The next Free Spirit Friday interview features Beth from Hardly A Globetrotter. I got to know Beth during my four-month stay in Spain through our Irish friends we had in common. I only realised that Beth was a fellow travel blogger about three months in, but now I love everything she writes. Every time she uploads a new blog post, I find myself being incredibly excited to read it.
Let’s kick this one off!
In a word, YES. When I first moved to Spain I didn’t speak any Spanish and I didn’t know anyone in my chosen city. I’d moved for a change of scene and to learn a new language but in a lot of ways I hadn’t really prepared myself – the culture shock was huge and it didn’t help that I was living in an area where a large percentage of the population didn’t speak English! Screwed myself a bit there, didn’t I? Ultimately it came down to putting myself out there, saying yes to everything and meeting as many people as possible while also taking the initiative to learn the basics of Spanish. One year on and I have a lot of friends here and I can (just about) speak Spanish! It was hard, but in the end it was worth it, I’ve met so many amazing people
I’ve always had friends from a variety of different age groups so for me, having a lot of friends on their Erasmus, some of whom were seven or eight years younger than me, wasn’t an issue. To be honest, without those guys I probably never would have integrated into life here! Now I have friends who are studying, friends in their mid-late 20s like me and even friends in their 40s! It’s nice to have that mix.
I wanted to leave the UK because I was getting very disillusioned with London life – I love London and I had a great (very well paid!) job, lots of friends and a nice apartment. The problem was I felt like that was sort of it and I was going to be working in my chosen industry until I got too old to do it any more. I didn’t want to ‘settle down’ per se. And although I’d travelled a lot, I had always wanted to live abroad. Staying in Europe was the best option for me because as a UK citizen I had freedom of movement. (no Brexit questions please, thinking about it still upsets me too much). I wanted to learn another language and I’ve always loved Spanish culture and the lifestyle here, plus it’s such a beautiful (and extremely useful) language.
If I could, I’d live everywhere! I spent some time in the States when I was younger and I always wanted to move there, although nowadays I don’t know how easy it would be for me. I would love to travel around South America and I think it would be nice to spend a couple of years over there, though I’m unsure as to which country.
Good question! Someone probably asks this question just about every time I go back to the UK haha. The answer for me is no. When I was in the UK I was headed towards what we would see as traditional milestones – buying a house, getting married, starting a family. In all honesty I wasn’t ready for it, I wanted to travel, to learn, to experience new things, and I knew that if I settled down, it would be much harder to do. To be honest, I don’t see myself doing it anytime soon. When I was 21, I thought by now I would have found a husband and maybe even have kids (I’m 28). Now I realise how young I still am and how much I have left to do – there’s plenty of time to do the family thing in the future, if I decide it’s right for me. But right now, I feel more fulfilled and happy than I ever felt in London, staring down the barrel of a mortgage!
JAFFA CAKES JAFFA CAKES JAFFA CAKES! I miss them so much. You can get them here but they’re not the same! Can I choose another type of food? I can? Excellent! I would also choose my mum’s homemade chocolate cake. She’s an amazing baker and I really miss her cakes.
I think Brits can learn a lot from the Spanish. I think the main takeaway we could benefit from in the UK is the more relaxed pace of life. Of course, every individual is different. But here in Spain, I just feel like nobody stresses that much about the small stuff. There’s more focus on the things that are really important – family, friends, food, having a good time, and taking life at your own pace. People work hard here but they know how to balance their lives a little better. I’ve definitely learned a lot!
I’m very lucky that I was raised by two absolute legends who always told us we could be and do anything we wanted if we worked for it. My parents were incredibly supportive of my decision. They’re both quite well-travelled people and they’re all about educating yourself, broadening your mind, etc. My mum actually did something similar when she was my age – she packed up and moved to the States. She was 27/28, single and it was the 80s so everyone thought she’d gone mental, but she didn’t care and ended up having an incredible time there, so she was especially excited for me. I know my parents miss me a lot and it must be hard for them but they’ve been nothing but supportive to me in everything I’ve done.
