Rio De Janiero for a year. Despite it being a dangerous city, he was never once robbed. His friend’s parents came to visit for a couple weeks and were robbed twice. The difference is that they looked like tourists, spoke none of the language, and probably stuck out like a sore thumb. If you want to be safe and be respected by people in their country, walk confidently, don’t wear flashy jewelry, smile, and say hello. The fact that a country is unknown makes it feel scary and dangerous. I’m going to Haiti next month, which scares me a little bit. But I know exactly what will happen. I’ll get there, get familiar with the place, and it will feel as comfortable as walking at home in Austin. Embrace the unknown. Another worry people sometimes have, my former self included, is of corrupt police. We get this idea that corrupt police are above
INTRODUCTION
the law and will torture us, even if only financially, just for fun. This is a misconception. My experience with corrupt police has been overwhelmingly pleasant, and I’ve dealt with a dozen or so. If you haven’t done anything remarkably stupid, they usually just let you go without even asking for a bribe. After being goaded on by the local kids below, my friend Todd jumped off a thirty foot high bridge into a river. The bridge had, very clearly, a sign warning of a fifty dollar fine and fifty days in jail. As soon as he hit the water, the police went after him. They explained that jumping off the bridge was prohibited, but they let him go without even asking for a bribe. Cops are people too, even if they’re corrupt. If you do have to deal with a crooked cop, just fold twenty dollars up and hand it to him discreetly. He may ask for more, but if you tell him that’s all you’ve got, he’ll take it. Paying small bribes is a lot more convenient than dealing with real tickets. I was mugged once, in the Dominican Republic. There were two routes to my favorite restaurant: one went on busy street packed with friendly people. The other, which shaved one minute off my walking time, went through the scariest road I’ve ever seen. The road is more of an alley, always empty, bordered on one side by a dark graveyard and on the other by a concrete building that’s falling apart and littered with trash and rubble. Every time I walked through it I thought, “this is the type of place where someone would get mugged.” And it was. I got my passport and hotel keys stolen by a couple punk kids.
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So learn from my mistakes. Carry only what you need with you, and stay in trafficked areas if possible.
Part Two Preparing to Go
PLANNING YOUR TRIP “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” John Steinbeck
“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” Dwight D. Eisenhower
We may as well start off with the fun part, right? The first decision you’ll have to make is how far in advance you want to plan. The standard method is to plan a full year in advance, while other nomads (like myself ) prefer to plan as we go. There are some pros and cons to each method that deserve consideration. First we’ll discuss planning ahead. One of the main reasons people like to plan ahead is because they can go to travel agents and purchase Round The World (RTW) tickets. This is a convenient way to buy all of your tickets for the year at a reasonable price. If you go with some of their featured sale packages, the price may be even better than reasonable. However, if you use the airfare booking tips in this book you’ll find that you can almost always beat their deals, often by 40% or so. When browsing round the
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world tickets, keep in mind that advertised prices usually don’t include taxes which usually tack on a few hundred dollars at least. If you plan far in advance, you make it easy for your friends and family to visit you. People whose yearly travel is limited usually need to plan ahead at their jobs. If you “might be in Morocco sometime in the spring”, they probably won’t be able to meet up with you. If you provide specific dates, they might be able to plan around your schedule a bit. The IRS allows a huge tax exemption on the first $87,600 (as of 2009) of your income if you are out of the United States for 330 days out of the year. If you plan ahead meticulously, you can make sure that you qualify for this exemption. I have never done this myself because I have too many friends and family in the US to stay out for so long and my tax burden is not unreasonable. The biggest downside of planning ahead is that you will invariably want to change your plans, but will either be unable to or will have to forfeit a ticket you’ve already purchased. The former ruins some of the versatility of traveling and the latter negates the potential cost benefits of planning ahead. Scheduling a Long Term Plan Read this section even if you intend to plan short term, as a lot of the information will still apply but won’t be repeated. The ideal amount of time in each location will vary from person to person. My preference, to which I constantly make exceptions, is to spend two months in a place I’ve never been to or one month in a place I’m familiar with, and then a period of two to four weeks doing shorter trips, usually around the area or en route to the next country.
PLANNING YOUR TRIP
So, for example, you might spend two months in Taiwan, fly to Singapore and spend a few weeks going through Malaysia and Southern Thailand, and then spend another two months in Bangkok. My reasoning is this: to really get to know a place you need to spend at least a month or two there. Any less and you’ll find yourself touring more than living. At the same time, I think it’s a good idea to blaze through countries to get a feel for them and consider spending more time there the following year. I generally try to spend the one and two month segments of my trip in countries whose language I’m trying to learn. More on this in the language section. Last year I spent a week or so in Bangkok. I had no real interest in Thailand because I assumed it was a seedy sex tourist infested country and I didn’t have any interest in learning Thai. To be honest, I wasn’t particularly looking forward to the week. As you know if you’ve ever been to Bangkok, I was dead wrong in my estimate. There is a level of shade to the city, but the remaining 95% of the experience of living in Bangkok is amazing. This year I intend to spend a lot more time there. If I had not made the short trip through Bangkok, I may have never given it a chance. Create a list of every place you’d like to stay for a month or two. Don’t worry about how much time you’re going to be gone for, just make the list. Let’s say that your list looks something like this: •
Barcelona
•
London
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•
Moscow
•
Beijing
•
Shanghai
•
Taipei
•
Tokyo
•
Bali
•
Bangkok
•
Sydney
•
Cape Town
•
Panama City
•
Bogota
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Rio De Janeiro
•
Santiago
That’s a long list, and there’s really no way you’re going to visit all fifteen places in a year and do them all justice. Time to whittle down the list. Let’s say that you’re planning for the next year. If you don’t plan on returning home (I aim to return home for one month every four or five months), that means that you have time for 4-5 major destinations with 2-4 months of spare time to see less pressing places. If you’re anything like me, your first thought will be, “Wow! It’s going to take me a lot longer to see the world than I thought!” To make matters worse, once you start traveling your list will grow
PLANNING YOUR TRIP
rapidly. Other travelers that you meet will constantly be recommending places that the absolutely love1, and their passion will get you excited to visit. One such place for me was Berlin. I never had any inclination to visit Germany, but so many people have raved about it that it’s now at the top of my list. How do you decide which ones to remove? I tend to place an emphasis on developing countries rather than developed countries. London is stable and isn’t going to change too much. Beijing, however, is rapidly changing and will never be the same. Similar statements could be made for places like Panama City, Bogota, and a few others on that list. If you’re dying to go to Barcelona, then go, but if you’re on the fence, defer it. An additional factor to consider is that staying in developing countries is usually much cheaper than developed countries, but they are usually more expensive to get to. You’ll probably also find them less familiar since “Western” civilization is a bit more homogenized than the real exotic locations. These three factors together, along with a couple others, make developing countries ideal candidates for long term stays and developed countries ideal for short hops in between. The comfortable and familiar can be evaluated in just a few days, and the unknown and mysterious are given enough time to be fully appreciated. Where you “feel like” going is as good enough a reason as any. I know I’ll make it to Australia someday, but so far I haven’t been 1 I always recommend Japan, particularly staying in Tokyo and doing side trips on their amazing rail system. If you are on the fence about Japan, definitely add it. If you haven’t considered it before, do so. It’s my favorite place and I go every year now. If Japan is already a definite, check out Yakushima – it was one of my favorite parts of Japan. More on that later.
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excited enough about it to actually make it down there. This is your trip and your life, so go to places that excite you. The trip doesn’t need to have a theme, doesn’t need to hit every continent, and doesn’t need to focus on one area. It can just be about where you want to go. One suggestion I’d urge you to take is to spend at least half of your time in places you’ve never been before. Once again, strike back against the urge to stay in your comfort zone. Creating the Route We arrived at our apartment around midnight. Taiwan has a nocturnal culture, so the girl we were renting from didn’t mind meeting us so late. We exchanged pleasantries and chit chatted until she said, “I’m surprised you’re visiting Taiwan now.” Why? “Today is the first day of monsoon season!” Oops. We hadn’t done our homework. We had a great time in Taiwan, but it rained constantly and as a result we ended up staying in a lot more than we had hoped to. Side trips were cut short and few days lent themselves to aimless wandering around the city. Besides rainy and dry seasons near the equator, you’ll also have to factor in summer and winter further North and South. The web site weather2travel.com has an excellent site for checking historical averages for anywhere in the world. I particularly like their tool because they show tons of useful information in one easy to read page. Even more important than the weather is determining which major events you want to experience in each place. In some places
PLANNING YOUR TRIP
there’s no overriding reason to be there at any particular time, but other places have famous festivals, events, or seasons that you won’t want to miss. For example, Japan has hanami, or cherry blossom viewing season, from late March to early April. If you want to run with the bulls in Pamplona, you’re going to have to get there during the second week of July. Make a chronological list of countries with events first. Then add to the list the other countries, along with a list of the best months to visit. Write weather information next to the event locations, too. Events are typically short, so you still have the option of scheduling your visit with the event at the beginning, middle, or end. Let’s say you chose to visit Dubai, Rio, Tokyo, Barcelona (with a side trip to Pamplona to run with the bulls), and Bangkok. Here’s what you might write down: •
Rio – Carnaval (Feb 13-16) – Equal Rain in Jan and March
• Tokyo – Cherry Blossoms (Late March, Early April) – Cold in Feb, warm in April • Barcelona – Pamplona (July 6-14) – June seems more pleasant, August is fine too For Bangkok and Dubai you have no particular events, so you record only the weather. •
Bangkok – November to April are the dry months
•
Dubai – November to April are best here too
Now our schedule is starting to shape up. We’ll want to be in Tokyo by March 21 so that we don’t miss the cherry blossoms. Rio is nice in March and Tokyo is better in April, so:
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Jan 21 – Mar 21 : Rio Mar 21 – May 21 : Tokyo That was easy, but now we have a quandary. Barcelona is easy, but both Bangkok and Dubai are fighting over a small chunk of time. Assuming we want to be back in the US by Christmas, November 1 – December 21 is the only window of time that they both have good weather. This reveals a certain truth about trip planning: creating a perfect travel schedule is just about as likely as finding a magical unicorn on which to ride from country to country. The important thing to remember is that people live happily in these countries all year round. Weather should be a guide for your itinerary, but not an absolute arbiter of where you go. The last consideration is routing flow. Financially it generally (but not always) makes sense to go in as simple a path as possible. When you read the section on airfare you will understand the exceptions to this rule. The problem we have now is that time wise it makes sense to go to Barcelona right after Tokyo, but doubling way back to Bangkok is probably not the smartest idea. In this case I would shift the whole schedule up by two weeks, which leaves us leaving Tokyo by May 7th. I’d go directly to Bangkok, then to Barcelona and Pamplona on July 7th (you really only need to do one day of Running with the Bulls), and spend two months there. That puts at September 7th with just Dubai remaining. We now have around three months and a week left before returning home. I would push Dubai to the end of that time period to take ad-
PLANNING YOUR TRIP
vantage of the good weather, and use the extra five weeks to jaunt around Europe by train, visit Northern Africa, or maybe even get a cheap flight to India. Planning minor stops is usually better done once you have your major stops planned and know when and where you’ll have spare time. And thus, our year is planned. It’s a messy and inexact science. Because there are so many variables, it’s never a quick and easy affair. The process will almost always involve playing with the dates and routes until you figure one out that works for you. Getting Visas If you do decide to plan far in advance, it will be easiest for you to get your visas while you’re at home. At the very least you should check to see which countries you need visas for and which you don’t. The place I go to check is the Wikipedia page for the US passport at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Us_passport. At the bottom of the page you’ll find a map and chart of the rules for every country in the world. It may be the case that the site isn’t 100% up to date, but these rules generally don’t change often and the list hasn’t let me down yet. Getting visas while traveling is usually-- but not always-- a simple process. Certain places like China, which are notorious for being difficult, are probably better off obtained ahead of time if you can manage it. Usually, though, you can just head to the embassy of whichever country you’re going to next and ask for a visa. I’ve heard stories of requests for small bribes, but haven’t encountered this firsthand. To the contrary, the Vietnamese embassy in Bangkok graciously let us in after hours when we got there too late and almost messed up our whole trip.
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Short Term Planning Long term planning can give you a sense of stability and peace of mind, which might make your first trip easier, but I prefer planning as I go. The benefits are obvious: you can change your mind and follow any desire you may have and you can take advantage of abnormally low fares that you find on the go. Sure, your friends won’t always be able to plan ahead to visit you, but with unlimited freedom you can arrange to visit them instead. Depending on the terms of your visa, and how easy it is to visa hop2, you can stay in places you like for longer than you expected, and leave early if somewhere else catches your eye. Of course, there are no rules on how short or far in advance you have to plan. Sometimes you may find yourself in situations where you have no idea what country you’ll be in the following week. Other times you’ll find such good deals on fares that you’ll book up the next month or two. A good rule of thumb is to stay put until somewhere else excites you. Not much has to be done if you choose the short term method. I generally come up with an approximate route that I’m likely to follow, so that if nothing strikes my fancy along the way I have a bit of a plan. So far I’ve never stuck to it exactly. Check the visa requirements for your first country, get the visa, and buy a one way ticket. 2 Some countries, Thailand being the quintessential example, allow you to cross the border and come back in immediately to start your visa time all over. In places where this is practical there are usually buses that run across the border for the sole purpose of visa hopping.
PLANNING YOUR TRIP
Unless there’s a compelling reason to buy the next ticket in your route, don’t do it. You never know when you’ll regret giving up your flexibility. Compelling reasons that come to mind would be: •
coordinating to travel a certain segment with a friend
•
getting a great deal on a fare
• coming close enough to your departure date that it made sense to get a ticket before the prices rose. Otherwise, enjoy your freedom. When you have no fixed costs, it is simple to travel as you please and not break the bank. The same resources mentioned in the long term planning section can come in handy. If you’re debating between a few destinations, it never hurts to check the weather and events in each one.
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SELLING EVERYTHING Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. Henry David Thoreau
He who would travel happily must travel light Antoine de saint Exupery
Before we get to the fun part of preparing, getting set up with the gear and services which will make sure you’re the best equipped nomad out there, let’s deal with all of that stuff you have sitting everywhere. I’m about to outline an aggressive plan for getting rid of everything you own. Your initial reaction will be one of moderation – thinking that maybe you should keep a few things in storage. Don’t do it. The more you have back home, the less you will enjoy being a nomad. Part of the enjoyment of the nomadic lifestyle comes from the simplicity. You have few obligations, no burdensome caches of junk, and can move without a second thought. If you have a car and a storage unit and whatever else back home, you will think about it and wonder if it doesn’t make sense to go back to it.
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Here’s another angle to think about it: everything depreciates. The possible exception is a house, which I will get to in a minute. If you sell your car for $10,000 now and then travel for a year without worrying about it, you can probably buy the same car for $8500 or $9000. Plus if you decide you’d like a different car, you have that option as well. I’ll sympathize if you’re sentimental like I am and want to keep a few boxes of letters, photos, childhood trophies, etc. Convince a friend or family member to let you keep it in their attic or basement. If you have a house, the best thing you can do is sell it. My reasons are beyond the scope of this book, but the gist of it is that taxes, repairs, and interest on the mortgage will generally mean that you’re “throwing away” about as much money as you would pay for a comparable rental. Besides that, you don’t want to worry about your house while you’re gone. Renting to someone you know, trust, and can count on to live there while you’re gone may make sense, but finding such a dream tenant is probably more of a fantasy than the unicorn I mentioned earlier. The one last reason that you may not want to sell your house is if it is in a desirable area for tourists. If you have someone nearby who might be willing, for a small fee, to help you administer it, you may be able to use www.homeexchange.com to temporarily swap your house for another one where you travel. This probably isn’t worth the hassle, but I include it just in case there’s some reason you can’t sell or rent your house and want to get some value out of it.
SELLING EVERYTHING
Without an excellent reason not to, it’s probably time to put your house on the market. If you’ve sold a house before you know that the process is a bit of a pain and can take a while, so consider doing it immediately. If you have an apartment, get rid of it. There will probably be a fee for breaking your lease. Try to talk your way out of it, but if you can’t, just consider it a small investment in your new nomadic lifestyle. Getting Rid of Everything You Own And now for the brutal step by step guide to shedding all of your possessions in the most efficient way. This is the same process my travel partner and I each underwent when we left for the first time. 1. Go through your house with a trash bag and throw away everything you don’t need that’s worth less than ten dollars1. Items under ten dollars will generally not be worth your time to list and ship or to sell on Craigslist. At the same time throw away any trash, extra pens, old food (or food you won’t eat), or anything else you can think of that is not making your life better. 2. Go through a second time and find all of the expensive things that you need to get rid of. Old laptops, cameras, furniture, etc. Take a digital picture of each item NOW and put the stuff in a pile somewhere. 3. List each item on Craigslist for about 10% less than the best “Buy it Now” price you can find on eBay. Your eBay and Paypal 1 If you feel like it will be useful to someone, or useful enough that you can donate and deduct it from your taxes, put it in a separate pile.
