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
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, half-flooded tunnel. It was a clever strategy: send an un-uniformed of-ficer past us, so that when we see four more ofof-ficers waiting ahead of us, we have nowhere to run.
Not that running was actually a possibility. The cloudy spring wa-ter 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.
These weren’t just any police, either. I’d heard the legends of the Cataflics, the Catacomb Police, whose only job was to keep tres-passers 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. Explor-ing 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 sneak-ing 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.”
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 go-ing to arrest me. If I was still in Austin with my friends and fam-ily, 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 com-panion, Todd, and his mastery of the French language, we were released without any sort of penalty. I think he managed to con-vey that we were more interested in French history than vandal-ism.
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 favor-ite 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
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 le-veraging technology, we have separated our obligations and com-mitments from fixed locations. As we travel around the world we work, play, and learn.
Incredibly, living this way isn’t expensive. My total costs, includ-ing 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 in-cluded, for $25 a day. You will understand how to book interna-tional 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.
What is a Modern Nomad?
“Be indifferent to where you live.”
Miyamoto Musashi
We’ve come a long way from the herding-yaks-through-the-steppes 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 opportu-nity 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.
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 be-cause 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 min-utes with few or no expenses constraining my decision.
Flexibility of movement isn’t the only type of flexibility that’s im-portant, 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 coun-tries, big councoun-tries, 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 Viet-nam.
Our world offers an amazing and limitless wealth of experiences and knowledge1, 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 By the way, not many of these are within your city. Think about what you’re missing out on if you don’t leave.
On the other hand, it’s important to remember that the abil-ity 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 fre-quented by backpackers, tourists, and vacationers. There’s noth-ing wrong with spendnoth-ing time on these trails (who’s gonoth-ing 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
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 al-ways pay for it, even when doing so costs a lot of money. And un-less 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 mul-tivariate testing tool, which I was convinced would make me rich1. 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.
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
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 Chi-cago? I’d been to both cities a few times and liked them.
Why was I constraining myself to the United States, I asked my-self. It’s a great country, but plenty of people live in other coun-tries 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.
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 Eu-rope?
I don’t even mean to criticize that lifestyle all that much. Com-pared to most of the world , it’s a pretty deluxe life2. It’s
comfort-able and safe.
What I am trying to say, what I want to shout out from the roof-tops, 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 driv-ing your life, not just riddriv-ing 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 de-pendent 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 liv-ing 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.
Even though I knew it would devastate my parents, I finally mus-tered 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 regret-ted 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 ex-pectations, 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 com-pany.
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 ar-guing 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.
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.
Then there’s the small remaining minority who also don’t like be-ing 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 les-sons 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 mon-ey on experiences, it made them happier on average. The rea-son, 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
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.
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 disci-pline.
At times you’ll find yourself stranded in some airport or train sta-tion 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
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 hap-py 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 emo-tional 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 air-port 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 account-able 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 resil-ient 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.
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 ev-eryone back home. Best of all, evev-eryone thought that I was com-ing 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.
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 of-fice in Paris is like walking through a history museum.
Daily life involves intimate interaction with the near invisible nu-ances of each place you’re in. You learn the minutia of the coun-try that can only be discovered through firsthand experience. And then there’s the language. Without even trying your pro-ficiency 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 un-derstand 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 vaca-tion.
Kin Hubbard
Despite placing travel next to godliness, I hate vacation. Vaca-tions are the fast food version of travel. They’re artificial, con-sumed in a hurry, and ultimately unsatisfying.
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 regu-lar 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 day-light 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 do-ing nothdo-ing. It’s not. Luxury is havdo-ing the ability and lack of en-cumbrances to do whatever you want to do. In that way, a mini-malist 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.
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 peo-ple hauled away everything I owned.
First, I realized that no one really cared about what they were tak-ing. In one corner of my bedroom I had put a stack of plates that I had once treasured. They were off white, shaped somewhere be-tween 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 sec-ond 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 fun-ny 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.
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 mini-malism-land.
My parents moved that same year, and I was conscripted to help them2. I think I probably officially became a minimalist
some-time 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.
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 ac-companies 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 in-creasingly 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 suc-cess 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 de-cided 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 go-ing to outline a step by step plan to get rid of everythgo-ing 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.
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.
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 infest-ed 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 nar-row 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 far-ther. 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.
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 differ-ent route.
The world is packed full of people, and the overwhelming major-ity of them are good honest people who want you to enjoy their country. This goes double if you seem like you are actually inter-ested 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 be-ing a dangerous city, he was never once robbed. His friend’s par-ents 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 confi-dently, don’t wear flashy jewelry, smile, and say hello.
The fact that a country is unknown makes it feel scary and dan-gerous. 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 fa-miliar 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
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 ex-plained 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 fall-ing 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.
So learn from my mistakes. Carry only what you need with you, and stay in trafficked areas if possible.
Part Two
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 plan-ning is indispensable.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower
We may as well start off with the fun part, right? The first deci-sion 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 peo-ple 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
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 invari-ably 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 excep-tions, 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.
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 Bang-kok.
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 re-maining 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
• Moscow • Beijing • Shanghai • Taipei • Tokyo • Bali • Bangkok • Sydney • Cape Town • Panama City • Bogota • 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 ma-jor 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
rapidly. Other travelers that you meet will constantly be recom-mending 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 Pana-ma 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.
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 noc-turnal culture, so the girl we were renting from didn’t mind meet-ing 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 stay-ing 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 histori-cal 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 ma-jor events you want to experience in each place. In some places
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 pleas-ant, 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 To-kyo by March 21 so that we don’t miss the cherry blossoms. Rio is nice in March and Tokyo is better in April, so:
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, Novem-ber 1 – DecemNovem-ber 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 Bang-kok 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 re-ally 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-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 af-fair. 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 of-ten 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 be-ing 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 Bang-kok graciously let us in after hours when we got there too late and almost messed up our whole trip.
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 plan-ning 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 in-stead.
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
expect-ed, 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.
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.
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 every-thing 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 en-joy 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.
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 base-ment.
If you have a house, the best thing you can do is sell it. My rea-sons 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 wor-ry 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 rea-son you can’t sell or rent your house and want to get some value out of it.
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 do-ing 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 nomad-ic 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 ev-erything 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, furni-ture, 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.
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 ques-tioning.
“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?
The disbelief expands– in both directions—when we both realize that despite carrying a bag with less than half the standard back-packer 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 rav-ing about how that’s all you need (and I’d probably be carryrav-ing 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.
inconvenience to you. It can be packed or unpacked in a matter of twenty minutes, meaning that you can be ready for a trans-continental 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