FOMO is definitely something you have to consider if you’re planning to move abroad. The first few months will be especially tough – I remember seeing photos on social media of my friendship group back home all together and thinking “What the eff have I done?” It’s normal. It takes time to adjust to a new culture, new lifestyle and being away from your family. Even now I get really homesick sometimes, especially when I miss big things at home. My cousin got engaged a couple of months ago and we’re really close, but I couldn’t celebrate with her. My sister bought a house with her boyfriend and I couldn’t go to visit them. One of my best friends got engaged to her girlfriend of a decade, two awesome people I’ve known since uni, and I couldn’t celebrate with them. It’s really tough sometimes and you have to anticipate that you’re going to feel isolated. Keep busy, embrace your new life and find ways to keep in touch with home which work for you. I would also say be careful not to be too dependent on those back home – it will make you feel more alienated from your new surroundings if you don’t embrace it fully.
Yes, definitely, if an opportunity presents itself! Right now I think I’d like to stay in Spain for a couple more years. But I’m looking into opportunities in other Spanish-speaking countries. We’ll see what happens! I think I’m always going to be someone who travels. I’ll be one of those crazy hippie grandmas who splits her time between two or three countries. I’ve never felt a burning need to settle in one place. I feel at home anywhere if I’m with the right people!
I don’t think there is anywhere I would rule out. Obviously some parts of the world are more dangerous or unwelcoming than others. Many of those places change with time, though. So although I’m not planning a move to North Korea anytime soon, there’s nowhere I would completely rule out in the future. You never know where you’re going to end up!
Huge thank you to Beth for letting me grill her about what it’s like to live in Spain, even though I lived there myself for four months. You can follow Hardly (a) Globetrotter on her blog, Instagram, Twitter and Mixcloud (yes, Beth is also a DJ).
If you’ve ever looked for information on cheap travel online, you know who Nomadic Matt is. Even though you might not realise it, you have definitely looked at one of his articles while you were planning a trip. Well, I got the opportunity to interview travel blogging titan Nomadic Matt about his life as a full-time traveller.
I asked Matt a number of questions about his lifestyle as a digital nomad and a travel expert.
Without any further ado, here’s the story of Matthew Kepnes, also known as Nomadic Matt.
Hey everyone! My name is Nomadic Matt and I run the budget travel website nomadicmatt.com. In a nutshell, my job is to help people travel better, cheaper, and longer. But before I became ‘Nomadic’ Matt I was just regular Matt. I went to college, worked in a cubicle, and lived a pretty typical life in Boston. But like many people, I felt like there was more out there; I felt like something was missing. There has to be more to life than just working a 9-5 grind, right?
After going on a trip to Costa Rica for a couple weeks, I wanted to travel more. I had officially caught the travel bug! I eventually planned another trip which brought me to Thailand. It was there that I met some backpackers — full-time travelers — and had my eyes opened. As soon as I got back home I knew I had to find a way to travel more.
So, I worked a ton of overtime, saved up all my money, and eventually quit my job to travel the world. Along the way, I started teaching English overseas and eventually started a travel blog to share my travel stories with people back home. Over the past decade, Nomadic Matt has grown from a simple travel journal to a comprehensive budget travel resource that helps millions of people every month. It certainly wasn’t an easy journey, but it’s been an incredible opportunity. One that I’m grateful for everyday!
For my first trip, I was just looking to go somewhere warm, interesting, and somewhere relatively safe. I was looking to take a break from things and go on vacation, but I didn’t want to just spend my time sitting on the beach at some resort. I wanted to do something more adventurous, but I wasn’t quite ready for solo travel — heck, I don’t think solo travel even crossed my mind! After doing some research, I decided to travel to Costa Rica on a tour. That way, I would be able to get off the beaten path but without having to worry about all the logistics. It was my first real trip abroad, after all, so going on a tour was a great way for me to test the waters and experience travel beyond the typical resort vacation.