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fees will cost about that much anyway, and with Craigslist you can make people come pick it up from you to save time. 4. Whatever doesn’t sell in a week goes up on eBay. No reserve, $9.99 starting price, seven day auction. The point isn’t to get every last penny, but rather to get most of the money you deserve with minimal effort2. 5. Now take all of the useful things that you have that aren’t worth the effort to sell online and put them on your lawn. I hate selling things online, so my cutoff was around $40-50. Put an ad in the “free stuff” section of Craigslist and say: “Free yardsale. Giving away tons of valuable stuff because I’m trying to simplify my life. Don’t call or e-mail, come pick up at [your address]. I will delete this post when everything is gone.” Believe me, they will come. 6. Bring your clothes to a thrift store. Take the pitiful amount of money they give you, and ask them to donate any clothes they refused to pay for. On second thought, save a few changes of clothes they wouldn’t buy until you get your new travel clothes. At this point you should have nothing other than a small bundle of cash. If you have something else that I somehow forgot to mention, it’s pretty safe to assume that you should sell it.
2 I got a strange satisfaction from getting bad prices on my stuff. I felt like I was teaching myself a lesson on why to never buy tons of stuff again.
BUYING GEAR “A man should ever be ready booted to take his journey.” Michel Eyquem De Montaigne
“Where’s your luggage?” she demanded. “Just this.” She looked up at my backpack. I was used to this line of questioning. “Where’s the rest of it?” “That’s all I have.” She eyed me with a suspicious yet familiar glare. “And how long are you staying?” “Two months.” Just as it seems unfathomable to others that I travel for so long with such a small backpack, it seems equally insane to me that everyone else seems to have such huge backpacks. What in the world is in there?
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The disbelief expands– in both directions—when we both realize that despite carrying a bag with less than half the standard backpacker capacity, I’m almost always better equipped. I feel guilty when I call myself a minimalist. After all, I have a laptop, a camera, a video camera, and even a portable cot with silk sheets. If I were to truly get down to the bare necessities, I could probably travel out of a zip lock bag. Twenty Eight Liters is All You Need Twenty eight liters is a bit of a random number. If the Greatest Backpack of All Time was twenty nine liters, I’d instead be raving about how that’s all you need (and I’d probably be carrying a down blanket to boot). For reference, the typical backpack sold for middle schoolers is 34-37 liters1. If you have a vision of looking like one of those backpackers who seems to have a scale model missile silo on his back, erase it immediately. We’re talking about a seriously small bag here. Even fully loaded, you won’t stand out like a sore thumb. If you get a larger pack I guarantee that you will find stuff to fill it with. Don’t give in to the temptation. I promise that I will have you traveling in style with just twenty eight liters. Why Pack So Light? There are many reasons to pack light. For one, it maximizes your versatility. A small backpack can be brought anywhere without 1 The Jansport “Big Student”, is 34.4L and the LL Bean Deluxe Book Pack (which is what I had in middle school) is 36.8 liters.
BUYING GEAR
inconvenience to you. It can be packed or unpacked in a matter of twenty minutes, meaning that you can be ready for a transcontinental move in half an hour at most. That is freedom. Checking bags at the airport is a killer. Not only will your stuff get lost at least once, you can’t use one of my more advanced methods to getting low fares. Because of this, carrying a bag that can’t be checked can nearly double your ticket price, and that’s not even including the fifteen or more dollar fee that the airline will charge you for it. When all you have is a small backpack, packing for side trips, hikes, or daily adventures is simple. You just take what you think you might need, since you know it all fits in there anyway. In a way, packing light is more respectful to local culture. You don’t stick out as yet another tourist or backpacker who is about to steamroll their culture. Instead you’ll probably just appear to be an expatriate. You can also take local trains and buses, rather than having to take a taxi to put your giant bag in. If you bring something that is not making your trip better, it’s making your trip worse. That’s a fundamental law of traveling. Extra items require care when packing. If they’re clothes they need to be laundered. They weigh your pack down. The less you can carry, the happier you’ll be. No one travels for a long period of time and wishes they had brought more. Think about that. Yes, You Need a Backpack I know that backpacks aren’t the most fashionable items. At best you look like an alpine explorer, and at worst you look like some sort of student or backpacker. No one is going to think that you’re a businessman or king of the world.
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A friend of mine was considering coming to Morocco with me. I told her that the one requirement is that she pack light so that we aren’t encumbered. “Do I HAVE to get a backpack, though? They’re not chic at all.” Yes, you do. I know they’re not chic, and the best advice I can give is to get over it. Backpacks make sense, and when you’re a nomad, form follows function. To offer an olive branch, what’s more chic than gallivanting around the world as you please? The reasons for choosing a backpack are as numerous as they are obvious. Any terrain can be crossed, they compact when they’re less full, they don’t stick out, and they are designed to be waterproofed. Detach your ego from what you own. Even if you’re reading this book to live vicariously and not because you actually intend to fly away, take this advice to heart. “You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your fucking khakis.” Fight Club
The more I’ve gotten rid of, the more I’ve understood the truth in this idea. No one cares about what you have, but they do care about who you are, what you’ve done, and what you’re going to do. Your interactions change with materialistic people once you leave their ranks. They flaunt what they have with an air of desperation to try to win your approval. I used to do that, too. Become your actions and your principles. Stop trying to create a façade of who you are through buying things. Buying things is
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easy, and everyone knows it. It can garner wonder or excitement, but never respect. Think about people you look up to. Is it because of what they have, or who they are? I used to think that being a minimalist was a sacrifice, but a worthy one. As I grew into it, I realized that it was actually an upgrade over rampant consumerism and materialism. I’m not some sort of peace pipe toting hippie, either. I like capitalism and love excellent products. I’ve just come to believe that best way to enjoy what this amazing world has to offer is through limited but high quality consumption. Choosing Gear Your gear matters. A lot. When you have only twenty eight liters to pack in, each liter matters. Most products are designed with no regard for how much space they take up, especially a lot of “travel products”. This seems shocking once object volume becomes an issue for you, but price is more important than space for most people. Because of this, the stuff you leave with will probably be completely different stuff than you have now. There’s just not much everyday stuff that works well for traveling. Don’t try to force it to – get rid of items that aren’t serving you well, and treat yourself right. You’ll have few things, so make sure that they’re all excellent. Even before becoming a nomad, one of my passions was seeking out excellent products. At one point I had a three hundred dollar toaster that was used by not only the best restaurants, but also the Queen of England. I’ve gotten rid of the toaster, but my quest
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for the best has continued even as I’ve become a minimalist. I can virtually guarantee you that every product I recommend is the absolute best in its class; if it wasn’t, I wouldn’t be using it. If you do find something better, though, or something I never thought of, let me know! Clothes “The difference between a man of sense and a fop is that the fop values himself upon his dress; and the man of sense laughs at it, at the same time he knows he must not neglect it.” Lord Chesterfield
“If men can run the world, why can’t they stop wearing neckties? How intelligent is it to start the day by tying a little noose around your neck?” Linda Ellerbee
Two weeks earlier I had arrived back in Texas for a surprise visit. Since then I’d spent nearly every day hanging out with my friends, including my friend Hayden. Inspired by the shedding of my worldly possessions, he started to probe. “How many pants do you have?” “One pair, and they zip off to become shorts too.” “But what about the other pants you’ve been wearing?” “What do you mean?” “Like, which pants did you wear when we were hanging out yesterday?” “These. They’re my only pants.”
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“Wait. You mean to tell me that every time we’ve hung out since you’ve gotten back, you’ve been wearing the same pants?” Unless you’re dressed outlandishly, no one knows what you’re wearing. Don’t believe me? Think of who you had lunch with yesterday. What was he wearing? Most people are so focused on what they’re wearing and how others will perceive it that they never even stop to soak in what anyone else is wearing. And that’s okay. Clothes, in terms of form, don’t really matter. As far as function in concerned, on the other hand, clothes may be the most important thing you pack. Sticking with our minimalist nomad philosophy, here’s the clothing packing list: •
Two pairs of socks
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Two pairs of underwear
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One pair of convertible pants
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One bathing suit
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Three shirts
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One bra (if you’re a woman, or a crossdresser)
That’s it. We’ll get to outerwear in a little while. Before I get into individual selections for each item and justifications for such low numbers, I’m going to take a second to address the issue of fabric. When it comes to retail clothes, cotton is king. Most of what you own and wear is probably cotton. And why shouldn’t it be? Well, a lot of reasons, as it turns out. In fact, there is probably no worse textile for the traveler. The biggest problem is its wet
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performance. When you’re wet you want your shirt, for example, to dry off as soon as possible. When it’s hot you want it to wick sweat away from your body. And, when it’s cold, you want your shirt to keep you warm, not give you hypothermia. Cotton fails on every count. It’s notoriously slow drying, does not wick sweat away, and is actually dangerous if it’s wet in cold weather. We wear cotton for two reasons: it’s cheap and it feels nice. Synthetic materials like polyester are better in most ways, and worse in a couple. They dry fast, wick sweat away, and don’t freeze you if it’s cold. But they don’t keep you very warm, and they smell bad faster than any other material. The answer to all of our problems is wool. Wool does an amazing job wicking sweat away, dries quickly, keeps us warm even when wet, and smells great. I used to wash my wool shirts every time I wore them, but some experimentation has lead me to realize that just airing them out in between uses lets me wear them four or five times each before washing. As if it needed another party trick, wool can absorb one third of its weight before it feels wet to the touch. This makes a big difference when putting on socks after swimming. Most people associate wool with those terrible scratchy sweaters your grandmother used to make you wear as a child. Luckily, that’s not the current state of affairs. Fabric makers have learned to use the finest fibers and weave them so tightly that the wool feels a lot more like cotton than the wool you’re used to. No itching, just pure, smooth, magic fabric. Getting back to our list, two pairs of socks is all you need. Wash one while you wear the other. Wool can be washed with soap or
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shampoo, so just do your daily laundry in the shower. It’s also nice to have two pairs of socks because in a real pinch you can use the second pair as mittens. The best brand to buy socks from is Smart Wool, although if you follow my shoe recommendation and need to buy toe socks, Injinji is the only known manufacturer of wool toe socks. They aren’t nearly as wonderful as the Smart Wools, but they hold their own. Don’t be tempted to get more pairs of socks. As you get more, it’s more difficult to decide which are clean and which are dirty, and washing a ton of clothes in the shower is a pain. Two is easier than three. Underwear falls in basically the same category. Get two pair and wash them every day in the shower. If you miss a day, it doesn’t really matter. Wool is antimicrobial so it feels clean and smells fine even if you wear it twice in a row. The best wool underwear is made by Icebreaker, my personal preference being the Beast Briefs. They’re tiny, which makes them easy to pack, and they look great. At the risk of sharing more with you than you wish to receive, the pouch on them is quite flattering. I’ll admit that convertible pants are stretching the fashion envelope a bit. They do have full-width horizontal seams right across the knees. Still, what they lack in fashion (and truthfully, they’re fine in practice) they make up for in form. Being able to change into shorts, in public no less, just by zipping off the legs, can be a godsend. Having only one set of pockets is also convenient – leave your passport in a side pocket and never worry about whether or not you have it with you. I have yet to see wool convertible pants, and given the alternative, I don’t really care if I ever see them. Brushed nylon is an excel-
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lent choice. It’s extremely durable (I’ve tipped over and rolled a 4 wheeler in the rocky Qatar desert without so much as a scuff or rip), it dries quickly, and is comfortable in all temperatures. While synthetic shirts smell terrible quickly, synthetic pants don’t seem to. I wash mine once every week or two. My favorite brand for these is Cloudveil, but they are only available seasonably and my favorite color (dark grey) is now discontinued. Many outdoor-oriented pants are so baggy that they look ridiculous, so my best advice is to try on as many pairs as you can before choosing one. Most outdoor gear stores have fantastic return policies, so do what I do: buy every pair in your size and return all but one. Pay attention to the pockets on your pants. I like having as many zippable pockets as possible. They thwart pickpockets and keep things in your pocket when you’re reclined in a train or doing strange acrobatic maneuvers in the jungle. It’s possible to get away without a bathing suit, but it’s nice to have something dry to change into if you go swimming, and it’s also good to be able to wear your bathing suit when you do a load of laundry. I went with a square cut belted Speedo because it looks hilarious, dries quickly, and is tiny. If you went for a different bathing suit, I wouldn’t hold it against you. Keep it small and fast drying. I pack three shirts, which occasionally feels like one too many. Wool is, of course, the fabric of choice, and there is one brand that stands head and shoulders above the competition: Icebreaker. Go for their lightest weight shirts, the 140gm / cm and 150gm/ cm. With appropriate layering, which I’ll discuss in a minute, they’ll keep you warm enough for sub freezing weather and cool enough for the Middle Eastern desert.
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If you’re a girl, you’re probably going to bring a bra. I’ve heard the fierce opinions girls have over their bras, so I won’t touch the subject. Take a look at Icebreaker’s offerings, though. I know how crazy it sounds to have so few clothes, but believe me, you get used to it and fall in love with it fast. I have the sneaking suspicion that by the time this book is released, I’ll be down to two shirts. Outdoor Gear Your basic clothes kit will keep you comfortable when it’s warm and dry, but what about when it’s rainy, cold, snowy, muddy, windy or all of the above? This is where things get exciting, provided you’re a gear geek like I am. If you’re not, you probably will be soon. My current setup was put to the test recently in the middle of winter in Toronto, Canada. I had worn most of the gear in cold climates, but this was to be the first time I would be in a serious winter environment. For the week I was there the winds gusted to almost forty miles an hour, the high temperature for the day was sometimes below twenty degrees Fahrenheit, and at one point dropped as low as five degrees. It was cold. I’ll admit that I wasn’t the warmest I’ve ever been in my life, but I was comfortable enough that many nights I chose to walk through the snow rather than take the subway. It may seem inconceivable that you can store, in such a small bag, enough cold weather to stay warm and dry in such an environment. The key is in the layering of cutting edge fabrics.
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The standard formula is this: a layer with an ultra high warmth to weight ratio covered in the thinnest wind and waterproof layer you can find. It’s a simple method, but its beauty is twofold: 1. Maximum efficiency. All of the warming is left to a substance that is chosen only for its high warmth to weight ratio. The waterproof and windproof layer merely holds the heat in. 2. Maximum versatility. Both layers can be worn separately, depending on the level of warmth and dryness desired. I have experimented superficially with wool as a warmth layer for the chest, but it seems that the current king of warmth to weight in terms of a jacket is synthetic fleece. Which company you buy from doesn’t matter particularly, as long as you get the highest warmth possible without a wind blocker. Wind blocking adds weight and is redundant. In particular, you want to look for a jacket with Polartec Thermal Pro high loft fleece. I wear an Arc’teryx Delta SV, which is one of only two jackets I know of that use this fleece. The other is made by Mountain Hardwear. The fleece will be expensive, somewhere between two and three hundred dollars, but you’ll be relying on it as your primary heat retainer. Don’t skimp! The Arc’teryx one has a lifetime warranty, too, so it may be the last fleece you ever buy. To cover the fleece you’ll need what’s called a hard shell, which is a jacket that looks like a fancy raincoat but uses high tech membranes to keep water out and still be breathable. The gold standard is Gore-Tex Paclite, but other companies like eVent are starting to make fabrics that compete.
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I use a Mountain Hardwear Aiguille, but if I was buying gear again I would likely choose a Golite jacket. I’d probably try one of the alternatives to Gore-Tex which is lighter. For the rest of the body we’ll use a layer of wool covered in a waterproof layer. That means a merino wool hat (make sure to get one that covers your ears), wool glove liners, and wool long underwear. Icebreaker or Smartwool are always top brands to get wool clothing from. To cover your legs, get rain pants made from Gore-Tex or a competitor. The hood on your jacket will cover your head. Outdoor Research makes some very packable waterproof outer mittens. For shoes I recommend Vibram Five Fingers. They will be the weirdest shoes you’ll ever see, and the best you ever wear. They can best be described as armor for your feet. They’re lightweight and they’re shaped around the contours of your feet, including each individual toe. Besides being lightweight, Five Fingers dry fast, can be machine washed, and are great for every purpose. I have hiked with them, walked many miles with them, swam with them, and even dined on the Queen Mary II wearing a tuxedo with them. They are truly versatile footwear. The one trick they can’t pull off is being weather resistant. In fact, when I tried to walk through the slush in them in Toronto , my feet became painful, and then numb. I wondered if I was going to get frostbite2. Fortunately, a company called NEOS comes to the rescue. NEOS makes high quality waterproof overboots. I had considered order2
Yes, this was a really dumb idea.
