Introduction to Long Term Travel
And why it’s cheaper and easier than you thought
So we already know that vacation is an entirely different thing from travel. But many people are still interested in getting started with long-term travel, and I would like this post to serve as a base of knowledge you can use to get started if you are interested. For other long-term travelers, this is a discussion — please contribute! I want mega-posts like this to be collaborative efforts, not only my opinion.
Making Sure You Really Want It
When people hear about the trip I’m currently taking, people often react by saying that this sounds amazing and they are jealous. Whenever I hear this, I usually explain that there is no reason to be jealous, since they can easily do it themselves. I then usually probe a bit further, asking if they seriously would want to travel for a whole year, or if it just seems like a cool idea. About half the time, the response I get is that they don’t actually think they would want to do it, it just seems cool.
Travel is something that is glorified and glamorized by society. People drool over alluring instagram shots of sparkling white sand beaches and videos of misty clouds floating lazily over mountaintops. They imagine living the good life, adventuring, relaxing, and seeing the world’s most amazing sites in comfort and style. The reality of travel is nothing like this, you’re just watching the highlight reel. As a long term traveler, you will always be working hard to minimize costs, plan your next destination, stay in touch with friends and family, meet new people, and actually get value out of your experiences rather than just hopping from tourist site to tourist site meaninglessly. You will grapple with the meaning of your life, what you are doing and why you’re doing it. You will face constant instability, not knowing where you will stay the next night or if you’ll have the funds or time to do what you want, or even eat. You will only have a couple tee shirts, and probably all of them will be dirty. You’ll face highs and lows, like relaxing on a beach you just hiked 10 miles to get to, and having all of your belongings stolen. Travel is not an extended luxury, it’s simply a different lifestyle with its own set of ups and downs. You have to want to completely gut your lifestyle and start fresh, and be confident doing so if you want to travel long-term.
Making a Commitment
So, you have sized yourself up and decided that long term travel is actually something you want. The next step is turning it from a lofty dream to a hard-set reality. You need to make a commitment to travel. Tell your friends, your family. Announce it on Facebook. Open up an investment account and put a chunk of savings in it. A lot of people think “wow, this would be so cool to do” and/or “I’ll do it someday!” No. No no no. You will not do it someday. You will pick a day upon which you will start doing it, and commit to that day. That’s how you actually get things done. It’s scary, but so is everything about travel, really. If you just don’t feel like you are up for it, maybe it’s not for you, which is totally fine!
Saving and Budgeting
Long term travel is much less expensive than you would think, but you still are going to need some savings to make it through. Travel is usually priced by daily budget. In my experience, there are a couple different ‘tiers’ of budgets.
$15/day or less is really scrapping it. This is possible, but you are going to need to have free accommodation most or all of the time, cook for yourself with limited cheap ingredients every night, and not be doing things like paying to enter UNSECO world heritage sites because that’s more than your entire budget for the day. If faced with a choice between a 24 hour bus ride through the mountains vs a 1 hour plane flight for twice the price, you’ll need to take the former, every time. Hitchhiking will also be a primary mode of transit. From having spoken to people who are on this budget, it is uncomfortable for sure, and you will end up sacrificing experiences, time, and potentially healthy, but it is possible. This could be made much more comfortable always doing work exchanges, or by biking and camping. This requires $5,475 banked for a full year.
$30/day is decent. You will be able to pay for accommodation sometimes, but will need to aggressively seek out free accommodation most of the time. You might be able to go out for food occasionally, but you will be cooking for yourself most of the time. To stay in this budget range, you’ll want to have a heavy portion of your food and lodging costs covered by work exchanges. You’ll be able to afford transit, but swing much harder towards cheap busses, car shares, and ultra budget flights booked months ahead. In my opinion, this is as thrifty as you can get without giving up health or basic comforts. This requires $10,950 banked for a full year.
$50/day gives you a bit more of a comfortable buffer. At this rate, you don’t need quite as much free housing, and you can afford to eat out sometimes, if you want. You will also be able to afford small luxuries like entering famous tourist sites that charge for admission, or taking a boat tour of an island. You still will not be staying in hotels or shopping for sure, and will be aiming to reduce costs as much as possible, because you never know when a country or flight will be more expensive than you thought (*cough London*). This is around our budget, to be transparent, and we feel quite comfortable in this range, and not frequently limited by money. This requires $18,250 banked for a full year.
Anything over $50/day is pushing into probably more than you need, but if you can afford this go for it. At this range you can spend the whole trip without getting free accommodation, but if you do have some mixed in, which you should, you can book nicer places when you are not staying somewhere free. You can go out to eat most of the time if you want to. You can afford to be more lax in your transit booking and make a couple mistakes that cost more. You will be able to enter paid tourist sites without issue. You won’t feel like you need to be as aggressive in cutting your costs at every opportunity. This requires over $20,000 banked for a full year.
