A Quick Note on “Piracy”

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make your life better. Honestly. My secondary goal is to profit
from it.
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 Part One
A New Perspective
 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 officers 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.
2 LIFE NOMADIC

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.”
 INTRODUCTION 3

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
4 LIFE NOMADIC

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.
 INTRODUCTION 5

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.
6 LIFE NOMADIC

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 countries, 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 knowledge , laid out for your personal consumption, and it’s
1

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.
 INTRODUCTION 7

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 spending time on these trails (who’s going 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
8 LIFE NOMADIC

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
rich . Every day, seven days a week, I had the same routine at the
1

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

1 It didn’t.
10 LIFE NOMADIC

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.
 REDEFINING REALITY 11

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?
12 LIFE NOMADIC

I don’t even mean to criticize that lifestyle all that much. Com-
pared to most of the world , it’s a pretty deluxe life . It’s comfort-
2

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 riding 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.
 REDEFINING REALITY 13

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.
14 LIFE NOMADIC

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.
 REDEFINING REALITY 15

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.
16 LIFE NOMADIC

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
 REDEFINING REALITY 17

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 NOMADIC EXPERIENCE

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
20 LIFE NOMADIC

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.
 INTRODUCTION 21

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, everyone 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.
22 LIFE NOMADIC

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.
 INTRODUCTION 23

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 nothing. It’s not. Luxury is having 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.
24 LIFE NOMADIC

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.
 INTRODUCTION 25

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.
26 LIFE NOMADIC

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.
4 From The Game by Neil Strauss. I go by the name “Herbal” in the book.
 INTRODUCTION 27

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 everything 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.
28 LIFE NOMADIC

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.
 INTRODUCTION 29

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.
30 LIFE NOMADIC

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
 INTRODUCTION 31

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.
32 LIFE NOMADIC

So learn from my mistakes. Carry only what you need with you,
and stay in trafficked areas if possible.
 Part Two
Preparing to Go
 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
34 LIFE NOMADIC

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.
 PLANNING YOUR TRIP 35

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
• London
36 LIFE NOMADIC

• 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
 PLANNING YOUR TRIP 37

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.
38 LIFE NOMADIC

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
 PLANNING YOUR TRIP 39

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:
40 LIFE NOMADIC

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 – December 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-
 PLANNING YOUR TRIP 41

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.
42 LIFE NOMADIC

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.
 PLANNING YOUR TRIP 43

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.
45 LIFE NOMADIC

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.
 SELLING EVERYTHING 46

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.
47 LIFE NOMADIC

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?
49 LIFE NOMADIC

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 carrying 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.
 BUYING GEAR 50

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
you’re a businessman or king of the world.
51 LIFE NOMADIC

A friend of mine was considering coming to Morocco with me. I

told her that the one requirement is that she pack light so that we
aren’t encumbered.
“Do I HAVE to get a backpack, though? They’re not chic at all.”
Yes, you do. I know they’re not chic, and the best advice I can
give is to get over it. Backpacks make sense, and when you’re a
nomad, form follows function. To offer an olive branch, what’s
more chic than gallivanting around the world as you please?
The reasons for choosing a backpack are as numerous as they are
obvious. Any terrain can be crossed, they compact when they’re
less full, they don’t stick out, and they are designed to be water-
proofed.
Detach your ego from what you own. Even if you’re reading this
book to live vicariously and not because you actually intend to fly
away, take this advice to heart.

“You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank.
You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re
not your fucking khakis.”
Fight Club

The more I’ve gotten rid of, the more I’ve understood the truth
in this idea. No one cares about what you have, but they do care
about who you are, what you’ve done, and what you’re going to
do. Your interactions change with materialistic people once you
leave their ranks. They flaunt what they have with an air of des-
peration to try to win your approval. I used to do that, too.
Become your actions and your principles. Stop trying to create
a façade of who you are through buying things. Buying things is
 BUYING GEAR 52

easy, and everyone knows it. It can garner wonder or excitement,

but never respect.
Think about people you look up to. Is it because of what they
have, or who they are?
I used to think that being a minimalist was a sacrifice, but a wor-
thy one. As I grew into it, I realized that it was actually an up-
grade over rampant consumerism and materialism. I’m not some
sort of peace pipe toting hippie, either. I like capitalism and love
excellent products. I’ve just come to believe that best way to en-
joy what this amazing world has to offer is through limited but
high quality consumption.

Choosing Gear

Your gear matters. A lot. When you have only twenty eight liters
to pack in, each liter matters. Most products are designed with no
regard for how much space they take up, especially a lot of “travel
products”. This seems shocking once object volume becomes an
issue for you, but price is more important than space for most
people.
Because of this, the stuff you leave with will probably be com-
pletely different stuff than you have now. There’s just not much
everyday stuff that works well for traveling. Don’t try to force it
to – get rid of items that aren’t serving you well, and treat your-
self right. You’ll have few things, so make sure that they’re all ex-
cellent.
Even before becoming a nomad, one of my passions was seeking
out excellent products. At one point I had a three hundred dol-
lar toaster that was used by not only the best restaurants, but also
the Queen of England. I’ve gotten rid of the toaster, but my quest
53 LIFE NOMADIC

for the best has continued even as I’ve become a minimalist. I can
virtually guarantee you that every product I recommend is the
absolute best in its class; if it wasn’t, I wouldn’t be using it. If you
do find something better, though, or something I never thought
of, let me know!

Clothes

“The difference between a man of sense and a fop is that the fop values him-
self upon his dress; and the man of sense laughs at it, at the same time he
knows he must not neglect it.”
Lord Chesterfield

“If men can run the world, why can’t they stop wearing neckties? How intel-
ligent is it to start the day by tying a little noose around your neck?”
Linda Ellerbee

Two weeks earlier I had arrived back in Texas for a surprise vis-
it. Since then I’d spent nearly every day hanging out with my
friends, including my friend Hayden. Inspired by the shedding of
my worldly possessions, he started to probe.
“How many pants do you have?”
“One pair, and they zip off to become shorts too.”
“But what about the other pants you’ve been wearing?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like, which pants did you wear when we were hanging out yes-
terday?”
“These. They’re my only pants.”
 BUYING GEAR 54

“Wait. You mean to tell me that every time we’ve hung out since
you’ve gotten back, you’ve been wearing the same pants?”
Unless you’re dressed outlandishly, no one knows what you’re
wearing. Don’t believe me? Think of who you had lunch with yes-
terday. What was he wearing?
Most people are so focused on what they’re wearing and how oth-
ers will perceive it that they never even stop to soak in what any-
one else is wearing. And that’s okay. Clothes, in terms of form,
don’t really matter.
As far as function in concerned, on the other hand, clothes may
be the most important thing you pack. Sticking with our mini-
malist nomad philosophy, here’s the clothing packing list:
• Two pairs of socks
• Two pairs of underwear
• One pair of convertible pants
• One bathing suit
• Three shirts
• One bra (if you’re a woman, or a crossdresser)
That’s it. We’ll get to outerwear in a little while. Before I get into
individual selections for each item and justifications for such low
numbers, I’m going to take a second to address the issue of fabric.
When it comes to retail clothes, cotton is king. Most of what you
own and wear is probably cotton. And why shouldn’t it be?
Well, a lot of reasons, as it turns out. In fact, there is probably
no worse textile for the traveler. The biggest problem is its wet
55 LIFE NOMADIC

performance. When you’re wet you want your shirt, for example,
to dry off as soon as possible. When it’s hot you want it to wick
sweat away from your body. And, when it’s cold, you want your
shirt to keep you warm, not give you hypothermia.
Cotton fails on every count. It’s notoriously slow drying, does
not wick sweat away, and is actually dangerous if it’s wet in cold
weather. We wear cotton for two reasons: it’s cheap and it feels
nice.
Synthetic materials like polyester are better in most ways, and
worse in a couple. They dry fast, wick sweat away, and don’t
freeze you if it’s cold. But they don’t keep you very warm, and
they smell bad faster than any other material.
The answer to all of our problems is wool. Wool does an amazing
job wicking sweat away, dries quickly, keeps us warm even when
wet, and smells great. I used to wash my wool shirts every time I
wore them, but some experimentation has lead me to realize that
just airing them out in between uses lets me wear them four or
five times each before washing.
As if it needed another party trick, wool can absorb one third of
its weight before it feels wet to the touch. This makes a big differ-
ence when putting on socks after swimming.
Most people associate wool with those terrible scratchy sweat-
ers your grandmother used to make you wear as a child. Luckily,
that’s not the current state of affairs. Fabric makers have learned
to use the finest fibers and weave them so tightly that the wool
feels a lot more like cotton than the wool you’re used to. No itch-
ing, just pure, smooth, magic fabric.
Getting back to our list, two pairs of socks is all you need. Wash
one while you wear the other. Wool can be washed with soap or
 BUYING GEAR 56

shampoo, so just do your daily laundry in the shower. It’s also

nice to have two pairs of socks because in a real pinch you can
use the second pair as mittens. The best brand to buy socks from
is Smart Wool, although if you follow my shoe recommendation
and need to buy toe socks, Injinji is the only known manufactur-
er of wool toe socks. They aren’t nearly as wonderful as the Smart
Wools, but they hold their own.
Don’t be tempted to get more pairs of socks. As you get more,
it’s more difficult to decide which are clean and which are dirty,
and washing a ton of clothes in the shower is a pain. Two is easier
than three.
Underwear falls in basically the same category. Get two pair and
wash them every day in the shower. If you miss a day, it doesn’t
really matter. Wool is antimicrobial so it feels clean and smells
fine even if you wear it twice in a row. The best wool underwear
is made by Icebreaker, my personal preference being the Beast
Briefs. They’re tiny, which makes them easy to pack, and they
look great. At the risk of sharing more with you than you wish to
receive, the pouch on them is quite flattering.
I’ll admit that convertible pants are stretching the fashion enve-
lope a bit. They do have full-width horizontal seams right across
the knees. Still, what they lack in fashion (and truthfully, they’re
fine in practice) they make up for in form.
Being able to change into shorts, in public no less, just by zipping
off the legs, can be a godsend. Having only one set of pockets is
also convenient – leave your passport in a side pocket and never
worry about whether or not you have it with you.
I have yet to see wool convertible pants, and given the alternative,
I don’t really care if I ever see them. Brushed nylon is an excel-
57 LIFE NOMADIC

lent choice. It’s extremely durable (I’ve tipped over and rolled a
4 wheeler in the rocky Qatar desert without so much as a scuff
or rip), it dries quickly, and is comfortable in all temperatures.
While synthetic shirts smell terrible quickly, synthetic pants don’t
seem to. I wash mine once every week or two.
My favorite brand for these is Cloudveil, but they are only avail-
able seasonably and my favorite color (dark grey) is now discon-
tinued. Many outdoor-oriented pants are so baggy that they look
ridiculous, so my best advice is to try on as many pairs as you
can before choosing one. Most outdoor gear stores have fantastic
return policies, so do what I do: buy every pair in your size and
return all but one.
Pay attention to the pockets on your pants. I like having as many
zippable pockets as possible. They thwart pickpockets and keep
things in your pocket when you’re reclined in a train or doing
strange acrobatic maneuvers in the jungle.
It’s possible to get away without a bathing suit, but it’s nice to
have something dry to change into if you go swimming, and it’s
also good to be able to wear your bathing suit when you do a
load of laundry. I went with a square cut belted Speedo because it
looks hilarious, dries quickly, and is tiny. If you went for a differ-
ent bathing suit, I wouldn’t hold it against you. Keep it small and
fast drying.
I pack three shirts, which occasionally feels like one too many.
Wool is, of course, the fabric of choice, and there is one brand
that stands head and shoulders above the competition: Icebreaker.
Go for their lightest weight shirts, the 140gm / cm and 150gm/
cm. With appropriate layering, which I’ll discuss in a minute,
they’ll keep you warm enough for sub freezing weather and cool
enough for the Middle Eastern desert.
 BUYING GEAR 58

If you’re a girl, you’re probably going to bring a bra. I’ve heard

the fierce opinions girls have over their bras, so I won’t touch the
subject. Take a look at Icebreaker’s offerings, though.
I know how crazy it sounds to have so few clothes, but believe
me, you get used to it and fall in love with it fast. I have the
sneaking suspicion that by the time this book is released, I’ll be
down to two shirts.

Outdoor Gear

Your basic clothes kit will keep you comfortable when it’s warm
and dry, but what about when it’s rainy, cold, snowy, muddy,
windy or all of the above? This is where things get exciting, pro-
vided you’re a gear geek like I am. If you’re not, you probably will
be soon.
My current setup was put to the test recently in the middle of
winter in Toronto, Canada. I had worn most of the gear in cold
climates, but this was to be the first time I would be in a serious
winter environment.
For the week I was there the winds gusted to almost forty miles
an hour, the high temperature for the day was sometimes below
twenty degrees Fahrenheit, and at one point dropped as low as
five degrees. It was cold.
I’ll admit that I wasn’t the warmest I’ve ever been in my life,
but I was comfortable enough that many nights I chose to walk
through the snow rather than take the subway. It may seem in-
conceivable that you can store, in such a small bag, enough cold
weather to stay warm and dry in such an environment. The key is
in the layering of cutting edge fabrics.
59 LIFE NOMADIC

The standard formula is this: a layer with an ultra high warmth

to weight ratio covered in the thinnest wind and waterproof layer
you can find. It’s a simple method, but its beauty is twofold:
1. Maximum efficiency. All of the warming is left to a sub-
stance that is chosen only for its high warmth to weight ratio.
The waterproof and windproof layer merely holds the heat in.
2. Maximum versatility. Both layers can be worn separately,
depending on the level of warmth and dryness desired.
I have experimented superficially with wool as a warmth layer for
the chest, but it seems that the current king of warmth to weight
in terms of a jacket is synthetic fleece. Which company you buy
from doesn’t matter particularly, as long as you get the highest
warmth possible without a wind blocker. Wind blocking adds
weight and is redundant.
In particular, you want to look for a jacket with Polartec Thermal
Pro high loft fleece. I wear an Arc’teryx Delta SV, which is one of
only two jackets I know of that use this fleece. The other is made
by Mountain Hardwear.
The fleece will be expensive, somewhere between two and three
hundred dollars, but you’ll be relying on it as your primary heat
retainer. Don’t skimp! The Arc’teryx one has a lifetime warranty,
too, so it may be the last fleece you ever buy.
To cover the fleece you’ll need what’s called a hard shell, which
is a jacket that looks like a fancy raincoat but uses high tech
membranes to keep water out and still be breathable. The gold
standard is Gore-Tex Paclite, but other companies like eVent are
starting to make fabrics that compete.
 BUYING GEAR 60

I use a Mountain Hardwear Aiguille, but if I was buying gear

again I would likely choose a Golite jacket. I’d probably try one
of the alternatives to Gore-Tex which is lighter.
For the rest of the body we’ll use a layer of wool covered in a wa-
terproof layer. That means a merino wool hat (make sure to get
one that covers your ears), wool glove liners, and wool long un-
derwear. Icebreaker or Smartwool are always top brands to get
wool clothing from.
To cover your legs, get rain pants made from Gore-Tex or a com-
petitor. The hood on your jacket will cover your head. Outdoor
Research makes some very packable waterproof outer mittens.
For shoes I recommend Vibram Five Fingers. They will be the
weirdest shoes you’ll ever see, and the best you ever wear. They
can best be described as armor for your feet. They’re lightweight
and they’re shaped around the contours of your feet, including
each individual toe.
Besides being lightweight, Five Fingers dry fast, can be machine
washed, and are great for every purpose. I have hiked with them,
walked many miles with them, swam with them, and even dined
on the Queen Mary II wearing a tuxedo with them. They are
truly versatile footwear.
The one trick they can’t pull off is being weather resistant. In fact,
when I tried to walk through the slush in them in Toronto , my
feet became painful, and then numb. I wondered if I was going
to get frostbite2.
Fortunately, a company called NEOS comes to the rescue. NEOS
makes high quality waterproof overboots. I had considered order-

2 Yes, this was a really dumb idea.

61 LIFE NOMADIC

ing them for almost a year, but the pictures online made them
seem too large to be packing in my nearly full bag.
Not so. After the near-frostbite incident I hobbled to an out-
door gear store and gave them a try. They actually pack down to
about the same size my sandals packed down to before I got rid
of them. Now scared of the freezing slush, I cautiously walked
through it with the overboots on. Sure enough, I was warm. I
further tested by packing my feet in snow and standing in deep
icy puddles. Nothing would make my feet cold.
Try the overshoes on in person if you can. Because Vibram Five
Fingers are so small, the sizing chart on NEOS will probably
be wrong. I was able to buy the smallest pair they made, which
means that the overshoes aren’t oversized and clunky and they
pack small. They’re so light and flexible that it’s actually comfort-
able to run in them.