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ing them for almost a year, but the pictures online made them seem too large to be packing in my nearly full bag. Not so. After the near-frostbite incident I hobbled to an outdoor gear store and gave them a try. They actually pack down to about the same size my sandals packed down to before I got rid of them. Now scared of the freezing slush, I cautiously walked through it with the overboots on. Sure enough, I was warm. I further tested by packing my feet in snow and standing in deep icy puddles. Nothing would make my feet cold. Try the overshoes on in person if you can. Because Vibram Five Fingers are so small, the sizing chart on NEOS will probably be wrong. I was able to buy the smallest pair they made, which means that the overshoes aren’t oversized and clunky and they pack small. They’re so light and flexible that it’s actually comfortable to run in them. Technology Some of the places you’ll go on your trip you will never again visit, and neither will any of your friends. There’s just not enough time. Some of the things you will do will be once in a lifetime experiences. Some situations can’t ever be replicated. For this reason, I say to take what you need to document your travels and share them with your friends, family, and maybe even the whole world. Conventional travel advice warns not to take expensive cameras or even bring a laptop. I say this: you’ve gotten rid of everything you own, you’ve pared your clothes down to the absolute minimum, and you have a smaller backpack than anyone you’ll ever
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meet traveling. Splurge a little and buy the equipment you need to do your trip justice. Let’s face it: Point and shoot cameras suck. Maybe they’ll get better some day, but having small sensors and small lenses mean that until there is some quantum breakthrough, they will just never take professional quality photos. I get complimented on my photos all the time, but it’s nonsense. I have a great camera with a very good lens, and that puts me ahead of nearly every other traveler out there. Still Camera The options for still cameras aren’t great. Digital goes without saying, which seems to leave us only with Digital SLR cameras. In case you don’t know what that is, it’s the giant cameras that “serious photographers” carry. I hate these because they are huge. If you must get a DSLR, at the very least get a prime lens, meaning a lens that does not zoom. Zoom lenses are huge and heavy, whereas prime lenses are relatively small. You’ll risk missing some great Paparazzi shots of Jennifer Aniston on her yacht, but you already have a bit of a zoom built in: your feet. If you want to zoom into something, walk towards it. That’s obviously a bit tongue in cheek, but with a 40mm prime lens I’ve encountered few shots I couldn’t make work. By the way, if I sound like some sort of expert, I’m not. Once you get a good camera you learn all the jargon by accident. There are two less common cameras which are each about half the size of the smallest DSLR. The first is the one that I have, and the second is the one that a practical person, like yourself maybe, will get.
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I have a digital rangefinder. If you haven’t heard of that, don’t feel badly. Only two companies make them, Leica and Epson. The Leica M8 is one of the most revered cameras in the world. The four thousand dollar price has something to do with that, but mostly it’s the fact that it’s a high end camera in a small and unobtrusive package. Focusing a rangefinder is different from a DSLR, but is easy to get used to. I won’t go into specific details here, but do look it up on Wikipedia if you’re interested. Epson’s rangefinder costs half as much as a Leica, and is nearly as good. It’s slightly lower resolution (six megapixels versus eight3), does better in low light, and is harder to service. This is what I have. Both cameras are fully manual, which means no autofocus, automatic aperture control, or ISO control. This sounds annoying, but after a brief adjustment period you will learn to do it all manually and end up being able to take better pictures, especially in strange lighting situations, than anyone with an automatic camera. I love technology and automation, but I hope to never go back. Still, I’ll be clear. These are expensive cameras that produce amazing results, at the cost of you doing all the work. One overlooked benefit to them is that they are relatively small and look like old fashioned cameras. The Epson actually has a manual lever you 3 This is inappropriate for the scope of the book, but I feel obligated to share this knowledge with you: megapixels don’t matter. There are a lot of reasons for this, but basically after six or so you are wasting your time. Eight is nice. Ten, twelve, or sixteen are marketing hype. A good three megapixel camera is far better than an average ten megapixel camera. The more important factors by far are sensor size and lens quality.
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must crank to cock the shutter after each shot, as well as only manual gauges. An LCD screen flips out from the back, but when it’s hidden the camera doesn’t look very fancy. A far more practical alternative is the new breed of Micro four thirds cameras coming out. They are, in a nutshell, shrunken down versions of DSLR cameras that retain most of the functionality. Notably missing is an optical viewfinder – like cheap point and shoots you must use the built in screen to frame your shot. Whether you consider this a bonus or a detriment will probably also determine whether a micro four thirds camera or digital rangefinder is best for you. These new cameras can record video as well. The quality is good, possibly good enough to replace a video camera. As of this writing, the two cameras in this category are the Olympus E-P1 and the Panasonic GF1. Both are new to the market and look excellent. If neither of these options appeals to you, check out the Sigma DP2 or the Leica X1. They are weird Frankenstein creations between a DSLR and a point and shoot. The image quality won’t be quite as good as a rangefinder or micro four thirds camera, but it will be far better than any point and shoot. Video Camera A video camera is less necessary than a still camera. People will eagerly look at your photos, assuming you cull out the duplicates and boring ones. Unedited video, on the other hand, is so boring that no one will want to watch it. So realize that if you’re buying a video camera, you’re also committing to editing footage as you go. This becomes a bit of a bur-
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den, especially if you opt for an HD camera. Video files are enormous, and you’ll never want to delete them. If that doesn’t scare you, head over to www.camcorderinfo.com. This is the site I use to make decisions on video cameras. My personal choice is the Sanyo VPC-WH1. I hate that it doesn’t have optical video stabilization, but it’s small, shoots in HD resolution, and is fully waterproof. Last year my friend’s camera got some salt water in it and broke, so I’ve been scared into getting a waterproof camera. I particularly like that cameras that shoot in 720p instead of 1080i or 1080p. I consider 720p to be acceptably high quality, but the files are two thirds of the size compared to the alternative. If you aren’t concerned with waterproofing, check out Canon’s line. They always seem to have the best video cameras. Whatever you do, make sure you get a camera that has no tapes. A hard drive is okay, but solid state media is better because it can’t be corrupted by shocks or vibration. Get a Gorillapod instead of a tripod so that you can be in the videos as well. It uses a standard mount, so you’ll also be able to use it with your still camera. The Gorillapod has three bendable legs which make it possible to hang from a tree, hence the name, as easily as it can stand on three legs on a table. Laptop Your laptop is going to be your connection to the outside world, both as a means to earn money and to stay in touch with your friends. If you’re a huge nerd like me, it will be a whole lot more than that, too.
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There’s a new breed of cheap and tiny laptops coming out, which people like to call netbooks. I hate that name, but I love the idea. If you have a huge laptop, with a screen that’s fourteen inches or higher, you should probably sell it and get a smaller one. If you have something in the eight to twelve range, you may already be set. The biggest consideration will be whether or not you plan on video editing, which will of course be determined by whether or not you get a video camera. Video editing is extremely processor intensive, and tiny laptops with “Atom” processors are not going to get the job done. However, if you don’t have video editing to do, I recommend a netbook. One often overlooked consideration is screen resolution. Many studies have been done that positively correlate screen resolution with productivity. Clinical speaking aside, it also makes sense. Screen resolution is the amount of dots on your screen. The more you have, the more you can fit on your screen, albeit at smaller sizes. If you have bad eyes, this isn’t so great, but if you have good eyes it makes a huge difference. Avoid screens with 800x480 (the same as some cell phones) or 1024x600 resolutions. You will find it difficult to work for long periouds of time on them. The Sony P netbook has an amazing 1600x768 resolution, and 12” and above laptops should have at least 1280x768. If you are editing video, and therefore not buying a netbook, make sure to get a large hard drive. Being faced with the necessity of deleting footage to make room for new footage is a nightmare.
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Cell Phone Don’t get an iPhone. I realize that this will upset people to read, but the iPhone is not a serious phone for a serious traveler. Yes, it will be able to make calls, but that’s about it. If you get a real phone you will be able to do a lot more – almost everything you can do on your laptop. A few examples: • Translation - Load bilingual dictionaries of dozens of languages onto your phone so that whenever you need to figure out how to say something, the information is at your fingertips. • VOIP calling - A great feature which I will discuss in detail later, enables you to use an internet connection to make free or nearly free calls back to the US. • GPS – How about having moving maps of the entire world loaded into your phone? • Train Schedules – Free software (MetrO) is available which has the train routes and schedules for the entire world, or close to it anyway. Think of it as Mapquest or Google Maps for trains. The best choice for a mobile phone is to get one with the Windows Mobile operating system. The interface itself is merely acceptable, but the amount and quality of software available is excellent. While they may have slick graphics and animations, no other phone operating system has as many great applications available. When choosing a phone, the most vital consideration is the bands that it operates on. To be sure that your phone will work anywhere you visit, make sure to get an unlocked quad band
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GSM phone. If you already have a phone through either T-Mobile or AT&T (not Sprint or Verizon), call them to see if they’ll unlock your phone for international travel. Most phones sold in the United States are “locked” to one carrier, meaning that when you go to Spain and put a new SIM card in, it won’t actually work. If you are unable to unlock your phone, or don’t have a GSM phone, your next best bet is going to be eBay. My phone is a Sony X2, which I chose primarily because it has a large, high-resolution screen that makes it suitable for reading books or watching movies. If you don’t choose this phone, check out the offerings from HTC. You may be surprised at how expensive these phones are. Most phones purchased in the US are subsidized by hundreds of dollars by the carriers. They make the money back in the long run by charging higher monthly fees for service. An unlocked phone will be unsubsidized, and thus hundreds of dollars more expensive, because it can be used with any phone network. Still, a good phone is a vital tool to have as a nomad. In a new city with no place to stay I can often walk around until I find a wireless internet signal, and then use the phone’s browser to begin my apartment search, or use the VOIP functionality to make phone calls. Charging your Gadgets Electronics are tough. Even when they’re small, sleek, and functional, they still seem to come with huge chargers and cables. Besides being bulky, these chargers are also a mess to work with. The answer is to standardize to USB in two separate ways.
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First, get USB chargers for everything you own. I’ve been able to find them for everything except for my rather eccentric camera. Luckily, like many cameras, its charger isn’t so big. All phones have USB chargers available and most MP3 players either use USB by default or can use it with optional adapters. Energizer even makes a great standard battery charger that works off USB. To make it smaller, rip off the top, which you don’t actually need. That covers us for output. We can now take the power coming from a USB plug and use it to charge everything we have. Luckily there are also a lot of ways to get power to USB. The easiest is your computer. It probably has at least two USB ports, so you can charge two things from it. The really nice thing about this is that if you have one universal adapter you can now charge your computer and at least two devices from just one plug. My compact laptop has three USB ports, and some have even more. You can also get a wall charger that outputs USB. It won’t work in all countries, but sometimes it’s easier than taking out your whole computer. It connects to the universal adapter, of course. Maybe more interesting, you can also get a solar charger that works with USB. I love the MySoldius, which is compact and has considerably higher output wattage than the Solio. The Solio, which is the most common solar charger, is very slow to charge and is shaped awkwardly, which makes it difficult to pack. I’ve tried it and hated it. Besides standardizing power, you can also standardize your transfer cables somewhat. Try to buy devices that use a standard USB mini 5 pin connector. My phone, backup hard drive, and old mp3 player all use this. Some things, like my GPS watch, will
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use different cables, but when choosing things like phones, mp3 players, or digital cameras where there’s a lot of available variety, go for Mini USB. Electrical Plug Adapters There are two types of adapters: those which adapt only to the physical shape of the plug, and those which actually convert the electricity to a specific format (usually 110v/60hz). You probably don’t need the bulky ones which transform the power. Why? Because almost all modern devices can accept anything from 110-240v. Check your labels to make sure. I’ve never had anything that needed 110v specifically. This is especially true when you standardize to USB. As far as I know, every modern laptop power brick can take 110-240v, and so can the small wall socket to USB adapters. Double check your chargers to make sure. The absolute best adapter is the APC INPA adapter. It’s an ingenious design which packs down small and can adapt any plug to fit any socket in the world. A Portable Bed Bringing your own bed with you isn’t wholly necessary, but during those rare occasions that you need it, nothing else substitutes. I opt to bring one because I have the space in my pack, and I like being able to stay with friends who don’t have extra beds or couches. It also comes in really handy if you find yourself laid over at an airport overnight.
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The bed is called the Luxury Lite cot, and is sold by an eccentric inventor in Texas through his site, luxurylite.com. The ingenious design packs down to the size of a loaf of bread, and weighs only a few pounds. It’s a delight to sleep on for most people, myself included. Whenever I have the opportunity to sleep on it I get a great night’s sleep. To go with the bed, consider the Sea to Summit silk sheets. If there’s no wind, when you’re indoors for example, they add about ten degrees of warmth. Outside they do just about nothing, but they compress down to the size of a soda can so packing them isn’t much of an issue. If you have a little more room, you may want to buy the Mont Bell Spiral Thermal Sheet. It’s a thin down sleeping bag that looks comfortable and weighs next to nothing. Other Gear You’ll bring a lot of other gear with you on your trip. To save space in this book and to make sure your packing list is up to date, I maintain a complete list of every piece of gear I travel with, along with suggestions on where you can buy them. To see this list, visit tynan.net/currentgear. My gear may not meet all of your needs, though, so I’ll give you a few tips on where to find good gear on your own. Unfortunately, most travel accessories are geared towards the types of people who lug 32” suitcases around the world. Finding compact and light gear is difficult. One of the best sources is outdoor gear stores. Hikers, especially ultralight hikers, are obsessed with light things. I’ve even read
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about them cutting off half of their toothbrush handle and then drilling holes through what’s left to make it as light as possible. Backpacker type travel stores also have some good items amidst the oversized junk they sell. For electronics, you’ll almost always have to look at the higher end. It’s expensive to miniaturize electronics. Check Japanese import sites for slightly overpriced but compact laptops and phones. Packing it In If you’re thinking that all of that stuff might be a tight fit for such a small backpack, you’re absolutely right. To pack efficiently we’ll need to follow two principle strategies: •
Air space must be minimized.
•
The most frequently used items must be the most accessible.
Air space is the enemy. Every cubic foot of air space is a cubic foot of useful stuff that you won’t be able to bring. That means that we want to compress clothes as much as possible and layer items in the pack with as little extra room on the sides as possible. A great packing tool is the Aloksak, which is a waterproof heavy duty plastic bag. Fold your clothes to fit in a single bag, kneel on it to press all of the air out, and you’ll be left with a dense puck of clothes that just happens to be the same width as the interior space of the pack. A small side benefit is that if your bag happens to get soaked in a boat ride or something, you’ll still have dry clothes to change into. The Deuter can be separated into two distinct compartments rather than one big one. Using this feature allows you to pack the
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bottom compartment as tightly as possible while leaving the top area relatively empty, so that you can access items while traveling. This method also leaves you with two access points, which means that you have two areas to place items you may need to get to in a hurry. I keep my cameras and computer near the top one, and my rain gear near the bottom one. Keep small items, like cords, grouped together in smaller aloksaks to make them easier to find. Make good use of the mesh pockets on the sides of the bag. They can hold a lot more than a water bottle and are very valuable spaces since they’re so easy to access. Keep extra passport photos, business cards, tickets, and other scraps of paper together in the flat front pockets.
Services Not all who wander are lost J. R. Tolkien
“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.” Western Union Internal Memo
Filling the gap between our physical presence in our home country and where our travels are a host of services. Using these services it’s possible to do virtually anything remotely, even certain tasks which normall require a physical presence. Banking There is a hidden tax of at least three percent that almost every traveler pays without even knowing it. It’s applied to every dollar spent by credit card and cash, and even ATM withdrawals. I’m talking about hidden currency conversion fees. The good news is that any long term traveler can easily avoid paying this hidden tax with a bit of knowledge and advance planning. The way it works is this: when you charge something on your credit card in another currency, say Malaysian Ringgits, your
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credit card company checks the current conversion rate, converts your purchase to dollars, and then tacks three percent on top of that. You probably never notice it, because who actually checks market conversion rates when looking over their bank statement? Worse is when vendors charge in dollars, using something called dynamic currency conversion. This service uses terrible rates, and replaces the three percent fee with a six percent fee. Never allow a vendor in a foreign country to charge your credit card in dollars. It’s against their agreement with Visa or MasterCard to prohibit you from paying in local currency. Fortunately there are a few credit card companies who quietly offer zero percent conversion fees. The biggest one is CapitalOne. They have dozens of different cards that you can get, including some with airline miles and some without yearly fees. A worthless bonus that still gets me excited for some reason is the ability to put your own design on the card. Mine, predictably, is a Life Nomadic card. I also carry an American Express Platinum card because of their excellent services. They charge 2.5% on foreign fees, so I primarily use them for booking flights and cruises online in US Dollars, as well as for stocking up on gear and general purposes when I’m in the US. Foreign purchases go on the CapitalOne card. With the Amex Platinum you are allowed into most of the airline clubs (Northwest, Continental, American, and Delta), which provide a welcome oasis during long layovers. Some even have showers. Additionally, you have a free concierge on call 24 hours a day. Like credit cards, ATMs add a three percent fee, plus the occasional foreign ATM fee, and sometimes an owner fee for the
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ATM. Take out $100 and you might be losing ten percent to your bank. Luckily there are quite a few banks, most of them internet based, which don’t charge a fee. The best of the bunch is Schwab High Yield Investor Checking. There are no monthly fees, they rebate unlimited ATM fees, and it comes with a stock trading account just in case, again with no monthly fees. Also noteworthy is the $2000 ATM withdrawal limit. You won’t need to withdraw that much frequently, but apartment rentals are usually paid for in cash and can cost more than the standard $500 that most cards limit you to. Exchanging cash is probably the worst deal of all. Banks sometimes offer reasonable rates, but the kiosks you find in airports and train stations are usually abysmal. You don’t know the current rate, and they know that. Beware of street changers, too. They’ll often give you a great rate, but “miscount” and keep a few bills for themselves. If you get a wad of cash and keep exchanging it from one country to the next, the problem compounds upon itself. Go through five countries and you’ve lost fifteen or twenty percent of your cash. Avoid using money exchangers whenever possible. Sure, it’s better to exchange your remaining Vietnamese Dong at a bad rate rather than carry them around with you, but getting rid of excess country as you leave a country should be the exception to the rule. The best cash management strategy is to charge everything you can on your Capital One credit card (and pay it off in full every month), withdraw cash in small chunks as needed (since Schwab is rebating your fees anyway), and then exchange your leftover cash at a bank in the next country.