Now, how do you save up these chunks of money? You can save a lot by aggressively cutting out luxuries from your life, and putting them towards your travel fund. Cook for yourself at home, stop shopping for new things you don’t need, plan activities with friends that don’t revolve around expensive things, like having lunch at a park instead of a restaurant, and drinking and hanging out at your place, rather than a bar. This guy has been traveling on $15/day on average for 8 years, and all his income is from a home that he rents out in Germany. This guy moved out of his apartment and slept with friends or at his office to save money. Get creative, be thrifty as hell. It will pay off when you feel the thrill of that first day of knowing you are going on the adventure of a lifetime.
If you have skills you can use to work remotely, this can help to ease costs significantly as well. I am fortunate to work in computer programming, and as such can work remotely to help subsidize our costs a bit. Currently I am working one day per week, and this for me is a good amount. If I were staying longer in places (like an average of two weeks per location), I would be comfortable working two days a week or more. Really, this is a balance you need to find for yourself through.
And of course, make sure to invest all your savings, because that adds to your money for free.
Planning the Trip
First things first, you can not plan long-term travel entirely before you leave. This is the kind of thing that you can do for vacations, so you might be used to it, but it doesn’t work for long term travel. You need to be accustomed to planning on the road.
That being said, you want to book your plane flights 3 months ahead of time for the lowest prices, and have a general idea of where you want to be. My girlfriend and I made an initial route that has ended up drastically changing over the course of the trip, but at least having a general sense of where we wanted to visit helped a lot.
You want to give yourself time in the places you are staying, way more time than if you were taking a vacation. In our experience, three days or less is a pretty rough experience. We try to aim for at least 5 days in each place we stay, and about 2 weeks at work exchanges.
Why so much more time than usual? A couple reasons. First, transit cuts days out. You need to get to the place and leave. You need to assume that there’s a strong chance you will give up the entire day you arrive and leave from a place. If you arrive in the afternoon somewhere, you still need to figure out how to get to the place you are staying, get there, put down your stuff, relax for a little bit, find the nearest grocery store, maybe wash your clothes, probably eat some food, and get a good sense of the city. On the day you leave, you need to pack up your stuff, eat food, make and/or pack another meal or snacks during transit, and get to whatever station you’re leaving from pretty early so you don’t miss it. You could rush this and force yourself to get out as soon as possible, or book flights early or late for more money so you have more time in a day, but these things are not as reasonable when traveling long term. You need to save money and relax, which means transit days are usually given up to the travel gods. So that’s minus two days off your time in a place.
Also, when traveling long term, you are not going out and seeing things full time. You also need time to work, plan the next portion of your trip, research the place you’re at, keep on top of your budget, and stay in touch with friends and family. This stuff takes much longer than you think, and at very least you should assume you’ll need one “personal day” per week, when you can get things done. It would be much more comfortable to have two though. So that’s minus at least one more day.
Now you can see why three days in a place is too little. That can easily get whittled down to zero days, then you don’t see the place at all, so why go in the first place? Even five days is a stretch, giving you on average two days during which you can actually experience the place you’re in. For long term travel, the rule is generally that you want to spend more time in fewer places, don’t let yourself fall victim to vacation-style city-hopping or fear of missing out driving you to neglect personal time.
As for the actual planning, we mostly use TripAdvisor. Honestly, it’s not a great resource. It’s chock full of ads and crappy reviews, and is really hard to tell if a place worth it or not. Really, it’s more of an app for tourists and vacationers. We have been thinking about and planning an alternative service to tripadvisor aimed at long-term travelers, more details on this in a future post. But it will still give you a decent overview of the most important places to see in a city or region, and you can make a little list of the ones that interest you and save some cities offline. This type of research generally takes us no more than an hour. You will get better at this as you travel more.
Transforming Your Lifestyle
In reality, unless you are actually a trust-fund baby looking for an extended vacation, the reality of travel is a severely restricted budget. Any non-rich human being is going to be facing a major downsize in lifestyle, becoming much more frugal than they ever imagined. I have met travelers who lived on less than $10 a day for months, trying every day to figure out a place they can stay for cheap or free, and dining on only ramen noodles and water.
But as we know, life for most people is simply a scale of hedonic adaptation, so while you may fear the concept of drastically scaling back your luxuries, research has shown that you will actually be just as happy. In my humble opinion, you’ll actually be even happier, since you’ll also be traveling, learning, and growing as a person rather than grinding it out in the same bland daily routine.
So, how can you manage to spend so much less? A small, simple set of changes can drastically cut costs, while also making your healthier and giving you a much deeper integration into local culture.
Saving Money on Common Costs
For accommodation, you can get this for free by staying with friends or family, couchsurfing, or doing a workaway or wwoof. All of these are great experiences where you get to live with a local and much better experience the culture of a place, and I greatly prefer these over anything else. As an added bonus, they also are free, which lines up nicely. For couchsurfing or work exchange experiences, make sure that you reach out to many people (10 at minimum) and do this at the very least 2 weeks ahead of time. The earlier the better though, in most cases. You will get a lot of people who do not respond and reject you, get used to this. Free accommodation is pretty highly desirable, no surprises.