Technology

Some of the places you’ll go on your trip you will never again
visit, and neither will any of your friends. There’s just not enough
time. Some of the things you will do will be once in a lifetime
experiences. Some situations can’t ever be replicated.
For this reason, I say to take what you need to document your
travels and share them with your friends, family, and maybe even
the whole world.
Conventional travel advice warns not to take expensive cameras
or even bring a laptop. I say this: you’ve gotten rid of everything
you own, you’ve pared your clothes down to the absolute mini-
mum, and you have a smaller backpack than anyone you’ll ever
 BUYING GEAR 62

meet traveling. Splurge a little and buy the equipment you need
to do your trip justice.
Let’s face it: Point and shoot cameras suck. Maybe they’ll get bet-
ter some day, but having small sensors and small lenses mean that
until there is some quantum breakthrough, they will just never
take professional quality photos. I get complimented on my pho-
tos all the time, but it’s nonsense. I have a great camera with a
very good lens, and that puts me ahead of nearly every other trav-
eler out there.

Still Camera

The options for still cameras aren’t great. Digital goes without
saying, which seems to leave us only with Digital SLR cameras.
In case you don’t know what that is, it’s the giant cameras that
“serious photographers” carry. I hate these because they are huge.
If you must get a DSLR, at the very least get a prime lens, mean-
ing a lens that does not zoom. Zoom lenses are huge and heavy,
whereas prime lenses are relatively small. You’ll risk missing some
great Paparazzi shots of Jennifer Aniston on her yacht, but you
already have a bit of a zoom built in: your feet. If you want to
zoom into something, walk towards it.
That’s obviously a bit tongue in cheek, but with a 40mm prime
lens I’ve encountered few shots I couldn’t make work. By the way,
if I sound like some sort of expert, I’m not. Once you get a good
camera you learn all the jargon by accident.
There are two less common cameras which are each about half
the size of the smallest DSLR. The first is the one that I have, and
the second is the one that a practical person, like yourself maybe,
will get.
63 LIFE NOMADIC

I have a digital rangefinder. If you haven’t heard of that, don’t feel

badly. Only two companies make them, Leica and Epson. The
Leica M8 is one of the most revered cameras in the world. The
four thousand dollar price has something to do with that, but
mostly it’s the fact that it’s a high end camera in a small and un-
obtrusive package.
Focusing a rangefinder is different from a DSLR, but is easy to
get used to. I won’t go into specific details here, but do look it up
on Wikipedia if you’re interested.
Epson’s rangefinder costs half as much as a Leica, and is nearly as
good. It’s slightly lower resolution (six megapixels versus eight3),
does better in low light, and is harder to service. This is what I
have.
Both cameras are fully manual, which means no autofocus, au-
tomatic aperture control, or ISO control. This sounds annoy-
ing, but after a brief adjustment period you will learn to do it all
manually and end up being able to take better pictures, especially
in strange lighting situations, than anyone with an automatic
camera. I love technology and automation, but I hope to never
go back.
Still, I’ll be clear. These are expensive cameras that produce amaz-
ing results, at the cost of you doing all the work. One overlooked
benefit to them is that they are relatively small and look like old
fashioned cameras. The Epson actually has a manual lever you

3 This is inappropriate for the scope of the book, but I feel obligated to share
this knowledge with you: megapixels don’t matter. There are a lot of reasons for this,
but basically after six or so you are wasting your time. Eight is nice. Ten, twelve,
or sixteen are marketing hype. A good three megapixel camera is far better than an
average ten megapixel camera. The more important factors by far are sensor size and
lens quality.
 BUYING GEAR 64

must crank to cock the shutter after each shot, as well as only
manual gauges. An LCD screen flips out from the back, but
when it’s hidden the camera doesn’t look very fancy.
A far more practical alternative is the new breed of Micro four
thirds cameras coming out. They are, in a nutshell, shrunken
down versions of DSLR cameras that retain most of the function-
ality. Notably missing is an optical viewfinder – like cheap point
and shoots you must use the built in screen to frame your shot.
Whether you consider this a bonus or a detriment will prob-
ably also determine whether a micro four thirds camera or digital
rangefinder is best for you.
These new cameras can record video as well. The quality is good,
possibly good enough to replace a video camera. As of this writ-
ing, the two cameras in this category are the Olympus E-P1 and
the Panasonic GF1. Both are new to the market and look excel-
lent.
If neither of these options appeals to you, check out the Sigma
DP2 or the Leica X1. They are weird Frankenstein creations be-
tween a DSLR and a point and shoot. The image quality won’t be
quite as good as a rangefinder or micro four thirds camera, but it
will be far better than any point and shoot.

Video Camera

A video camera is less necessary than a still camera. People will

eagerly look at your photos, assuming you cull out the duplicates
and boring ones. Unedited video, on the other hand, is so boring
that no one will want to watch it.
So realize that if you’re buying a video camera, you’re also com-
mitting to editing footage as you go. This becomes a bit of a bur-
65 LIFE NOMADIC

den, especially if you opt for an HD camera. Video files are enor-
mous, and you’ll never want to delete them.
If that doesn’t scare you, head over to www.camcorderinfo.com.
This is the site I use to make decisions on video cameras. My per-
sonal choice is the Sanyo VPC-WH1. I hate that it doesn’t have
optical video stabilization, but it’s small, shoots in HD resolu-
tion, and is fully waterproof.
Last year my friend’s camera got some salt water in it and broke,
so I’ve been scared into getting a waterproof camera. I particu-
larly like that cameras that shoot in 720p instead of 1080i or
1080p. I consider 720p to be acceptably high quality, but the files
are two thirds of the size compared to the alternative.
If you aren’t concerned with waterproofing, check out Canon’s
line. They always seem to have the best video cameras. Whatever
you do, make sure you get a camera that has no tapes. A hard
drive is okay, but solid state media is better because it can’t be
corrupted by shocks or vibration.
Get a Gorillapod instead of a tripod so that you can be in the
videos as well. It uses a standard mount, so you’ll also be able to
use it with your still camera. The Gorillapod has three bendable
legs which make it possible to hang from a tree, hence the name,
as easily as it can stand on three legs on a table.

Laptop

Your laptop is going to be your connection to the outside world,

both as a means to earn money and to stay in touch with your
friends. If you’re a huge nerd like me, it will be a whole lot more
than that, too.
 BUYING GEAR 66

There’s a new breed of cheap and tiny laptops coming out, which
people like to call netbooks. I hate that name, but I love the idea.
If you have a huge laptop, with a screen that’s fourteen inches or
higher, you should probably sell it and get a smaller one. If you
have something in the eight to twelve range, you may already be
set.
The biggest consideration will be whether or not you plan on
video editing, which will of course be determined by whether or
not you get a video camera. Video editing is extremely processor
intensive, and tiny laptops with “Atom” processors are not going
to get the job done.
However, if you don’t have video editing to do, I recommend a
netbook.
One often overlooked consideration is screen resolution. Many
studies have been done that positively correlate screen resolution
with productivity. Clinical speaking aside, it also makes sense.
Screen resolution is the amount of dots on your screen. The more
you have, the more you can fit on your screen, albeit at smaller
sizes. If you have bad eyes, this isn’t so great, but if you have good
eyes it makes a huge difference.
Avoid screens with 800x480 (the same as some cell phones) or
1024x600 resolutions. You will find it difficult to work for long
periouds of time on them. The Sony P netbook has an amazing
1600x768 resolution, and 12” and above laptops should have at
least 1280x768.
If you are editing video, and therefore not buying a netbook,
make sure to get a large hard drive. Being faced with the necessity
of deleting footage to make room for new footage is a nightmare.
67 LIFE NOMADIC

Cell Phone

Don’t get an iPhone. I realize that this will upset people to read,
but the iPhone is not a serious phone for a serious traveler. Yes,
it will be able to make calls, but that’s about it. If you get a real
phone you will be able to do a lot more – almost everything you
can do on your laptop.
A few examples:
• Translation - Load bilingual dictionaries of dozens of lan-
guages onto your phone so that whenever you need to figure out
how to say something, the information is at your fingertips.
• VOIP calling - A great feature which I will discuss in detail
later, enables you to use an internet connection to make free or
nearly free calls back to the US.
• GPS – How about having moving maps of the entire world
loaded into your phone?
• Train Schedules – Free software (MetrO) is available which
has the train routes and schedules for the entire world, or close to
it anyway. Think of it as Mapquest or Google Maps for trains.
The best choice for a mobile phone is to get one with the Win-
dows Mobile operating system. The interface itself is merely ac-
ceptable, but the amount and quality of software available is
excellent. While they may have slick graphics and animations,
no other phone operating system has as many great applications
available.
When choosing a phone, the most vital consideration is the
bands that it operates on. To be sure that your phone will work
anywhere you visit, make sure to get an unlocked quad band
 BUYING GEAR 68

GSM phone. If you already have a phone through either T-Mo-

bile or AT&T (not Sprint or Verizon), call them to see if they’ll
unlock your phone for international travel. Most phones sold in
the United States are “locked” to one carrier, meaning that when
you go to Spain and put a new SIM card in, it won’t actually
work.
If you are unable to unlock your phone, or don’t have a GSM
phone, your next best bet is going to be eBay. My phone is a
Sony X2, which I chose primarily because it has a large, high-res-
olution screen that makes it suitable for reading books or watch-
ing movies. If you don’t choose this phone, check out the offer-
ings from HTC.
You may be surprised at how expensive these phones are. Most
phones purchased in the US are subsidized by hundreds of dollars
by the carriers. They make the money back in the long run by
charging higher monthly fees for service. An unlocked phone will
be unsubsidized, and thus hundreds of dollars more expensive,
because it can be used with any phone network.
Still, a good phone is a vital tool to have as a nomad. In a new
city with no place to stay I can often walk around until I find a
wireless internet signal, and then use the phone’s browser to be-
gin my apartment search, or use the VOIP functionality to make
phone calls.

Charging your Gadgets

Electronics are tough. Even when they’re small, sleek, and func-
tional, they still seem to come with huge chargers and cables.
Besides being bulky, these chargers are also a mess to work with.
The answer is to standardize to USB in two separate ways.
69 LIFE NOMADIC

First, get USB chargers for everything you own. I’ve been able to
find them for everything except for my rather eccentric camera.
Luckily, like many cameras, its charger isn’t so big.
All phones have USB chargers available and most MP3 players
either use USB by default or can use it with optional adapters.
Energizer even makes a great standard battery charger that works
off USB. To make it smaller, rip off the top, which you don’t ac-
tually need.
That covers us for output. We can now take the power coming
from a USB plug and use it to charge everything we have.
Luckily there are also a lot of ways to get power to USB. The
easiest is your computer. It probably has at least two USB ports,
so you can charge two things from it. The really nice thing about
this is that if you have one universal adapter you can now charge
your computer and at least two devices from just one plug. My
compact laptop has three USB ports, and some have even more.
You can also get a wall charger that outputs USB. It won’t work
in all countries, but sometimes it’s easier than taking out your
whole computer. It connects to the universal adapter, of course.
Maybe more interesting, you can also get a solar charger that
works with USB. I love the MySoldius, which is compact and
has considerably higher output wattage than the Solio. The Solio,
which is the most common solar charger, is very slow to charge
and is shaped awkwardly, which makes it difficult to pack. I’ve
tried it and hated it.
Besides standardizing power, you can also standardize your trans-
fer cables somewhat. Try to buy devices that use a standard USB
mini 5 pin connector. My phone, backup hard drive, and old
mp3 player all use this. Some things, like my GPS watch, will
 BUYING GEAR 70

use different cables, but when choosing things like phones, mp3
players, or digital cameras where there’s a lot of available variety,
go for Mini USB.

Electrical Plug Adapters

There are two types of adapters: those which adapt only to the
physical shape of the plug, and those which actually convert the
electricity to a specific format (usually 110v/60hz).
You probably don’t need the bulky ones which transform the
power.
Why? Because almost all modern devices can accept anything
from 110-240v. Check your labels to make sure. I’ve never had
anything that needed 110v specifically.
This is especially true when you standardize to USB. As far as I
know, every modern laptop power brick can take 110-240v, and
so can the small wall socket to USB adapters. Double check your
chargers to make sure.
The absolute best adapter is the APC INPA adapter. It’s an inge-
nious design which packs down small and can adapt any plug to
fit any socket in the world.

A Portable Bed

Bringing your own bed with you isn’t wholly necessary, but dur-
ing those rare occasions that you need it, nothing else substitutes.
I opt to bring one because I have the space in my pack, and I
like being able to stay with friends who don’t have extra beds or
couches. It also comes in really handy if you find yourself laid
over at an airport overnight.
71 LIFE NOMADIC

The bed is called the Luxury Lite cot, and is sold by an eccentric
inventor in Texas through his site, luxurylite.com. The ingenious
design packs down to the size of a loaf of bread, and weighs only
a few pounds.
It’s a delight to sleep on for most people, myself included. When-
ever I have the opportunity to sleep on it I get a great night’s
sleep.
To go with the bed, consider the Sea to Summit silk sheets. If
there’s no wind, when you’re indoors for example, they add about
ten degrees of warmth. Outside they do just about nothing, but
they compress down to the size of a soda can so packing them
isn’t much of an issue. If you have a little more room, you may
want to buy the Mont Bell Spiral Thermal Sheet. It’s a thin down
sleeping bag that looks comfortable and weighs next to nothing.

Other Gear

You’ll bring a lot of other gear with you on your trip. To save
space in this book and to make sure your packing list is up to
date, I maintain a complete list of every piece of gear I travel
with, along with suggestions on where you can buy them. To see
this list, visit tynan.net/currentgear.
My gear may not meet all of your needs, though, so I’ll give you a
few tips on where to find good gear on your own. Unfortunately,
most travel accessories are geared towards the types of people who
lug 32” suitcases around the world. Finding compact and light
gear is difficult.
One of the best sources is outdoor gear stores. Hikers, especially
ultralight hikers, are obsessed with light things. I’ve even read
 BUYING GEAR 72

about them cutting off half of their toothbrush handle and then
drilling holes through what’s left to make it as light as possible.
Backpacker type travel stores also have some good items amidst
the oversized junk they sell.
For electronics, you’ll almost always have to look at the higher
end. It’s expensive to miniaturize electronics. Check Japanese im-
port sites for slightly overpriced but compact laptops and phones.