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If you don’t wait until the next country, you may find yourself stuck at the airport with no way to buy food if the plane is delayed. Plus you’ll get a much better rate at the bank, as I mentioned previously. Notice that this strategy doesn’t include travelers’ checks. Travelers’ checks are a relic from the past that some people still associate with security and prudence. The truth is that they are an enormous hassle and many non tourist places, especially those in less developed countries, won’t even take them. You’re not much more likely to have your travelers’ checks lost or stolen abroad than you are to lose your cash at home. It’s security that you don’t need. Oh, and one last little tip. Money changers will never take coins, even though many countries have coins worth the equivalent of a dollar or two. Use them in the airport gift shops to buy postcards. Postal Mail Yesterday was tax day. I got a notice in the mail saying that I had made an error in last year’s return, so I completed and mailed a an amended return. Then, while I was in the mood, I filed my corporate tax return too. Best of all, I took care of this all from the WiFi connection at a coffee shop. That’s right – it’s now so easy and convenient to manage your mail online that even if I wasn’t a nomad, I’d still probably do it this way. Companies are just now budding which offer mail reception, scanning, and forwarding. I’ve been using the king of the hill, Earth Class Mail, ever since they first opened for business a year
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ago. With plans starting at just twenty dollars a month, getting your mail through them is a no brainer. Here’s how the process works: when your mail comes in, they scan the front and back of the envelope or postcard in full high resolution color. You then log in to your account and decide what to do with the letter. You have five options: • Recycle. If it has no personal information on it, they’ll recycle it for you for free. • Shred. If the letter may have personal information on it, but you don’t want it, like a credit card application or bank statement, they’ll shred it for free. • Scan. If it’s something you might need, have them scan it. Every account gets a certain number of pages scanned for free every month, and additional pages are relatively cheap. They do a great job, even scanning the front and back of credit cards so that you can use them online. • Archive. For five cents a month, after the first month, they’ll hang on to your mail. This is a great option if it’s something you want to get eventually, but don’t need now. • Ship. They will forward your mail, or even packages you receive, anywhere in the world. A great many companies won’t ship internationally, but if you have them ship to your Earth Class Mail address, you can still get the package relayed to you. If you get a check in the mail, you can even have it set up to deposit to your bank account! As you can probably tell – I love this service. They scan the mail to PDF, which is a lot more useful to me than actual hard copies
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of mail. An additional underpublicized feature is the ability to get a dozen or so personal PO Boxes addresses in different states for free. This can be useful if you want a separate mailing address for your business. Receiving Packages Even if you don’t have a good address, you can still usually receive packages in foreign countries, whether they’re sent through Earth Class Mail or from someone else. If you speak enough of the language, go to the post office and ask if they can receive a package for you. This is called “Poste Restante” or General Delivery, and is available throughout Europe and The United States. Other countries may have it as well – you’ll just need to ask. They’ll typically hold the package for up to a month, which makes coordinating easier if you’re on the move a lot. Just have the package shipped somewhere far ahead of you, and let it wait for you to arrive. If you’re in a less developed country and want to have something shipped to your rented apartment, use any service other than the post office. Post office packages get lost, Fedex generally doesn’t. Sending Mail Sending mail is now possible, too. There are a variety of services available, most of which I’ve found disappointing. Don’t get me wrong – they’ll all send a letter for you, but most aren’t as full featured as I’d like. The one standout is mailaletter.com. The interface isn’t quite as modern as I’d like, but I love that they allow PDF attachments.
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Portable Document Format, or PDF, is the standard format for most online documents, especially forms. I’ve found that most of what I end up having to mail in are forms. An application for a trading account or a credit card, a tax return, or an agreement for my web hosting provider. Usually these things can be faxed, which we’ll get to in a minute, but sometimes physical mail is the only option. Using Mail A Letter, or any of its competitors, is easy. You simply write a message on their email-like interface, put in an address, and pay a dollar or so. Upload your PDF attachment, if you have one, and hit send. Within twenty four hours your letter will be posted and on its way. How do you “sign” these forms? The best thing to do is to get a high quality scan of your signature before you leave. It’s a simple matter to take care of at Kinkos, or you can just take a digital picture of your signature and tweak it a bit. Barring that, PDF readers like Foxit will let you draw on the screen with a mouse or, if you have a tablet PC, the pen. It’s not perfect, but so far I haven’t had anyone reject it. For less serious correspondence, there are some services that will let you upload photos from your trip, turn them into postcards, and then send them to your friends with a message written on the back. One of the best services for this is HazelMail.com. Receiving Phone Calls International calling sounds a lot more expensive than it is. In fact, in most countries you’ll end up paying less per minute than you do for your cell phone plan back home. The people who call
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you may not believe that, though. Whenever I talk to my grandmother she’s always in a rush to get off the phone because she can’t imagine international calling not being expensive. There are two components to the system. First, you need a local prepaid cell phone plan. These plans are what most people use for everyday service in many countries, so they are generally trivial to get. All you do is prepay twenty dollars or less and get a new SIM card to put into your phone. Refilling minutes can usually be done at any convenient store, but usually you have to get the initial SIM card at a phone store. With your new service you should be able to make local calls as well as receive them. Create an account at www.callcentric.com. Callcentric is a VOIP, or Voice Over IP, provider, which is a fancy way of describing a company that routes phone calls over the internet. They can take incoming calls in the US, route them over the internet for free to another country, and then connect from there to your cell phone. The result is that instead of paying between fifty cents and a few dollars per minute, you’ll generally pay between three and twelve cents. The countries that are at the higher end of that spectrum are usually countries where cell phone users are not billed for incoming calls. In those countries you can buy the cheapest prepaid card, usually around $3, and receive calls all month. One feature of Callcentric that I particularly like is the ability to port your cell phone number. This means that you can cancel your cell contract, but keep your number. The cost for doing this is roughly six dollars per month, and people who call your cell phone may have no idea you ever left.
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Callcentric also has a great rule based interface for routing calls, which lets you have fine grain control over who can call and when. I use this to block junk calls. Making Phone Calls Making phone calls is the one area that isn’t quite polished yet. The best option is to use a Voice Over IP client for your phone. Nokia phones have this built in and people with Windows Mobile phones can get a great program called Agephone. The good news is that these programs can connect through a service like Callcentric or Callwithus for only a penny or two per minute. The bad news, of course, is that they only work when you’re in an area that has good wifi. Slow third world wifi usually doesn’t cut it. Callcentric doubles as a calling card, and has a bunch of local numbers in a dozen or so countries. If you happen to be in one of those countries, you can use the calling card feature to make calls at the same cheap rates. The one last option is a callback service, which Callwithus and Callcentric both provide. You log in to the web site, put in your local cell number and the number you want to call, and a second later your cell phone rings and connects to the remote number. This is how I make the bulk of my calls. I expect that in the near future outgoing calls will get better. For now, VOIP is a good choice when you’re in your apartment, and the calling card or callback option will suffice when you’re not.
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Faxing Even if you don’t fax now, you’ll probably find a few occasions on the road where you’ll need to. Luckily there are some excellent solutions. For receiving faxes, check out K7.net. The interface is laughably bad, but they will give you an absolutely free fax and voicemail number. No credit card or any sort of documentation is required. I’ve been using their service for years, and it’s been great. They have a feature I particularly like where every fax is just sent to your e-mail address, with no need to ever log in. I’ve been using this so long that I don’t even know what my login name is anymore. Terrible interfaces seem to be en vogue for fax sites, and the next site is no exception. Fax1.com is the winner in the fax sending arena, and believe me, I’ve tried a ton of them. Besides rates so good that it’s lasted me a year on a six dollar credit, the best thing about Fax1 is that it comes with printer drivers. That means that you just click Print on any document you want to fax, and a dialog box pops up offering a preview and asking for the number. It couldn’t be any easier. Just like with mailing letters, make sure to have a good scan of your signature for pasting onto documents to fax. Insurance As I mentioned in the section about danger, you will probably greatly overestimate the chance of you running into trouble. Based on personal experience, I’d suggest you do as I do: don’t insure your gear.
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More valuable than insurance is common sense coupled with some security related pieces of gear that I will recommend shortly. If you do decide to buy insurance, I recommend a company called Safeware. Most travelers’ insurance policies cover only a small amount of electronics per traveler, not enough to make it useful for a most people. Safeware, on the other hand, will let you cover whatever you want, and will quote you a reasonable price. Health insurance is another topic. Your local insurance will probably not cover you in foreign countries, although you should check with them to make sure. That means that you should probably cancel your health insurance before you go if you pay for it yourself. There are plenty of health insurance options available for travelers, but whether or not you need them is up to your own discretion. World Nomads Insurance, at worldnomads.com is one of the more popular options. My own health strategy is to eat healthy food, get enough rest, and exercise. As a result I haven’t gone to the doctor in the US or elsewhere in at least ten years. If I do need medical care, which I’m sure I will eventually, I will just pay for it out of my own pocket. Many countries have high quality medical care at a fraction of the cost of US prices, and in fact have people go there specifically for “medical tourism”. That’s probably the route I would take. Everyone has a different health situation, so make sure to review both options before making a decision.
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Part Three Living Nomadically
BEGINNING YOUR NEW LIFE If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored. One’s destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things. Henry Miller
The night before was full of fanfare. Everyone had come to the restaurant to say goodbye. My best friends were there, but so were a handful of acquaintances I barely ever saw. I was happy to see them, but couldn’t help but think that I probably hadn’t seen them in a longer period of time than I was leaving for. The morning I left was less eventful. I took my backpack and walked into the same restaurant for breakfast. “I thought you were leaving?” asked the cashier casually. “I am. My flight is in a few hours.” As we ate our breakfast, I stared down at my tiny little backpack. It was strange to see my entire life compressed down into something so insignificant looking. Momentary waves of panic shot through me as my subconscious came up with random things I may have forgotten to do. What about my car! Oh yeah, I sold it. Looking back at the task of getting rid of everything, it seemed so monumental. It was more cathartic than unpleasant, and had
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definitely firmed up my minimalist notions that I had been developing. I checked my new GPS watch which had replaced a flashier but less functional watch. I knew I had plenty of time, but missing this flight would be terribly unfortunate. We finished our breakfast leisurely and waited outside for our friend Kristen to come pick us up. People hem and haw when you need a ride to the airport to go somewhere boring like Cleveland, but when you’re embarking on a grand nomadic journey, everyone volunteers. If we’d been a bit less considerate, we probably could have arranged for a full on motorcade. I looked at each passing building, places I’d seen a million times before, trying to etch them in my memory. All of a sudden the Texaco on the corner seemed like an important landmark, an anchor to my life in Austin. An hour later I was on a plane. I hadn’t even landed in the first country yet, but I already knew that I’d never go back. Sure, I’d visit from time to time, but the idea of giving up this free and exciting life seemed unfathomable. When I landed back in Austin seven months later for a surprise visit, it felt like I never left. In the context of normal American life, my two hundred or so days away seemed like some sort of bizarre dream. I got comfortable in Austin, and quickly fell back into old routines. I picked back up with my friends, and it was as if the past months had just been a day or so. We’d kept in touch so well online that we barely had anything to catch up on. The restaurants I used to love were still serving the same food, and the waitresses I’d made friends with were still serving it. Even downtown, which
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was in the middle of a huge condo boom, didn’t seem all that different. The one thing that had changed was me. I saw the world through different eyes. There were now a handful of cities around the world that felt similarly familiar. And most of all, I knew that there was no telling what sort of adventures lay ahead. The differences in daily life as a nomad will surprise you, but so will the similarities. You quickly realize that a bed feels the same no matter what country it’s in, so does a shower, and so does sitting in front of your laptop. If you’re anything like me, that’s a pretty good chunk of your day right there. The similarities are a good thing, though. They provide contrast to the new and exciting things you’ll experience, and give you enough stability to focus on building the skills you’ll need to thrive in strange lands. One of the best parts of being a nomad is inventing your life as you go along, figuring out what works and what doesn’t. In this section I’ll share with you some of the things that I figured out along the way.
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LEARNING LANGUAGES No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits. Otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great baby-so helpless and so ridiculous. Ralph Waldo Emerson
“What does that mean?” “It means your Japanese is very good.” Obviously it’s not. I barely understood a word of the compliment. Still, I was trying, and in this case, that’s what counts the most. “You speak very good Japanese” ought to be translated as, “Thank you for trying”. There are two distinct sides to every country: one you experience if you speak the language, and another you experience if you don’t speak a word. It’s a safe bet that the version you see when you speak the language is a whole lot better than the other. This was illustrated best in Japan. I had built my proficiency to where I could articulate just about anything I wanted, even if it was in as inarticulate and roundabout a manner as could be imagined (“I want eat thing that next to that thing.”). As a result, every Japanese person I met bowled over with enthusiasm, praise, and an authentic desire to show me their country.
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A good friend of mine visited for a week in Japan. Obviously with such a short visit, it didn’t make sense for her to learn Japanese. She made the mistake we all make when trying to communicate with people who don’t speak English: we speak to them in English as if they were half deaf toddlers. I watched the experience she was having in Japan, and although she had a great time, it was obvious to me that there was a depth of experience that she wasn’t able to enjoy. The people are what define the country, not the landmarks, and if we can’t talk to them, we lose out. A few weeks later I was in Thailand, talking to people in baby English, all too aware of what I was missing out on. I’ve always tried to learn the language of anywhere I stay for at least a month. As a result I can get by in Spanish, French, Chinese, and Japanese. After a humbling tour through Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and Cambodia, I now try to at least learn the most basic dozen words or so, as well as the grammar structure of any other country. Please, thank you, no, yes, hi, how are you, and goodbye go a really long way. Most tourists show so little effort that just that small bit of interest in their culture conveys a lot of authenticity to locals. Sure, you still won’t be able to have real conversations with them, but if they see you trying, they’ll be more likely to try hard as well. In Japan it’s common for people to say that they speak no English, but then once they realize your Japanese is worse, they’ll open up and speak English. It’s often surprising how good “bad English” is. The bad news, which isn’t really news at all, is that learning languages is difficult. I know people who took a couple years of
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Spanish in school and still can’t order properly at Mexican restaurants. The good news is that because learning language is such a common goal, high quality ways to learn have been discovered and refined to a science. It will probably come as no surprise to you that a classroom setting isn’t one of those ways. In the late 60s a psychologist and French teacher named Paul Pimsleur began to study language learning. Whet he discovered, amongst other things, is that there are certain intervals at which one needs to hear something to commit it to memory. Specifically, they are 5 seconds, 25 seconds, 2 minutes, 10 minutes, 1 hour, 5 hours, 1 day, 5 days, 25 days, 4 months, and 2 years. He created a language learning method that was based around this idea, creating lessons with quiz words at approximately those intervals. Although he’s now dead, his system lives on through a series of audible language lessons called The Pimsleur Method. Each language consists of ninety half hour tapes, divided into three units. You do one a day, every day, for three months. It’s a minimal time commitment, but you leave with the ability to hold some sort of conversation. The level of fluency you’ll achieve is based mostly on the difficulty of the language. Spanish is a lot easier than Russian, and thus you come out of the program with a comparatively good grasp of the language. Forget about Rosetta stone, Berlitz, or any other language program. Pimsleur is the best by far. Its treatments of writing and reading are so superficial that I usually skip them, but it is known for being both efficient and for producing speakers who pronounce things unusually well. It’s easy to figure out why: each lesson is interactive. A third of the time is spent listening to the speaker, and the rest is spent replying back and answering questions.
