How to travel around the world for a year.
alexmaccaw.com
alexmaccaw.com
So the net cost for the tip was about $22k. I paid for the vast majority of
this with one month's consultancy beforehand. That's crazy when you think
about it, one month's consultancy in return for a year traveling.
And I certainly didn't hold back with the budget, I met a lot of people
doing it for much cheaper. Where there's a will, there's a way.
That Mark Twain quote really hit home. I recently decided that I need to do the same thing actually. I'm sick of the USA, of the people here, their attitudes, etc.. (I am in LA). Ready to get out and experience the rest of the world. I leave for Sweden on Feb 24th! My first time out of the country!
You could have picked a good time to visit, but you just had to pick the coldest month? Why? :-)
I'm primarily excited for a taste of new culture, a break from the shitstorm that I feel like my life is right now, and hopefully a new outlook on life.
Have fun in Sweden, be prepared for a high prices though!
I spent 2 years driving from Alaska to Argentina, working on freelance websites and programming on the side.
Total trip cost (yes, including gas) was $27k.
Full story at http://theroadchoseme.com
Anyone interested in a similar experience should checkout http://wikioverland.org , the encyclopedia of Overland Travel
Always wanted to do that.
Great thing about traveling in alaska-- you can just pull over to the side of the road and sleep. Spent weeks doing that, and the only "incident" was when an Alaskan Pipeline worker woke me up (it was noon! I my clock was thrown off by the 24 hour sunlight) to make sure I was ok. (I was relatively near the pipeline at that point, and they patrol it.)
Thanks for sharing your experience, I'm enjoying reading it!
Sleeping on the side of the road like that is not only in Alaska, I camped almost my entire trip.
If any of you younger whippersnappers are reading this blog post, GO OUT AND DO THIS!!! You'll most likely regret not doing it when you're older.
I have two sisters, a step-sister, and a step-brother.
What are you waiting for?
We moved to St Anton am Arlberg (Awesome ski resort in the Alps) with a 15 month old & mortgage. Ski by day, work remote by night, best six months in a long time. So good, we are doing another ski season in Japan for 2012/13 (and we have a 2nd kid now).
One of the great things about IT is that you can be geographically free. Leave the hustle & bustle, get in touch with nature/family/yourself/beer and you will never regret it.
I've learned more about almost any place from books and media than just passing through, seeing the sites, and meeting some people. "Traveling" is really not as enlightening as people try to pretend. Living somewhere a couple years is another matter.
I strongly protest about this. I travel extensively, in a similar way to the OP (live where I choose for how long I can on a visa). My life, and especially my view on my home country, has vastly expanded. I have friends all over the world, I can speak a couple of languages and a smattering of many others which has lead to expanding our business because I can communicate sufficiently, and more critically, understand their particular needs. I wonder if you stayed in fancy hotels all the time? Have you spent a few nights in a Casa Particular in Cuba, or camped out in South Africa with local farmers?
"Essentially a form of entertainment". Wow, what an understatement about what this great world and the people in it can teach us.
Reading down a bit more, maybe you're referring to the travelling-salesman effect, a few days or hours in one place, all you are seeing are hotel lobbys and airports. This isn't travelling: it's commuting.
I'm nuts about Japanese culture. Did a lot of reading when I was a little weeaboo, even took a few semesters of Japanese language in college. It's all tremendously exciting and rewarding. But, when I landed in Osaka last year, it was a whole new ballgame watching, meeting, and talking to these people, conversing in their language, eating their food, seeing their homes and shops and shrines.
The reading prepared me for the experience. But it did not replace the experience. It's profoundly enlightening to go out, make yourself a foreigner in a new land and come to grips with a people, language, and culture who are not your own.
It may have helped that I took an unorthodox approach to vacationing, and minimized "sightseeing" and visiting tourist spots, instead just choosing to spend time in the city or in one of the outlying towns, observing and interacting with the natives.
Is what most people do because they are very short of time, due to the fact that the time they have is vacation time from their full time job. This forces them into a particular mode. But for many people, this is still very rewarding.
>"Traveling" is really not as enlightening as people try to pretend.
I think there's a big difference between spending 3 hours and 3 days somewhere. There's also a big difference between spending 3 days and 3 months somewhere. And then even further, you could spend 3 year somewhere.
I know in 3 months we don't get the same level of experience as spending 3 years, and we may well find a place where we want to spend 3 years at a time.
Everything in life involves tradeoffs, especially travel. I won't knock someone who spends 3 hours in a place I spend 3 months, anymore than I would want to be knocked by someone who spent 3 years there.
But I strongly disagree that you can books and media can replace travel. Sure you can learn a lot, but the experience of living somewhere or even visiting is a lot different than seeing it portrayed by others.