Packing it In

If you’re thinking that all of that stuff might be a tight fit for such
a small backpack, you’re absolutely right. To pack efficiently we’ll
need to follow two principle strategies:
• Air space must be minimized.
• The most frequently used items must be the most accessible.
Air space is the enemy. Every cubic foot of air space is a cubic
foot of useful stuff that you won’t be able to bring. That means
that we want to compress clothes as much as possible and layer
items in the pack with as little extra room on the sides as possible.
A great packing tool is the Aloksak, which is a waterproof heavy
duty plastic bag. Fold your clothes to fit in a single bag, kneel on
it to press all of the air out, and you’ll be left with a dense puck
of clothes that just happens to be the same width as the interior
space of the pack. A small side benefit is that if your bag happens
to get soaked in a boat ride or something, you’ll still have dry
clothes to change into.
The Deuter can be separated into two distinct compartments
rather than one big one. Using this feature allows you to pack the
73 LIFE NOMADIC

bottom compartment as tightly as possible while leaving the top

area relatively empty, so that you can access items while traveling.
This method also leaves you with two access points, which means
that you have two areas to place items you may need to get to in
a hurry. I keep my cameras and computer near the top one, and
my rain gear near the bottom one.
Keep small items, like cords, grouped together in smaller aloksaks
to make them easier to find. Make good use of the mesh pockets
on the sides of the bag. They can hold a lot more than a water
bottle and are very valuable spaces since they’re so easy to access.
Keep extra passport photos, business cards, tickets, and other
scraps of paper together in the flat front pockets.
 Services

Not all who wander are lost

J. R. Tolkien

“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a

means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.”
Western Union Internal Memo

Filling the gap between our physical presence in our home coun-
try and where our travels are a host of services. Using these ser-
vices it’s possible to do virtually anything remotely, even certain
tasks which normall require a physical presence.

Banking

There is a hidden tax of at least three percent that almost every

traveler pays without even knowing it. It’s applied to every dollar
spent by credit card and cash, and even ATM withdrawals.
I’m talking about hidden currency conversion fees. The good
news is that any long term traveler can easily avoid paying this
hidden tax with a bit of knowledge and advance planning.
The way it works is this: when you charge something on your
credit card in another currency, say Malaysian Ringgits, your
75 LIFE NOMADIC

credit card company checks the current conversion rate, converts

your purchase to dollars, and then tacks three percent on top of
that. You probably never notice it, because who actually checks
market conversion rates when looking over their bank statement?
Worse is when vendors charge in dollars, using something called
dynamic currency conversion. This service uses terrible rates, and
replaces the three percent fee with a six percent fee. Never allow a
vendor in a foreign country to charge your credit card in dollars.
It’s against their agreement with Visa or MasterCard to prohibit
you from paying in local currency.
Fortunately there are a few credit card companies who quietly
offer zero percent conversion fees. The biggest one is CapitalOne.
They have dozens of different cards that you can get, including
some with airline miles and some without yearly fees. A worthless
bonus that still gets me excited for some reason is the ability to
put your own design on the card. Mine, predictably, is a Life No-
madic card.
I also carry an American Express Platinum card because of their
excellent services. They charge 2.5% on foreign fees, so I primar-
ily use them for booking flights and cruises online in US Dollars,
as well as for stocking up on gear and general purposes when I’m
in the US. Foreign purchases go on the CapitalOne card.
With the Amex Platinum you are allowed into most of the air-
line clubs (Northwest, Continental, American, and Delta), which
provide a welcome oasis during long layovers. Some even have
showers. Additionally, you have a free concierge on call 24 hours
a day.
Like credit cards, ATMs add a three percent fee, plus the oc-
casional foreign ATM fee, and sometimes an owner fee for the
 SERVICES 76

ATM. Take out $100 and you might be losing ten percent to
your bank. Luckily there are quite a few banks, most of them in-
ternet based, which don’t charge a fee.
The best of the bunch is Schwab High Yield Investor Checking.
There are no monthly fees, they rebate unlimited ATM fees, and
it comes with a stock trading account just in case, again with no
monthly fees. Also noteworthy is the $2000 ATM withdrawal
limit. You won’t need to withdraw that much frequently, but
apartment rentals are usually paid for in cash and can cost more
than the standard $500 that most cards limit you to.
Exchanging cash is probably the worst deal of all. Banks some-
times offer reasonable rates, but the kiosks you find in airports
and train stations are usually abysmal. You don’t know the cur-
rent rate, and they know that. Beware of street changers, too.
They’ll often give you a great rate, but “miscount” and keep a few
bills for themselves.
If you get a wad of cash and keep exchanging it from one country
to the next, the problem compounds upon itself. Go through five
countries and you’ve lost fifteen or twenty percent of your cash.
Avoid using money exchangers whenever possible. Sure, it’s bet-
ter to exchange your remaining Vietnamese Dong at a bad rate
rather than carry them around with you, but getting rid of excess
country as you leave a country should be the exception to the
rule.
The best cash management strategy is to charge everything you
can on your Capital One credit card (and pay it off in full every
month), withdraw cash in small chunks as needed (since Schwab
is rebating your fees anyway), and then exchange your leftover
cash at a bank in the next country.
77 LIFE NOMADIC

If you don’t wait until the next country, you may find yourself
stuck at the airport with no way to buy food if the plane is de-
layed. Plus you’ll get a much better rate at the bank, as I men-
tioned previously.
Notice that this strategy doesn’t include travelers’ checks. Trav-
elers’ checks are a relic from the past that some people still as-
sociate with security and prudence. The truth is that they are an
enormous hassle and many non tourist places, especially those in
less developed countries, won’t even take them. You’re not much
more likely to have your travelers’ checks lost or stolen abroad
than you are to lose your cash at home. It’s security that you don’t
need.
Oh, and one last little tip. Money changers will never take coins,
even though many countries have coins worth the equivalent of a
dollar or two. Use them in the airport gift shops to buy postcards.

Postal Mail

Yesterday was tax day. I got a notice in the mail saying that I had
made an error in last year’s return, so I completed and mailed a
an amended return. Then, while I was in the mood, I filed my
corporate tax return too. Best of all, I took care of this all from
the WiFi connection at a coffee shop.
That’s right – it’s now so easy and convenient to manage your
mail online that even if I wasn’t a nomad, I’d still probably do it
this way.
Companies are just now budding which offer mail reception,
scanning, and forwarding. I’ve been using the king of the hill,
Earth Class Mail, ever since they first opened for business a year
 SERVICES 78

ago. With plans starting at just twenty dollars a month, getting

your mail through them is a no brainer.
Here’s how the process works: when your mail comes in, they
scan the front and back of the envelope or postcard in full high
resolution color. You then log in to your account and decide what
to do with the letter. You have five options:
• Recycle. If it has no personal information on it, they’ll re-
cycle it for you for free.
• Shred. If the letter may have personal information on it,
but you don’t want it, like a credit card application or bank state-
ment, they’ll shred it for free.
• Scan. If it’s something you might need, have them scan it.
Every account gets a certain number of pages scanned for free
every month, and additional pages are relatively cheap. They do a
great job, even scanning the front and back of credit cards so that
you can use them online.
• Archive. For five cents a month, after the first month, they’ll
hang on to your mail. This is a great option if it’s something you
want to get eventually, but don’t need now.
• Ship. They will forward your mail, or even packages you re-
ceive, anywhere in the world. A great many companies won’t ship
internationally, but if you have them ship to your Earth Class
Mail address, you can still get the package relayed to you.
If you get a check in the mail, you can even have it set up to de-
posit to your bank account!
As you can probably tell – I love this service. They scan the mail
to PDF, which is a lot more useful to me than actual hard copies
79 LIFE NOMADIC

of mail. An additional underpublicized feature is the ability to get

a dozen or so personal PO Boxes addresses in different states for
free. This can be useful if you want a separate mailing address for
your business.

Receiving Packages

Even if you don’t have a good address, you can still usually receive
packages in foreign countries, whether they’re sent through Earth
Class Mail or from someone else. If you speak enough of the
language, go to the post office and ask if they can receive a pack-
age for you. This is called “Poste Restante” or General Delivery,
and is available throughout Europe and The United States. Other
countries may have it as well – you’ll just need to ask.
They’ll typically hold the package for up to a month, which
makes coordinating easier if you’re on the move a lot. Just have
the package shipped somewhere far ahead of you, and let it wait
for you to arrive.
If you’re in a less developed country and want to have something
shipped to your rented apartment, use any service other than the
post office. Post office packages get lost, Fedex generally doesn’t.

Sending Mail

Sending mail is now possible, too. There are a variety of services

available, most of which I’ve found disappointing. Don’t get me
wrong – they’ll all send a letter for you, but most aren’t as full
featured as I’d like.
The one standout is mailaletter.com. The interface isn’t quite as
modern as I’d like, but I love that they allow PDF attachments.
 SERVICES 80

Portable Document Format, or PDF, is the standard format for

most online documents, especially forms.
I’ve found that most of what I end up having to mail in are
forms. An application for a trading account or a credit card, a
tax return, or an agreement for my web hosting provider. Usu-
ally these things can be faxed, which we’ll get to in a minute, but
sometimes physical mail is the only option.
Using Mail A Letter, or any of its competitors, is easy. You simply
write a message on their email-like interface, put in an address,
and pay a dollar or so. Upload your PDF attachment, if you have
one, and hit send. Within twenty four hours your letter will be
posted and on its way.
How do you “sign” these forms? The best thing to do is to get a
high quality scan of your signature before you leave. It’s a simple
matter to take care of at Kinkos, or you can just take a digital
picture of your signature and tweak it a bit. Barring that, PDF
readers like Foxit will let you draw on the screen with a mouse or,
if you have a tablet PC, the pen.
It’s not perfect, but so far I haven’t had anyone reject it.
For less serious correspondence, there are some services that will
let you upload photos from your trip, turn them into postcards,
and then send them to your friends with a message written on
the back. One of the best services for this is HazelMail.com.

Receiving Phone Calls

International calling sounds a lot more expensive than it is. In

fact, in most countries you’ll end up paying less per minute than
you do for your cell phone plan back home. The people who call
81 LIFE NOMADIC

you may not believe that, though. Whenever I talk to my grand-

mother she’s always in a rush to get off the phone because she
can’t imagine international calling not being expensive.
There are two components to the system. First, you need a local
prepaid cell phone plan. These plans are what most people use for
everyday service in many countries, so they are generally trivial
to get. All you do is prepay twenty dollars or less and get a new
SIM card to put into your phone. Refilling minutes can usually
be done at any convenient store, but usually you have to get the
initial SIM card at a phone store.
With your new service you should be able to make local calls as
well as receive them.
Create an account at www.callcentric.com. Callcentric is a VOIP,
or Voice Over IP, provider, which is a fancy way of describing a
company that routes phone calls over the internet. They can take
incoming calls in the US, route them over the internet for free to
another country, and then connect from there to your cell phone.
The result is that instead of paying between fifty cents and a few
dollars per minute, you’ll generally pay between three and twelve
cents. The countries that are at the higher end of that spectrum
are usually countries where cell phone users are not billed for in-
coming calls. In those countries you can buy the cheapest prepaid
card, usually around $3, and receive calls all month.
One feature of Callcentric that I particularly like is the ability
to port your cell phone number. This means that you can cancel
your cell contract, but keep your number. The cost for doing this
is roughly six dollars per month, and people who call your cell
phone may have no idea you ever left.
 SERVICES 82

Callcentric also has a great rule based interface for routing calls,
which lets you have fine grain control over who can call and
when. I use this to block junk calls.

Making Phone Calls

Making phone calls is the one area that isn’t quite polished yet.
The best option is to use a Voice Over IP client for your phone.
Nokia phones have this built in and people with Windows Mo-
bile phones can get a great program called Agephone.
The good news is that these programs can connect through a
service like Callcentric or Callwithus for only a penny or two per
minute. The bad news, of course, is that they only work when
you’re in an area that has good wifi. Slow third world wifi usually
doesn’t cut it.
Callcentric doubles as a calling card, and has a bunch of local
numbers in a dozen or so countries. If you happen to be in one of
those countries, you can use the calling card feature to make calls
at the same cheap rates.
The one last option is a callback service, which Callwithus and
Callcentric both provide. You log in to the web site, put in your
local cell number and the number you want to call, and a second
later your cell phone rings and connects to the remote number.
This is how I make the bulk of my calls.
I expect that in the near future outgoing calls will get better. For
now, VOIP is a good choice when you’re in your apartment, and
the calling card or callback option will suffice when you’re not.
83 LIFE NOMADIC

Faxing

Even if you don’t fax now, you’ll probably find a few occasions on
the road where you’ll need to. Luckily there are some excellent
solutions.
For receiving faxes, check out K7.net. The interface is laughably
bad, but they will give you an absolutely free fax and voicemail
number. No credit card or any sort of documentation is required.
I’ve been using their service for years, and it’s been great. They
have a feature I particularly like where every fax is just sent to
your e-mail address, with no need to ever log in. I’ve been using
this so long that I don’t even know what my login name is any-
more.
Terrible interfaces seem to be en vogue for fax sites, and the next
site is no exception. Fax1.com is the winner in the fax sending
arena, and believe me, I’ve tried a ton of them.
Besides rates so good that it’s lasted me a year on a six dollar cred-
it, the best thing about Fax1 is that it comes with printer drivers.
That means that you just click Print on any document you want
to fax, and a dialog box pops up offering a preview and asking for
the number. It couldn’t be any easier.
Just like with mailing letters, make sure to have a good scan of
your signature for pasting onto documents to fax.

Insurance

As I mentioned in the section about danger, you will probably

greatly overestimate the chance of you running into trouble.
Based on personal experience, I’d suggest you do as I do: don’t
insure your gear.
 SERVICES 84

More valuable than insurance is common sense coupled with

some security related pieces of gear that I will recommend short-
ly.
If you do decide to buy insurance, I recommend a company
called Safeware. Most travelers’ insurance policies cover only a
small amount of electronics per traveler, not enough to make it
useful for a most people. Safeware, on the other hand, will let you
cover whatever you want, and will quote you a reasonable price.
Health insurance is another topic. Your local insurance will prob-
ably not cover you in foreign countries, although you should
check with them to make sure. That means that you should prob-
ably cancel your health insurance before you go if you pay for it
yourself.
There are plenty of health insurance options available for travel-
ers, but whether or not you need them is up to your own discre-
tion. World Nomads Insurance, at worldnomads.com is one of
the more popular options.
My own health strategy is to eat healthy food, get enough rest,
and exercise. As a result I haven’t gone to the doctor in the US or
elsewhere in at least ten years. If I do need medical care, which
I’m sure I will eventually, I will just pay for it out of my own
pocket.
Many countries have high quality medical care at a fraction of the
cost of US prices, and in fact have people go there specifically for
“medical tourism”. That’s probably the route I would take.
Everyone has a different health situation, so make sure to review
both options before making a decision.
 Part Three
Living Nomadically
BEGINNING YOUR NEW LIFE

If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally
anchored. One’s destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking
at things.
Henry Miller

The night before was full of fanfare. Everyone had come to the
restaurant to say goodbye. My best friends were there, but so
were a handful of acquaintances I barely ever saw. I was happy to
see them, but couldn’t help but think that I probably hadn’t seen
them in a longer period of time than I was leaving for.
The morning I left was less eventful. I took my backpack and
walked into the same restaurant for breakfast.
“I thought you were leaving?” asked the cashier casually.
“I am. My flight is in a few hours.”
As we ate our breakfast, I stared down at my tiny little backpack.
It was strange to see my entire life compressed down into some-
thing so insignificant looking. Momentary waves of panic shot
through me as my subconscious came up with random things I
may have forgotten to do. What about my car! Oh yeah, I sold it.
Looking back at the task of getting rid of everything, it seemed
so monumental. It was more cathartic than unpleasant, and had
87 LIFE NOMADIC

definitely firmed up my minimalist notions that I had been de-

veloping.
I checked my new GPS watch which had replaced a flashier but
less functional watch. I knew I had plenty of time, but missing
this flight would be terribly unfortunate.
We finished our breakfast leisurely and waited outside for our
friend Kristen to come pick us up. People hem and haw when
you need a ride to the airport to go somewhere boring like Cleve-
land, but when you’re embarking on a grand nomadic journey,
everyone volunteers. If we’d been a bit less considerate, we prob-
ably could have arranged for a full on motorcade.
I looked at each passing building, places I’d seen a million times
before, trying to etch them in my memory. All of a sudden the
Texaco on the corner seemed like an important landmark, an an-
chor to my life in Austin.
An hour later I was on a plane. I hadn’t even landed in the first
country yet, but I already knew that I’d never go back. Sure, I’d
visit from time to time, but the idea of giving up this free and
exciting life seemed unfathomable.
When I landed back in Austin seven months later for a surprise
visit, it felt like I never left. In the context of normal American
life, my two hundred or so days away seemed like some sort of
bizarre dream.
I got comfortable in Austin, and quickly fell back into old rou-
tines. I picked back up with my friends, and it was as if the past
months had just been a day or so. We’d kept in touch so well on-
line that we barely had anything to catch up on. The restaurants
I used to love were still serving the same food, and the waitresses
I’d made friends with were still serving it. Even downtown, which
 BEGINNING YOUR NEW LIFE 88

was in the middle of a huge condo boom, didn’t seem all that dif-
ferent.
The one thing that had changed was me. I saw the world through
different eyes. There were now a handful of cities around the
world that felt similarly familiar. And most of all, I knew that
there was no telling what sort of adventures lay ahead.
The differences in daily life as a nomad will surprise you, but so
will the similarities. You quickly realize that a bed feels the same
no matter what country it’s in, so does a shower, and so does sit-
ting in front of your laptop. If you’re anything like me, that’s a
pretty good chunk of your day right there.
The similarities are a good thing, though. They provide contrast
to the new and exciting things you’ll experience, and give you
enough stability to focus on building the skills you’ll need to
thrive in strange lands.
One of the best parts of being a nomad is inventing your life as
you go along, figuring out what works and what doesn’t. In this
section I’ll share with you some of the things that I figured out
along the way.
 LEARNING LANGUAGES

No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he
visits. Otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great baby-so helpless and so
ridiculous.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

“What does that mean?”

