a heartfelt & honest review of 6 months as a digital nomad
On October 19th 2022 I *officially* left my sweet little home city of Melbourne, Australia and hit the road as a full time digital nomad. This article will be a full & honest review of that past 6 months - and I will plan to do one of these reviews from now on every month, or every few months. For anyone interested in what I am up to, and for my own memories as well. but this one will absolutely be the longest and most general. just what has been on my mind lately as well as some logisitics.
I had kind of intended to do these regularly when I left home, but to be honest I didn’t know for certain this was a lasting lifestyle I’d be embracing. I didn’t know if I would go home after a couple of months. But now, it feels like I am all in - so let’s discuss.
what motivated me to become a digital nomad?
that, my friends, is a loaded question with a lot of twisting and turning, interwoven answers. I first heard of this lifestyle back in 2014, when I became a bit travel blog obsessed. I thought, “that is the one and only life path for me.”
obviously it took me 9 years, ups and downs, experiments and figuring out how to do it in a way that felt good, to embrace it as my lifestyle. it took a lot of getting what I THOUGHT i wanted (nice apartment, a cat, girl gang) to realise that something was always missing. and that something was a sense of unlimited adventure.
if i answer simply, would say that I love travel. not in a “oh its really fun to escape my life for a while” kind of way. but in a “i would die if you told me I had to stay in one place for the rest of my life kind of way.” there is no feeling that makes me higher than stepping off a plane/train/bus into a place I have never been. the magic potent, swirling around me when I am alone & free in a new place. infinite possibilities of a place priorly mysterious and unexplored to me. there is nothing that compares to the sensation of leaving, nothing that satiates me like touching down. each place I explore becomes like a new lover to me: i take time to memorise not just their physical appearance. but their moods. their frequency. their vibration. the feelings they bring me in just being with them.
travel is an addiction - the most powerful drug I have ever known. an addiction I don’t care to kick. an addiction that has saved my life 100 times and never soured it.
I dislike staying still. I used to think of it as a character flaw, and maybe to some people it is: an instability; an unpredictability, a wildness inside of me I cannot quiet. I tried, oh how I tried. to quiet my burning desire to leave before dust could gather on my window sill. but i couldn’t. it burnt too loud. too violently. as if a thrashing kraken inside my body led me to skyscanner.com every night, no matter how beautiful my life at home became. there was always. something. missing.
but no way of living is better than any other, if the person living that way is happy within it. there are people who prefer groundedness and stability. and it works for them. there are people who prefer the unexpected and the freedom to fly away. and that works for them. and some people discover after a stretch of time on the road a desire to let dust settle on their windowsill, so to speak. and that is perfect too. whatever life your heart calls you toward, it is ideal.
i had trialled this lifestyle with 6 months travelling around australia in 2021 as a digital nomad (I visited every state) and 3 months in cambodia, sri lanka, greece, cyprus, israel and egypt in 2022. but those times I always thought of Melbourne as home, and of home as somewhere i would return to eventually. to settle down, whatever that means - this internalised conditioned desire that lives even inside of me to tame the wild and feral creature begging for freedom.
to me now this lifestyle makes the most sense. it feels the most natural to me. when i try and play ‘house’ i feel like a bad improv actor trying to find my flow in a plot i don’t understand. like i am out of step with the scene and actors around me.
how do i define home now?
this is one of my favourite questions to ask other travellers, because of the variation in responses. and it is a tricky question to answer because it too, has layers.
home to me isn’t necessarily in other people, though i do find fragments of feeling at home inside the hearts of people I meet who feel like home. home is, in a sense, also in the small amount of belongings I have lugged around the world with me. it is the backpack I have had since 2015, my zip-up home, the one belonging I would genuinely shed tears for if it were to break beyond use. home, above all, is something intangible. something inside of me. it is never a place or a building or a thing or another person: but a thread of gold inside of my chest that I can follow when i feel dislocated. home in that sense is in the present moment - always available for me to tune into, no matter where in the world I am.
and so when people ask me now when i plan to go home - for now I can answer honestly by saying:
i always am.
but of course, there is another layer to that. there is nothing that compares to the familiarity of my home land. melbourne represents a place I don’t need to learn anything - a place I can navigate with an ease that I cannot anywhere else. and yet, my childhood and early adulthood has been plagued with a feeling that I am out of place there. like I didn’t belong. like everyone else understood something I didn't about being at ease in a place I supposedly belonged.
the road is home because the road is the only place I can belong everywhere and no where, but all at once. the road is home because the road is filled with fellow misfits. the road is home because the familiarity of people who have experienced the same struggles of never feeling like we belong is more familiar than even my childhood home.
the logistics of the last 6 months.