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What I particularly like about Pimsleur is that it gets results fast. Doing even two weeks of a series will give you enough skills to improve your experience in the country which speaks the language. I also like that it’s self contained. You can download the MP3s to your MP3 player and listen to them wherever you are. Yes, people will think you’re weird for speaking to yourself in some other language, but you can’t argue with the results. The courses are expensive - $600 for all three months, but when you consider that you’ll be speaking as well as someone who took the class in school for a couple years in just a few months, you might agree that it’s worth it. If not, almost every public library has every language available for free, and it’s hard to argue with that price. Immersion Immersion is the only real way to learn a language. Pimsleur immerses you in your new language for half an hour a day, but it will take more than that to gain real fluency. The key is to travel to countries whose language you’re learning, and then comes the hard part: using it. One thing I’ve found is that most people want to practice their English more than they want to speak with a novice in their language, so they just switch to English. The solution is easy: listen in English, speak in the new language. This is actually a great method for both parties to improve their language skills. Don’t be scared to speak the language, even if you know you’re not great at it. Learning takes place outside of your comfort zone, and believe me, they’ve heard worse. If you travel with a friend, designate days or hours where you agree to only speak the foreign language. Yes, it’s a bit cumber-
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some and can be really annoying when you want to talk about something technical, but it’s also effective. Just two months of concerted effort in a country can make a huge difference. I did three months of Pimsleur Japanese last year, and then two months in Japan. When I started I didn’t know much beyond “konnichi-wa (hello)”, and by the end of the trip I was having full conversations in Japanese. I took five years of Spanish in middle and high school, so after two months in Panama I got the hang of things. My friend Todd had taken no Spanish in high school, but after three months of Pimsleur and two months in Panama, he was speaking around my level as well. The key is to focus on functioning language rather than fluency. People are smart and will figure out what you mean. I’d rather speak five languages passably than two perfectly. Three months of tapes and two of immersion won’t get you fluent, but it should get you functional. Another effective strategy is to get a language partner. Being an English speaker makes you a lot rarer than a speaker of the native language. If you’re open to it, people will be practically lining up at your door to have you as a language partner1. Just in case they can’t find your door, search on local classifieds sites or craigslist for them. Learning Kanji I was clicking random links online one day when I came upon a blog of a guy who said that he had learned Kanji in only two 1 By the way, in Japan many girls are signing up to get a language partners in hope of dating an American. Something to consider.
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months. This seemed ridiculous—Kanji are the complex Chinese characters used in both Chinese and Japanese. Each one represents a whole word, not a sound. Just the smallest subset, the Japanese Joyo Kanji, makes up the almost two thousand characters necessary to read a newspaper. I may as well give it a try, I thought. Two months later, I finished learning the last of the 2042 most basic Kanji. I couldn’t pronounce them, but I knew what each one meant in English and could write them all. The most practical application of this knowledge is the continued study of Kanji, but an intermediate side benefit is that I can understand pretty much any menu or sign, or even the gist of simple paragraphs. Fluent? No, but functional. The task of learning Kanji seems so overwhelming that many students, including my former self, just skip it. At one point at time that was probably the best decision, too. No one had figured out a way to make learning Kanji practical. Times change. Now there’s an excellent book by James Heisig called Remembering the Kanji. His approach is to assign a meaning to each sub-element of each character, and then create a story involving those elements to remember the whole character. For example, the word for apricot is the character for “tree” on top of the character for “mouth”, so to remember it you imagine someone standing under an apricot tree, trying to catch one in his mouth. The more absurd the image is, the better the story sticks. To use his method most effectively, pair it with a good flash card system. The best of them, like Anki, use the “spaced repetition”
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method, which is similar to the interval system used by Pimsleur for spoken language. There is also a community online called “Reviewing the Kanji” at kanji.koohii.net, where people share their own stories. Users rate each story, making it easy to go online and find great stories effortlessly. Studying just thirty five new words a day, seven days a week, will get you up to speed in two months. If you’re planning on spending a significant amount of time in Japan or China, you’ll probably find that the time was well spent. Phoenetic Alphabets Written Russian and Arabic look totally foreign at first glance. Russian looks like a glitched computer and Arabic looks like random squiggles. Unlike Kanji, though, these languages are phonetic, meaning that they have relatively small pronounceable letters. Even Japanese has two secondary phonetic alphabets, one of which is used liberally on menus because it functions to emulate English words. Despite appearances, all of these alphabets can be learned in a day of serious study each. You won’t have any idea what you’re reading, but you’ll at least be able to pronounce it. There’s value in such a simple skill. You can look for signs that say a particular thing, and as you pick up words here and there you’ll know how to write them.
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BUDGETING I swims in the Tagus all across at once, and I rides on an ass or a mule, and swears Portuguese, and have got a diarrhea and bites from the mosquitoes. But what of that? Comfort must not be expected by folks that go a pleasuring. Lord Byron
How much do you suppose it costs to live as a nomad, following your whims around the world, moving from country to country at your convenience? Take a guess now so that you can compare it to the real answer. The one factor people never seem to include in their estimates is the reduction of costs they’ll have. Even without getting into expenses like car payments and property tax, most people pay for things like gas, phone service, cable, electricity, and internet service. A conservative estimate tallies those expenses up be at least two to three hundred dollars a month. Spending a lot more wouldn’t be difficult. To put things in perspective, I pay an average of just $265 per month in airfare. There’s a difference between being a miser and spending money efficiently. The former connotates an indifference to value, being unwilling to part with money unless absolutely necessary. The latter is something different. It represents a shift in perspective,
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moving towards the idea that money should be spent in ways that will genuinely enhance one’s life, and that all other expenses should be ruthlessly culled. Our society, or segments of it at least, have glorified the spending of money. Rappers brag about how much they spent on their jewelry, not how the jewelry has improved their lives. An application sold for the iPhone which did nothing other than put a red glowing icon on the phone that said, “I am rich”. The price of the application was a thousand dollars, and eight people bought it before it was removed by Apple. Two of the buyers thought it was a joke and got their money refunded. The other six were happy customers. I think it’s a clever idea on the developer’s part, and if people want to pay for it that’s fine with me too. What troubles me, though, is the underlying trend in our culture that has made this possible. Money, originally conceived as a store of value, has instead become, in many cases, a store of status. Returning one’s mind to the idea of money as a store of value, and refusing to base one’s self esteem or worth on the amount of money they spend for a good or service, is a major step in the right direction. I say to be proud of spending money efficiently. Spend as little money as necessary on flights and comfortable lodging, and save the rest to fund the unexpected adventures that your future surely holds. I spend somewhere around $1500 per month, which is broken down approximately as follows:
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$500 for lodging1
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$265 for plane, train, ship, and cruise tickets
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$500 for food2
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$50 in fees for phones, remote mail, faxing
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$185 in gear replacement and miscellaneous expenses3
This is an average over the long term. In places like Panama my expenses are closer to $900, and in Tokyo they can be closer to $2000. Often times the most expensive flights lead to the places with the cheapest lodging and food, so those two figures relate conversely. Fifteen hundred dollars a month may not seem like much, but in fact I live like a king. The following sections will explain my methods and enable you to live as cheaply as you want to, while living life to the fullest and seeing the world.
1 I now have so many friends to stay with around the world that my actual figure is much lower. Five hundred dollars assumes that staying with friends isn’t an option. 2 I eat a very strict vegan diet with the additional avoidance of all processed flours, sugars, and bad oils. Eating such a healthy diet is a luxury which I’m happy to pay for. If I ate normal food I imagine my costs would be far closer to $250 per month. 3 I can be a bit absent minded and tend to lose more of my gear than I should. This number is probably higher than I actually spend, but I’d rather err on the side of caution.
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FLYING A friend of a friend wanted to come to Panama to visit. He called his travel agent and booked a round trip coach ticket for a whopping $1800. I’m still not sure how it’s possible to get a ticket that expensive, but the kicker is this: he stepped off the plane and into a much more familiar land than he expected. His travel agent had booked him for Panama City, Florida, not Panama City, Panama. The lesson to be learned? If you want cheap (and correct) flights, it’s good to do a bit of the legwork yourself. The airfare booking system is complex, and a bit confusing. It’s possible, if not probable, that between two strangers sitting on a plane, one might have paid twice what the other paid. I like systems like this – they reward the smart and determined at the cost of the lazy or ignorant. If you’re in the latter category now, don’t feel bad. I’ve been there too on both counts. Buying cheap airfare is a key component of living a successful nomadic lifestyle for a couple reasons. First, it’s the only major expense you’ll have that you didn’t have back home. Second, if your flights are cheap you’ll be much more likely to travel as you please, and not feel obligated to stick in one place, or never leave your home country in the first place.
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I consider finding cheap flights to be a hobby. Armchair psychologists observing me might call it something else. As a result of my obsession, I have developed and discovered an arsenal of techniques which enable me to fly unbelievably inexpensively. My average expense for all transportation is under three hundred dollars a month. All of a sudden those cable and electricity bills may not seem like such a good value. Here are some examples I’ve flights I’ve booked recently, including all taxes and fees: Toronto to Panama City - $258 Panama City to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic - $272 London to Marakkesh, Morocco (round trip) - $144 London to Toronto to Austin to London (three legs) - $610 In the following sections I will explain how I got each one of these fares, and how you can employ the same strategies. Fly on Tuesday or Wednesday Business travelers make up the bulk of passengers on an airplane, which means that they also regulate the price to a large extent. And generally, businesses have more money to spend on flights than individuals. Since most business travel happens from Thursday to Monday, flights on the remaining days tend to be less in demand, and thus, cheaper. How much cheaper? I’d say that twenty percent is average, and often times it’s more like fifty percent. That doesn’t mean that deals can’t ever be had on the remaining days, but it does mean that you should carefully check every day of the week. This is where the flexibility of being a nomad comes into play. Many
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people have constraints that prevent them from getting these deals – you don’t, so take advantage of them. The easiest way to check the whole week at once is by using the “flexible dates” feature of your favorite flight search engine. My favorite is Kayak. Beware, though, the flexible date feature is not completely accurate. Often times it will find the best flights only on your preferred day and some second best flights on the other days. I always spend the extra few minutes to manually check each day individually. Not doing so could be a hundred dollar mistake! Two For (Less Than) the Price of One Even if you only need a one way, check the price of a round trip ticket as well. It is extremely common for a round trip ticket to be sold less that a one way ticket for the same route. I can’t really fathom why this is true, but it definitely is. First try setting the return date to a Wednesday or Tuesday a week in advance. Then try the following week. If those prices are good, try to think of any possible time you might want to use the return trip. Since it is essentially free (or even better than free), you don’t need to be certain you’ll use it. If you can’t imagine any time you’ll use it, see how far ahead you can book it for without paying more money. You may be able to move the date around later by paying a fee or just maybe convince them to allow you to credit it against a future flight. I wouldn’t count on that one, though.
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The Hub Method Aggregators like Kayak, Expedia, or Orbitz are not the end all be all of airfare prices. For example, when I searched for a flight from Toronto to Panama, even on Tuesday and Wednesday, the flight cost over $500. When you consider how far away the two cities are, it’s not an unreasonable price. But there’s a little known secret I was able to exploit to cut that cost in half. The secret is this: aggregators don’t show you the best flight you can buy. They show you the best flight that you can buy from one vendor. This is a small but crucial distinction. Often times you can buy two complementary tickets which end up costing far less than the best price on the effective combined route. New York is a major hub, which means that it will almost always have the best international fares in the United States. Los Angeles, Miami, and sometimes Chicago are other examples of cities with excellent prices. I knew that Toronto to New York would cost almost nothing. A quick search confirmed my suspicions by offering a one way ticket for $105. Then I searched for a flight that left a few hours later from New York to Panama. As I suspected, I found a fare for $153. Combined, the two tickets cost me only $258, which is $242 less than the aggregator showed me. Besides ultra low fares, there’s another incentive to using this method. I had been to New York recently and was eager to get to Panama, but if I had wanted to, I could have scheduled my second flight a couple days or even weeks later, giving me a free stop in New York. Try calling up your airline to extend a normal
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stopover, and they’ll either totally disallow it or charge an obscene rate for the privilege. Although it’s a bit harder to line up the times unless you’re taking a free stop, you can also use this method to book two overlapping round trip tickets. A friend wanted to come to Morocco with me, but the price of the ticket was one thousand dollars from Austin. Instead he booked a $500 ticket to London, and then the same $144 round trip ticket to Morocco that I took. He added a free stop in London on the way in to spend some time in the city and meet up with another one of his friends who was there too. Besides international flights, this technique also works for domestic flights in the United States. Hub to hub flights, like LAX to NYC are so cheap that it’s often worth taking a quick hop to the closer one to get to the other. Las Vegas is a city that is unbelievably cheap to get to from almost anywhere. One shortcut to finding good hubs is to look at regular tickets for the route that have layovers and see where they stop. Many trips to Central and South America stop off in the Miami area (Miami, Palm Beach, or Fort Lauderdale), which can tell you that those three airports are probably hubs worth checking out. Remember a little while back when I said to keep an eye out for round trip tickets that are cheaper than one way tickets? An advanced strategy you can employ is to use the return ticket to get to a hub city. Let’s say you want to fly from Tokyo to San Francisco, stay there for a couple months, and then take a trip to Bangkok. You could buy all of those tickets separately, or you could get a round trip from Tokyo to San Francisco. Set the return date for when you
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want to go to Bangkok, and then take a cheap flight from Tokyo to Bangkok. Be sure to check for local discount airlines as well. Air Asia, for example, is like Southeast Asia’s version of Southwest Airlines in the United States. It’s comfortable, new, and unbelievably cheap. In fact, it’s so cheap that I recently booked a 10 leg journey with them for only $160. That’s sixteen dollars per international flight. This isn’t an isolated incident. Air Asia offers totally free fares several times a year, and Ryan Air has them on a pretty regular basis as wall, although their fees and taxes are higher that Air Asia. These ultra cheap airlines make money by retaining all bookings to themselves, and not paying the commissions necessary to get onto airfare aggregating sites. That means that you need to seek them out and find their fares individually. A good strategy is often to get to a hub city in the general region you want to visit, and then take a second flight on a discount airline. As you can see, when your life is a series of trips from one place to the next, you earn a lot of flexibility which really lets you maximize your travel expenditures. Multiple Stop Tickets Multiple stop tickets are a strange breed. Eighty percent of the time they’re outrageously expensive, far more costly than if you had just booked the equivalent one ways yourself. But the remaining twenty percent of the time they’re oddly cheap. I haven’t yet figured out how this happens. Take my flight from LHR (London) to YYZ (Toronto) to AUS (Austin) to LHR. I was really just looking for a ticket to Toronto
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and then to Austin. These two one ways added up to over six hundred dollars. The culprit was the summer travel rush where every second year college student in America wants to go to Western Europe. I was planning on going back to Europe in July anyway, so I looked for a round trip to Toronto, and then a round trip from there to Austin. That cost a bit over $750, which was starting to look like a decent price since it would spare me the cost of the London leg. Then on a lark I tried the “multiple destination” feature of Kayak. Sure enough, it showed a fare for $610 for the whole trip, only $203 per leg. I booked it immediately. One thing I’ve noticed is that multiple destination trips are often, but not always, much cheaper if your last destination is the same as the place you originally leave from, just like booking round trip tickets. Planning Around Sales If you’re flexible in your timing or have a wide variety of places you’d be excited to go to next, check online deal sites. They often have insanely low fares which you can then plan around. A good example is that ten segment trip I mentioned earlier. I saw online that Air Asia, for one day only, were selling tickets for just the price of the taxes. I immediately booked a forty day trip throughout Southeast Asia, even though I hadn’t previously planned to go there and didn’t even have a ticket to the starting point yet.