“It means your Japanese is very good.”
Obviously it’s not. I barely understood a word of the compli-
ment. Still, I was trying, and in this case, that’s what counts the
most. “You speak very good Japanese” ought to be translated as,
“Thank you for trying”.
There are two distinct sides to every country: one you experi-
ence if you speak the language, and another you experience if you
don’t speak a word. It’s a safe bet that the version you see when
you speak the language is a whole lot better than the other.
This was illustrated best in Japan. I had built my proficiency to
where I could articulate just about anything I wanted, even if
it was in as inarticulate and roundabout a manner as could be
imagined (“I want eat thing that next to that thing.”). As a result,
every Japanese person I met bowled over with enthusiasm, praise,
and an authentic desire to show me their country.
90 LIFE NOMADIC

A good friend of mine visited for a week in Japan. Obviously

with such a short visit, it didn’t make sense for her to learn Japa-
nese. She made the mistake we all make when trying to commu-
nicate with people who don’t speak English: we speak to them in
English as if they were half deaf toddlers.
I watched the experience she was having in Japan, and although
she had a great time, it was obvious to me that there was a depth
of experience that she wasn’t able to enjoy. The people are what
define the country, not the landmarks, and if we can’t talk to
them, we lose out.
A few weeks later I was in Thailand, talking to people in baby
English, all too aware of what I was missing out on.
I’ve always tried to learn the language of anywhere I stay for at
least a month. As a result I can get by in Spanish, French, Chi-
nese, and Japanese. After a humbling tour through Singapore,
Malaysia, Thailand, and Cambodia, I now try to at least learn the
most basic dozen words or so, as well as the grammar structure
of any other country. Please, thank you, no, yes, hi, how are you,
and goodbye go a really long way. Most tourists show so little ef-
fort that just that small bit of interest in their culture conveys a
lot of authenticity to locals.
Sure, you still won’t be able to have real conversations with them,
but if they see you trying, they’ll be more likely to try hard as
well. In Japan it’s common for people to say that they speak no
English, but then once they realize your Japanese is worse, they’ll
open up and speak English. It’s often surprising how good “bad
English” is.
The bad news, which isn’t really news at all, is that learning lan-
guages is difficult. I know people who took a couple years of
 LEARNING LANGUAGES 91

Spanish in school and still can’t order properly at Mexican restau-

rants. The good news is that because learning language is such a
common goal, high quality ways to learn have been discovered
and refined to a science. It will probably come as no surprise to
you that a classroom setting isn’t one of those ways.
In the late 60s a psychologist and French teacher named Paul
Pimsleur began to study language learning. Whet he discovered,
amongst other things, is that there are certain intervals at which
one needs to hear something to commit it to memory. Specifical-
ly, they are 5 seconds, 25 seconds, 2 minutes, 10 minutes, 1 hour,
5 hours, 1 day, 5 days, 25 days, 4 months, and 2 years.
He created a language learning method that was based around
this idea, creating lessons with quiz words at approximately those
intervals. Although he’s now dead, his system lives on through a
series of audible language lessons called The Pimsleur Method.
Each language consists of ninety half hour tapes, divided into
three units. You do one a day, every day, for three months. It’s
a minimal time commitment, but you leave with the ability to
hold some sort of conversation. The level of fluency you’ll achieve
is based mostly on the difficulty of the language. Spanish is a lot
easier than Russian, and thus you come out of the program with
a comparatively good grasp of the language.
Forget about Rosetta stone, Berlitz, or any other language pro-
gram. Pimsleur is the best by far. Its treatments of writing and
reading are so superficial that I usually skip them, but it is known
for being both efficient and for producing speakers who pro-
nounce things unusually well. It’s easy to figure out why: each
lesson is interactive. A third of the time is spent listening to the
speaker, and the rest is spent replying back and answering ques-
tions.
92 LIFE NOMADIC

What I particularly like about Pimsleur is that it gets results fast.

Doing even two weeks of a series will give you enough skills to
improve your experience in the country which speaks the lan-
guage. I also like that it’s self contained. You can download the
MP3s to your MP3 player and listen to them wherever you are.
Yes, people will think you’re weird for speaking to yourself in
some other language, but you can’t argue with the results.
The courses are expensive - $600 for all three months, but when
you consider that you’ll be speaking as well as someone who took
the class in school for a couple years in just a few months, you
might agree that it’s worth it. If not, almost every public library
has every language available for free, and it’s hard to argue with
that price.

Immersion

Immersion is the only real way to learn a language. Pimsleur im-

merses you in your new language for half an hour a day, but it
will take more than that to gain real fluency. The key is to travel
to countries whose language you’re learning, and then comes the
hard part: using it.
One thing I’ve found is that most people want to practice their
English more than they want to speak with a novice in their lan-
guage, so they just switch to English. The solution is easy: listen
in English, speak in the new language. This is actually a great
method for both parties to improve their language skills. Don’t be
scared to speak the language, even if you know you’re not great at
it. Learning takes place outside of your comfort zone, and believe
me, they’ve heard worse.
If you travel with a friend, designate days or hours where you
agree to only speak the foreign language. Yes, it’s a bit cumber-
 LEARNING LANGUAGES 93

some and can be really annoying when you want to talk about
something technical, but it’s also effective.
Just two months of concerted effort in a country can make a huge
difference. I did three months of Pimsleur Japanese last year, and
then two months in Japan. When I started I didn’t know much
beyond “konnichi-wa (hello)”, and by the end of the trip I was
having full conversations in Japanese.
I took five years of Spanish in middle and high school, so after
two months in Panama I got the hang of things. My friend Todd
had taken no Spanish in high school, but after three months of
Pimsleur and two months in Panama, he was speaking around
my level as well.
The key is to focus on functioning language rather than fluency.
People are smart and will figure out what you mean. I’d rather
speak five languages passably than two perfectly. Three months of
tapes and two of immersion won’t get you fluent, but it should
get you functional.
Another effective strategy is to get a language partner. Being an
English speaker makes you a lot rarer than a speaker of the native
language. If you’re open to it, people will be practically lining up
at your door to have you as a language partner1. Just in case they
can’t find your door, search on local classifieds sites or craigslist
for them.

Learning Kanji

I was clicking random links online one day when I came upon
a blog of a guy who said that he had learned Kanji in only two

1 By the way, in Japan many girls are signing up to get a language partners in
hope of dating an American. Something to consider.
94 LIFE NOMADIC

months. This seemed ridiculous—Kanji are the complex Chinese

characters used in both Chinese and Japanese. Each one repre-
sents a whole word, not a sound. Just the smallest subset, the
Japanese Joyo Kanji, makes up the almost two thousand charac-
ters necessary to read a newspaper.
I may as well give it a try, I thought.
Two months later, I finished learning the last of the 2042 most
basic Kanji. I couldn’t pronounce them, but I knew what each
one meant in English and could write them all. The most practi-
cal application of this knowledge is the continued study of Kanji,
but an intermediate side benefit is that I can understand pretty
much any menu or sign, or even the gist of simple paragraphs.
Fluent? No, but functional.
The task of learning Kanji seems so overwhelming that many stu-
dents, including my former self, just skip it. At one point at time
that was probably the best decision, too. No one had figured out
a way to make learning Kanji practical.
Times change. Now there’s an excellent book by James Heisig
called Remembering the Kanji. His approach is to assign a mean-
ing to each sub-element of each character, and then create a story
involving those elements to remember the whole character.
For example, the word for apricot is the character for “tree” on
top of the character for “mouth”, so to remember it you imag-
ine someone standing under an apricot tree, trying to catch one
in his mouth. The more absurd the image is, the better the story
sticks.
To use his method most effectively, pair it with a good flash card
system. The best of them, like Anki, use the “spaced repetition”
 LEARNING LANGUAGES 95

method, which is similar to the interval system used by Pimsleur

for spoken language.
There is also a community online called “Reviewing the Kanji” at
kanji.koohii.net, where people share their own stories. Users rate
each story, making it easy to go online and find great stories ef-
fortlessly.
Studying just thirty five new words a day, seven days a week, will
get you up to speed in two months. If you’re planning on spend-
ing a significant amount of time in Japan or China, you’ll prob-
ably find that the time was well spent.

Phoenetic Alphabets

Written Russian and Arabic look totally foreign at first glance.

Russian looks like a glitched computer and Arabic looks like ran-
dom squiggles. Unlike Kanji, though, these languages are pho-
netic, meaning that they have relatively small pronounceable let-
ters. Even Japanese has two secondary phonetic alphabets, one of
which is used liberally on menus because it functions to emulate
English words.
Despite appearances, all of these alphabets can be learned in a
day of serious study each. You won’t have any idea what you’re
reading, but you’ll at least be able to pronounce it. There’s value
in such a simple skill. You can look for signs that say a particular
thing, and as you pick up words here and there you’ll know how
to write them.
 BUDGETING

I swims in the Tagus all across at once, and I rides on an ass or a mule, and
swears Portuguese, and have got a diarrhea and bites from the mosquitoes.
But what of that? Comfort must not be expected by folks that go a pleasur-
ing.

Lord Byron

How much do you suppose it costs to live as a nomad, following

your whims around the world, moving from country to country
at your convenience? Take a guess now so that you can compare
it to the real answer.
The one factor people never seem to include in their estimates
is the reduction of costs they’ll have. Even without getting into
expenses like car payments and property tax, most people pay
for things like gas, phone service, cable, electricity, and internet
service. A conservative estimate tallies those expenses up be at
least two to three hundred dollars a month. Spending a lot more
wouldn’t be difficult. To put things in perspective, I pay an aver-
age of just $265 per month in airfare.
There’s a difference between being a miser and spending money
efficiently. The former connotates an indifference to value, being
unwilling to part with money unless absolutely necessary. The
latter is something different. It represents a shift in perspective,
97 LIFE NOMADIC

moving towards the idea that money should be spent in ways

that will genuinely enhance one’s life, and that all other expenses
should be ruthlessly culled.
Our society, or segments of it at least, have glorified the spend-
ing of money. Rappers brag about how much they spent on their
jewelry, not how the jewelry has improved their lives. An applica-
tion sold for the iPhone which did nothing other than put a red
glowing icon on the phone that said, “I am rich”. The price of the
application was a thousand dollars, and eight people bought it
before it was removed by Apple. Two of the buyers thought it was
a joke and got their money refunded. The other six were happy
customers.
I think it’s a clever idea on the developer’s part, and if people
want to pay for it that’s fine with me too. What troubles me,
though, is the underlying trend in our culture that has made this
possible. Money, originally conceived as a store of value, has in-
stead become, in many cases, a store of status.
Returning one’s mind to the idea of money as a store of value,
and refusing to base one’s self esteem or worth on the amount
of money they spend for a good or service, is a major step in the
right direction.
I say to be proud of spending money efficiently. Spend as little
money as necessary on flights and comfortable lodging, and save
the rest to fund the unexpected adventures that your future surely
holds.
I spend somewhere around $1500 per month, which is broken
down approximately as follows:
 BUDGETING 98

• $500 for lodging1

• $265 for plane, train, ship, and cruise tickets
• $500 for food2
• $50 in fees for phones, remote mail, faxing
• $185 in gear replacement and miscellaneous expenses3
This is an average over the long term. In places like Panama my
expenses are closer to $900, and in Tokyo they can be closer to
$2000. Often times the most expensive flights lead to the places
with the cheapest lodging and food, so those two figures relate
conversely.
Fifteen hundred dollars a month may not seem like much, but
in fact I live like a king. The following sections will explain my
methods and enable you to live as cheaply as you want to, while
living life to the fullest and seeing the world.

1 I now have so many friends to stay with around the world that my actual
figure is much lower. Five hundred dollars assumes that staying with friends isn’t an
option.
2 I eat a very strict vegan diet with the additional avoidance of all processed
flours, sugars, and bad oils. Eating such a healthy diet is a luxury which I’m happy
to pay for. If I ate normal food I imagine my costs would be far closer to $250 per
month.
3 I can be a bit absent minded and tend to lose more of my gear than I should.
This number is probably higher than I actually spend, but I’d rather err on the side
of caution.
 FLYING

A friend of a friend wanted to come to Panama to visit. He called

his travel agent and booked a round trip coach ticket for a whop-
ping $1800. I’m still not sure how it’s possible to get a ticket that
expensive, but the kicker is this: he stepped off the plane and into
a much more familiar land than he expected. His travel agent had
booked him for Panama City, Florida, not Panama City, Panama.
The lesson to be learned? If you want cheap (and correct) flights,
it’s good to do a bit of the legwork yourself.
The airfare booking system is complex, and a bit confusing. It’s
possible, if not probable, that between two strangers sitting on a
plane, one might have paid twice what the other paid. I like sys-
tems like this – they reward the smart and determined at the cost
of the lazy or ignorant. If you’re in the latter category now, don’t
feel bad. I’ve been there too on both counts.
Buying cheap airfare is a key component of living a successful
nomadic lifestyle for a couple reasons. First, it’s the only major
expense you’ll have that you didn’t have back home. Second, if
your flights are cheap you’ll be much more likely to travel as you
please, and not feel obligated to stick in one place, or never leave
your home country in the first place.
100 LIFE NOMADIC

I consider finding cheap flights to be a hobby. Armchair psy-

chologists observing me might call it something else. As a result
of my obsession, I have developed and discovered an arsenal of
techniques which enable me to fly unbelievably inexpensively. My
average expense for all transportation is under three hundred dol-
lars a month. All of a sudden those cable and electricity bills may
not seem like such a good value. Here are some examples I’ve
flights I’ve booked recently, including all taxes and fees:
Toronto to Panama City - $258
Panama City to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic - $272
London to Marakkesh, Morocco (round trip) - $144
London to Toronto to Austin to London (three legs) - $610
In the following sections I will explain how I got each one of
these fares, and how you can employ the same strategies.

