Travel Musings

Over the years, a number of people have asked me “how I do it”: how I manage to travel relatively often, to far-flung places around the globe.  Plenty of others haven’t asked directly, but I can tell they wonder about this a little.  Every time I share that I’m going on a new trip, I pick up on a sense of “wow, again?” from some people (though most of my friends and family at this point have moved on from that reaction to one more along the lines of “well, what else is new?”)

There are tons of blogs and articles out there already outlining how to travel more: save money, stay in hostels, work while you travel (I taught English for a year in Prague to get to both live and travel overseas), and of course, be frugal (no more daily Starbucks for you!)  I don’t feel the need to add to this store of wisdom.  A lot of it is valuable, some of it strikes me as kind of silly and unnecessary.  (For the record, I will NEVER tell anyone to give up their daily Starbucks habit, as I myself am a Starbucks fiend.  Some things are sacred!)

Instead, if I had one piece of solid advice to offer on how to make your travel dreams come true, it would be this: start making travel non-negotiable.

What I mean by this is, don’t sit around and wait for travel to happen to you.  Don’t expect the travel fairy to drop plane tickets into your lap.  But most of all, don’t treat travel as something you’d kind of maybe like to do someday.  This is not how dreams are realized.

I’ll make all the usual disclaimers: I know not everyone can travel.  Many people are struggling to pay bills, or fighting illnesses, or caring for sick family members—there are plenty of factors that can make travel genuinely impossible for plenty of people who’d otherwise love to do it.  I’m not here to tell people in these situations that “just changing their mindset” will get them on a plane.  I know it’s not always that easy.

I realize, and appreciate, that I’m very privileged to be able to travel as much as I do.  Some of this is luck and circumstance.  However, a lot of it is the direct result of my own hard work and ultimately, the attitude I take towards making travel a major part of my life. Without this attitude, I can tell you I’d be nowhere (literally and figuratively).

And so, here are a few tips from my own experience (or the story of how I’ve made it to twenty-seven countries in the last ten years).  I hope some of them are helpful in making your own around-the-world adventures happen!

Plitvice waterfalls, Croatia: I spent years planning to get here!

How I Make Travel Non-Negotiable:

• Attitude.  I know it sounds cliché, but sometimes they’re true for a reason: my attitude is the single most important thing that keeps me traveling.  By this I mean that I quite literally treat travel as non-negotiable.  If I have a steady job and any vacation time and money, I’m going to be traveling.  That’s not a hope or a dream; it’s a fact.

I keep a list in my Iphone notes section of countries I’ve visited, trips I’m actively planning, and places I want to visit that I haven’t been to yet (the latter still contains roughly forty countries).  Every year, when new years’ and the resolutions roll around, I sit down and plan out my travel year.  Where do I want to go?  What can I fit in, realistically, given time and money constraints (we all have those, right?)  I think, I dream, then I plan (see #4 for more on this step).

After ten years, I made it to Slovenia and Lake Bled!

One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that lots of people who say they want to travel never make it to this step.  They talk idly about how they’d love to go here or there, but they never tell themselves, definitively, “I’m going to do it!  This year!”  Their attitudes are passive rather than proactive; all too often, they treat travel as negotiable…a thing they’d like to do someday, with more time or money, but not now.  That attitude keeps you grounded.  The only way to fly is to change it, and decide that no, you won’t put off your dream trip any longer, and yes, this is the year you’ll finally do it.  From there, with a little money, planning, and strategy, so much becomes possible!

Cafe Angelina hot chocolate in Paris: a splurge that’s worth saving for at home!