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Often times these sales are for trips months in the future. A reasonable strategy is to head to a country that’s likely to have deals, like anywhere in Europe, and just wait around for one that’s interesting to you. Alternate Airports There are the obvious alternative airports like Stansted, Gatwick, and Luton in London, but it’s also a good strategy to consider airports even further away from the main one. Take, for example, Dublin. Dublin is almost always a cheaper flight to New York than London is, often by a hundred dollars or so. If you’re using the hub method, you’ll usually fly into New York when you return from Europe. Instead of flying from London, you can take trains and ferries to Dublin. The journey takes half a day and is scenic and comfortable. The ferry is a luxury ferry which even has a movie theater on it, in addition to bars and restaurants. The combined tickets from London to Dublin cost around forty US dollars, which means that you can save money and get to see Dublin for a day or two for free. Anywhere there’s rail or ferry lines, I check for nearby (and sometimes not so nearby) airports that will offer me a chance to see another city and save money simultaneously. Travel Agents I don’t use them often, but travel agents aren’t quite the dinosaurs of a previous generation that we imagine them to be. To understand how they fit into the picture, it’s important to understand how the airline industry works. A key term in the industry is the
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“minimum advertised price”. Airlines can’t regulate what price another company sells their tickets for, but they can regulate the price at which they’re advertised. That’s why airfare vendors always guarantee that they have the lowest published price, not the lowest overall price. This may seem to be an issue of semantics, because we always buy at the lowest prices we see advertised, but it’s not. Travel agents have the ability to sell tickets much cheaper than the published prices, as long as you call and ask them about it. In practice they usually can’t beat using the hub method, but I hear the occasional rumor of unbelievably cheap tickets gotten through, which leads me to believe that somewhere out there is a mythical travel agent who can beat the hub method. If you’re going to preplan your entire trip and want to buy your tickets in advance, buying from a travel agent that specializes in round the world trips is the way to go. Even if you’re going to book them yourself, you may as well see what they can offer and use it as a benchmark for your own research. AIRPORT GAMES As a nomad you’ll spend a good deal of time in airports. I certainly have, and have come up with a few tricks to make the experience a bit more pleasant and economical. Free Lounges For a long layover, the best places to wait are the airport lounges like the Crown Room, Admiral’s Club, or President’s Club. The amenities vary, but you can always count on comfortable seats, power plugs, wireless internet, snacks, and an open bar. Nicer
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lounges, like the Continental’s President’s Club in Houston have things like showers with built in clothes-elevators to have your clothes pressed for free as you take a shower. One of my favorite perks is that they all have ticket agents with no line. Whenever I have a late flight and need to rebook because I have missed my connecting flight, I head to the nearest club. This lets me cut ahead of the other passengers who also need to get rebooked, and I’ve even had a few situations where they’ve broken some rules to get me on a flight when everything looked booked up. If normal agents tend to be apathetic or even a bit hostile, these agents tend to be the opposite. These lounges are owned by the airlines and command a hefty annual fee for entrance. However, all American Express Platinum Card members are entitled to unlimited entry as long as they’re flying on the airline whose lounge they want to use. Alone this can nearly justify the annual fee of the card, but combined with the other benefits, it’s an easy decision to get the card. But what happens when you’re flying on an airline that doesn’t have a lounge? Normally I just hang out in the terminal with the peasants, but if the layover is three hours or longer, I exploit a small loophole. Simply go up to the nearest gate of the airline whose club you want to use, and tell the agent you’d like to purchase a fully refundable ticket on the last flight of the day to New York. Once you get your ticket, head to the airport lounge, and then call the airline on your cell phone to cancel it once you get inside. Ethical? You be the judge, but I’m willing to do it if it’s a long layover and I’m hungry for free apples.
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Sneaking Metal Past Security Any traveler worth his salt brings carryon baggage only. But draconian TSA rules prohibit all sorts of useful things that aren’t actually dangerous. Take, for example, the P-38 military can opener. It’s an ounce or so of stamped metal with a tiny half inch dull blade that folds out to open the can. I like having one because cans of beans are great healthy snacks that are available all over the world. These things aren’t dangerous. You could give a terrorist a box of them and he wouldn’t be able to hurt anyone. The TSA allows much larger and sharper blades on small scissors. I used to just keep mine in my bag, but once in a rare while the TSA agent would get high on his horse, decide it was a weapon, and confiscate it. Safety razor blades are specifically permitted by TSA rules available online, but one in twenty agents will confiscate those as well and refuse to go over the rules with you to verify their actions. Same goes for small blunt tipped scissors. What’s a traveler to do? Subject himself to the misinformed opinion of an undertrained TSA employee? I don’t think so. I researched airport metal detectors and learned that they work by sending pulses from one side of the arch to the other. These pulses bounce off of metal, so if a small pulse comes back earlier than expected then the detector knows that it hit some metal. If metal detectors were 100% sensitive, you wouldn’t be able to get anything metal through them, including rings, watches, and zippers on your jeans. So they turn the sensitivity down. Consider how small the profile of a stamped piece of metal is – it’s almost nonexistent.
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I wear a thin metal chain around my neck and hang my can opener from it. It never gets detected. I keep my razors in my bag, but I don’t leave everything up to chance. I keep one in my wallet as a backup. I’ve also carried my scissors in my pocket undetected, but now I have new ones that are tiny with big rounded tips. So far they’ve enjoyed a high degree of scrutiny, but no confiscations. Obviously this trick shouldn’t be used to carry anything seriously dangerous on a plane. You may be able to sneak a small knife onto the plane, which would be convenient to have while traveling, but I wouldn’t ever try it. A can opener is easy to justify, but a real knife would probably get you in real trouble. Sleeping in Airports The flight schedule was terrible, but cost hundreds of dollars less than the next best one, so I took it. I liked that it left later in the afternoon, but arriving in Panama at three in the morning was inconvenient to say the least. By the time we got a taxi and booked a hotel downtown, it would be four in the morning. Luckily there was another option. Our flight arrived and we quickly cleared customs, but instead of following the signs outside, we headed upstairs to the arrival lounge. Others had the same idea and were awkwardly strewn across the chairs which are specifically designed to be as uncomfortable as possible to sleep in. With smug grins on our faces we walked past the backpackers to a quiet spot and set up our Luxury Lite cots. I put on my sleep mask and put in my ear plugs and may as well have been sleeping at the Four Seasons. When a security guard gently nudged me
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awake in the morning, chuckling at the bizarre comfort I had enjoyed, I was well rested and ready to get an early start on the day. While I can’t imagine any situation that would make long term airport sleeping a reasonable idea, I actually enjoy opportunities to sleep there for a night. It means that I took a late flight, and thus got to enjoy the day, I saved a night’s lodging expenses, and then I got an early start the next day. Some airports are better suited than others for overnight stays. Luckily there’s a great web site at www.sleepinginairports.net that reviews a huge number of airports. Ultra Short Term Car Rentals Sometimes you will find yourself with a twelve hour layover with nothing to do. This is especially likely if you use my hub method of booking tickets. Rather than spend a ton of money on taxis or loaf around the airport, consider renting a car. With a bit of due diligence on the internet, it’s easy to find a one day rental for twenty or forty dollars per day in most cities. To me that’s a small price to pay to have the chance to go to a decent restaurant, stock up on snacks at the grocery store, or maybe even find a beach or museum to check out. Car rentals from airports are fast and convenient, which minimizes the hassle of getting back there for your flight. Another hidden benefit is that you can lock your backpack in the car and not have to lug it around with you like you would if you took a taxi or bus. Of course, some cities like New York have such good public transportation that renting a car doesn’t make much sense.
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Staying Grounded I love just about everything about air travel, other than TSA screeners. I like finding the deals, I like hanging around in the airport, I like the distraction free solitude of the flight where I get loads of work done, and I even like really long layovers. Even with all that in mind, I consider flying to be amongst the worst ways to travel. At best, it’s my third choice, after train and ship. As we’ve all heard before, it’s the journey that matters, not the destination. Train trips, cruises, and even road trips in cars all take a lot longer than flights, but the time is usually filled well. The real value in these alternative routes is that they show you parts of the country you’d otherwise never see. Buying a plane ticket for Chitre, Panama, just doesn’t make any sense. But when you drive through on your way somewhere else, see a group of kids playing baseball in a dirt patch, and stop and play with them until the sun finally sets, you understand the value of the journey.
TRAINS “Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! We return.” - Edward M. Forster
Trains are another wonderful way to travel, and are generally my first choice. The scenery rolls by at a slow enough pace that it can be fully absorbed. Locals travel on trains, which provides a good opportunity to make friends with them and ask them about their country. Longer journeys are always better. There’s more to see, and they offer more comfortable accommodations than shorter hauls. Of particular interest are sleeper trains, which I absolutely love riding. Although they are prohibitively expensive in North America, sleeper cars are bargains in other areas of the world. I have fond memories of a two night trip from Saigon to Hanoi, in a tiny little six-bunk room with a Vietnamese family. The kids were tickled pink that a Westerner was taking the train, and I was equally excited to be traveling with them. If you’ve never looked into it before, you might be surprised how much ground you can cover by train. Europe and Asia in particular have excellent coverage, making it possible, among other trips,
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to trace the Trans Siberian railroad from London to Beijing. The trip costs little more than an equivalent plane ticket, and it takes you through Russia, Siberia, and Mongolia. I could go on and on about trains, but the truth is that I get all of my information from one place, Seat61.com. The site is an astoundingly great catalog of what seems to be every train route in the world. Whenever I add a new country to my itinerary, my first impulse is to check Seat61.com to see what train trips are available for it. Beware of rail passes. Not all buffets are worth the price of admission. Europe has an amazing rail system, but it is disappointingly expensive. Rail passes, unless you are hell-bent on extracting every last dollar out of them, generally aren’t worth the cost. Check the various options before making that decision for yourself, though. Rail in Japan One rail pass that pays off after just one or two trips is the JR Rail Pass in Japan. A three week pass costs $587, and entitles you to unlimited travel on all trains in Japan with a few exceptions: • The very fastest express bullet trains. This is a non issue because the same routes are simultaneously serviced by a nearly as fast bullet train. • Sleeper cars. There is a loophole to this which I will explain in a minute. • Some local subways. Half of the main lines in Tokyo are covered by the pass, and the other half cost a dollar or two per ride.
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My strategy is to get one three week pass per two month visit in Japan. I spend five weeks slowly exploring Tokyo and living a normal life, and then when it’s time to use the pass, I try to get on an overnight train nearly every night and cover as much of the country as possible. The value is outstanding. A single trip to Sapporo and back might cost $500 or so if you had to buy the ticket yourself. I’ve done that trip in two days on a rail pass and then headed down to the Southern tip of Japan immediately after. Last year I added up the retail cost of the tickets I used, and it was somewhere close to two thousand dollars. As I mentioned before, there is a small loophole in the no sleeper train rule, which I take advantage of liberally. On certain routes there are sleeper cars which are classified as regular seats. They come in two flavors: the Nobi Nobi and the venerable Goron to Shito. The Nobi Nobi car is a charming two deck car with carpeted areas to lie down in. Each “bed” comes with a small blanket and a cup for water. For six dollars or so you can use the shower, which is an experience in its own right. Some people don’t like sleeping on a hard surface, but I love being rocked to sleep by the train. The Goron to Shito is a big upgrade from the Nobi Nobi. Instead of a hard surface you get an actual bunk bed. Normally these beds would cost an additional $80 per night, but since they are classified as seats, they’re yours for free. It’s hard to keep track of which sleeper trains have these cars, but the ticket agents, like everyone else in Japan, are friendly and helpful. I’ve even just asked “Which trains that leave from here have Nobi Nobi or Goron to Shito seats?”
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Even if you can’t find a bootleg sleeper car, there are almost always comfortable reclining seats that you can ride for free with your pass. Wander up and down the cars and you may even find a shower. Although I haven’t done it yet, I’ve long harbored the fantasy of sleeping on trains every night for the full twenty one days and showering at onsen, Japanese public bath houses, along the way. You may as well go anywhere. If you don’t like where you wake up, just take a bullet train somewhere else. Some of my fondest memories of Japan are of wandering in random places like Aomori, where I would have never gone on purpose.
CRUISING “Now is the season for sailing; for already the chattering swallow is come and the pleasant west wind; the meadows bloom and the sea, tossed up with waves and rough blasts, has sunk to silence. Weigh thine anchors and unloose thy hawsers, O Mariner, and sail with all thy canvas set.” Leonidas of Tarentum
I felt like James Bond. I was wearing my bespoke Tuxedo that I got made by George Bush’s tailor in Thailand. Despite his gentle but persistent advice that I choose a more versatile black Tuxedo, I insisted on a white dinner jacket. For no reason I can imagine, the casino refused to staff the poker table until nine at night. Over the past few nights we had made friends with the other dozen or so regulars at the table, and we had agreed to all meet in the afternoon to see if a large group of gamblers would be enough incentive to induce them to give us a dealer. It wasn’t. I’ve always had a bit of contempt for authority, especially when nonsense rules are imposed, so I decided to take matters into my own hands. I ran and bought two decks of cards from the gift shop, and instructed everyone to buy chips from the casino cage. Then I went to one of the long hallways lined with felt tables for jigsaw puzzles, and pushed a few of the tables together.
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And that’s how I came to deal a rogue poker game on the Queen Mary 2, the most famous and luxurious ocean liner in operation. But could you really blame me? The table was full of rich, bored, friendly European travelers. I’m a mediocre poker player, but as a group they were far worse. By the end of the cruise I had earned back over half of the fare I’d paid to get on the ship in the first place. A month prior I had a conundrum on my hands. I was in Europe and had to get back to the US unexpectedly. But it was July, peak European travel season. The absolute cheapest flight I could get was over five hundred dollars to New York, and another hundred fifty to Austin. Then I thought of the Queen Mary II. She’s the only ship that regularly crosses the Atlantic, but I was sure that such luxury must come at a great cost. As often happens, I was pleasantly surprised to be wrong. I checked online and found rates of about one thousand dollars including taxes and port fees. Not a bargain by any means, but I considered taking the trip anyway. The five hundred dollars over the flight I was going to have to pay for anyway might be worth it. Besides the experience of taking such a legendary cruise, I’d have all of my living expenses paid for a week. Then I stumbled across a gem of a site called Cruise Compete. If you put in your desired itinerary, dozens of bargain basement cruise brokers will reply with their lowest price. In the end I booked a ticket for just a hair over eight hundred dollars. That was just three hundred over the price of a plane ticket, and included living expenses for a week. Factor in the easy poker table winnings, and I came out ahead of the plane ticket.
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Even though it ended up making financial sense in my situation, the Queen Mary II is expensive for a cruise ship. In fact, the $115 per day that I paid is more than twice what I paid for the next most expensive cruise. When shopping for cruises, the general rule of thumb is that fifty dollars a day or less is a great price. Through Cruise Compete, most standard cruises can be booked at that rate. Almost everyone pays a ton more, but the savvy traveler won’t. There are two times during the year, however, that yield a perfect storm of circumstances for the nomad, bringing the price down far lower. On the last cruise I booked, I paid only twenty six dollars per night. Every fall and spring there is a great migration of cruise ships. Cruise ships can generally make more money in Europe in the summer and more money in the Caribbean in the winter. That means that in the fall many cruise companies want to move their ships to Europe, and in the Spring they want to move them back. Their problem is twofold. First, most cruise ships are slow. The Queen Mary II was designed specifically to cross the Atlantic in the standard seven days that people set aside for vacations. This was an extremely difficult feat which required many engineering breakthroughs1. A standard cruise ship can do the trip in ten days at best. Besides having to take all that time off, most people prefer round trip cruises to avoid a flight home. Second, there’s not much to see besides ocean. The average person saving up for one cruise a year is more likely to choose a 1 Indeed, looking at the water below from the decks of the Queen Mary II is a strange feeling. Your brain keeps telling you that a ship of her size couldn’t possibly be going as fast as it seems she is.
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comfortable seven day trip through the Caribbean with stops nearly every day. But for the nomad, these repositioning cruises are perfect. They can be used as transportation. Most of them go from Central America, South America, or the Caribbean to Europe. Some circle around South America and stop at a bunch of ports. Others go on random trips that could never be predicted. Best of all, they’re dirt cheap. It makes a lot of sense to anticipate the repositioning cruises as you travel, spend two weeks on one going East, and then another two weeks going back West. Here’s an example of a fourteen day cruise I took this year: •
Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
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Philipsburg, St. Maarten
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Funchal, Madeira2
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Lisbon, Portugal
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Vigo, Spain
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A Coruna, Spain
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London
Single occupancy prices were $360 total, Double occupancy prices were $320 each, and triple and quad occupancy dropped off from there. These prices include tax, port fees, food, and everything. This is an excellent deal, but isn’t so rare that you won’t be able to get a similar deal twice a year. 2 Madeira is an amazing Portuguese island in the middle of the Atlantic that is home to the best example of the now very rare laurel forests. But would you really ever go there if not on a cruise?
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The slow pace of life on a cruise ship may turn some people off from the idea, but I love it. I spend days at sea working on my laptop and watching the waves roll by. Food is free, plentiful, and good. The gym is an elevator away. I love the responsibility and adventure of daily life as a nomad, but a few days of luxury here and there provide a nice contrast. Then, when in port, I know I have just eight hours to see a place, so I go at it with everything I’ve got. All in all, it’s not a bad way to live. Ferries Besides luxurious multi day cruises, there are more utilitarian ferries that often cover good routes. Seat61.com does a good job of listing these. One excellent route is to take a ferry from Beijing to Seoul and then another ferry from Seoul to Tokyo. It’s far cheaper than a flight from Beijing to Tokyo, offers a lot more character, and gives you a stop in South Korea. Some ferries are quite upscale. I rode in one once that had a full onsen and a sauna! I had slept in a cave the night before3, and was soaking wet, so the sauna was particularly useful for drying off my clothes. There are many ferries that coordinate with train schedules and stops. It is actually possible to go from Morocco all the way to Vietnam by train and Ferry. 3 A group of friends and I timed our arrival incorrectly and were stuck in a tiny Japanese coastal town with nowhere to sleep. A free map of the area had a funny dot off in the middle of nowhere that said “Cave”. I jokingly suggested we sleep in the cave, and no one was willing to say no to an adventure. So we slept in a cave. The following night we took the wrong trail while hiking, and ended up sleeping on the roof of a bathroom. The best adventures are the unexpected ones.