Backpacking in Costa Rica really opened my eyes to the world of travel. Seeing and experiencing a different culture with my own eyes, meeting locals, and disconnecting from regular everyday life did wonders for me. I had an amazing experience, and as soon as I got home I was already thinking about my next trip. The only question was, “Where should I go next?”
To be honest, I never ever knew long-term/full-time travel was a thing until I went to Thailand. I think like most people, travel to me was just something you did for a vacation; it was a chance to get away and relax, not an entire lifestyle. Meeting those backpackers when I was traveling in Thailand really opened my eyes to the possibilities out there. You didn’t need to work the 9-5 to get by. There were countless opportunities out there for anyone willing to break free of the norm and seize them. Working holidays, teaching English abroad, volunteering overseas — the sky was the limit!
Looking back, it was backpacking in Thailand that was really the catalyst for everything. Who knows, if I never met those backpackers in Thailand there might not have been a Nomadic Matt!
It wasn’t until after starting a blog that I was making a living from my website. Initially, the blog was just a hobby; it was a way for me to showcase my writing so I could (hopefully) get a job as a travel writer for Lonely Planet. I had been teaching English in Asia for a while, which supplied me with most of my income when I was just starting out. I also sold some links to supplement my income (that was a common practice back in the day, but it’s long-since abandoned as Google has cracked down on that sort of thing).
Once I started to see that my blog was actually getting traffic, I decided to focus on it full-time. But even then, it still took me a couple of years before I was able to make a living from it. Making money online is the dream, but it’s not as easy as it looks! Sponsorships and ads will only take you so far, so if you really want financial independence you will need to make your own product or sell a service. That is what will set you apart from the crowd and get you on the road to financial freedom.
A lot of people think that starting a travel blog is easy and that it’s a great way to get rich quick — both of which are not true! But if you’re willing to put in the work and learn what it takes to succeed, there’s a good chance you’ll be able to build a successful business and eventually make a living from your own blog too.
Social media definitely paints a picture that working online is easy and hassle free but that is hardly the case. Working remotely usually means long hours sitting at your laptop, it means always hunting for Wi-Fi and putting in a lot of hours to make sure you’re not falling behind. Anyone promoting pictures of laptops by the pool or at the beach is likely just doing that to entice you to buy something because that isn’t the reality!
Working online can make it really hard to find that work/life balance, since there aren’t as many clear-cut divides between your work life and your personal life. It’s very easy to overwork and always be stressing about your next project or initiative. Or conversely, it can be really easy to slack off and not get anything done because you’re your own boss — no one is there to get you in trouble if you just relax on the beach all day!
So you’ll want to make sure you make a conscious effort to develop a solid work/life balance so that you can avoid the major pitfalls that most remote workers fall into. Because if you can do that, then this lifestyle has a lot of benefits that you’ll be able to enjoy!
To help me stay on track, these days when I travel I usually don’t work. Sure, I’ll answer emails and maybe tinker with some smaller tasks, but for the most part I leave my laptop alone. I find this lets me focus more on the destination, allowing me to soak it all in and relax more. That way, when I get home I can focus on writing better content because I was actually able to immerse myself in the destination, meet locals, and get a much better sense of the destination. It really helps me find a better work/life balance and gives me a chance to disconnect, which I think is vital in this day and age.
After traveling for years, it just felt like it was time to settle down a little bit. Constantly moving around can be exhausting — especially if you’re trying to also run a business. I felt like I needed to spend some time really focusing on my website, which was just too difficult to do when I was constantly bouncing around. Settling down gave me the time to make tons of improvements to the website, launch new content and initiatives, hire staff to help me manage things, and grow the website like I had never done before. So, while I wanted to slow my travels down it was also a smart business decision.
As for why I picked New York, that’s simply because I think it’s one of the best cities in the world! I’m a city person at heart, with my favorite destinations being places like London, Bangkok, Hong Kong, and Stockholm. And when it comes to cities, few places can compete with the Big Apple. It has everything you need no matter what your interests are, offering amazing museums and attractions, a wild nightlife, amazing food, and everything in between. Even if you’re not a city person, I think everyone should visit New York City at one point in their lives, just to see the city for themselves. Because if you ask me, I think it’s one of the best places in the world!