• Priorities.  We all spend money every day.  What you choose to spend your disposable income on is your business; I’m not going to tell you to spend less on this or that.  But as a fairly frugal person, I find that saving in some areas of my life that I prioritize less allows me to spend more on (and save more for) the areas I prioritize the most.  It’s a different equation for everyone, of course, but I find that moderation is often the key, as well as finding balance between what you really want and what you don’t really need.  For example, I love Starbucks and go there almost every day.  However, I drink maybe one alcoholic drink a week (and it’s almost always a happy hour special).  I’m not a big drinker or partier, so this tradeoff works for me.  Likewise, I love getting salads for lunch at the fancy salad place near my office, but I’m not willing to shell out $10 a day for this (which would add up to $200 a month—money much better dedicated to a travel fund!)  So I go once or twice a week and brown-bag it the rest of the time.  I love massages and mani-pedis, but I’m also a huge fan of free museums, which luckily are abundant in my town.  I enjoy the occasional fancy brunch out with friends, like every self-respecting city dweller, but I do this once every month or two, not once a week.  My yoga and kickboxing classes come free as part of my gym membership.  You get the picture.  Yours will look different than mine, but ultimately the key is to make sure you’re spending money on the things that bring you true joy (including travel!), and not frittering it away on things you really don’t care that much about.

• Save. Step Three is pretty self-explanatory (if not always fun) but I want to spell it out here anyway. If you really want to travel, start saving!  And make that savings a regular part of your budget.  It doesn’t matter how much or how little it is to begin with: if all you can save is $50 a month, it will still add up over the course of a year.  The key is to make it a regular part of your life.  I have a set amount of money that I transfer from my paycheck to my travel-specific savings account once a month.  Every month, I watch it build a little more until I’m ready to set off on my next adventure.  It’s practical, and also motivating…once you start and see the numbers in your savings account rise, you want to keep at it.  No time like the present to begin!

• Research. Travel costs money: this much is obvious and sadly, won’t be changing any time soon.  But often, it doesn’t cost as much as people think. One commonality I’ve noticed among friends who don’t travel often is that they tend to think it costs a lot more than it really does to see the world.  This is where research comes in handy.  Decide where you want to go, and then figure out how much it will cost to get there and have the trip you want.  Or on the flip side, figure out how much money you have to work with and start looking at where you can go with that budget.

This gorgeous view in Phuket, Thailand wasn’t as expensive as you might think….

How do I research?  I usually decide on a place from my endless list first, then start reading about it on travel blogs, buying guidebooks, and talking to anyone I know who’s been.  I search my Skyscanner app (the best thing ever, and free to download!)  to check airfares on different dates and see what a typical flight will cost.  Depending on whether I want to go budget or a bit fancier, I then either check out www.hostelworld.com or look in guidebooks or places like www.hotels.com for sample hotel fares (admittedly, I do a lot more of the latter than the former these days…perks of adulthood).

One final point: I know a LOT of people who believe that foreign travel is inherently expensive, more than domestic travel they may have done.  This is not always true.  If anything, I think America is a bit overpriced (you can get a nice hotel room in plenty of parts of the world for far less than it would cost you in lots of U.S. cities).  If you can get a good deal on a flight (check out Skyscanner and sign up for Scott’s Cheap Flights emails to help find these), you may find on the ground costs overseas far cheaper than you would expect.  A few of my personal overseas budget wins include a round-trip flight to Iceland for under $300; an entire weekend in Budapest for $150 including transportation  (I mean, I was living in Prague at the time but still, that’s not too shabby!); a $10 hourlong massage in Cambodia; and my personal favorite: a luxurious beach-adjacent hotel room in Thailand for $25 a night.  There are deals out there to be had, so start searching!

• Plan, Plan, Plan! It’s a bit of a running joke that I am ALWAYS planning a trip, even when I don’t have one imminently scheduled.  Planning creates a wonderful kind of forward momentum that helps everything else fall into place. If you book a ticket to Italy (hopefully with a great fare you found through doing your research!) you’ll be much more motivated to keep saving steadily, to cut back on unnecessary expenses, to scour for hotel deals online, and to start planning your itinerary (booking museum tickets online in advance can be super helpful!)  Of course you want to allow some spontaneity in your trips too, but the more you plan, the better prepared you’ll be when the time finally comes around to depart on your adventure.  It’s all part of keeping travel a non-negotiable part of life, which, if you do it right, will pretty soon start to feel like second nature.