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A ROOF OVER YOUR HEAD Towns are full of people, houses full of tenants, hotels full of guests, trains full of travelers, cafés full of customers, parks full of promenaders, consulting-rooms of famous doctors full of patients, theatres full of spectators, and beaches full of bathers. What previously was, in general, no problem, now begins to be an everyday one, namely, to find room.” Jose Ortega y Gasset
You may not need a permanent address anymore, but you’re definitely going to need somewhere to sleep every night. Most travelers only consider hotels, but unless you’re the heir to a diamond mine, you’ll probably want to come up with something else. The good news is that quality accommodations can be had for reasonable prices. My general criteria for a good place to stay are the following: • I want an EXCELLENT location. If I’m going to be in a new city, I want to be in the middle of downtown. Often times the additional cost of living downtown versus living a few miles away from the center is justified by the cost savings of taking trains or taxis to all of the places you want to see. Even when it’s more expensive, I’m always willing to pay a bit extra for the time savings and convenience.
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• It must be clean and comfortable. I don’t mind roughing it here and there, but if I’m staying somewhere for a long time, I want it to be a pleasant environment. That rules out raucous hostels and some of the cheaper apartments. I spend a good deal of time working from home, which makes this doubly important. • I don’t need much. I’ve stayed in fancy places and I’ve stayed in plain places. The marginal benefit of staying somewhere fancy is low. Real luxury, for me at least, is to have a comfortable place in an excellent location, not to have fancy modern furniture. A bed, a desk, and a nice clean bathroom with hot water are all I ask for. I want my place to be conducive to sleeping as well as to working, but other than that I want it to be boring enough that I’ll be more motivated to go out. • If possible, I want a view. This is lower on the priority list, but I’m willing to pay a little bit more to have a nice view of outside, whether it’s a busy street, the mountains, or the ocean. • Sharing a place is great as long as I have my own room. I like to meet other travelers, but sharing a room with six strangers in bunkbeds isn’t my first choice. Your criteria may be the same, or they may be wildly different. Either way, they should be articulated. Knowing what you’re looking for makes it a lot easier to find it. Prices vary from place to place, but I don’t think I’ve ever paid more than one thousand dollars per month for two beds or bedrooms. Traveling solo costs me closer to six hundred for my own room. Relaxing my standards would have dropped the price a bit, and of course looking for fancier accommodations would have skyrocketed them. For a reality check, look up the per capita
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GDP of your destination country, and realize that most of the population is spending only that much money per year. Flights rarely last longer than twelve hours – I’d sit on the floor for twelve hours if it would save me some money. On the other end of the spectrum, I’ll spend hundreds of hours per month in my apartment, so the cost of getting a great place can almost always be justified. The experience that each place will provide you must be considered as well. Living downtown, in particular, gives you great access to the city. Hostile to Hostels I’ll start with best parts my least favorite type of accommodation. I like that hostels are cheap, require no advance notice, and are ubiquitous. At the very least, they offer a safety net: I know that I can fly anywhere on a moment’s notice, and there will be some hostel there that I’ll be able to sleep at. I also like the fact that it’s easy to meet other travelers at hostels. I’ve made long term friends at them, and have also just found random acquaintances to share an adventure with. There are two types of hostels. There are the hostels that have dirty bathrooms, and common areas filled with dirty people drinking beer and spending all day watching movies1. The kitchens are so filthy that I won’t cook in them, and it quickly becomes apparent that the only draw to the place is the low price.
1 I will never understand why so many backpackers spend all day watching movies. I’ve seen a few of these people at every hostel I’ve ever stayed at.
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As you have probably already guessed, I avoid these places like the plague (which could possibly be found in them, actually). In my hostelling experience, I’ve found that the majority of hostels fall into this category, or dangerously near it. On the other hand, I’ve stayed at some amazing hostels. The one hostel in Qatar is particularly good. My friend and I were given our own huge private room with four beds in it and our own large clean bathroom. It wasn’t right downtown, but we were there for only a few days, so taxis had to suffice. Another real standout is Lost Paradise, a hostel in the cloud forests of Panama. I consider hostels an acceptable option for short term stays of under a week. Once you’re staying for longer than a week, the cost to benefit ratio goes down compared to better options. Apartments I spend most of my time living in a rented apartment, or a room in a large rented apartment. Going through the trouble of finding an apartment is generally not worth it unless you’re staying for a week or more, and becomes an excellent value once you’re in the month to two month range. My typical modus operandi is to land in a country with no plans at all, find a hostel, and stay there for a couple days as I make friends and get the lay of the land. It usually doesn’t take long to familiarize myself with the different areas of town, which helps me make a good decision on where I want to live. I harbor the fantasy that one of these days I’ll meet a local who happens to know about a great deal on a furnished apartment, but so far it hasn’t happened. I’ve had my best luck with sites like
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VRBO and Craigslist. Many of the people renting these rooms and apartments out treat it as a side business and provide soap, clean towels, and sometimes maid service. Renting a room in a large apartment is one of my favorite situations. I tend to be more interested in making friends with the types of travelers that choose this option, and I can usually count on having a nice stocked kitchen to cook in. If I’m traveling alone, it’s nice to be around people, although they usually speak English, which also makes this dangerous. Couchsurfing Couchsurfing is the practice of staying on a couch or guest bed, usually owned by someone you don’t know. The most common method to finding these arrangements is by going on couchsurfing.com, creating a profile, and searching in the area you want to visit. Results will vary, but even the remote corners of the world have potential hosts. As I write this, almost 1.4 million couchsurfers are registered. I was apprehensive the first time I surfed. I had no idea what to expect, and that stereotype that everyone on the internet is a weirdo rattled through my mind. After all, who would open up their house to a complete stranger? The answer is simply: really amazing hospitable people. My host drove me around everywhere, showed me the sites, and housed me. I had hoped to pay for dinner a few times, but it never happened because she cooked every meal for me. After more than token resistance, she finally let me fill her car up with gas.
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But more important than any of that, I had an instant friend. Seeing the sites was great, but hanging out with her and her friends at their local haunts was an experience I couldn’t have gotten on my own. Couchsurfing is great, and may be the best way to live when you first get to a new place. I might find it a bit rude to sit at someone’s house and work all day, though, so I’d rather get an apartment of my own eventually. Couchsurfers are all very outgoing and friendly, so even if you don’t stay with them, you could very easily meet some for coffee to make some friends and potential guides. Hotels Hotels usually don’t make much sense to stay in, but there are notable exceptions. Southeast Asia is packed full of hotels so cheap that I can’t make any sense of it. Take the Atlanta Hotel in Bangkok, for example. In the fifties it was the best hotel in all of Bangkok. It hasn’t been maintained well, but it’s in the dead center of the best area of the city. The staff are wonderful, the rooms cost around twenty dollars a night, and there’s a large and deep pool to sit around and swim in. Staying there is the easy choice when visiting Bangkok. Cambodia is the same way. We stayed at the SCAN hotel, which is one of the more expensive hotels at $30-45 per night. It’s in a great location, the owner was a wealth of great suggestions, and the hotel itself is beautiful. On the beautiful Thai island of Koh Phi Phi, where The Beach was filmed, any number of guesthouses and hotels are available for $10 to $20 per night. A local club called “Reggae Bar” offers any traveler $20 per night to hand out flyers for a few hours. A
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particularly impoverished travel could take them up on their offer, easily stay there as long as his visa lasted, and leave with the same amount of money he came in with. Even Europe offers some relatively great deals. Hostels are so expensive in Europe that for short stays it sometimes makes a more sense to just get a cheap hotel room. We paid $90 for a room with two beds right in downtown Paris with French doors leading out to a small balcony. A hostel would have cost $70 for a dormitory bed. The key to getting good deals on hotels is to avoid big sites like Expedia. Unless you’re going to Las Vegas, they won’t have the best price. Search Google for hotels and book at their individual sites. Better yet, here’s a trick I learned from a friend in the hotel industry: call up and ask if they have anything other than the “rack rate”. The rack rate is the insider term for the published rate. Using it makes them assume that you’re also in the hospitality industry, and has never failed to earn me a discount. I don’t know how to say rack rate in other languages, though, so I’ve only done it in English speaking countries. Another excellent option for bigger cities is Priceline. Using advanced techniques found on sites like biddingfortravel.com, you can often get amazing deals, especially on upscale hotels. I managed to book a $237 room at the Westin on the water in Toronto for just $60, and I suspect I could have bid lower.
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EARNING MONEY AS YOU TRAVEL Every year it takes less time to fly across the Atlantic and more time to drive to the office. Unknown Source
“There is a gigantic difference between earning a great deal of money and being rich.” Marlene Dietrich
Telling you how to earn money while you travel is like telling you how to earn money while not traveling. It’s such a broad question that no answer can really do it justice. There are an unlimited ways of earning money, both as a nomad and while living in one place. Making money on the go isn’t any harder than making money stationary. It’s just different, and the thought of having to break out of their comfort zone stops most people from even considering the possibility that they may be able to do it. Still, no book on being a nomad would be complete without some guidance on how to transition from a location-based income to a location-independent income. At the same time, some of my personal income comes from writing about traveling. I understand the skepticism that this generates.
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If it’s any consolation, I launched myself into Life Nomadic without having any income from the project, or any real expectation of earning any from it. My income initially came from sales of an unrelated book1, and I was working full time on a piece of software I intended to sell. Only after I began a personal blog to keep my friends and family in the loop did I start getting paid to write about travel. Starting a Business If you want to succeed you should strike out on new paths, rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success. John D. Rockefeller
I’m a die hard entrepreneur, and I find it difficult to even consider that there is any decent reason to work for someone else. As a result, my suggestions will be biased towards this possibility. If you have no desire to start your own business, you can skip this chapter without missing anything. If you have ever wanted to start your own business, though, particularly an online business, now is probably the time. Think about the ideal circumstances for a budding entrepreneur: •
Low living expenses
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A chunk of saved money
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Lots of free time
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A high degree of motivation
1
Make Her Chase You, a book on dating for men, available at Amazon.com
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Now, which of those circumstances is offered by a nomadic lifestyle? Well, living expenses are as low, especially if you opt for a more relaxed two-months-in-each-place travel schedule. You’ve just sold everything you own, so you have a bit of a nest egg that you can rely on while you start your business, and you have all the free time in the world. Lastly, what’s more motivating than wanting to continue traveling and seeing the world? As personal experience tells me: not much. The Life Nomadic is as conducive to starting a business as it is unconventional. Sure, you can’t hire local employees and have an office, but you can hire remote workers. I have a wonderful assistant from the Philippines who does great work at a great price. Besides the tangible benefits of being a nomad, there’s also a spirit of independence and confidence that travel breeds which I think also helps as an entrepreneur. Being exposed to the world offers perspective and a greater understanding of how it all works. Although I’ve done it myself, I’m not an expert on starting a business, so I won’t drone on and on about. I will, however, condense some of the best advice I’ve read and absorbed over the years: • Do work that you’re passionate about. Let the money come second. • Create something remarkable that provides real benefit to your customers. • Work harder than anyone else and hold yourself to higher standards than everyone else. •
Be ruthlessly persistent. Most people aren’t.
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Beyond those principles, most of the details will be specific to your business. We’re lucky to live in a time when the Internet has made it so easy to be an entrepreneur. I’ve incorporated companies, filed tax returns, opened and funded bank accounts, set up credit card merchant accounts, and even published a book all without leaving my keyboard. Entrepreneurs, on average, earn more money than employees. I’d bet that they’re more likely to be doing something they love, as well. If you’ve ever toyed with the idea of going into business for yourself, why not use this as an opportunity to make a huge lifestyle change? Leave behind the struggle of a wage slave living in suburbia and join the new growing subculture of mobile entrepreneurs. Contracting If you’re not interested in becoming a remote employer, maybe it’s time to join the other side and become a remote employee or contractor. As more entrepreneurs take their businesses online, the demand for remote employees increases. Even stationary business owners are looking for remote labor, especially from contractors. Craigslist is a great resource for finding remote work. Many jobs offer set tasks like creating web sites or programming an application for fixed prices, and they don’t care whether you’re next door or on a beach hut in Bali. Even companies who do want you there in person can probably be persuaded to give you a trial run if you sell yourself hard enough. Elance.com is a site that is specifically dedicated to freelance contractors, complete with ratings and searchable listings. The site
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is perfectly designed and I can’t imagine anyone going there and not finding something they could do. Not all professions are portable. If you’re an auto mechanic your options are probably going to be to stay put or find a new line of work. However, many office jobs can translate into contractor work. You may even be surprised to find out how much you get paid on contract. When the company doesn’t have to provide insurance, parking, a computer, and a desk, they can pay you more money. I find it far easier to be productive outside of an office environment. When I had a real job I would spend a good portion of my day procrastinating and staying busy without actually creating any valuable output. When I’m left to my own devices there’s no benefit to looking busy – there’s no one to impress. I don’t usually work a full forty hours per week, but I probably put in at least twice as many productive hours as the average full timer. Jobs that are particularly conducive to going mobile are jobs that require minimal interaction with others like writing, editing, programming, graphic design, and system administration. If you’re already skilled in one of these areas, you can probably get work within a week. If you have no skills to draw on which translate well into online work, then maybe the time to build them now. Businesses are always looking for workers who can use specific programs. If you learn how to use Photoshop, for example, you can make a living. Figure out which program you’d like to become proficient at. Buy the software, buy the great tutorials to learn it from Lynda.com, and spend some time practicing. The money you’ve amassed from
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selling everything should easily last you through the transition period. Ignore My Advice and Keep Your Job The idea of quitting your job and going out to see the world is romantic, but what if you like your job? It sounds ridiculous, but I actually know some people who enjoy their jobs. You could do what Todd did: he kept it. Bosses might like seeing you look busy, but they absolutely love it when you produce results. Transitioning from being a stationary employee to a nomadic one is tougher than starting off as a nomad from the get go. Your boss will probably be a little bit jealous of your freedom, and will worry even more about jealousy you may generate amongst your former coworkers. They key is to become so invaluable that they really don’t have a choice, and be ready to walk away. Don’t ask if you can do it, tell them it’s your only option. If you’re that valuable, they won’t let you go. That’s what happened with Todd. He produced such excellent work that they allowed him to stop going in to the office, because they knew that he was irreplaceable. They would have preferred it if he stayed, but they didn’t put up a fight. Months later, the arrangement is working out just fine for both parties. If you’re considering taking this route, you really owe it to yourself to read Tim Ferriss’ Four Hour Workweek. It covers a wide variety of topics that I expect would be interesting to most readers of this book, and does particular justice to the topic of weaning your boss off your presence.
SPENDING YOUR TIME The tourist who moves about to see and hear and open himself to all the influences of the places which condense centuries of human greatness is only a man in search of excellence. Max Lerner
The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist see what he has come to see. Gilbert K. Chesterton
The modern American tourist now fills his experience with pseudo-events. He has come to expect both more strangeness and more familiarity than the world naturally offers. He has come to believe that he can have a lifetime of adventure in two weeks and all the thrills of risking his life without any real risk at all. Daniel J. Boorstin,
The Louvre was an overwhelming experience for me. I knew next to nothing about art, yet was surrounded by innumerable examples of it at its finest. I tried to stand in quiet contemplation, imagining the greatness of each painting I looked at. I felt like I was faking it, though. With so many similar paintings, each one blended in. We went from section to section, in an unfulfilling quest to see it all.
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I was excited about the Mona Lisa, though. The painting is such a sensation that I just knew it would be a big deal to see it. The Louvre is so huge and the layout is so confusing, though, that it took us forever to finally find the hall that the Mona Lisa was in. What we saw was astounding. I don’t mean the painting. In fact, I could barely even see the thing. Throngs of people were pressed up against the wooden railing that set up a twenty foot perimeter from Mona Lisa. It looked like the front row of a rock concert, except there was no music. In front of the painting was a glossy glass window, and next to it was a guard. The masses held up their low resolution camera phones and took terrible pictures of the greatest painting in the world. What was the point of the pictures? Proof that they had been there. That’s all. We left without waiting our turn to be in the front. Looking at a picture of the Mona Lisa on the internet is more satisfying – as long as it’s not one of those camera phone pictures. Our society has become comfortable. Too comfortable. Everything is so easy and convenient that we don’t actually need to do anything anymore. We live our lives vicariously by watching TV. Our food is formed in factories and reheated in microwaves. We don’t even like to be troubled to talk on the phone anymore, let alone in person. We send text messages and emails instead. There is so much out there in the world, and it is so tragically easy to miss all of it. In the same way the prepackaged microwave dinners pale in comparison to real home made food, the prepackaged standard American life which gets handed to us by default pales in comparison to a real life full of action and experience.