I think slow travel is the best way to travel. At the end of the day, it comes down to quality over quantity. I know it can be tempting to see as much as you can as fast as you can (especially if you don’t get a lot of vacation time) but it will all just end up a blur if you rush around too quickly. You’ll spend more time on trains and buses than in the actual places you want to visit! I think many travelers — including myself — learn this lesson the hard way.
For that reason, I always encourage people to slow down. Stop and smell the roses. Soak in the destination. Get under its skin. Not only will you learn more, but you’ll open yourself up to more spontaneous experiences and be more likely to meet locals. Don’t waste your vacation by zipping around to a new city every other day. Slow down. Focus on quality. I promise you won’t regret it!
I think my days of full-time travel have come to an end. Then again, every time I say I’m going to travel less I never really do so what do I know! I just booked a trip to South America! So while I doubt I’ll ever go back to full-time travel, I think travel will always be a big part of my life. Because even when I say I’m going to stay home I always end up booking a flight somewhere. Once the travel bug bite, it’s hard to resist for long!
I think anyone can learn the skills to be a successful digital nomad or remote worker, but whether or not it’s the lifestyle for you will depend on your personality. Are you self-disciplined and self-motivated? Can you create deadlines and stick to them or do you need someone to tell you what to do? Do you mind working long hours for little money — or no money — when you’re just starting out? How are you when it comes to teaching yourself new skills, including tech skills?
Starting a blog is the same as starting a business. You need to have what it takes to plan, to prepare, and to stick with it no matter what. It’s a tedious, risky process that isn’t guaranteed to succeed. But, if you can pull it off you’ll be rewarded with the freedom to explore the world on your own terms. And if you ask me, that is more than worth the price.
A huge thank you to Matt for taking the time to answer my questions and for letting us know what it’s like to be one of the biggest travel bloggers in the world. You can follow Nomadic Matt on his blog, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest.
Our next guest for Free Spirits Friday is Daniela. I met Daniela in a Facebook group for travel bloggers and we’ve been sharing tips and tricks with each other ever since. Daniela was born in Germany but she moved to Peru in 2017, where she’s now still based. She’s the genius behind her travel blog, Digital Nomads Peru, where she shares tips on how to move to Peru and what to do there.
This is my first interview in a new series of blog posts called Free Spirits Interviews. In these blog posts I interview insiders of the nomad and/or expat business. I can’t wait to share them all with you and give you some insight into the people I interviewed. In this first interview, I ask Lauren from Never Ending Footsteps some questions about life as a nomad and settling down after years of travelling.
I sincerely hope you enjoy these posts as much as I do.
Without any further ado, here’s our first guest!
Lauren Juliff was born in London, England, and has spent the past seven years travelling the world and venturing outside of her minuscule comfort zone. She was once afraid of buses, small talk, rice, and most anything you can think of. But through travel, she has overcome anxieties large and small in a quest to prove to a former Lauren she can do anything she sets her mind to. Lauren runs the travel blog Never Ending Footsteps, where she writes about her frequent misadventures. She is also the author of the travel memoir How Not to Travel the World.
Hi! I’m Lauren and I’ve been travelling around the world for much of the past seven years.
At age 23, after five years of saving, I quit my job and bought a one-way ticket out of the U.K. I’d always dreamed of travel, and decided to do so after graduating college. I figured that it would be the one time in my life when I’d likely be free of ties. I planned to travel for a year or two — essentially until the point when my savings ran out.
My travel blog, Never Ending Footsteps, was a way to keep friends updated on my adventures around the world. I never expected to one day turn it into a business. After six months of travel, though, I was unexpectedly making enough money from it to travel indefinitely in cheaper regions of the world. That’s exactly what I decided to do. I met my boyfriend, Dave, through my travel blog and for the next five years, we travelled the world together.
We decided to stop because continuous travel was no longer fulfilling for us. We were sick, exhausted, overweight, and fed up, craving a home base to return to between trips. Portugal sounded like a good place to live and we had friends there, so we signed a lease on an apartment within a month of first stepping foot in Lisbon.
