In this report, we share how to slow travel the world happily with your lover.
How to slow travel the world successfully, in a traveling relationship what could go wrong? Okay, when you are living a normal life in your home country, and you may each go off to work for eight hours per day, you each get a bunch of alone time.
You may even have a large sphere of influence, that don’t completely overlap, but when it is just the two of you, and you are slow traveling the world, you are together 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, so you need to think about things you might not be thinking about right now.
So we are going to tell you what some of the problems we faced are, and things we do about them. Some of the most difficult ones come last, so make sure you listen until the end.
Where do you go next?
As a couple, you have to agree on where you go next? The countries or places within each country that you both wanted to visit, may not be the same. So you need a methodology for settling where to go next, that works for both of you.
For example, Qiang wanted to go to Galapagos while we were in Ecuador, but I was worried about how much money we would spend. Qiang settled this argument by doing research that allowed us to stay within budget.
Then, I wanted to skip Peru because I had already spent weeks there and not many of our followers were interested in retiring in Peru. But Qiang felt it was one of the most interesting places in the world for culturally aware people.
Plus she was able to show that we would stay within budget easily during our visit to Peru. So I consented to a few weeks in Peru, but once we got there, we spent a few months traveling there since we loved it so much. By the end, we agreed that Peru was the Egypt of South America.
Here is a way to negotiate where to go next. Each of you makes a list of your top countries in the world. Put them in order, favorites first, second favorite second, etc. Then sum the numbers of each country and go to the lowest sum country first.
For example, if your Colombia is number 1, and their Colombia is number 4, then the sum of your ordered countries is 1 + 4, which equals five. If 5 is the lowest sum, then you go to the lowest sum first, or Colombia.
But we are also slow travelers and we like to stay within a budget of around $1000 to $1500 USD per month. So we move around all the countries of interest within a region (countries near each other) before we fly to another region of the world.
This keeps our annual international flight costs down to a minimum. So we visit all of the countries that we are interested in within a single region before we think about spending big money to fly to another region of the world.
Allow for personal space or alone time
When you are together 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, you don’t have much personal time or space alone. You have to figure out routines where you have alone time or space so it fulfills that need without alienating your partner.
The routines you set up to honor this alone time need to fit into your personal needs. One of the ways I do this is to get up in the morning and run around the area where we are visiting. So I like to run around the city and exercise alone to get that alone time.
The other way I fill this need is my natural sleep rhythms. I wake up early in the morning and spend hours writing on my computer and before Qiang wakes up in the mornings. So I might wake up at 4 AM in the morning and I write from 4 AM until 6, 7, or 8 AM when Qiang wakes up.
Allow for differences in Food
I am a vegetarian and Qiang has a wider spectrum of foods she loves to eat. And sometimes we both feel like eating home foods. For Qiang, home food is Malaysian, Indonesian. Thai, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. I totally love Qiang’s home foods too.
Plus we both love European foods. So we mainly look for restaurants that have both Vegetarian and non-Vegetarian foods that we are both excited about. Qiang doesn’t want meat at every meal, but she does like to eat it at least a few times per week.
So when we head out to eat in restaurants, we try to find places that have something we both are interested in eating, both veg, and non-veg.
Plus, I am the cook, and I only cook veg at home, but Qiang also cooks, and when she feels like meat, she just adds a dish that includes meat to whatever we are making at home that day.
So we don’t try to control what each of us eats. We just respect each other in our food choices and let each other eat what we want without judging each other about our food choices. We just respect each other and we don’t spend any time trying to control what each of us eats.
All of the planning that goes into slow traveling and work-life balance
You have to research where you are going to go, how long you are going to stay, where you are going to stay when you arrive, and how you are going to get there, whether flights, train, ferry, or bus.
Also, how do you balance the amount of time that you spend on work versus play when you are enjoying the country that you are currently visiting? This is the work-life balance that each of you spends when you are in each country.
We both have travel as our life hobby, and we both make money doing our hobbies, so we are not completely in retirement. So how do you balance the work and fun in your life? So you need to make sure that one person isn’t carrying all the weight in your relationship.
Luckily, Qiang is a workaholic like me. So we can each work for hours on a workday without the other getting bored waiting to start playing that day. Qiang likes picking where we will live when we move to a new place. So when you are splitting up the work, think about what each of you likes to do.
You might have different travel goals
One party might be a travel adventurer and the other is more into cultural exploration. We are both more into cultural adventures but we also love nature and physical adventures and hikes on weekends or day trips away from the culture we are exploring.
Your safety risk acceptance levels may be different
You may not agree on activities that put your physical safety at risk. I don’t mind being upside down on a rope swinging over a jungle in the middle of nowhere. But that doesn’t mean Qiang is comfortable doing that.
In general, neither of us seeks out this kind of death wish behavior, but I am more willing to give it a go when it ends up in front of us on our journey.
Do your country visa rights vary?
If you are from two different countries, there might be countries that your spouse can go to without a visa, that you can’t or vice versa. So how do you handle that if one of you wants to go there but the other doesn’t?
You could just split up and go to different countries of interest and then meet back up in a country of interest to both of you. Or you could just bite the bullet and try to get a visa to a country you are not personally interested in because your partner wants to go to that country.
This has not been a problem for Qiang and me because we both have very favorable passports that can go almost everywhere in the world without getting a visa. Most countries even allow us the same visa-free period so we can both stay in countries the same amount of time before leaving.
Do you have different budget goals?
One of you might want to spend your limited budget more in night life and in restaurants and the other might want to spend more of your limited budget on beautiful accommodations where you cook and party more at home.
So this is an issue you will have to decide. We like to stay within $1000 to $1500 USD per month. So do you try to find accommodations for $200 a month so you have more to spend on restaurants and tours, or do you get a nice place for $400 to $600 per month and cook more at home?
Since we tend to like a 1 bedroom apartment that feels comfortable, we tend to stay home and cook more at home to stay within our budget of $1000 to $1500 per month.
Personality Differences
Do you like the toilet paper to roll on the inside or the outside? Do you become upset easily when your partner leaves the toilet seat up or down? Or do you just let go and accept your partner for who they have always been, from the day you met them and fell in love?
Do you try to negotiate a change management program to improve your partner’s faults or do you let go and let them be the person you fell in love with when you first met them?
Conclusion
Thank you for consuming our content, How to slow travel the world happily with your lover. Make sure to grab a free copy of my eBook, How I Fired My Boss and Traveled the World for 14 years.
This is Dan of Vagabond Awake, the YouTube channel for VagabondBudha.com. The world is your home. What time will you be home for dinner?