So, those are my tips.  I hope they help inspire you to seize control of the narrative of your life, to transform yourself from someone who’d like to travel into a traveler, and to start making your next adventure a reality!

View of Soca river in Slovenia.

More than two years ago, I got the idea to create a travel blog. My motivations were pretty simple: I love to travel and I love to write, so why not combine both interests in one place where I can share a record of my travels, and hopefully inspire other people to get out and see the world as well?

Since I created it, I’ve always viewed Perpetual Voyager primarily as a place to share my travel stories and musings, and I’ve written dozens of posts which aim to do exactly that in a hopefully interesting fashion. But as I think about taking things up a notch—expanding my audience, dedicating more time and resources to what’s always been a hobby blog—I find myself thinking more seriously about what it is I want this blog to be. What am I bringing to the table: what is my brand, so to speak, in the travel blogger universe?

It’s a good question and one I’m not certain how to answer yet. My travels don’t follow a clear linear pattern: basically, I go any place that interests me. I’ve traveled on five continents, mostly in Europe, but I don’t consider myself a Europe expert. I lived for a year in Prague and a year in London and loved both experiences, but I wouldn’t call myself an expert on those cities either (I haven’t even been back to Prague in the decade since I left!)

I love travel writ large. On a smaller scale, what do I enjoy? I like museums, beaches, bookstores, cafes with good hot chocolate and pastries. I love food, but I’m certainly not equipped to become a foodie blogger. I enjoy wine tastings but don’t particularly like wine, and I like the occasional adventure but consider myself far from an adrenaline junkie. Hmm.

I have a job in the development/foreign policy field that involves occasional international travel, and ensures that much of my mental energy is expended trying to learn about and understand the world around me even when I’m not traveling. Travel isn’t just something I do for fun, though it is that; it’s something that allows me to make deeper connections and gain deeper understanding of cultures and people very different from myself, in hopes of making some sense out of this crazy planet we’re all spinning around on. Is that a brand? I kind of doubt it, and even if it were, I fear that trying to commodify this way of experiencing the world would just end up cheapening the experiences themselves.

So, what am I left with? Or to put the question another way: should I change the way I approach blogging, or find something in my current approach to travel—where I go, what I do, why it’s meaningful to me—that I can pull out as a thread to tie my perpetual adventures together?

I’m not quite sure of the answer yet.

A few things I do know: I want to change my approach to travel a bit, and make it more about having certain experiences than simply going certain places. At 35 countries and counting, I’ve already seen a lot of my bucket list (though it keeps getting longer!). I’m past the days where I felt the need to visit Istanbul or Buenos Aires solely to see these cities and cross them off my list. I had a wonderful time in both places, don’t get me wrong, but I was so anxious to see these cultural and historical capitals that I basically didn’t venture beyond them, took quick long-weekend trips to each, and gave short shrift to the rest of Turkey and Argentina. I don’t want to make that mistake again.

From now on, when I travel, I want to dig in a bit more, spend time more cohesively in a single country or region per trip, add on small towns and countryside excursions to give myself a fuller picture of a place without feeling my trips are too rushed or jam-packed. I want to travel a bit slower and deeper.

I also want to focus not just on where I want to go, but what I want to do while I’m there. I dream of doing yoga in Bali, scuba diving in Thailand, skiing in New Zealand. Of course I still want to see sights and museums when I travel, but I also want to combine my other interests and passions and make them part of my trips, so that one country doesn’t become indistinguishable from another when I look back on them afterwards.

