We are travelling permanently with only carry-on luggage, having sold the rest of our belongings. I have a 30 litre backpack and Simon has a 40 litre backpack and a small travel guitar. It’s been surprisingly easy to live with such small bags and to fit everything we need into them, including two laptops and an SLR camera. Life is actually much simpler when you own less.
We were inspired to take Problogger’s 7 Link Blog Challenge by travel bloggers The Planet D. The idea is that bloggers have so much content that gets hidden in the archives and we should provide ways for new readers to find it. We’ve only been going for five months but we still have 67 posts published.
Based on Problogger’s suggested categories here are our seven links.
Our first post was written a few weeks before we set off on our current Never Ending Voyage. It looked back on what we had gained from our first round the world trip and examined why we had chosen to travel forever. Five months later and it all still stands.
We are often asked how much it costs to travel for a year. Obviously this isn’t an easy question to answer – it depends on where you go, what you do and what level of comfort you would like. To answer this question for yourself you need to come up with a travel budget. This is how we budgeted for our year long round the world (RTW) trip.
Have a rough idea of which countries you’d like to visit and how long for. You can (and very probably will) adjust this later, depending on what you can afford and how your plans change.
These include flights (RTW or pay as you go), travel insurance, visas, vaccinations and gear (clothes, backpack, camera etc).
For this you need to know where you want to go, how long for and how much an average daily budget is for that country. For example we budgeted £12 each per day for India for 3 months which totals £1080 per person. It helps when countries within a region have similar budgets, so you can budget say £12 a day for 5 months on the Indian Subcontinent and £15 a day for 3 months in Southeast Asia. This gives you greater flexibility to change your plans without messing up your budget.
We’d been back for a few months, struggling to adjust to the grey, wet gloominess of a British winter after an incredible year travelling the world. I was supposed to forget about travel for a few years, focus on my career and our life in Manchester. Yet I was drawn to the Lonely Planet website, and came across Soultravelers3 who had won a LP Travel Blog Award. The family of three have been travelling for over three years and have no plans to stop.
Their website opened my eyes to the possibilities of permanent travel. I had read plenty of travel blogs but the trips all ended after a year. Suddenly I discovered a world of perpetual travellers, digital nomads and location independent professionals. Travel wasn’t temporary for these people, it was a lifestyle. They had all found ways to make a living on the road, so they could travel or live wherever they wanted. The thought of this freedom was intoxicating. There was no going back and our journey to becoming perpetual nomads began.
We are Simon Fairbairn & Erin McNeaney a couple who sold everything and left the UK in March 2010 to travel the world forever. We write about our travels and our journey to become digital nomads. Read more...