countries visited: 10
In the first 6 months I was super excited by my newfound freedom and probably moved around a lot more than I will moving forward (mostly because I discovered firsthand just how difficult it is to ACTUALLY work on a flight/bus/train on transit days - and that to create what I want to create in my business moving forward, I need a slight level of stillness.)
countries visited: philippines (7 weeks-ish); indonesia (3 months-ish); singapore (5 days); germany (5 days); switzerland (3 days); france (2 days); spain (8 days); malta (9 days); italy (9 days); albania (one week, so far).
how do you afford it?
i know it probably sounds crazy to some people, but it is cheaper (and I live a much better quality of life) when I live on the road than when I live at home. on average in Melbourne I will spend between 2500-3500 per month ($AUD). My cheapest month on the road (one month living in Gili Air, Indonesia) cost me around $900aud, and most expensive (one month travelling Western Europe) cost me about $3000 including flights/buses/trains (a few of those days I had free accommodation staying with friends).
at home, my money goes places and to things I don’t care about (rent, cleaning supplies, water bills) plus I am focused on saving to be able to afford travel. when I live on the road, basically all my expenses are travel-related. so automatically, i place value on everything I pay for. even though I might be paying the equivilent of rent in hotels/hostels/airbnbs: to me I am recieving so much more VALUE from the hotel/hostel/airbnb, because it means I get to explore a new place. it means i get to live a dream.
my biggest expense up until this point has definetly been food/eating out - I don’t LOVE cooking, plus I have been moving too quicky to buy groceries and cook. In Albania I am staying in an airbnb for a month and am planning to cook a lot (mostly to get my health back on track and eat a ton of vegetables after ‘the great month of the daily croissant’ in Western Europe.)
typically, the less you move around the more money you save. for example, a lot of airbnbs will give discounts for a monthly or even weekly stay!!! My current Airbnb was the same price for 3 weeks or 4 weeks, with the monthly discount. Yup, a whole week “free”. plus, you can cook, do laundry at home, and take your sweet time exploring a city slowly versus needing to pack a bunch of pricey activities into 4-5 days. plus, usually in airbnbs/rentals you can stay a little outside of the touristic centre of cities, meaning you pay local prices in cafes/restaurants near you.
when it comes to flights and buses - flexibility is key. because i don’t have an intense plan, I can be flexible with the dates and places that I travel. a little bit of a creative mind and refusal to pay too much for flights etc can see you snag some wild deals. for example, my flight from Spain to Malta was about $40aud. My flight Malta to Italy was about $30aud. Flights around Asia you can find for $80-$130aud if you shop around.
oh, and travelling carry-on only is amazing because you don’t need to pay to check a bag AND you don’t have to wait around forever for your baggage to arrive. I know that over my lifetime of travel i will and i DO shop: new books, new clothes, etc. so I have a rotating flow of clothes with me, leaving various items behind for another traveller to adopt and enjoy once i tire of it.
the thing is, my costs will vary to anyone else’s - because every traveller has different needs. some will spend way more than me on activities (my favourite activities are eating, walking, chatting and vibing). some will spend less on accommodation, because I appreciate a certain level of aesthetic/comfort now, in my no-longer-22-years-old state. but one thing I want everyone to understand is that travel isn’t always a $5000 10 day trip. it means everything to me, so even at my most broke i got crafty and i made it happen (living in Brighton, UK making £170 per week in an icecraam shop eating only curried pototoes and saving my cash to take a weekend trip to Paris is still one of my fondest and proudest memories).
the difficulties
what are the biggest challenges?
oh yeahhhh. my god; there are challenges. I laugh when people call me, or any other woman who travels solo ‘lucky’ - the courage and stregth and resilence it takes cannot be understated. blessed????? yes. to have been born in a country with a powerful passport and relative peace; making travel even a choice. but lucky? i gave my blood, sweat and tears for this - i GIVE my blood sweat tears to see the world like this. and i would give it all again. and i would do it all over. there is an unspoken bond between women who travel solo because only we know the strength it takes, and the funny/worried looks from family and friends and ex-lovers and all of them when we announce our plans to go on a trip without a partner/friends.
that being said the biggest challenge so far was by far the wifi connection in the Philippines. many hissy fits were had including one that saw me booking a next-day flight back to indonesia.
plus, while i say i love the instability, i do have my limits - there have been times I genuinely don’t know what country I will be in the following week, or I don’t have accommodation booked for the following night. some people do well in that kind of uncertainty, but i prefer at least a fragment of stability. while I know I will always be okay, i am no longer a 24 year old backpacker with no responsibilities. I have clients and students who depend on me to be in a place I can get online and comfortably share what i need to share.