So I think I can confidently say that going forward, I want to have a travel life that prioritizes personally meaningful experiences over box-checking, and to have a blog that reflects that. I want to tell deeper stories about my adventures. I want to write about the history of the places I visit and how the past informs the present—always a central interest of mine anywhere I go. I want to write about food and cafes and museums and bookstores and anyplace else I discover in the course of my wandering that brings me joy.

I’ve always considered myself a bit too random to have a real brand: there are too many often disparate passions swirling around in my head to make into one coherent message. And I can’t promise this blog will always succeed in doing that. But hopefully I’ll tell some fun, meaningful stories that make at least one person reading them decide to book their next plane ticket. And in the end, isn’t that—encouraging people to pursue their own dreams of discovering this amazing, majestic planet—kind of the point of telling all these tales in the first place?

For me, I guess it is.

Stay tuned for more stories and adventures down the road—and I hope that maybe some of them will inspire you to pursue a passion or dream of your own, whatever it may be.

Thanks for reading!

Plitvice waterfalls, Croatia

As you may recall, I haven’t been traveling this year due to circumstances beyond my control. As a result, it’s been a rather boring few months on the blogging end of things (not to mention the boredom I’ve suffered due to lack of travel itself).  I’ve struggled to think of things to write—sure, there’s my recent lovely getaway to Philadelphia, and I’ll write in more detail about that soon.  But I want to really be able to delve deep into new stories I create on a new, exotic adventure—or at the very least, be able to announce with certainty that I’m about to do so.  But alas, that day is not (quite) here yet.

So, what is there to report from my travel-loving soul in the meantime?  Well…I bought a guidebook.  Several, actually.  This is not unusual for me—I regularly buy guidebooks for places I have no plans to visit in the near future—as I always tell myself, it’s cheaper than an actual trip, right?  But these are guidebooks to places I actually hope to visit in the next few months, and that’s got me excited.  I love a lazy afternoon reading a guidebook in my living room, but it’s all the more thrilling if I have actual travel plans to make based on Lonely Planet’s recommendations.

Where will these books be guiding me, you might ask?  I don’t want to give away too many details, but I’ll drop a few hints:

1) Two of them cover two completely new-to-me countries, in a region of the world where I’ve done little traveling so far;

2) The other is a regional guide, to a region of the world I know very well, but am always eager to explore more every time I return;

3) Two of the books are to warm weather destinations, perfect for a winter trip (February perhaps?) while the other is more suited for summer adventures.

4) One is to a country that’s quite hot right now in travel circles, and features astonishing landscapes from top to bottom;

5) And finally, one has some of the most beautiful beaches in the world.

That’s about all the hints I can offer right now, but I hope within the next month or so to have at least the first trip (the warm weather one) booked.  Stay tuned for more details soon!

Are you a guidebook addict too? What do you do to keep yourself excited about traveling when you can’t actually travel?

In the almost two years I’ve been blogging (and, more to the point, reading travel blogs pretty voraciously), I’ve noticed that a lot of themes seem to come and go in the travel blogging community.  There’s almost a pattern of push-pull, in which an idea is trumpeted by many bloggers to the point where it becomes cliché, only for another blogger (or two, or three, and then more) to push back and say “well, actually, I don’t really agree with that…”  And the cycle goes round and round.

View of a mist-covered mountain outside Nairobi

For instance, when I first discovered that travel blogs were a thing, there were a TON of inspirational blog posts along the lines of “quit your job to travel and start living life to the fullest!”  Then, a year or so later, I noticed a pattern in the opposite direction: more and more bloggers of the non-digital-nomad variety writing pieces pushing back against the idea that the only way to live your best life was on a yoga retreat in Southeast Asia while drinking something out of a pineapple.  A number of blogs popped up stating that, in fact, you could have a normal life and travel too.  (For the record, I agree with this, though I certainly also see the appeal of dropping everything to move to Thailand and do yoga on a beach.  In fact, my whole life is kind of a balancing act between wanderlust and seeking stability as twin goals, so I understand both sides of this debate).