Fly on Tuesday or Wednesday

Business travelers make up the bulk of passengers on an airplane,

which means that they also regulate the price to a large extent.
And generally, businesses have more money to spend on flights
than individuals. Since most business travel happens from Thurs-
day to Monday, flights on the remaining days tend to be less in
demand, and thus, cheaper.
How much cheaper? I’d say that twenty percent is average, and
often times it’s more like fifty percent. That doesn’t mean that
deals can’t ever be had on the remaining days, but it does mean
that you should carefully check every day of the week. This is
where the flexibility of being a nomad comes into play. Many
 FLYING 101

people have constraints that prevent them from getting these

deals – you don’t, so take advantage of them.
The easiest way to check the whole week at once is by using the
“flexible dates” feature of your favorite flight search engine. My
favorite is Kayak. Beware, though, the flexible date feature is not
completely accurate. Often times it will find the best flights only
on your preferred day and some second best flights on the other
days. I always spend the extra few minutes to manually check
each day individually. Not doing so could be a hundred dollar
mistake!

Two For (Less Than) the Price of One

Even if you only need a one way, check the price of a round trip
ticket as well. It is extremely common for a round trip ticket to
be sold less that a one way ticket for the same route. I can’t really
fathom why this is true, but it definitely is.
First try setting the return date to a Wednesday or Tuesday a
week in advance. Then try the following week. If those prices are
good, try to think of any possible time you might want to use the
return trip. Since it is essentially free (or even better than free),
you don’t need to be certain you’ll use it.
If you can’t imagine any time you’ll use it, see how far ahead
you can book it for without paying more money. You may be
able to move the date around later by paying a fee or just maybe
convince them to allow you to credit it against a future flight. I
wouldn’t count on that one, though.
102 LIFE NOMADIC

The Hub Method

Aggregators like Kayak, Expedia, or Orbitz are not the end all
be all of airfare prices. For example, when I searched for a flight
from Toronto to Panama, even on Tuesday and Wednesday, the
flight cost over $500. When you consider how far away the two
cities are, it’s not an unreasonable price.
But there’s a little known secret I was able to exploit to cut that
cost in half. The secret is this: aggregators don’t show you the
best flight you can buy. They show you the best flight that you
can buy from one vendor. This is a small but crucial distinction.
Often times you can buy two complementary tickets which end
up costing far less than the best price on the effective combined
route.
New York is a major hub, which means that it will almost always
have the best international fares in the United States. Los Ange-
les, Miami, and sometimes Chicago are other examples of cities
with excellent prices.
I knew that Toronto to New York would cost almost nothing.
A quick search confirmed my suspicions by offering a one way
ticket for $105. Then I searched for a flight that left a few hours
later from New York to Panama. As I suspected, I found a fare
for $153. Combined, the two tickets cost me only $258, which is
$242 less than the aggregator showed me.
Besides ultra low fares, there’s another incentive to using this
method. I had been to New York recently and was eager to get
to Panama, but if I had wanted to, I could have scheduled my
second flight a couple days or even weeks later, giving me a free
stop in New York. Try calling up your airline to extend a normal
 FLYING 103

stopover, and they’ll either totally disallow it or charge an obscene

rate for the privilege.
Although it’s a bit harder to line up the times unless you’re taking
a free stop, you can also use this method to book two overlapping
round trip tickets. A friend wanted to come to Morocco with me,
but the price of the ticket was one thousand dollars from Austin.
Instead he booked a $500 ticket to London, and then the same
$144 round trip ticket to Morocco that I took. He added a free
stop in London on the way in to spend some time in the city and
meet up with another one of his friends who was there too.
Besides international flights, this technique also works for domes-
tic flights in the United States. Hub to hub flights, like LAX to
NYC are so cheap that it’s often worth taking a quick hop to the
closer one to get to the other. Las Vegas is a city that is unbeliev-
ably cheap to get to from almost anywhere.
One shortcut to finding good hubs is to look at regular tickets
for the route that have layovers and see where they stop. Many
trips to Central and South America stop off in the Miami area
(Miami, Palm Beach, or Fort Lauderdale), which can tell you that
those three airports are probably hubs worth checking out.
Remember a little while back when I said to keep an eye out for
round trip tickets that are cheaper than one way tickets? An ad-
vanced strategy you can employ is to use the return ticket to get
to a hub city.
Let’s say you want to fly from Tokyo to San Francisco, stay there
for a couple months, and then take a trip to Bangkok. You could
buy all of those tickets separately, or you could get a round trip
from Tokyo to San Francisco. Set the return date for when you
104 LIFE NOMADIC

want to go to Bangkok, and then take a cheap flight from Tokyo

to Bangkok.
Be sure to check for local discount airlines as well. Air Asia, for
example, is like Southeast Asia’s version of Southwest Airlines in
the United States. It’s comfortable, new, and unbelievably cheap.
In fact, it’s so cheap that I recently booked a 10 leg journey with
them for only $160. That’s sixteen dollars per international flight.
This isn’t an isolated incident. Air Asia offers totally free fares sev-
eral times a year, and Ryan Air has them on a pretty regular basis
as wall, although their fees and taxes are higher that Air Asia.
These ultra cheap airlines make money by retaining all bookings
to themselves, and not paying the commissions necessary to get
onto airfare aggregating sites. That means that you need to seek
them out and find their fares individually. A good strategy is of-
ten to get to a hub city in the general region you want to visit,
and then take a second flight on a discount airline.
As you can see, when your life is a series of trips from one place
to the next, you earn a lot of flexibility which really lets you max-
imize your travel expenditures.

Multiple Stop Tickets

Multiple stop tickets are a strange breed. Eighty percent of the

time they’re outrageously expensive, far more costly than if you
had just booked the equivalent one ways yourself. But the re-
maining twenty percent of the time they’re oddly cheap. I haven’t
yet figured out how this happens.
Take my flight from LHR (London) to YYZ (Toronto) to AUS
(Austin) to LHR. I was really just looking for a ticket to Toronto
 FLYING 105

and then to Austin. These two one ways added up to over six
hundred dollars. The culprit was the summer travel rush where
every second year college student in America wants to go to
Western Europe.
I was planning on going back to Europe in July anyway, so I
looked for a round trip to Toronto, and then a round trip from
there to Austin. That cost a bit over $750, which was starting to
look like a decent price since it would spare me the cost of the
London leg.
Then on a lark I tried the “multiple destination” feature of Kayak.
Sure enough, it showed a fare for $610 for the whole trip, only
$203 per leg. I booked it immediately.
One thing I’ve noticed is that multiple destination trips are often,
but not always, much cheaper if your last destination is the same
as the place you originally leave from, just like booking round
trip tickets.

Planning Around Sales

If you’re flexible in your timing or have a wide variety of places

you’d be excited to go to next, check online deal sites. They often
have insanely low fares which you can then plan around.
A good example is that ten segment trip I mentioned earlier. I
saw online that Air Asia, for one day only, were selling tickets
for just the price of the taxes. I immediately booked a forty day
trip throughout Southeast Asia, even though I hadn’t previously
planned to go there and didn’t even have a ticket to the starting
point yet.
106 LIFE NOMADIC

Often times these sales are for trips months in the future. A rea-
sonable strategy is to head to a country that’s likely to have deals,
like anywhere in Europe, and just wait around for one that’s in-
teresting to you.

Alternate Airports

There are the obvious alternative airports like Stansted, Gatwick,

and Luton in London, but it’s also a good strategy to consider
airports even further away from the main one.
Take, for example, Dublin. Dublin is almost always a cheaper
flight to New York than London is, often by a hundred dollars
or so. If you’re using the hub method, you’ll usually fly into New
York when you return from Europe.
Instead of flying from London, you can take trains and ferries to
Dublin. The journey takes half a day and is scenic and comfort-
able. The ferry is a luxury ferry which even has a movie theater on
it, in addition to bars and restaurants. The combined tickets from
London to Dublin cost around forty US dollars, which means
that you can save money and get to see Dublin for a day or two
for free.
Anywhere there’s rail or ferry lines, I check for nearby (and some-
times not so nearby) airports that will offer me a chance to see
another city and save money simultaneously.

Travel Agents

I don’t use them often, but travel agents aren’t quite the dinosaurs
of a previous generation that we imagine them to be. To under-
stand how they fit into the picture, it’s important to understand
how the airline industry works. A key term in the industry is the
 FLYING 107

“minimum advertised price”. Airlines can’t regulate what price

another company sells their tickets for, but they can regulate the
price at which they’re advertised. That’s why airfare vendors al-
ways guarantee that they have the lowest published price, not the
lowest overall price.
This may seem to be an issue of semantics, because we always buy
at the lowest prices we see advertised, but it’s not. Travel agents
have the ability to sell tickets much cheaper than the published
prices, as long as you call and ask them about it.
In practice they usually can’t beat using the hub method, but I
hear the occasional rumor of unbelievably cheap tickets gotten
through, which leads me to believe that somewhere out there is a
mythical travel agent who can beat the hub method.
If you’re going to preplan your entire trip and want to buy your
tickets in advance, buying from a travel agent that specializes in
round the world trips is the way to go. Even if you’re going to
book them yourself, you may as well see what they can offer and
use it as a benchmark for your own research.

AIRPORT GAMES

As a nomad you’ll spend a good deal of time in airports. I cer-

tainly have, and have come up with a few tricks to make the ex-
perience a bit more pleasant and economical.
Free Lounges
For a long layover, the best places to wait are the airport lounges
like the Crown Room, Admiral’s Club, or President’s Club. The
amenities vary, but you can always count on comfortable seats,
power plugs, wireless internet, snacks, and an open bar. Nicer
108 LIFE NOMADIC

lounges, like the Continental’s President’s Club in Houston have

things like showers with built in clothes-elevators to have your
clothes pressed for free as you take a shower.
One of my favorite perks is that they all have ticket agents with
no line. Whenever I have a late flight and need to rebook because
I have missed my connecting flight, I head to the nearest club.
This lets me cut ahead of the other passengers who also need to
get rebooked, and I’ve even had a few situations where they’ve
broken some rules to get me on a flight when everything looked
booked up. If normal agents tend to be apathetic or even a bit
hostile, these agents tend to be the opposite.
These lounges are owned by the airlines and command a hefty
annual fee for entrance. However, all American Express Platinum
Card members are entitled to unlimited entry as long as they’re
flying on the airline whose lounge they want to use. Alone this
can nearly justify the annual fee of the card, but combined with
the other benefits, it’s an easy decision to get the card.
But what happens when you’re flying on an airline that doesn’t
have a lounge? Normally I just hang out in the terminal with the
peasants, but if the layover is three hours or longer, I exploit a
small loophole.
Simply go up to the nearest gate of the airline whose club you
want to use, and tell the agent you’d like to purchase a fully re-
fundable ticket on the last flight of the day to New York. Once
you get your ticket, head to the airport lounge, and then call the
airline on your cell phone to cancel it once you get inside.
Ethical? You be the judge, but I’m willing to do it if it’s a long
layover and I’m hungry for free apples.
 FLYING 109

Sneaking Metal Past Security

Any traveler worth his salt brings carryon baggage only. But dra-
conian TSA rules prohibit all sorts of useful things that aren’t
actually dangerous.
Take, for example, the P-38 military can opener. It’s an ounce or
so of stamped metal with a tiny half inch dull blade that folds out
to open the can. I like having one because cans of beans are great
healthy snacks that are available all over the world.
These things aren’t dangerous. You could give a terrorist a box of
them and he wouldn’t be able to hurt anyone. The TSA allows
much larger and sharper blades on small scissors. I used to just
keep mine in my bag, but once in a rare while the TSA agent
would get high on his horse, decide it was a weapon, and confis-
cate it.
Safety razor blades are specifically permitted by TSA rules avail-
able online, but one in twenty agents will confiscate those as well
and refuse to go over the rules with you to verify their actions.
Same goes for small blunt tipped scissors. What’s a traveler to do?
Subject himself to the misinformed opinion of an undertrained
TSA employee? I don’t think so.
I researched airport metal detectors and learned that they work
by sending pulses from one side of the arch to the other. These
pulses bounce off of metal, so if a small pulse comes back earlier
than expected then the detector knows that it hit some metal.
If metal detectors were 100% sensitive, you wouldn’t be able to
get anything metal through them, including rings, watches, and
zippers on your jeans. So they turn the sensitivity down. Con-
sider how small the profile of a stamped piece of metal is – it’s
almost nonexistent.
110 LIFE NOMADIC

I wear a thin metal chain around my neck and hang my can

opener from it. It never gets detected. I keep my razors in my
bag, but I don’t leave everything up to chance. I keep one in my
wallet as a backup. I’ve also carried my scissors in my pocket un-
detected, but now I have new ones that are tiny with big rounded
tips. So far they’ve enjoyed a high degree of scrutiny, but no con-
fiscations.
Obviously this trick shouldn’t be used to carry anything seriously
dangerous on a plane. You may be able to sneak a small knife
onto the plane, which would be convenient to have while travel-
ing, but I wouldn’t ever try it. A can opener is easy to justify, but
a real knife would probably get you in real trouble.
Sleeping in Airports
The flight schedule was terrible, but cost hundreds of dollars less
than the next best one, so I took it. I liked that it left later in
the afternoon, but arriving in Panama at three in the morning
was inconvenient to say the least. By the time we got a taxi and
booked a hotel downtown, it would be four in the morning.
Luckily there was another option. Our flight arrived and we
quickly cleared customs, but instead of following the signs out-
side, we headed upstairs to the arrival lounge. Others had the
same idea and were awkwardly strewn across the chairs which are
specifically designed to be as uncomfortable as possible to sleep
in.
With smug grins on our faces we walked past the backpackers to
a quiet spot and set up our Luxury Lite cots. I put on my sleep
mask and put in my ear plugs and may as well have been sleep-
ing at the Four Seasons. When a security guard gently nudged me
 FLYING 111

awake in the morning, chuckling at the bizarre comfort I had en-

joyed, I was well rested and ready to get an early start on the day.
While I can’t imagine any situation that would make long term
airport sleeping a reasonable idea, I actually enjoy opportunities
to sleep there for a night. It means that I took a late flight, and
thus got to enjoy the day, I saved a night’s lodging expenses, and
then I got an early start the next day.
Some airports are better suited than others for overnight stays.
Luckily there’s a great web site at www.sleepinginairports.net that
reviews a huge number of airports.
Ultra Short Term Car Rentals
Sometimes you will find yourself with a twelve hour layover with
nothing to do. This is especially likely if you use my hub method
of booking tickets. Rather than spend a ton of money on taxis
or loaf around the airport, consider renting a car. With a bit of
due diligence on the internet, it’s easy to find a one day rental for
twenty or forty dollars per day in most cities.
To me that’s a small price to pay to have the chance to go to a de-
cent restaurant, stock up on snacks at the grocery store, or maybe
even find a beach or museum to check out. Car rentals from air-
ports are fast and convenient, which minimizes the hassle of get-
ting back there for your flight. Another hidden benefit is that you
can lock your backpack in the car and not have to lug it around
with you like you would if you took a taxi or bus.
Of course, some cities like New York have such good public
transportation that renting a car doesn’t make much sense.
112 LIFE NOMADIC

Staying Grounded
I love just about everything about air travel, other than TSA
screeners. I like finding the deals, I like hanging around in the
airport, I like the distraction free solitude of the flight where I
get loads of work done, and I even like really long layovers. Even
with all that in mind, I consider flying to be amongst the worst
ways to travel. At best, it’s my third choice, after train and ship.
As we’ve all heard before, it’s the journey that matters, not the
destination. Train trips, cruises, and even road trips in cars all
take a lot longer than flights, but the time is usually filled well.
The real value in these alternative routes is that they show you
parts of the country you’d otherwise never see. Buying a plane
ticket for Chitre, Panama, just doesn’t make any sense. But when
you drive through on your way somewhere else, see a group of
kids playing baseball in a dirt patch, and stop and play with them
until the sun finally sets, you understand the value of the journey.
 TRAINS

“Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through
them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! We return.”
- Edward M. Forster

Trains are another wonderful way to travel, and are generally my

first choice. The scenery rolls by at a slow enough pace that it can
be fully absorbed. Locals travel on trains, which provides a good
opportunity to make friends with them and ask them about their
country.
Longer journeys are always better. There’s more to see, and they
offer more comfortable accommodations than shorter hauls. Of
particular interest are sleeper trains, which I absolutely love rid-
ing. Although they are prohibitively expensive in North America,
sleeper cars are bargains in other areas of the world. I have fond
memories of a two night trip from Saigon to Hanoi, in a tiny lit-
tle six-bunk room with a Vietnamese family. The kids were tick-
led pink that a Westerner was taking the train, and I was equally
excited to be traveling with them.
If you’ve never looked into it before, you might be surprised how
much ground you can cover by train. Europe and Asia in particu-
lar have excellent coverage, making it possible, among other trips,
114 LIFE NOMADIC

to trace the Trans Siberian railroad from London to Beijing. The

trip costs little more than an equivalent plane ticket, and it takes
you through Russia, Siberia, and Mongolia.
I could go on and on about trains, but the truth is that I get all
of my information from one place, Seat61.com. The site is an
astoundingly great catalog of what seems to be every train route
in the world. Whenever I add a new country to my itinerary, my
first impulse is to check Seat61.com to see what train trips are
available for it.
Beware of rail passes. Not all buffets are worth the price of admis-
sion. Europe has an amazing rail system, but it is disappointingly
expensive. Rail passes, unless you are hell-bent on extracting ev-
ery last dollar out of them, generally aren’t worth the cost. Check
the various options before making that decision for yourself,
though.