For the next two years, I merged expat life with travel, spending six months of each year living in Lisbon and six months travelling. This felt like the perfect balance for me, and just having an office at home was enough for me to triple my travel blogging income. I had friends, I had a more settled life, and I felt healthier than ever. I was still exploring the world, but I had a base to return to between trips, which helped keep me sane.
Eventually, I decided a move to the U.K. was on the cards. I didn’t feel as though I belonged in Portugal, struggled with the language and cultural barrier, and craved an easier life. I moved to Bristol — a brand new city to me, as I grew up in London — six months ago, and so far, it feels like the best decision I’ve ever made.
After five years, full-time travel began to have more downsides than up.
A life of continuous travel is also a life of continuous goodbyes. I was meeting so many wonderful people on the road, but having to say goodbye several days later when we each moved on to our next destination. That was disheartening to have to go through. Not only that, but it also meant that I had a shallow relationship with everyone I met. After five years, I realised I had a ton of acquaintances spread out across the world, but nobody I would consider a best friend.
I also found full-time travel to be unhealthy for me. It’s rare to have access to a kitchen when you travel. That means eating out for three meals a day for five years straight. Food poisoning brought me down regularly, and I was taking an average of four courses of antibiotics a year. The lack of stability combined with little exercise and a poor diet resulted in my anxiety disorder returning and I began to have panic attacks.
I discovered that you can have too much of a good thing. The more I travelled, the more it would take to impress me. Waterfalls used to amaze me, but once I had seen 60 of them? It would take a hell of an impressive one to leave me in awe.
Finally, I found it tough to have any hobbies. I wanted to start weightlifting. to learn how to knit, to try rock climbing. It was near-impossible to consistently pursue a hobby that wasn’t travel-focused. I travelled, I planned travel, I wrote about travel, I read about travel, I talked about travel, I hung out with other travellers. I was such a one-dimensional human.
So, the decision was definitely made: we needed to find a base.
We decided to move to Portugal because we were desperate to stop moving and that was the next destination on our list.
We didn’t put any real thought into it.
My boyfriend and I both have British passports, so living somewhere in Europe made a lot of sense. Besides, we had some digital nomad friends already living there. Portugal is inexpensive, sunny, and with a thriving start-up scene. It made a lot of sense to live there.
We turned up in Lisbon having never been there before, and decided to live there two days later.
We were so desperate to stop travelling that I would have moved anywhere at that point, to be honest.
Pretty much.
After two years in Portugal, Dave and I realised that it didn’t feel like a long-term home for us. As a consequence, we started to consider new countries.
Portugal is wonderful, but I’m not Portuguese and I’ll never be Portuguese. I love immersing myself in unfamiliar cultures when I travel, but that’s the opposite of what I want from a home base. Also, trying to deal with bureaucracy in Portugal was horrendous. I just didn’t think expat life was something that worked for me.
Every time I returned home, it felt like home in a way that nowhere else in the world did. I felt like I belonged, and I wanted that feeling every day. I didn’t think I’d ever feel that way in Lisbon.
It was a mutual decision and fortunately, we were both equally ready to find a base. Dave also struggled with many of the points I mentioned above. He was feeling jaded by travel, he wanted to pick up other interests, he was fed up with not having any real friends, and the unhealthy lifestyle had left him 20 kgs overweight and feeling terrible.
The fact that we both wanted to stop travelling made making the decision a lot easier than it might have otherwise been.
It feels amazing to return home, and I’m so happy. It really doesn’t feel all that different to my expat life, or even my full-time traveller life, to be honest.
Because I still work online and in travel, I still have just as much freedom as I did when I travelled as a digital nomad, and I still take full advantage of it. It’s not as though I’m not grounded and unable to leave. If I want to head to India next week, I can buy a plane ticket and do exactly that. I still travel for four months of the year.
