What does it mean to live while travelling?
There are three distinct ways of living in any country:
- A couple of weeks’ holiday — in which case all you need is a suitcase and some cash. Food, cleaning and every other domestic matter are taken care of by the hotel or a restaurant.
- Living somewhere for years on end, steadily and permanently — where you have your own home, and furnish it with furniture, crockery and all manner of pleasant little things.
And then there’s the middle path — living somewhere for several months at a time. This is where domestic and professional questions begin to creep in.
Daily life
Living in a hotel for several months is either prohibitively expensive, since you’d need to book a suite with a separate bedroom, or thoroughly impractical, given how rarely hotel rooms come with a kitchen. Hence, short-term apartment rentals. These already come furnished, with a kitchen, bedding, towels, even crockery. Every so often you find yourself wanting to buy something extra — a salad bowl, perhaps, or a decent chopping board, that sort of small thing. Buying anything larger makes little sense: you can’t take it with you when you leave, and yet it feels wasteful to abandon it. So you quickly learn to make do with whatever’s at hand — I, for one, have learned to cook porridge in a mug.
Transport falls under this same heading. You need a feel for when to rent something and when to buy it outright. In Thailand and Bali, for instance, if you’re staying longer than six months, it works out cheaper to buy a motorbike and sell it on before you leave. Helmets, though, are worth buying regardless, since rental helmets tend to be absurdly flimsy — I simply give mine away to the rental shop before I fly out. Driving licences belong in this same category: for longer stays, a local licence is often required by law.
Work
I need to earn a living, which means I need to work. You can work remotely for an employer, freelance, or run your own business. Whichever it is, a good internet connection is essential, since working legally within the country you’re staying in is next to impossible without the right visa — and falling foul of the visa rules can get you deported, or even land you in prison.
For myself, I’ve come close to building something resembling my dream working life. I’ve always found it difficult to sit in an office from nine to six, and my brain has always needed more than a lunch break to reset over the course of a day. I start work in the morning and, throughout the day, alternate between work, everyday errands and leisure. This lets my mind switch gears and genuinely rest. During my long trip around Thailand, for example, my life settled into two distinct states — work on one hand, activities and entertainment on the other. Work gave my body a rest; outings and travel gave my mind one.
A schedule like this has its own quirks — I start early and finish late, but in exchange, work fits seamlessly into life rather than the other way round, and I have no fixed working days or hours. I can take a day off whenever the mood strikes me. Though sometimes that luxury simply isn’t available, and I end up working for days on end without a single break — this very article, for instance, has taken me four days to write, simply because work got in the way.
Then there’s the entertainment of time zones. If you’re employed by someone else, this problem doesn’t arise. But working for yourself is a different matter entirely. I might wake up at seven in the morning to a message from Japan, and drift off to sleep to one arriving from Europe. And I don’t even bother explaining that I’m in an entirely different time zone — I simply put my phone on silent.