Lately, I’ve noticed another emerging trend among travel blogs.  The new idea being espoused in many corners is that, if people don’t want to travel, that’s perfectly okay and we shouldn’t make them feel bad about it, because after all, travel isn’t the be-all and end-all of life and there are many other ways to live a fulfilled existence, even without possessing a passport.

And while I see the point being made here, I have to raise my hand in the back of the room and say…I don’t completely agree with this “no-travel-is-totally-okay” philosophy either.

View of Lake Atitlan, Guatemala

Look, I’m all for live-and-let-live, for not judging others by the criteria of my own desires and goals.  I get that we’re all different and want different things out of life.  I know that there are plenty of people out there whose goals don’t include travel at all, and I know I should say that’s just fine.

But here’s the thing:  if you’ve never traveled, how do you know you don’t want to do it?   How can you definitively close yourself off to something you’ve never actually experienced?

Now, I understand that we humans don’t have to experience everything possible in order to know if we do or don’t want it as part of our lives.  For instance, I have friends who absolutely know, without a doubt, that they don’t want to have kids—and they don’t need to go out and give birth to one and try out raising it for a few months to confirm that to themselves.  They just know in their bones that parenthood isn’t the right choice for them, even without having tried it.  Fair enough.

But I do think travel is different.  For one thing, it doesn’t involve nearly the level of commitment that raising a child, buying a house, or changing careers does.  If you have sufficient funds and a week or two of vacation days per year, you can travel somewhere.  Maybe not a six-month backpacking trip through Europe, but you can hop on a plane, or a train, or a bus, and go somewhere new.  And I’d argue  you have little to lose by doing so, and a lot to gain.

Table Mountain, Cape Town, South Africa

Travel is a funny thing. I think, often, you do need to experience it to know for sure whether you want it in your life or not.   I mean, I’ve been consumed by wanderlust since I was a child staring at maps of the world and tagging along with my dad to the travel agent to collect brochures to plan all the trips I was going to take “someday.”  But I’ve known other people who never gave much thought to travel, but then decided to give it a chance and discovered they loved it.  And considering our society often doesn’t put much of a premium on travel (we’re just supposed to work, work, work and pride ourselves on our unused vacation days, apparently), I think it often helps to think outside our boxes a bit and give travel an opportunity to take hold of us and our imaginations.

I wrote last year about the importance of getting out of your comfort zone to see the world, and I still believe very strongly in the value of doing so.  To people who claim they don’t have any desire to travel, I have to wonder: leaving travel aside, how often do you get outside of your own comfortable space of the familiar?  Do you try new restaurants, read new books, talk with people who hold different viewpoints than you do?  If so, great; and travel will likely only enhance these experiences.  If not, well…maybe your lack of interest in travel is symptomatic of a lack of interest in trying new things in general.  And while I know it’s not my business to judge anyone’s life choices, I have to believe that ultimately, stepping outside the box we’re accustomed to—through travel, or any other means—can only benefit us.

The Louvre in Paris

So, I challenge everyone out there who has never really thought they wanted to travel: give it a shot.  Just try it out.  Whether it’s a weekend away a few towns over or a trip to China, use travel as a means to explore the world around you and see if it’s something that brings you joy, and maybe expands your worldview and appreciation for this glorious planet we’re fortunate enough to call home.  You may be pleasantly surprised by how rewarding you find exploring the world in this way.  And if not—well, at least you tried.  You got out there and took a chance and hopefully learned something about yourself, and that’s a great thing.

There’s no shame in not being a wanderlust-filled globetrotter. Not everyone will want or need a passport filled with stamps from around the world.  But I truly think that, all other things being equal, travel is one of those things we owe it to ourselves to try out, at least once in our lives…just to see where the road may take us.

What are your thoughts on this? Is travel something everyone should try if they can, or is it fine to eschew it if you don’t think it’s for you?