- you are forced to solve new problems imposed by your surroundings, which makes you a better problem-solver generally
- you become exposed to and aware of different ways that other cultures solve problems, which widens your own tool set
- you become more aware of some of your own default cultural/political/technological assumptions, and thus better able to set some of those biases aside when you face problems for which they aren't appropriate.
A weekend package tour won't give you much of that, but living for a few weeks or months someplace significantly different than your home country often will.
Given the endless research literature on challenges and cognitive capabilities, and especially the inverse correlation between novelty and mental decline in the elderly, I would be chary of making such claims.
Travel can give you most of the benefits most people claim it does without you actively trying because of how it forcibly takes you out of your comfort zone. But if you show up just expecting it to change you, or even worse; challenge it to, then you won't get anywhere near as much out of it.
I expect that your own experiences are more a reflection of your attitude towards it than what most enthusiastic travelers (including myself) claim it does.
You get out what you put in.
It's not making you any smarter or better, which is what a lot of people try to claim.
The best quote on travel I've read is, "travel doesn't make you interesting, it makes you interested." The few people I've met who thought it made 'better' were the same sorts of desperate saps that name-drop their college all the time. But these schmucks say nothing about going to college, just as the other schmucks say nothing about the validity of travel. You can't judge the world on the basis insecure people.
That said, I spent roughly 3-4 months back and forth staying in NY in 2010 and it was also an eye opening experience.
The key is to try and live like a local (as much as your persona permits) - and then address why you feel uncomfortable when you do, yet everyone else around you does not.
I'm addressing the people who endlessly hit up new places and try to pretend it means something. It's just novelty seeking, as best I can tell, which is to some extent a trait of immaturity.
I suspect that the problem here is simply that you are wrong.
I'm not sure why, but you're consistently trying to be condescending about those who value travel. What do you gain by categorizing and marginalizing others? Living somewhere is okay, but merely traveling through is just "novelty seeking"? As if "novelty seeking" cannot itself be an activity that leads to personal growth?
I think the key is the attitude change that is often stimulated by, but not necessarily caused by travel. You could get the same thing by waking up one morning and realizing you'd like to meet some folks from the other side of town and learn what they think about life, work, love, etc.
Disclaimer: I travel for work. Meeting up with CouchSurfers keeps me sane.
I was a bit off-put at first by the fact that the gorgeous photos in this post were not taken by Alex. I then realized that it was the photographer that inspired Alex to take his trip in the first place.
There's also something to be said for staying "behind your eyes" instead of "behind the glass." It's easier to be "in the moment" when you don't have to worry about documenting everything for posterity.
If you are like me and want the latter, then become a contractor and specialise in something that pays well (for me, J2EE - not a great technology, but Big Corp Inc. pays well for these skills).
The OP seems to suggest a work/travel approach, but to be honest I found that can be tough to sustain. To be maximally productive, it's really helpful to have comfortable and familiar surroundings, very solid internet, etc. I tend to do just-for-fun coding on trips instead, since I found trying to get setup in new places to be stressful.
E.g., what kind/level of J2EE expertise do you need to become a solo contractor for Big Corp Inc.?
As a contractor, do you work on a project in a company office for X months and then leave? Or do you work from home? Etc.
Thanks.
1. Worked for around eight years as an employee at a few places, including a couple of startups. Ended up with a lot of Java experience.
2. Realised I wanted to restructure my life to work less (but still make good money) and travel/have fun.
3. Spoke to various people and found that contracting through a consulting company (not recruiters, but a team of like-minded programmers) was the way to go, rather than pounding the pavement to look for contracts. The company takes its cut, but I still end up with $80-$95/hr, and they find the work for me.
As for experience: Big Corp Inc. wants contractors who can get up to speed very quickly. You tend to get pigeonholed based on technology, so if you get the assignment as a "J2EE guy" and you don't have a lot of experience, then you look pretty dumb. Spend time working as a normal employee first and really become a good programmer.
As for work duration: generally, the contracts are open-ended and I am terminated when a project gets cancelled or whatever.
I specify up front that I will spend the bulk of my time working from home and that I am taking holidays from time x to time y. The company that subcontracts me out is based in Silicon Valley, as is Big Corp and friends, and I live in western Canada, so this isn't usually an issue. I fly down once in while to hang out.
So to sum up: get experience - learn to be a good programmer who has a reputation for getting things done; learn what big companies want in terms of technology; find a company with good connections who will contract you out, possibly as a team with other people; be up front about your lifestyle but work hard to integrate with their project schedules.
It also helps to not have kids.
I was referred to the company I now work with most, but I found the last bunch of guys I was with via Craigslist.
My plan for the next trip is to travel in between contracts and then settle down for a few months at a time whilst working. Hopefully that will allow more focus.
Edit: Actually I like gexla' idea above - pick a comfortable home base to work in and travel to nearby areas/countries in between contracts.