Some of the time, you’ll end up paying for accommodation though. If this is the case, you’ll want to aim for hostels or AirBnbs. Hotels really are obsolete at this point because of AirBnb. They are consistently much more expensive, and give a much weaker value. For half the price or less of a vanilla hotel room, you can rent out the entire home of a local, with a kitchen and usually washing machine, on AirBnb. Booking AirBnbs is easy if you know how to do it right. Hostels are also simple to book ahead through Hostelworld, I’ve got more on our hostel booking process here. In South America, we managed to find very low priced hostels, under $10/day frequently. In Europe, hostels tend to be more pricey, so we have been using more AirBnbs.
For food, I strongly recommend cooking for yourself. If you are a decent or good cook, great, you are all set. If not, start learning. You will save quite literally thousands of dollars doing this (our average meal cost is about $3 per meal per person when cooking for ourselves). On top of that, you will become a much better cook, which is an important life skill. And finally, you will have more consistency in your diet, which makes you healthier and less likely to get food poisining. My girlfriend and I typically will rotate through just a few different types of meals made with common ingredients. For breakfast, we usually make some combination of pancakes, eggs, and cereal. For lunch, we make turkey and cheese sandwiches with some chips or nuts. For dinner, we just make chicken with vegetables most of the time. We’ll combine this with rice to make a stir fry, a tortilla and cheese to make a burrito, or pasta and sauce to make a pasta dish. We also frequently make hamburgers, which are simple to make with some ground beef, bread, cheese, and a frying pan, with some veggies on the side. Adding a fried egg to your burger is a nice treat too. We also carry a couple small containers of spices with us. I’ll have a more detailed post on our travel cooking later, but you get the idea.
For transit, we use Rome2Rio to get a rough idea of the cheapest way to get between places. This is an unbelievably good resource, it will pull all public transit options, airlines, etc and show you transit times and prices. Usually cheapest is best, but if you have the budget sometimes you’ll want to take a more expensive option to save yourself an extra 20 hours or so of transit. As mentioned previously, book plane flights 3 months ahead of time for the lowest fares. It’s similar for trains. Busses do not matter much when you book. You can also use blablacar in some countries to get a cheap shared ride and a more genuine experience. It helps a lot if you speak the language though. Hitchhiking is an option, although we have not done this because of potential danger and because we have not needed to. Just hold up a thumb, and a sign to where you are going can help too.
Getting Valuable Experiences
Now the last question — what are you doing day-to-day? We figured out before long that always seeing tourist sites is a very empty pursuit. Really, it’s nothing more than low-value entertainment masked as a cultural experience. As such, we try hard to get a more genuine sense of each place we go. As mentioned earlier, doing a work exchange (through workaway or wwoof) is a great way to do this. You will live with a local, eat, and work with them. This kind of experience is significantly better than being pushed around by crowds of tourists through some museum or tower that you probably will have forgotten about in a week, and makes a deep, lasting impact on your life. My girlfriend and I have learned so much from our work exchange experiences, and they have pushed us to challenge so many parts of our life, from healthy eating to social relations to the value of work. When we are not doing a work exchange, we try to see friends or meet up with people that live in a place when possible. Use social networks through the industry you work in, or your normal social networks, family, and friends of friends, to find cool people. We have also met up with a couple really nice people through hastagnomads. And if we’re not doing either of these things, we’ll spend our time mixed between working (I work remotely one day a week, my girlfriend is working on medical research), planning the things we’re doing next, walking around a city or area just to take in the atmosphere and enjoy it, with a sprinkle of tourist sites when one is particularly lovely.
What Do You Return To?
Earlier, I was talking about long term travel with someone from twitter (shameless plug), and they asked me this question. This is something I had not thought much about, but really it’s incredibly an important question. The essence is, once I am done traveling, am I just back to the hamster wheel, grinding out work on my daily schedule and feeling sad about life, reminiscing of the days of my travel freedom?
The answer to this is a resounding “absolutely not!” Travel will turn your views on life inside out. You will re-evaluate what you can live on, what makes you happy, and how you can really be fulfilled. When you get back, you will need to fight slipping back into the standard routine and work towards building a life that truly makes you happy. And that’s exactly what this blog is about. Everything I post is backed by this core theme — that you don’t have to live life according to a routine, pushed around by ridiculous expectations and cultural values that you accept without thinking about. You can build a more balanced life that makes you much more happy if you are truly pragmatic about your choices, and take every opportunity you can to learn and push yourself towards great value. Isn’t that a cute ending? But seriously, if this is something that seems interesting to you, subscribe and keep reading — I will not let you down.
Photo is of the fireworks show on Bastille Day in Paris, France. It was pure luck that we ended up in Paris on this day, but was an incredible experience.