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Not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, the same technology that offers us hollow lives of convenience also give us everything we need to live happily and comfortably as nomads. It’s a double edged sword, and the side you end up with is totally up to you. Even travel, glorious as it is, can be reduced to nothing more than a real life slideshow of monuments and sights. Thousands of tours are just that. My advice is to go out there and do something. Experience something. Interact. There is more to do and to experience in this world than we’ll have time for in our lives. And frustratingly, more new things are invented every day. I like to see the sights of a city as much as anyone else does. If it’s the biggest, slowest, fastest, longest, shortest, or tallest of anything, I’m probably going to find time to check it out. But at the same time, I’ve learned that what really create satisfaction are the experiences in between. Interaction is what builds experiences, even if it’s something as simple as hiking up a mountain and feeling the breeze on your face as you look out at the sea. Sometimes adventure and excitement will find you. Other times you’ll have to go out and find it yourself. UNESCO The most beautiful forest in the world is a lot more appealing when the sun is up and you have half a clue where you are. The hike was supposed to be a gentle two hour walk through the woods, but we’d been gone for six hours now and hadn’t been on a civilized path in miles. Now we strained our eyes against the dark to find the piece of taped wrapped around a tree which signaled the next waypoint.
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Or at least we thought it did. At this point we had no idea what we were supposed to do. We all knew that we couldn’t go back, though. The looming cedar trees blocked out any moonlight there was, and we didn’t have enough flashlights to go around. Besides, half the time we were scrambling up steep muddy inclines or crossing the stream that cascaded down the hill in a series of waterfalls. Every corner we turned brought more false hope. We were looking for a mountain hut, supposedly put there by the national park to provide a place for hikers to rest. At this point I figured we were more likely to see a giant anime monster with tentacles than the hut. We were in Japan, after all. “This is really it! I see a sign!” I was excited. There really was a sign. Sure, it had taken us three times as long as expected, but at least we had finally reached the mountain hut. But when we got to the sign there was no mountain hut in sight. In fact, the sign seemed to indicate that we were still at the starting point. After a spirited debate, we finally reached a consensus. We had accidentally followed the “route” and not the “trail”, which are apparently two different things. Our route was meant for hardcore outdoor adventure seekers, and it led from the sea to the beginning of the real trails. We later discovered that we were supposed to take a bus there, not hike to it. Exhausted, frustrated, and not eager to negotiate the terrain in the dark, we scoured the area for shelter. It was impossible to go back, and by now was the middle of night. We didn’t even get the cell phone service that could have gotten us out of there. And so
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we did what anyone would do: We climbed on top of the bathroom and set up camp. The next day we pranced along the trail. It was so much easier than the previous day’s effort that we barely noticed that we were climbing to the peak of a mountain. And what a peak it was. We pulled ourselves out of the dense cedar forest and on to the big rock jutting off the side of the mountain, to be rewarded with the most beautiful view I’ve ever seen in my life. The lush green mountains gave way to a freezing cold stream of water below, which ran all the way North to the sea of Japan. The scale of it was dizzying, and seemed only as real as landscapes seem when looking out the window of an airplane. We stood in silence marveling at the beauty of the island of Yakushima, Japan. A month prior I had never heard of Yakushima. It’s not in most guidebooks, and isn’t advertised anywhere. The only other white people we saw during the three days we stayed there were a German couple intent on taking pictures of their stuffed sheep in a variety of locations around the world. We discovered Yakushima through the free online catalog of UNESCO World Heritiage sites. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, mercifully abbreviated to UNESCO, is a United Nations organization with the lofty stated goal of contributing “to peace and security by promoting international collaboration through education, science, and culture in order to further universal respect for justice, the rule of law, and the human rights and fundamental freedoms proclaimed in the UN Charter.”
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A small part of this mission is the diligent evaluation and cataloging of what they call “World Heritage Sites”. Simply, this is the attempt to identify sites around the world that are important parts of our heritage as a civilization. The places they list, which number almost one thousand, span one hundred forty five countries. Included are natural wonders like the Rainforests of the Atsinanana, Madagascar, as well as manmade features like the Medina of Fez. My only complaint is that their listings don’t do the sites justice. The places they list often sound boring or unremarkable, and it’s only on blind faith that I build the impetus to finally go. I’ve never been disappointed yet, though, and always make it a point to visit any World Heritage Sites on or near my path. What I particularly like about the World Heritage Sites is that there’s usually a lot of substance and few fellow travelers. I have nothing against other travelers, of course, but I’ll guiltily admit that the experience feels more authentic when I’m the only traveler there. Single or swarmed with tourists, you can always expect to be amazed and educated when you visit a World Heritage Site. Ask People Who Know To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries. Aldous Huxley
I could probably write a whole book about places I’ve gone just because a local told me to. Just like you know better than a guidebook when it comes to your city, locals know what’s worth doing in their city as well.
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We ate at the same restaurant for lunch every day, Mireya’s Restaurant, in Panama City. One of the owners, Jorge, was a deaf lawyer. He would speak to us in Spanish and then be totally unable to comprehend our replies. “Las Tablas,” he said. “Como?” “Las Tablas. Carnaval.” He seemed frustrated that we weren’t bowled over with enthusiasm. We had no idea what he was talking about. He got a pen and a napkin and scribbled something in Spanish: “For Carnaval, go to Las Tablas. It is the best place.” And thus our plans were cemented. This must be important, we thought, since he had never before felt the need to write anything down to make sure we understood. Las Tablas was a sight to behold. It’s a tiny speck on the map that during any other week wouldn’t raise an eyebrow. But during Carnaval, it lights up. The two main streets, “High street” and “Low street”, have a friendly but fierce competition to see who has the prettiest queen of Carnaval, who can put on a better fireworks show, and who can create the most elaborate floats. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before, and if it weren’t for Jorge, I would have probably never seen it. Be open minded when you take locals’ advice. I always trust them over some underpaid guidebook writer. Locals aren’t the only people with the inside scoop. If your neighbors are Korean, ask them about Korea. When you talk to a traveler who seems to have the same interests as you, ask him where
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he would go. I always ask travelers where their favorite place in the world is. Everyone has such a place, and they’re always worth visiting. The Internet And of course, there’s the internet. Besides UNESCO’s web site, there are two places I check for every single trip: Wikipedia and Wikitravel. Neither is as comprehensive as a guidebook, but they’re generally written by people who really care about the area they’re writing about. Amongst the standard hotel recommendations and tired commentary on the strange political situation of the country, you’ll often find a gem of a tip. I also keep a wish list of places I’d like to go. Whenever someone shows me a picture of somewhere amazing, I find it and add it to my list. If I read an article about something crazy going on in a country, I add that to my list too. The three things at the top of my list at the moment are the world’s tallest bungee jump off of the space needle in Macao, the most dangerous trail in the world in Hua Shan, China, and a small Chinese village where instead of using fireworks they sling molten iron at a giant wall. The video of it is amazing – look it up on youtube.
ATTITUDE If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears. Glenn Clark
We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started... and know the place for the first time. T. S. Eliot
I reached out my hand to introduce myself. His RV was a bit beat up, but it was a beautiful fifties model with metallic avocado paint and chrome trim. Ever since moving into a tiny RV myself I had gained an appreciation for RVs in general. I had been admiring his for a week. I parked in the same place for months, right in downtown Austin, Texas across from my favorite restaurant, but this was the first time I had a neighbor. I woke up one morning and there he was, parked directly in front of me. I had been hoping to meet the resident of the RV, but hadn’t yet run into him. “How are you doing?” he asked. “Actually, you must be doing real shitty if you’re in an RV like me,” he added before I had a chance to respond..
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I was shocked. I was doing great – I loved being in my RV. In fact, during the one month period where I had both a penthouse condo downtown and my tiny twenty one foot long RV, I spent every night in the joyful minimalism of the RV. This same difference in attitudes echoes all across the world through travelers everywhere. The range of experiences, both comfortable and foreign, that you will have a nomad will vary beyond my ability to describe it. What you make of it is up to you. Positivity I remember being on a plane which had been delayed by a couple of hours. When we finally landed two hours late, the woman in front of me raced to call someone and describe the “worst flight of her life”. Sure, it’s a bit frustrating to sit in a grounded airplane, but is it really that easy to overlook the fact that we flew through the air in a metal tube and arrived, in relative comfort, in a totally different place? When did we become so callous to the wonders of modern technology? If your trip doesn’t go exactly as planned-- and it won’t-- laugh about it and make the best of the situation. Realize that the privilege of living on this earth is a billion times more wonderful than any problem in your life is bad. The only real determinant of one’s happiness is the permission he gives himself to be happy. I’ve been through some of the poorest countries in the world and seen residents of them with the kind of beaming genuine smiles you rarely see walking down the street in the United States. Everything you need for happiness and enjoyment is there, it’s just a matter of you accepting it.
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Yes, you will end up on bad flights, you might get ripped off by a taxi driver, and you’ll almost definitely have to use scary and strange toilets. Learn to take these things in stride and use them as reminders of the great gift that world travel, and life itself, is. An exercise which I’ve found to be valuable is to examine any “bad” thing that happens to and to see the positive in it. The positive doesn’t have to justify the bad or overshadow it, it just has to be there. If your flight is late, then you have some extra time to get some work done or read a book. If you get ripped off then you’ve learned a lesson on how to deal with taxi drivers. If you’re face to face with a hole in the floor of the train, then consider it to be local color. As you make this exercise a daily habit you’ll find that it becomes easy and eventually takes over your thought process subconsciously. Just Say Yes John was a sixty year old Brit who looked like a mustachioed jungle explorer and said things like, “me noggin”. As far as we could tell, he was the only other guest of the hostel in Qatar. He was charismatic and honest in a way that made you like him instantly. When we were in Qatar, the taxi industry was in a state of flux. The old taxis had been taken off the streets, but there weren’t enough new taxis to fill the void. Catching one was difficult, which was further compounded by the hundred twenty degree sun that you had to endure while you waited. Still, we were on a mission. We found the name of a dune an hour north of the city where the locals go to ride their 4 wheelers in the desert, and we were determined to go.
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As luck would have it, there was a taxi pulling up to the hostel just as we went out the gate. John popped out and greeted us. “John, we’re about to go ride four wheelers in the desert. Do you want to come with us?” His response was so casual that it was as if he had made his decision hours ago. “Yep, just let me drop off me things in me room.” An hour later we were crisscrossing the dunes together as the sun fell and turned the sky into a dusty purple glow. He barely knew us and had no idea where we were even planning on riding. Refusing the offer and opting instead to read a book or watch TV would have been an easy decision. But instead John threw caution and comfort to the wind and just said yes. It was a perfect illustration of why the principle of just saying yes is an important one, especially while traveling. My heart skips a beat when I think of how many friendships and memories I have which hinged on a single decision to say yes instead of no, and could have easily never materialized. Travel with an open mind. Accept invitations and extend them as well. Indulge in other cultures and appreciate the best in them.
Resources Why reinvent the wheel? I’ve collected all of the sites that are crucial to my survival as a nomad. Most of them have been mentioned in the book and are repeated here for your convenience. Have a great site that I didn’t include? E-mail me at
[email protected] Tynan.net/currentgear Gear is updated too frequently for me to link to each piece of gear. At least once a year, or when major changes are made to my gear, I update this listing. Inside you’ll find pictures, descriptions, and links to every single item I carry with me.. Weather2travel.com Use this site to figure out the historic temperatures and rainfall for the places you’ll visit. I like it because it shows all of the important numbers on the same page. Hover over the temperature to see it in Fahrenheit. Airtreks.com I used Airtreks to book my first Life Nomadic trip. They’re a travel agency that specializes in round the world itineraries. Always check with them before booking a long trip yourself; sometimes
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you’ll be able to beat their prices, but sometimes they’ll crush the best price you can find on your own. En.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_passport Visit this wikipedia page to check which countries you need visas for and which you don’t. Camcorderinfo.com As the URL might suggest, this is the best site for reading reviews of video cameras. DPReview.com Visit DP Review for reviews of still cameras. Make sure to search for micro four thirds cameras. chotto.free.fr/tatami/Metro/ Download MetrO, a great program for some smartphones which is like MapQuest for trains all over the world. CapitalOne.com Capital One is one of the very few credit card companies which does not charge a 2-3% currency conversion fee. AmericanExpress.com American Express Platinum cards give you access to airport lounges all over the world. They also offer a free 24 hour concierge and damage protection for new purchases.
RESOURCES
Schwab.com Open a bank account at Schwab.com. They have no currency conversion fee on the debit cards and no ATM fees. In fact, they rebate ATM fees levied by other banks. EarthClassMail.com Earth Class Mail offers a unique service to manage your postal mail while you’re away. They scan, shred, recycle, and forward your mail according to your instructions. MailALetter.com There are a number of sites that let you create postal mail online, but MailALetter is my favorite because they have good rates and let you upload a PDF file to send. HazelMail.com Use HazelMail.com to create postcards from your travel photos and mail them without ever leaving your computer. CallCentric.com CallCentric is the best service for receiving incoming VOIP calls, and they have reasonable rates for outgoing calls as well. For a small fee you can port your cell phone number to them. CallWithUs.com CallWithUs has the best consistent low rates for outgoing VOIP calls. They no longer offer incoming phone numbers, but you can use a different service for incoming and outgoing.
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www.backsla.sh/betamax Betamax is a VOIP company that owns several VOIP sites. This site has a graph showing each company’s price to each country. CallWithUs usually has lower overall rates, but BetaMax sites often have the best rates for particular countries. www.k7.net If you need to receieve faxes, create a free account at k7.net. You’ll get your own phone number and unlimited incoming faxing for free. www.fax1.com Fax1 has a great printer driver for faxing, a free trial, and great prices on outgoing faxing. Safeware.com If you’re going to insure your belongings, Safeware is the best company to use. They have very good rates and will cover any amount you want. WorldNomads.com If you want a general insurance policy that covers emergency, some of your belongings, and certain trip cancellations, check out World Nomads. I have not used them personally, but they are well recommended. PimsleurApproach.com My favorite way to learn language is through the Pimsleur Approach. You can buy the CDs here, or borrow them for free at your local library.
RESOURCES
Kanji.koohii.com If you want to learn Kanji, there is no better resource than “Reviewing the Kanji”, found here. ichi2.net/Anki Anki is a great flashcard review program for PC, Mac, Linux, or iPhone. It’s particularly useful for written Chinese or Japanese. Kayak.com Kayak is always the first place I go when I’m about to book a flight. If you make an account you can use the flexible search feature, which will help you get the cheapest possible flight. Farecompare.com/search/flyertalk.html Want to see where you can fly cheaply from any given airport, or see which flights will give you the most frequent flyer miles per dollar? Check out this secret search engine on Farecompare.com AirAsia.com Air Asia has very cheap flights throughout Asia, especially Southeast Asia, and offers tons of free flights twice a year. With a little patience you could do a whole tour of Asia for just a couple hundred dollars in taxes. Ryanair.com If you’re in Europe or Nothern Africa, check Ryanair for really cheap flights. Prices often vary wildly from one departure day to the next, so check any days you’re able to leave or return.
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Travelzoo.com TravelZoo is a good easy place to find some great deals. They have a lot of mediocre deals as well, so you’ll have to sift through. My favorite sections are Exotic Cruises and International Airfare. Seat61.com If you consider trains or boats, make sure to check out Seat 61. It’s a wondefully comprehensive directory, complete with details, pictures, and stories, of just about every ferry and train in the world. It’s one of the first places I check for interesting adventures in a new country. SleepingInAirports.net Use this site to help decide whether any given airport will be easy to sleep in or not. Conditions vary widely from bright lights and oppressive air conditioning to designated quiet areas with guards who will watch your stuff. CruiseCompete.com Never book a cruise without first putting it into CruiseCompete. com. I have been able to get a better price there one hundred percent of the time, sometimes even half of the best price I could find on my own. VRBO.com Vacation Rentals By Owner is a decent way to find an apartment in a foreign city. Prices tend to be high, but I’ve found some good deals and quality is usually good. Don’t be afraid to counteroffer, especially if you’ll be staying for longer than a week.
RESOURCES
Craigslist.org I use Craigslist to find apartments all around the world. Make sure to check rooms / shared, sublets / temporary, and vacation rentals. I’ve found good places in each of those sections. Couchsurfing.com This is THE online community for finding couches to crash on and for offering your own couch. They have members in more countries than I was aware existied. HomeExchange.com If you have a house and you’re too stubborn to get rid of it, you can list it here and temporarily exchange it with a house in the country you’re visiting. I’ve never tried this personally.
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