Rail in Japan

One rail pass that pays off after just one or two trips is the JR
Rail Pass in Japan. A three week pass costs $587, and entitles you
to unlimited travel on all trains in Japan with a few exceptions:
• The very fastest express bullet trains. This is a non issue be-
cause the same routes are simultaneously serviced by a nearly as
fast bullet train.
• Sleeper cars. There is a loophole to this which I will explain
in a minute.
• Some local subways. Half of the main lines in Tokyo are
covered by the pass, and the other half cost a dollar or two per
ride.
 TRAINS 115

My strategy is to get one three week pass per two month visit
in Japan. I spend five weeks slowly exploring Tokyo and living a
normal life, and then when it’s time to use the pass, I try to get
on an overnight train nearly every night and cover as much of the
country as possible.
The value is outstanding. A single trip to Sapporo and back
might cost $500 or so if you had to buy the ticket yourself. I’ve
done that trip in two days on a rail pass and then headed down to
the Southern tip of Japan immediately after. Last year I added up
the retail cost of the tickets I used, and it was somewhere close to
two thousand dollars.
As I mentioned before, there is a small loophole in the no sleeper
train rule, which I take advantage of liberally. On certain routes
there are sleeper cars which are classified as regular seats. They
come in two flavors: the Nobi Nobi and the venerable Goron to
Shito.
The Nobi Nobi car is a charming two deck car with carpeted ar-
eas to lie down in. Each “bed” comes with a small blanket and a
cup for water. For six dollars or so you can use the shower, which
is an experience in its own right. Some people don’t like sleeping
on a hard surface, but I love being rocked to sleep by the train.
The Goron to Shito is a big upgrade from the Nobi Nobi. Instead
of a hard surface you get an actual bunk bed. Normally these
beds would cost an additional $80 per night, but since they are
classified as seats, they’re yours for free.
It’s hard to keep track of which sleeper trains have these cars, but
the ticket agents, like everyone else in Japan, are friendly and
helpful. I’ve even just asked “Which trains that leave from here
have Nobi Nobi or Goron to Shito seats?”
116 LIFE NOMADIC

Even if you can’t find a bootleg sleeper car, there are almost al-
ways comfortable reclining seats that you can ride for free with
your pass. Wander up and down the cars and you may even find
a shower. Although I haven’t done it yet, I’ve long harbored the
fantasy of sleeping on trains every night for the full twenty one
days and showering at onsen, Japanese public bath houses, along
the way.
You may as well go anywhere. If you don’t like where you wake
up, just take a bullet train somewhere else. Some of my fondest
memories of Japan are of wandering in random places like Ao-
mori, where I would have never gone on purpose.
 CRUISING

“Now is the season for sailing; for already the chattering swallow is come and
the pleasant west wind; the meadows bloom and the sea, tossed up with waves
and rough blasts, has sunk to silence. Weigh thine anchors and unloose thy
hawsers, O Mariner, and sail with all thy canvas set.”
Leonidas of Tarentum

I felt like James Bond. I was wearing my bespoke Tuxedo that I

got made by George Bush’s tailor in Thailand. Despite his gentle
but persistent advice that I choose a more versatile black Tuxedo,
I insisted on a white dinner jacket.
For no reason I can imagine, the casino refused to staff the poker
table until nine at night. Over the past few nights we had made
friends with the other dozen or so regulars at the table, and we
had agreed to all meet in the afternoon to see if a large group of
gamblers would be enough incentive to induce them to give us a
dealer.
It wasn’t. I’ve always had a bit of contempt for authority, especial-
ly when nonsense rules are imposed, so I decided to take matters
into my own hands. I ran and bought two decks of cards from
the gift shop, and instructed everyone to buy chips from the ca-
sino cage. Then I went to one of the long hallways lined with felt
tables for jigsaw puzzles, and pushed a few of the tables together.
118 LIFE NOMADIC

And that’s how I came to deal a rogue poker game on the Queen
Mary 2, the most famous and luxurious ocean liner in operation.
But could you really blame me? The table was full of rich, bored,
friendly European travelers. I’m a mediocre poker player, but as a
group they were far worse. By the end of the cruise I had earned
back over half of the fare I’d paid to get on the ship in the first
place.
A month prior I had a conundrum on my hands. I was in Europe
and had to get back to the US unexpectedly. But it was July, peak
European travel season. The absolute cheapest flight I could get
was over five hundred dollars to New York, and another hundred
fifty to Austin.
Then I thought of the Queen Mary II. She’s the only ship that
regularly crosses the Atlantic, but I was sure that such luxury
must come at a great cost. As often happens, I was pleasantly sur-
prised to be wrong.
I checked online and found rates of about one thousand dollars
including taxes and port fees. Not a bargain by any means, but I
considered taking the trip anyway. The five hundred dollars over
the flight I was going to have to pay for anyway might be worth
it. Besides the experience of taking such a legendary cruise, I’d
have all of my living expenses paid for a week.
Then I stumbled across a gem of a site called Cruise Compete.
If you put in your desired itinerary, dozens of bargain basement
cruise brokers will reply with their lowest price. In the end I
booked a ticket for just a hair over eight hundred dollars. That
was just three hundred over the price of a plane ticket, and in-
cluded living expenses for a week. Factor in the easy poker table
winnings, and I came out ahead of the plane ticket.
 CRUISING 119

Even though it ended up making financial sense in my situa-

tion, the Queen Mary II is expensive for a cruise ship. In fact, the
$115 per day that I paid is more than twice what I paid for the
next most expensive cruise.
When shopping for cruises, the general rule of thumb is that fifty
dollars a day or less is a great price. Through Cruise Compete,
most standard cruises can be booked at that rate. Almost every-
one pays a ton more, but the savvy traveler won’t.
There are two times during the year, however, that yield a perfect
storm of circumstances for the nomad, bringing the price down
far lower. On the last cruise I booked, I paid only twenty six dol-
lars per night.
Every fall and spring there is a great migration of cruise ships.
Cruise ships can generally make more money in Europe in the
summer and more money in the Caribbean in the winter. That
means that in the fall many cruise companies want to move their
ships to Europe, and in the Spring they want to move them back.
Their problem is twofold. First, most cruise ships are slow. The
Queen Mary II was designed specifically to cross the Atlantic in
the standard seven days that people set aside for vacations. This
was an extremely difficult feat which required many engineer-
ing breakthroughs1. A standard cruise ship can do the trip in ten
days at best. Besides having to take all that time off, most people
prefer round trip cruises to avoid a flight home.
Second, there’s not much to see besides ocean. The average per-
son saving up for one cruise a year is more likely to choose a

1 Indeed, looking at the water below from the decks of the Queen Mary II is a
strange feeling. Your brain keeps telling you that a ship of her size couldn’t possibly
be going as fast as it seems she is.
120 LIFE NOMADIC

comfortable seven day trip through the Caribbean with stops

nearly every day.
But for the nomad, these repositioning cruises are perfect. They
can be used as transportation. Most of them go from Central
America, South America, or the Caribbean to Europe. Some
circle around South America and stop at a bunch of ports. Others
go on random trips that could never be predicted.
Best of all, they’re dirt cheap. It makes a lot of sense to anticipate
the repositioning cruises as you travel, spend two weeks on one
going East, and then another two weeks going back West. Here’s
an example of a fourteen day cruise I took this year:
• Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
• Philipsburg, St. Maarten
• Funchal, Madeira2
• Lisbon, Portugal
• Vigo, Spain
• A Coruna, Spain
• London
Single occupancy prices were $360 total, Double occupancy pric-
es were $320 each, and triple and quad occupancy dropped off
from there. These prices include tax, port fees, food, and every-
thing. This is an excellent deal, but isn’t so rare that you won’t be
able to get a similar deal twice a year.

2 Madeira is an amazing Portuguese island in the middle of the Atlantic that is

home to the best example of the now very rare laurel forests. But would you really
ever go there if not on a cruise?
 CRUISING 121

The slow pace of life on a cruise ship may turn some people off
from the idea, but I love it. I spend days at sea working on my
laptop and watching the waves roll by. Food is free, plentiful, and
good. The gym is an elevator away. I love the responsibility and
adventure of daily life as a nomad, but a few days of luxury here
and there provide a nice contrast. Then, when in port, I know I
have just eight hours to see a place, so I go at it with everything
I’ve got.
All in all, it’s not a bad way to live.

Ferries

Besides luxurious multi day cruises, there are more utilitarian fer-
ries that often cover good routes. Seat61.com does a good job of
listing these. One excellent route is to take a ferry from Beijing to
Seoul and then another ferry from Seoul to Tokyo. It’s far cheaper
than a flight from Beijing to Tokyo, offers a lot more character,
and gives you a stop in South Korea.
Some ferries are quite upscale. I rode in one once that had a full
onsen and a sauna! I had slept in a cave the night before3, and
was soaking wet, so the sauna was particularly useful for drying
off my clothes.
There are many ferries that coordinate with train schedules and
stops. It is actually possible to go from Morocco all the way to
Vietnam by train and Ferry.

3 A group of friends and I timed our arrival incorrectly and were stuck in a tiny
Japanese coastal town with nowhere to sleep. A free map of the area had a funny dot
off in the middle of nowhere that said “Cave”. I jokingly suggested we sleep in the
cave, and no one was willing to say no to an adventure. So we slept in a cave. The
following night we took the wrong trail while hiking, and ended up sleeping on the
roof of a bathroom. The best adventures are the unexpected ones.
A ROOF OVER YOUR HEAD

Towns are full of people, houses full of tenants, hotels full of guests, trains
full of travelers, cafés full of customers, parks full of promenaders, consult-
ing-rooms of famous doctors full of patients, theatres full of spectators, and
beaches full of bathers. What previously was, in general, no problem, now
begins to be an everyday one, namely, to find room.”
Jose Ortega y Gasset

You may not need a permanent address anymore, but you’re defi-
nitely going to need somewhere to sleep every night. Most travel-
ers only consider hotels, but unless you’re the heir to a diamond
mine, you’ll probably want to come up with something else.
The good news is that quality accommodations can be had for
reasonable prices. My general criteria for a good place to stay are
the following:
• I want an EXCELLENT location. If I’m going to be in a
new city, I want to be in the middle of downtown. Often times
the additional cost of living downtown versus living a few miles
away from the center is justified by the cost savings of taking
trains or taxis to all of the places you want to see. Even when it’s
more expensive, I’m always willing to pay a bit extra for the time
savings and convenience.
123 LIFE NOMADIC

• It must be clean and comfortable. I don’t mind roughing it

here and there, but if I’m staying somewhere for a long time, I
want it to be a pleasant environment. That rules out raucous hos-
tels and some of the cheaper apartments. I spend a good deal of
time working from home, which makes this doubly important.
• I don’t need much. I’ve stayed in fancy places and I’ve stayed
in plain places. The marginal benefit of staying somewhere fancy
is low. Real luxury, for me at least, is to have a comfortable place
in an excellent location, not to have fancy modern furniture. A
bed, a desk, and a nice clean bathroom with hot water are all I
ask for. I want my place to be conducive to sleeping as well as to
working, but other than that I want it to be boring enough that
I’ll be more motivated to go out.
• If possible, I want a view. This is lower on the priority list,
but I’m willing to pay a little bit more to have a nice view of out-
side, whether it’s a busy street, the mountains, or the ocean.
• Sharing a place is great as long as I have my own room. I
like to meet other travelers, but sharing a room with six strangers
in bunkbeds isn’t my first choice.
Your criteria may be the same, or they may be wildly different.
Either way, they should be articulated. Knowing what you’re
looking for makes it a lot easier to find it.
Prices vary from place to place, but I don’t think I’ve ever paid
more than one thousand dollars per month for two beds or bed-
rooms. Traveling solo costs me closer to six hundred for my own
room. Relaxing my standards would have dropped the price a
bit, and of course looking for fancier accommodations would
have skyrocketed them. For a reality check, look up the per capita
 A ROOF OVER YOUR HEAD 124

GDP of your destination country, and realize that most of the

population is spending only that much money per year.

Flights rarely last longer than twelve hours – I’d sit on the floor
for twelve hours if it would save me some money. On the other
end of the spectrum, I’ll spend hundreds of hours per month in
my apartment, so the cost of getting a great place can almost al-
ways be justified. The experience that each place will provide you
must be considered as well. Living downtown, in particular, gives
you great access to the city.

Hostile to Hostels

I’ll start with best parts my least favorite type of accommodation.

I like that hostels are cheap, require no advance notice, and are
ubiquitous. At the very least, they offer a safety net: I know that
I can fly anywhere on a moment’s notice, and there will be some
hostel there that I’ll be able to sleep at.
I also like the fact that it’s easy to meet other travelers at hostels.
I’ve made long term friends at them, and have also just found
random acquaintances to share an adventure with.
There are two types of hostels. There are the hostels that have
dirty bathrooms, and common areas filled with dirty people
drinking beer and spending all day watching movies1. The kitch-
ens are so filthy that I won’t cook in them, and it quickly be-
comes apparent that the only draw to the place is the low price.

1 I will never understand why so many backpackers spend all day watching
movies. I’ve seen a few of these people at every hostel I’ve ever stayed at.
125 LIFE NOMADIC

As you have probably already guessed, I avoid these places like

the plague (which could possibly be found in them, actually).
In my hostelling experience, I’ve found that the majority of hos-
tels fall into this category, or dangerously near it.
On the other hand, I’ve stayed at some amazing hostels. The one
hostel in Qatar is particularly good. My friend and I were given
our own huge private room with four beds in it and our own
large clean bathroom. It wasn’t right downtown, but we were
there for only a few days, so taxis had to suffice. Another real
standout is Lost Paradise, a hostel in the cloud forests of Panama.
I consider hostels an acceptable option for short term stays of un-
der a week. Once you’re staying for longer than a week, the cost
to benefit ratio goes down compared to better options.