JEE, Spring, Maven, Checkstyle, Findbugs. Lock and Loaded.
I made this comment in another post also, but I will repeat it here. If you need to continue working, it's difficult to do contract work while on the move. I suggest setting up a home base in a region that you can concentrate on. For example, setup a home base in SE Asia, knock out some projects and then travel to the nearby areas while between projects. When you are happy that you have seen everything that you want to see in that region, then setup a home base in another region and repeat. With this strategy you could extend your "around the world trip" to as long as you like.
One of the best times to travel is between leases, if you can stand to 'move' twice. Once to storage, go travel, once from storage to a new place.
Doing these kinds of trips and long-term sabbaticals with kids is the best education you can give them.
(Stay wired a little, and apparently they barely dent career prospects too.)
I'd say traveling with family doesn't have to be boring or as expensive as people presume. But it is qualitatively different from traveling in your twenties.
Food for thought if you want to spend a lifetime on the road instead of just a year.
Anyone care to explain how that is possible?
So, with a little planning, you can dodge at least the income tax portion.
Depends where you live, in the UK I pay a flat 20% (after income and expenses). My monthly costs in London add up to about $2k. So that leaves me about $15k. Not quite as much as the OP but give me a couple more years of experience and I'll be able to put my rates up.
-- No job-related health insurance.
-- As a contractor, I pay almost twice as much employment taxes as full-time employees in the US.
-- Business is sometimes sporadic
-- your next paycheck is not guaranteed.
However, all that is perfectly acceptable to me since in the end, I'm my own boss. There are only a few kinds of job offers I'd consider at this point since I'm very happy with being a freelancer. But don't take the $100 figure at face value -- add in taxes, business cycle, time needed for marketing and accounting, etc, and it's not as much as it seems.
> As a contractor, I pay almost twice as much employment taxes as full-time employees in the US.
As a small business owner in the UK I have free healthcare and pay slightly less tax than I would as an employee. I pay minimal NI contributions (about 40 GBP per month, I think), 20% corporate tax on earnings (after subtracting expenses and a token 7.5k salary) and zero tax on up to 35k of dividends per year.
Not impossible but not easy, exactly. If you take a year to plan it out I think you could set that aside, working in tech, but it's obviously not for everyone.
If this is your first backpacking adventure, I highly recommend not starting in mainland China. It is an order of magnitude more difficult a place to travel than other places.
I agree with the thought though. Rural China is one of the most difficult places to get around I've been to. Outside the cities, most people are just not used to encountering others that can't speak or read, so you have to supply the skills to fumble around and communicate. And Mandarin is a fiendishly difficult language for the native English speaker, so it's tough to pick a few phrases to get around.
I did two things that I didn't usually do.
I got people at the hostels I stayed in to write down instructions for me (e.g. tell them to write down "I would like a haircut/I would like to buy a 2nd class sleeper at 22:30 from Xi'an to Chengdu" and stuff like that).
Another thing I did was have the number of somebody who spoke English and Chinese and call them up when I really needed some translation (e.g. with a bus station attendant telling me that their tickets are all sold out for that day).
That's it. Those are the only two things I did in China that I didn't do in Cambodia (or Shanghai/Beijing). Most stuff you buy you can buy just with gestures and a couple of words. Taxis can take you where you want to go with a point to a place on the map. What else is there?
Anything you write about this is really fantastic and helpful, so thank you : ) I'll certainly let you know how it's going once I get out there. You have inspired at least one young programmer, so thanks for that!
Also, if you go to Checkpoint Charlie, the Museum there is pretty good, and big, but during peak hours it is extremely crowded and this detracts from the experience. Worth trying to go in off hours for that one.
Also the DDR Museum is really great, as is the Berlin City Museum. Especially if you've an interest in the soviet era.
Wish there were a simpler way!
www.couchsurfing.org
I think the real cost of travel is time.
I suppose one compromise could be to deck out your own vehicle with an ideal setup and travel in that; but then you're more limited in where you can go.
The author seemed to be working on his own projects during his trip. Doing contract work on the road is far more difficult, so the "home base" strategy also works better if you have to continue contract work while abroad.
I believe that I could get by with a less ergonomic system if I limited myself to part-time work (say, four to six hours per day) and had ample time to walk around. I've found nothing better for back/neck problems than a good 15 - 30 minute walk, focusing on posture. Also, I would find something like a more powerful iPad, on a stand, with a nice Bluetooth keyboard to be much, much more valuable than a laptop, and it should still be very space efficient.
Thanks Alex!
Its great to take a year off, and see all those countries on $22k, and if you're considering doing that, I highly recommend doing something like what he's doing!
For us, we chose to make international living more of a lifestyle. We are running our startup this way. When we added our third co-founder, it became three of us traveling this way. It is working out pretty well. We use AirBnB or local real estate agents to book accommodations. We stay in a country for 3-6 months depending on their visa length.