Additionally, I chose to move to Bristol in the U.K., which is a brand new city for me. Even though I’m living in the country I was born in, I know little about Bristol, and I’m getting to discover it as a traveller as well as a resident.
I’d take it with a grain of salt, simply because I don’t believe anything can change everyone who does it. And I’m saying that as someone who experienced an enormous amount of transformation through travel! Some people travel and hate it; some people travel and have no desire to learn or change; and some people travel and come out a worse person because of it.
I think as well that by having that mindset, you’re saying that only people who are rich enough and privileged enough and able-bodied enough to travel have access to that transformation.
I think the ease with which you can carry out basic day-to-day tasks feels strange. Drinkable tap water and consistent access to hot water showers are both things I’ve yet to grow tired of. Being able to have a conversation with anybody I run into makes life so much easier, especially when it’s anything to do with the government. That was a nightmare in Portugal!
The technological advances have been shocking, too — contactless payments, the fact that nobody uses cash anymore, online grocery deliveries. I feel like I’m living in the future, because so many of the countries I travel in are cash-only. And sure, there were things like online delivery in Portugal. But there was always a language barrier, so everything took 10 times longer.
Living as an expat or travelling full-time comes with a certain baseline level of cognitive load. You have to communicate with people who speak a different language, understand the culture, navigate an unfamiliar city, guess at what food you’re eating. By eliminating all of that, I feel less exhausted. It almost makes me blind to the downsides of life in England. Everything is so easy that I simply can’t find anything to complain about!
The importance of leaving your comfort zone. When you travel, every day on the road presents challenges. And since there’s nobody else to fall back on, you have to leave your comfort zone in order to have a successful trip. And it’s leaving your comfort zone that helps you conquer your fears and prove you’re more capable than you might have otherwise believed.
Anxiety used to prevent me from doing anything that scared me, but travel forced me to do everything because I had no other option. Trying new things on a daily basis transformed my life, as I slowly realised the things that had made me nervous weren’t so intimidating after all. I learned that I was more than capable of doing them, and surviving a situation if my worst case scenario actually happened. Within a few week of starting to travel, my panic attacks faded away. I fell in love with trying new foods, I gained confidence and social skills, and a love of challenging myself to do the things that make me nervous.
I honestly can’t remember!
When I was a nomad, I usually spent two months catching up with family and friends in the U.K. every year. That way, it wasn’t like I had been away from England seven years straight and had missed so much. I regularly spent time back home, so hadn’t missed any particular food or meals.
Sort of.
I started to have panic attacks when travel started making me unwell. My anxiety was more of a warning sign that I needed to stop, rather than the reason behind me stopping. If that makes sense!
In the six months before I moved to Portugal, I suffered panic attacks every single day on the road. And they’d only stop when I thought about finding a home. That was a pretty major indication that I needed to make a change.
Very rarely.
I think a big part of that comes from choosing to continue to travel since moving to the U.K. My life isn’t all that different, as I’ve designed it to retain the freedom and spontaneity I loved while I was a nomad. If I want to fly to Brazil tomorrow, I can still do exactly that.
I actually took a six-month-long trip earlier this year and honestly? I didn’t love it. By the time I was about two months in, I was tired, unwell, and missing having a kitchen and office. I struggled to work on my travel blogging business, I missed having a community around me, and I found it tremendously difficult to maintain a healthy lifestyle.
That trip showed me that the life of a nomad is no longer something that would make me happy. When I have a base, I can still experience the positives to life as a nomad (travel! the freedom!), but I get to avoid all of the downsides that drove me crazy and made me sick.
Yes! I still love to travel, and now that I’m based in the U.K., I aim to spend four months of every year out of the country and exploring new destinations.
My next trip is in January. I’m going to be spending 10 days in India, 10 days island-hopping in Thailand, and then a few days in Qatar. India and Qatar are going to be brand new countries for me, and I’m excited to finally check them out!
Again, I’d like to thank Lauren very much for answering all of my questions and for allowing me to get a behind-the-scenes peak at what life as a nomad is like – the positives AND the negatives.
You can follow Lauren and her Never Ending Footsteps, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.
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