Apartments

I spend most of my time living in a rented apartment, or a room

in a large rented apartment. Going through the trouble of finding
an apartment is generally not worth it unless you’re staying for a
week or more, and becomes an excellent value once you’re in the
month to two month range.
My typical modus operandi is to land in a country with no plans
at all, find a hostel, and stay there for a couple days as I make
friends and get the lay of the land. It usually doesn’t take long to
familiarize myself with the different areas of town, which helps
me make a good decision on where I want to live.
I harbor the fantasy that one of these days I’ll meet a local who
happens to know about a great deal on a furnished apartment,
but so far it hasn’t happened. I’ve had my best luck with sites like
 A ROOF OVER YOUR HEAD 126

VRBO and Craigslist. Many of the people renting these rooms

and apartments out treat it as a side business and provide soap,
clean towels, and sometimes maid service.
Renting a room in a large apartment is one of my favorite situ-
ations. I tend to be more interested in making friends with the
types of travelers that choose this option, and I can usually count
on having a nice stocked kitchen to cook in. If I’m traveling
alone, it’s nice to be around people, although they usually speak
English, which also makes this dangerous.

Couchsurfing

Couchsurfing is the practice of staying on a couch or guest bed,

usually owned by someone you don’t know. The most common
method to finding these arrangements is by going on couchsurf-
ing.com, creating a profile, and searching in the area you want to
visit.
Results will vary, but even the remote corners of the world have
potential hosts. As I write this, almost 1.4 million couchsurfers
are registered.
I was apprehensive the first time I surfed. I had no idea what
to expect, and that stereotype that everyone on the internet is a
weirdo rattled through my mind. After all, who would open up
their house to a complete stranger?
The answer is simply: really amazing hospitable people. My host
drove me around everywhere, showed me the sites, and housed
me. I had hoped to pay for dinner a few times, but it never hap-
pened because she cooked every meal for me. After more than
token resistance, she finally let me fill her car up with gas.
127 LIFE NOMADIC

But more important than any of that, I had an instant friend.

Seeing the sites was great, but hanging out with her and her
friends at their local haunts was an experience I couldn’t have got-
ten on my own.
Couchsurfing is great, and may be the best way to live when you
first get to a new place. I might find it a bit rude to sit at some-
one’s house and work all day, though, so I’d rather get an apart-
ment of my own eventually. Couchsurfers are all very outgoing
and friendly, so even if you don’t stay with them, you could very
easily meet some for coffee to make some friends and potential
guides.

Hotels

Hotels usually don’t make much sense to stay in, but there are
notable exceptions. Southeast Asia is packed full of hotels so
cheap that I can’t make any sense of it. Take the Atlanta Hotel in
Bangkok, for example. In the fifties it was the best hotel in all of
Bangkok. It hasn’t been maintained well, but it’s in the dead cen-
ter of the best area of the city. The staff are wonderful, the rooms
cost around twenty dollars a night, and there’s a large and deep
pool to sit around and swim in. Staying there is the easy choice
when visiting Bangkok.
Cambodia is the same way. We stayed at the SCAN hotel, which
is one of the more expensive hotels at $30-45 per night. It’s in a
great location, the owner was a wealth of great suggestions, and
the hotel itself is beautiful.
On the beautiful Thai island of Koh Phi Phi, where The Beach
was filmed, any number of guesthouses and hotels are available
for $10 to $20 per night. A local club called “Reggae Bar” offers
any traveler $20 per night to hand out flyers for a few hours. A
 A ROOF OVER YOUR HEAD 128

particularly impoverished travel could take them up on their of-

fer, easily stay there as long as his visa lasted, and leave with the
same amount of money he came in with.
Even Europe offers some relatively great deals. Hostels are so ex-
pensive in Europe that for short stays it sometimes makes a more
sense to just get a cheap hotel room. We paid $90 for a room
with two beds right in downtown Paris with French doors leading
out to a small balcony. A hostel would have cost $70 for a dormi-
tory bed.
The key to getting good deals on hotels is to avoid big sites like
Expedia. Unless you’re going to Las Vegas, they won’t have the
best price. Search Google for hotels and book at their individual
sites. Better yet, here’s a trick I learned from a friend in the ho-
tel industry: call up and ask if they have anything other than the
“rack rate”. The rack rate is the insider term for the published
rate. Using it makes them assume that you’re also in the hospital-
ity industry, and has never failed to earn me a discount. I don’t
know how to say rack rate in other languages, though, so I’ve
only done it in English speaking countries.
Another excellent option for bigger cities is Priceline. Using ad-
vanced techniques found on sites like biddingfortravel.com, you
can often get amazing deals, especially on upscale hotels. I man-
aged to book a $237 room at the Westin on the water in Toronto
for just $60, and I suspect I could have bid lower.
EARNING MONEY AS YOU TRAVEL

Every year it takes less time to fly across the Atlantic and more time to drive
to the office.
Unknown Source

“There is a gigantic difference between earning a great deal of money and

being rich.”
Marlene Dietrich

Telling you how to earn money while you travel is like telling you
how to earn money while not traveling. It’s such a broad question
that no answer can really do it justice. There are an unlimited
ways of earning money, both as a nomad and while living in one
place.
Making money on the go isn’t any harder than making money
stationary. It’s just different, and the thought of having to break
out of their comfort zone stops most people from even consider-
ing the possibility that they may be able to do it.
Still, no book on being a nomad would be complete without
some guidance on how to transition from a location-based in-
come to a location-independent income. At the same time, some
of my personal income comes from writing about traveling. I
understand the skepticism that this generates.
130 LIFE NOMADIC

If it’s any consolation, I launched myself into Life Nomadic with-

out having any income from the project, or any real expectation
of earning any from it. My income initially came from sales of an
unrelated book1, and I was working full time on a piece of soft-
ware I intended to sell.
Only after I began a personal blog to keep my friends and family
in the loop did I start getting paid to write about travel.

Starting a Business

If you want to succeed you should strike out on new paths, rather than travel
the worn paths of accepted success.
John D. Rockefeller

I’m a die hard entrepreneur, and I find it difficult to even con-

sider that there is any decent reason to work for someone else. As
a result, my suggestions will be biased towards this possibility. If
you have no desire to start your own business, you can skip this
chapter without missing anything.
If you have ever wanted to start your own business, though, par-
ticularly an online business, now is probably the time. Think
about the ideal circumstances for a budding entrepreneur:
• Low living expenses
• A chunk of saved money
• Lots of free time
• A high degree of motivation

1 Make Her Chase You, a book on dating for men, available at Amazon.com
 EARNING MONEY AS YOU GO 131

Now, which of those circumstances is offered by a nomadic life-

style? Well, living expenses are as low, especially if you opt for a
more relaxed two-months-in-each-place travel schedule. You’ve
just sold everything you own, so you have a bit of a nest egg that
you can rely on while you start your business, and you have all
the free time in the world. Lastly, what’s more motivating than
wanting to continue traveling and seeing the world? As personal
experience tells me: not much.
The Life Nomadic is as conducive to starting a business as it is
unconventional. Sure, you can’t hire local employees and have an
office, but you can hire remote workers. I have a wonderful assis-
tant from the Philippines who does great work at a great price.
Besides the tangible benefits of being a nomad, there’s also a spirit
of independence and confidence that travel breeds which I think
also helps as an entrepreneur. Being exposed to the world offers
perspective and a greater understanding of how it all works.
Although I’ve done it myself, I’m not an expert on starting a busi-
ness, so I won’t drone on and on about. I will, however, condense
some of the best advice I’ve read and absorbed over the years:
• Do work that you’re passionate about. Let the money come
second.
• Create something remarkable that provides real benefit to
your customers.
• Work harder than anyone else and hold yourself to higher
standards than everyone else.
• Be ruthlessly persistent. Most people aren’t.
132 LIFE NOMADIC

Beyond those principles, most of the details will be specific to

your business. We’re lucky to live in a time when the Internet has
made it so easy to be an entrepreneur. I’ve incorporated compa-
nies, filed tax returns, opened and funded bank accounts, set up
credit card merchant accounts, and even published a book all
without leaving my keyboard.
Entrepreneurs, on average, earn more money than employees.
I’d bet that they’re more likely to be doing something they love,
as well. If you’ve ever toyed with the idea of going into business
for yourself, why not use this as an opportunity to make a huge
lifestyle change? Leave behind the struggle of a wage slave living
in suburbia and join the new growing subculture of mobile entre-
preneurs.

Contracting

If you’re not interested in becoming a remote employer, maybe

it’s time to join the other side and become a remote employee or
contractor. As more entrepreneurs take their businesses online,
the demand for remote employees increases. Even stationary busi-
ness owners are looking for remote labor, especially from contrac-
tors.
Craigslist is a great resource for finding remote work. Many jobs
offer set tasks like creating web sites or programming an applica-
tion for fixed prices, and they don’t care whether you’re next door
or on a beach hut in Bali. Even companies who do want you
there in person can probably be persuaded to give you a trial run
if you sell yourself hard enough.
Elance.com is a site that is specifically dedicated to freelance con-
tractors, complete with ratings and searchable listings. The site
 EARNING MONEY AS YOU GO 133

is perfectly designed and I can’t imagine anyone going there and

not finding something they could do.
Not all professions are portable. If you’re an auto mechanic your
options are probably going to be to stay put or find a new line
of work. However, many office jobs can translate into contractor
work. You may even be surprised to find out how much you get
paid on contract. When the company doesn’t have to provide in-
surance, parking, a computer, and a desk, they can pay you more
money.
I find it far easier to be productive outside of an office environ-
ment. When I had a real job I would spend a good portion of my
day procrastinating and staying busy without actually creating
any valuable output. When I’m left to my own devices there’s no
benefit to looking busy – there’s no one to impress. I don’t usually
work a full forty hours per week, but I probably put in at least
twice as many productive hours as the average full timer.
Jobs that are particularly conducive to going mobile are jobs that
require minimal interaction with others like writing, editing, pro-
gramming, graphic design, and system administration. If you’re
already skilled in one of these areas, you can probably get work
within a week.
If you have no skills to draw on which translate well into online
work, then maybe the time to build them now. Businesses are
always looking for workers who can use specific programs. If you
learn how to use Photoshop, for example, you can make a living.
Figure out which program you’d like to become proficient at. Buy
the software, buy the great tutorials to learn it from Lynda.com,
and spend some time practicing. The money you’ve amassed from
134 LIFE NOMADIC

selling everything should easily last you through the transition

period.

Ignore My Advice and Keep Your Job

The idea of quitting your job and going out to see the world is
romantic, but what if you like your job? It sounds ridiculous,
but I actually know some people who enjoy their jobs. You could
do what Todd did: he kept it. Bosses might like seeing you look
busy, but they absolutely love it when you produce results.
Transitioning from being a stationary employee to a nomadic
one is tougher than starting off as a nomad from the get go. Your
boss will probably be a little bit jealous of your freedom, and will
worry even more about jealousy you may generate amongst your
former coworkers.
They key is to become so invaluable that they really don’t have a
choice, and be ready to walk away. Don’t ask if you can do it, tell
them it’s your only option. If you’re that valuable, they won’t let
you go. That’s what happened with Todd. He produced such ex-
cellent work that they allowed him to stop going in to the office,
because they knew that he was irreplaceable. They would have
preferred it if he stayed, but they didn’t put up a fight. Months
later, the arrangement is working out just fine for both parties.
If you’re considering taking this route, you really owe it to your-
self to read Tim Ferriss’ Four Hour Workweek. It covers a wide
variety of topics that I expect would be interesting to most read-
ers of this book, and does particular justice to the topic of wean-
ing your boss off your presence.
 SPENDING YOUR TIME

The tourist who moves about to see and hear and open himself to all the
influences of the places which condense centuries of human greatness is only a
man in search of excellence.
Max Lerner

The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist see what he has come to see.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

The modern American tourist now fills his experience with pseudo-events. He
has come to expect both more strangeness and more familiarity than the world
naturally offers. He has come to believe that he can have a lifetime of adven-
ture in two weeks and all the thrills of risking his life without any real risk
at all.
Daniel J. Boorstin,

The Louvre was an overwhelming experience for me. I knew next

to nothing about art, yet was surrounded by innumerable ex-
amples of it at its finest. I tried to stand in quiet contemplation,
imagining the greatness of each painting I looked at. I felt like I
was faking it, though. With so many similar paintings, each one
blended in. We went from section to section, in an unfulfilling
quest to see it all.
136 LIFE NOMADIC

I was excited about the Mona Lisa, though. The painting is such
a sensation that I just knew it would be a big deal to see it. The
Louvre is so huge and the layout is so confusing, though, that it
took us forever to finally find the hall that the Mona Lisa was in.
What we saw was astounding. I don’t mean the painting. In fact,
I could barely even see the thing. Throngs of people were pressed
up against the wooden railing that set up a twenty foot perimeter
from Mona Lisa. It looked like the front row of a rock concert,
except there was no music. In front of the painting was a glossy
glass window, and next to it was a guard. The masses held up
their low resolution camera phones and took terrible pictures of
the greatest painting in the world.
What was the point of the pictures? Proof that they had been
there. That’s all. We left without waiting our turn to be in the
front. Looking at a picture of the Mona Lisa on the internet is
more satisfying – as long as it’s not one of those camera phone
pictures.
Our society has become comfortable. Too comfortable. Every-
thing is so easy and convenient that we don’t actually need to do
anything anymore. We live our lives vicariously by watching TV.
Our food is formed in factories and reheated in microwaves. We
don’t even like to be troubled to talk on the phone anymore, let
alone in person. We send text messages and emails instead.
There is so much out there in the world, and it is so tragically
easy to miss all of it. In the same way the prepackaged microwave
dinners pale in comparison to real home made food, the prepack-
aged standard American life which gets handed to us by default
pales in comparison to a real life full of action and experience.
 SPENDING YOUR TIME 137

Not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, the same technol-
ogy that offers us hollow lives of convenience also give us every-
thing we need to live happily and comfortably as nomads. It’s a
double edged sword, and the side you end up with is totally up to
you.
Even travel, glorious as it is, can be reduced to nothing more than
a real life slideshow of monuments and sights. Thousands of tours
are just that.
My advice is to go out there and do something. Experience some-
thing. Interact. There is more to do and to experience in this
world than we’ll have time for in our lives. And frustratingly,
more new things are invented every day. I like to see the sights
of a city as much as anyone else does. If it’s the biggest, slowest,
fastest, longest, shortest, or tallest of anything, I’m probably go-
ing to find time to check it out. But at the same time, I’ve learned
that what really create satisfaction are the experiences in between.
Interaction is what builds experiences, even if it’s something as
simple as hiking up a mountain and feeling the breeze on your
face as you look out at the sea.
Sometimes adventure and excitement will find you. Other times
you’ll have to go out and find it yourself.