We work a sort of regular schedule, so we're not out seeing tourist sites every day. But that's what we do on the weekends.
At the end of the day, living like this, all over the world, is cheaper than it would have been if we'd just stayed on the West Coast of the USA. Well, cheaper financially.
One way we keep things cheap is by trying to focus on inexpensive countries. Our time in europe was great, but even there we stayed in berlin (which since the wall came down still has reasonably priced rents), and a small UK town. Mostly we're focusing on less developed / expensive countries which is also the more interesting ones.
We book maybe 1-2 flights a year. We are careful about this. We got a nice 7 day "vacation" in Venice when we were able to save $300 by booking a layover thru that part of Italy on our repositioning trip. Taking your time on your flights lets you maximize flexibility and gives you great opportunities like Venice. Keeping major international flights to a minimum keeps our expenses low.
All three of us live out of big suitcases. We were trying the "one bag one world" thing and living out of a 55 Liter backpack. This was ok in terms of size, but airlines have decided that refusing to take bags, even if they're carryon size, is a revenue opportunity, so rather than fight them, or deal with the hassle, we've switched to a 2 bag solution- one carry on for the expensive electronics and one checked bag for the clothes etc. (so 2 bags each, though the carry ons tend to be rather small.)
I really need to do a blog post about this. Actually, I have a dozen blog posts, but I need the blog first. And the blog is not coming until the MVP is done.
Anyway, traveling around the world for a year-- totally good idea, not that unreasonably expensive, and if you want to make a lifestyle out of it, you can do it, by increasing the amount of time you spend in each country to bring the costs down.
Only downside of living this way: there's some impact on productivity due to the travel. So, we lose probably 4-6 weeks a year of productive time because of it. For instance, we didn't get a damn thing done in Venice. Some of those "lost" weeks are the most fun too.
The next stage of growth is hiring independant contractors for specific jobs that need to be done, and when we start wanting to have full time employees, they can be located anywhere. People want to telecommute and we like the sort of github style management policy.
I imagine that once a year we'd all get together in the same place for an annual meeting. Its also quite possible that we'll end up getting outside investors and have to start living in the Bay Area or something like that.
Having toted an SLR everywhere, I'll admit that unless you're an avid photographer, you will probably be happier and less anxious with a quality point-and-shoot. I gave an awful lot of impromptu classes on photography to people with SLRs that had kit lenses (not much better than a good P&S) and wildly inappropriate settings (much worse than a P&S).
It should be possible through behavioural studies and observation to prove whether there is any substance to "Travel is fatal to bigotry" or "You can't fail to come away from traveling inspired with a fresh perspective", and whether that makes any difference to anything.
"Traveling opens your eyes to some of the real problems people face", does it? "gives you the opportunity to come up with solutions to tackle those" and do people use that opportunity?
$22k and 1 year is a lot of opportunity cost. This is argued by someone who travelled easily from a powerful country, with an iPod and laptop, to surf, party and program while meeting Ruby programmers, and claiming travel is a way to "get out of the echo chamber"(!) From someone who talks about how possible it would be to turn it into a fulltime lifestyle doing the same consulting he did to pay for it in the first place, and after all that singing the praises, doesn't do so.
Is it really so downvotable to question how much is hype, and how much substance?
It is incredibly difficult, I should think, to quantify and measure any of this. However, I'm fairly certain very few exciting or interesting things, or things with growth potential, happen to people who spend all day at home and/or in the office compared to those who go off to explore the world.
And yes, you may also discover nothing of interest, and then you'll have "wasted" your time. So, how risk aversive are you? How important is it to you that you need new experiences - how sure are you of this if you haven't had those experiences? Tricky question. My philosophy has become "let's find out rather than theorize" and it's always been the right choice.
I will say that I think there's too much emphasis on travelling internationally to acquire these experiences. I suspect the type of people taking these trips and developing these exciting experiences and assuming it's about international travel might not do much travelling in their local environment and confuse the international environment as being the source of the new experiences, rather than their effort at exploring new environments.
I also think it's a bit naive to accept Mark Twain's observations about his world as necessarily applying directly today's world; the population of the US in 1861 when Twain started travelling was around 26 million: the diversity and interestingness of a given location was very different from what you have today (quite literally, any given place will have 150 years of additional history and I can guarantee it'll be far more interesting than the 150 years preceeding 1861!).
That being said, I don't think it's a stretch to imagine you're more likely to have interesting and unusual experiences in cultures or locales vastly different from what you're used to than otherwise.
In short give it try and find out. But don't bother if you can't summon a positive attitude, you'll just waste your time.
!
And if in fact you can't, why not hop a plane? It makes as much sense as any other response in that case.
"the world isn't the wild west that some people seem to think it is"
Precious.