another massive challenge has been the times I have been sick while alone - since December 2021 i have had the kind of period pain that makes you vomit/unable to move from bed; and I have thrown up/nearly passed out from pain:
on the side of the highway on an empty, creepy highway in australia
on the side of the street in a heatwave in Cyprus
outside a busy Bali cafe
in a Bali hostel while also battling food poisoning
on a Flixbus between Munich and Zurich
so yeah if there is one thing I could control that I cannot, it would be this.
challenges = expansion
sure, being somewhere you don’t speak or understand the language brings up challenges. it isn’t easy. sometimes it is lonely not being able to have a deep conversation because of a language barrier, and often the simplest task like finding the correct platform at the train station becomes difficult. but is life really about being comfortable and easy all the time???? no. i grow everyday from travel. the challenges that it brings. I am who i am because of it.
have i ever felt unsafe?
of course - I am a woman living on this planet. but i have felt unsafe at home, as well. in terms of crime the scariest place were Philippines CITIES (please don’t let that deter you from travelling to this incredible country - outside of the cities were some of the places i have felt safest and most comfortable and taken care of by locals, ever). in terms of general safety, because I have extreme natural disaster anxiety the most anxious I have been was probably on the flat small Gili islands of Indonesia, because it there was a tsunami there was literally no where to run, not even a slight hill to take comfort in. the one time there was an earthquake that we felt there, all you can do is surrender - if a tsunami comes, it will come.
solo travel is this mix of learning to be trusting of other people but also trusting your intuition about people/sitations above ANYTHING else.
the responsibility of being a good traveller
when you go somewhere that isn’t your home (whether to a fancy resort or to a hostel in the city centre or to camp in a remote mountain town) you become a temporary caretaker for that part of the earth.
you become responsible for the land you come into.
the land you are walking on demands reverance for what she is, not what you want her to be (for your own explotive purposes).
and this land is someone else’s home; and so you also become responsible for learning the customs and beliefs of the people of this place.
I like to be generous with my wealth and make sure it goes to places that truly support the community I have stepped into. I stay at local places rather than chain hotels. I eat at local restaurants, rather than chains. I drink at local coffee shops, rather than international chains. in south east asia when i haggle i do it for fun, and usually pay the original price the shop keeper asked for anyway. put it into perspective: you have travelled to another country, this shop keeper is trying to feed their family/themselves. $4 is very little to me but might a days worth of meals for someone else. the fact I am able to spread my wealth in this way is something I am beyond grateful for.
being away from home isn’t an excuse to abuse the land. being somewhere else is an opportunity to learn about a different lifestyle: not to complain about how it is different than your home. because of course it is: that is the point.
the opportunity to learn about life from another person’s perspective are so rampant it is such a shame to miss out of them because you are chasing the familiar comforts of your home.
and when i see tourists get mad at locals for not speaking English!!! oh god! it is and will always be my responsibility to figure out a way to communicate in any place that doesn’t have English as the first language. Whether that is learning some useful phrases, using body language and miming, or typing what I want to say into Google translate.
highlights
there are so many. a morning lounging on a hammock off the side of a boat with wild dolphins in Lovina, northern Bali. live reggae music on beachsides. the weirdest new years eve doing reiki for people having bad mushroom trips. meeting new people who would quickly become close friends. canyoneering in the beautiful waterfalls of the philippines island of Cebu. a basically deserted waterfall in Siquijor in the Philippines. going to visit a witch healer in Siquijor in the middle of nowhere in the misty mountains. staying in a treehouse hostel in the quietest Gili Island. ancient ruins of goddess temples in Malta. staying with a sweet friend in her hometown of Bologna, Italy and getting to go to her family birthday dinner in the mountains. meeting people from all over the world who also never felt like they could fit in where they came from, who have also found home on the road. and of course, homemade satay sauce.
what are my intentions for the future?
some people travel just to travel, and there is an element of that in it for me. but there is also a strong explorer thread inside of me. a part of me that wants to be able to say i have genuinely been everywhere. that I know a little something (or a lot of something) about everywhere. every place holds so many secrets that I know i can only uncover when I visit it for myself.
somewhere over the past couple of months the goal of visiting 100 countries before age 40 (that’s 66 countries in 10 years) came up. but i will just continue to follow whatever feels right in the moment.
i have no intentions of attempting the conditioned idea of ‘settling down’ anymore. i have tried again and again in my twenties and it never felt natural to me. i do think i will be slowing down a bit more often - maybe something like a month on, a month off of ‘quick’ travel. enough to satisfy my inner craving for chaos and movement, AND enough to give my body a rest and my work deep focus.
in terms of places deeply calling to me right now: Turkey and Argentina are big time calling. I want to have a friend with me for Turkey, so I hope that will happen soon.
here’s to another month on the road xo