UNESCO

The most beautiful forest in the world is a lot more appealing

when the sun is up and you have half a clue where you are. The
hike was supposed to be a gentle two hour walk through the
woods, but we’d been gone for six hours now and hadn’t been on
a civilized path in miles. Now we strained our eyes against the
dark to find the piece of taped wrapped around a tree which sig-
naled the next waypoint.
138 LIFE NOMADIC

Or at least we thought it did. At this point we had no idea what

we were supposed to do. We all knew that we couldn’t go back,
though. The looming cedar trees blocked out any moonlight
there was, and we didn’t have enough flashlights to go around.
Besides, half the time we were scrambling up steep muddy in-
clines or crossing the stream that cascaded down the hill in a se-
ries of waterfalls.
Every corner we turned brought more false hope. We were look-
ing for a mountain hut, supposedly put there by the national
park to provide a place for hikers to rest. At this point I figured
we were more likely to see a giant anime monster with tentacles
than the hut. We were in Japan, after all.
“This is really it! I see a sign!”
I was excited. There really was a sign. Sure, it had taken us three
times as long as expected, but at least we had finally reached the
mountain hut. But when we got to the sign there was no moun-
tain hut in sight. In fact, the sign seemed to indicate that we were
still at the starting point.
After a spirited debate, we finally reached a consensus. We had
accidentally followed the “route” and not the “trail”, which are
apparently two different things. Our route was meant for hard-
core outdoor adventure seekers, and it led from the sea to the
beginning of the real trails. We later discovered that we were sup-
posed to take a bus there, not hike to it.
Exhausted, frustrated, and not eager to negotiate the terrain in
the dark, we scoured the area for shelter. It was impossible to go
back, and by now was the middle of night. We didn’t even get the
cell phone service that could have gotten us out of there. And so
 SPENDING YOUR TIME 139

we did what anyone would do: We climbed on top of the bath-

room and set up camp.
The next day we pranced along the trail. It was so much easier
than the previous day’s effort that we barely noticed that we were
climbing to the peak of a mountain. And what a peak it was. We
pulled ourselves out of the dense cedar forest and on to the big
rock jutting off the side of the mountain, to be rewarded with
the most beautiful view I’ve ever seen in my life. The lush green
mountains gave way to a freezing cold stream of water below,
which ran all the way North to the sea of Japan. The scale of it
was dizzying, and seemed only as real as landscapes seem when
looking out the window of an airplane.
We stood in silence marveling at the beauty of the island of
Yakushima, Japan.
A month prior I had never heard of Yakushima. It’s not in most
guidebooks, and isn’t advertised anywhere. The only other white
people we saw during the three days we stayed there were a Ger-
man couple intent on taking pictures of their stuffed sheep in a
variety of locations around the world.
We discovered Yakushima through the free online catalog of
UNESCO World Heritiage sites. The United Nations Education-
al, Scientific and Cultural Organization, mercifully abbreviated
to UNESCO, is a United Nations organization with the lofty
stated goal of contributing “to peace and security by promoting
international collaboration through education, science, and cul-
ture in order to further universal respect for justice, the rule of
law, and the human rights and fundamental freedoms proclaimed
in the UN Charter.”
140 LIFE NOMADIC

A small part of this mission is the diligent evaluation and cata-

loging of what they call “World Heritage Sites”. Simply, this is
the attempt to identify sites around the world that are important
parts of our heritage as a civilization. The places they list, which
number almost one thousand, span one hundred forty five coun-
tries. Included are natural wonders like the Rainforests of the
Atsinanana, Madagascar, as well as manmade features like the
Medina of Fez.
My only complaint is that their listings don’t do the sites justice.
The places they list often sound boring or unremarkable, and
it’s only on blind faith that I build the impetus to finally go. I’ve
never been disappointed yet, though, and always make it a point
to visit any World Heritage Sites on or near my path.
What I particularly like about the World Heritage Sites is that
there’s usually a lot of substance and few fellow travelers. I have
nothing against other travelers, of course, but I’ll guiltily admit
that the experience feels more authentic when I’m the only trav-
eler there. Single or swarmed with tourists, you can always expect
to be amazed and educated when you visit a World Heritage Site.

Ask People Who Know

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.

Aldous Huxley

I could probably write a whole book about places I’ve gone

just because a local told me to. Just like you know better than a
guidebook when it comes to your city, locals know what’s worth
doing in their city as well.
 SPENDING YOUR TIME 141

We ate at the same restaurant for lunch every day, Mireya’s Res-
taurant, in Panama City. One of the owners, Jorge, was a deaf
lawyer. He would speak to us in Spanish and then be totally un-
able to comprehend our replies.
“Las Tablas,” he said.
“Como?”
“Las Tablas. Carnaval.”
He seemed frustrated that we weren’t bowled over with enthu-
siasm. We had no idea what he was talking about. He got a pen
and a napkin and scribbled something in Spanish:
“For Carnaval, go to Las Tablas. It is the best place.”
And thus our plans were cemented. This must be important, we
thought, since he had never before felt the need to write anything
down to make sure we understood.
Las Tablas was a sight to behold. It’s a tiny speck on the map
that during any other week wouldn’t raise an eyebrow. But dur-
ing Carnaval, it lights up. The two main streets, “High street”
and “Low street”, have a friendly but fierce competition to see
who has the prettiest queen of Carnaval, who can put on a better
fireworks show, and who can create the most elaborate floats. It
was like nothing I’d ever seen before, and if it weren’t for Jorge, I
would have probably never seen it.
Be open minded when you take locals’ advice. I always trust them
over some underpaid guidebook writer.
Locals aren’t the only people with the inside scoop. If your neigh-
bors are Korean, ask them about Korea. When you talk to a trav-
eler who seems to have the same interests as you, ask him where
142 LIFE NOMADIC

he would go. I always ask travelers where their favorite place in

the world is. Everyone has such a place, and they’re always worth
visiting.

The Internet

And of course, there’s the internet. Besides UNESCO’s web site,

there are two places I check for every single trip: Wikipedia and
Wikitravel. Neither is as comprehensive as a guidebook, but
they’re generally written by people who really care about the area
they’re writing about. Amongst the standard hotel recommenda-
tions and tired commentary on the strange political situation of
the country, you’ll often find a gem of a tip.
I also keep a wish list of places I’d like to go. Whenever someone
shows me a picture of somewhere amazing, I find it and add it to
my list. If I read an article about something crazy going on in a
country, I add that to my list too. The three things at the top of
my list at the moment are the world’s tallest bungee jump off of
the space needle in Macao, the most dangerous trail in the world
in Hua Shan, China, and a small Chinese village where instead of
using fireworks they sling molten iron at a giant wall. The video
of it is amazing – look it up on youtube.
 ATTITUDE

If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jeal-
ousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.
Glenn Clark

We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be
to arrive where we started... and know the place for the first time.
T. S. Eliot

I reached out my hand to introduce myself. His RV was a bit

beat up, but it was a beautiful fifties model with metallic avocado
paint and chrome trim. Ever since moving into a tiny RV myself
I had gained an appreciation for RVs in general.
I had been admiring his for a week. I parked in the same place for
months, right in downtown Austin, Texas across from my favorite
restaurant, but this was the first time I had a neighbor. I woke up
one morning and there he was, parked directly in front of me.
I had been hoping to meet the resident of the RV, but hadn’t yet
run into him.
“How are you doing?” he asked.
“Actually, you must be doing real shitty if you’re in an RV like
me,” he added before I had a chance to respond..
144 LIFE NOMADIC

I was shocked. I was doing great – I loved being in my RV. In

fact, during the one month period where I had both a penthouse
condo downtown and my tiny twenty one foot long RV, I spent
every night in the joyful minimalism of the RV.
This same difference in attitudes echoes all across the world
through travelers everywhere. The range of experiences, both
comfortable and foreign, that you will have a nomad will vary be-
yond my ability to describe it. What you make of it is up to you.

Positivity

I remember being on a plane which had been delayed by a couple

of hours. When we finally landed two hours late, the woman in
front of me raced to call someone and describe the “worst flight
of her life”. Sure, it’s a bit frustrating to sit in a grounded air-
plane, but is it really that easy to overlook the fact that we flew
through the air in a metal tube and arrived, in relative comfort,
in a totally different place?
When did we become so callous to the wonders of modern tech-
nology?
If your trip doesn’t go exactly as planned-- and it won’t-- laugh
about it and make the best of the situation. Realize that the privi-
lege of living on this earth is a billion times more wonderful than
any problem in your life is bad.
The only real determinant of one’s happiness is the permission he
gives himself to be happy. I’ve been through some of the poorest
countries in the world and seen residents of them with the kind
of beaming genuine smiles you rarely see walking down the street
in the United States. Everything you need for happiness and en-
joyment is there, it’s just a matter of you accepting it.
 ATTITUDE 145

Yes, you will end up on bad flights, you might get ripped off by
a taxi driver, and you’ll almost definitely have to use scary and
strange toilets. Learn to take these things in stride and use them
as reminders of the great gift that world travel, and life itself, is.
An exercise which I’ve found to be valuable is to examine any
“bad” thing that happens to and to see the positive in it. The pos-
itive doesn’t have to justify the bad or overshadow it, it just has
to be there. If your flight is late, then you have some extra time
to get some work done or read a book. If you get ripped off then
you’ve learned a lesson on how to deal with taxi drivers. If you’re
face to face with a hole in the floor of the train, then consider it
to be local color. As you make this exercise a daily habit you’ll
find that it becomes easy and eventually takes over your thought
process subconsciously.

Just Say Yes

John was a sixty year old Brit who looked like a mustachioed jun-
gle explorer and said things like, “me noggin”. As far as we could
tell, he was the only other guest of the hostel in Qatar. He was
charismatic and honest in a way that made you like him instantly.
When we were in Qatar, the taxi industry was in a state of flux.
The old taxis had been taken off the streets, but there weren’t
enough new taxis to fill the void. Catching one was difficult,
which was further compounded by the hundred twenty degree
sun that you had to endure while you waited.
Still, we were on a mission. We found the name of a dune an
hour north of the city where the locals go to ride their 4 wheelers
in the desert, and we were determined to go.
146 LIFE NOMADIC

As luck would have it, there was a taxi pulling up to the hostel
just as we went out the gate. John popped out and greeted us.
“John, we’re about to go ride four wheelers in the desert. Do you
want to come with us?”
His response was so casual that it was as if he had made his deci-
sion hours ago.
“Yep, just let me drop off me things in me room.”
An hour later we were crisscrossing the dunes together as the sun
fell and turned the sky into a dusty purple glow. He barely knew
us and had no idea where we were even planning on riding. Re-
fusing the offer and opting instead to read a book or watch TV
would have been an easy decision. But instead John threw cau-
tion and comfort to the wind and just said yes.
It was a perfect illustration of why the principle of just saying yes
is an important one, especially while traveling. My heart skips a
beat when I think of how many friendships and memories I have
which hinged on a single decision to say yes instead of no, and
could have easily never materialized.
Travel with an open mind. Accept invitations and extend them as
well. Indulge in other cultures and appreciate the best in them.
 Resources

Why reinvent the wheel? I’ve collected all of the sites that are
crucial to my survival as a nomad. Most of them have been men-
tioned in the book and are repeated here for your convenience.
Have a great site that I didn’t include? E-mail me at tynan@li-
fenomadic.com
Tynan.net/currentgear
Gear is updated too frequently for me to link to each piece of
gear. At least once a year, or when major changes are made to my
gear, I update this listing. Inside you’ll find pictures, descriptions,
and links to every single item I carry with me..
Weather2travel.com
Use this site to figure out the historic temperatures and rainfall
for the places you’ll visit. I like it because it shows all of the im-
portant numbers on the same page. Hover over the temperature
to see it in Fahrenheit.
Airtreks.com
I used Airtreks to book my first Life Nomadic trip. They’re a trav-
el agency that specializes in round the world itineraries. Always
check with them before booking a long trip yourself; sometimes
148 LIFE NOMADIC

you’ll be able to beat their prices, but sometimes they’ll crush the
best price you can find on your own.
En.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_passport
Visit this wikipedia page to check which countries you need visas
for and which you don’t.
Camcorderinfo.com
As the URL might suggest, this is the best site for reading reviews
of video cameras.
DPReview.com
Visit DP Review for reviews of still cameras. Make sure to search
for micro four thirds cameras.
chotto.free.fr/tatami/Metro/
Download MetrO, a great program for some smartphones which
is like MapQuest for trains all over the world.
CapitalOne.com
Capital One is one of the very few credit card companies which
does not charge a 2-3% currency conversion fee.
AmericanExpress.com
American Express Platinum cards give you access to airport
lounges all over the world. They also offer a free 24 hour con-
cierge and damage protection for new purchases.
 RESOURCES 149

Schwab.com
Open a bank account at Schwab.com. They have no currency
conversion fee on the debit cards and no ATM fees. In fact, they
rebate ATM fees levied by other banks.
EarthClassMail.com
Earth Class Mail offers a unique service to manage your postal
mail while you’re away. They scan, shred, recycle, and forward
your mail according to your instructions.
MailALetter.com
There are a number of sites that let you create postal mail online,
but MailALetter is my favorite because they have good rates and
let you upload a PDF file to send.
HazelMail.com
Use HazelMail.com to create postcards from your travel photos
and mail them without ever leaving your computer.
CallCentric.com
CallCentric is the best service for receiving incoming VOIP calls,
and they have reasonable rates for outgoing calls as well. For a
small fee you can port your cell phone number to them.
CallWithUs.com
CallWithUs has the best consistent low rates for outgoing VOIP
calls. They no longer offer incoming phone numbers, but you can
use a different service for incoming and outgoing.
150 LIFE NOMADIC

www.backsla.sh/betamax
Betamax is a VOIP company that owns several VOIP sites. This
site has a graph showing each company’s price to each country.
CallWithUs usually has lower overall rates, but BetaMax sites
often have the best rates for particular countries.
www.k7.net
If you need to receieve faxes, create a free account at k7.net.
You’ll get your own phone number and unlimited incoming fax-
ing for free.
www.fax1.com
Fax1 has a great printer driver for faxing, a free trial, and great
prices on outgoing faxing.
Safeware.com
If you’re going to insure your belongings, Safeware is the best
company to use. They have very good rates and will cover any
amount you want.
WorldNomads.com
If you want a general insurance policy that covers emergency,
some of your belongings, and certain trip cancellations, check out
World Nomads. I have not used them personally, but they are
well recommended.
PimsleurApproach.com
My favorite way to learn language is through the Pimsleur Ap-
proach. You can buy the CDs here, or borrow them for free at
your local library.
 RESOURCES 151

Kanji.koohii.com
If you want to learn Kanji, there is no better resource than “Re-
viewing the Kanji”, found here.
ichi2.net/Anki
Anki is a great flashcard review program for PC, Mac, Linux, or
iPhone. It’s particularly useful for written Chinese or Japanese.
Kayak.com
Kayak is always the first place I go when I’m about to book a
flight. If you make an account you can use the flexible search fea-
ture, which will help you get the cheapest possible flight.
Farecompare.com/search/flyertalk.html
Want to see where you can fly cheaply from any given airport, or
see which flights will give you the most frequent flyer miles per
dollar? Check out this secret search engine on Farecompare.com
AirAsia.com
Air Asia has very cheap flights throughout Asia, especially South-
east Asia, and offers tons of free flights twice a year. With a little
patience you could do a whole tour of Asia for just a couple hun-
dred dollars in taxes.
Ryanair.com
If you’re in Europe or Nothern Africa, check Ryanair for really
cheap flights. Prices often vary wildly from one departure day to
the next, so check any days you’re able to leave or return.
152 LIFE NOMADIC

Travelzoo.com
TravelZoo is a good easy place to find some great deals. They have
a lot of mediocre deals as well, so you’ll have to sift through. My
favorite sections are Exotic Cruises and International Airfare.
Seat61.com
If you consider trains or boats, make sure to check out Seat 61.
It’s a wondefully comprehensive directory, complete with details,
pictures, and stories, of just about every ferry and train in the
world. It’s one of the first places I check for interesting adventures
in a new country.
SleepingInAirports.net
Use this site to help decide whether any given airport will be easy
to sleep in or not. Conditions vary widely from bright lights and
oppressive air conditioning to designated quiet areas with guards
who will watch your stuff.
CruiseCompete.com
Never book a cruise without first putting it into CruiseCompete.
com. I have been able to get a better price there one hundred
percent of the time, sometimes even half of the best price I could
find on my own.
VRBO.com
Vacation Rentals By Owner is a decent way to find an apartment
in a foreign city. Prices tend to be high, but I’ve found some good
deals and quality is usually good. Don’t be afraid to counteroffer,
especially if you’ll be staying for longer than a week.
 RESOURCES 153

Craigslist.org
I use Craigslist to find apartments all around the world. Make
sure to check rooms / shared, sublets / temporary, and vacation
rentals. I’ve found good places in each of those sections.
Couchsurfing.com
This is THE online community for finding couches to crash on
and for offering your own couch. They have members in more
countries than I was aware existied.
HomeExchange.com
If you have a house and you’re too stubborn to get rid of it, you
can list it here and temporarily exchange it with a house in the
country you’re visiting. I’ve never tried this personally.