This is Dan of Vagabond Awake. This is Qiang of Hobo Ventures. And today we wanna ask the question, should we keep traveling out of a suitcase? Should we keep traveling? We get comments on our videos from time to time that says you’re traveling out of a suitcase. Why do you do that? Why don’t you just stay in one place, pick one place, move there, and just go on vacations like everybody else?
Are we living out of a suitcase?
Time: And so we wanted to talk about whether we should keep traveling like we are. And before we do that, we want to explain that we really don’t feel like we’re living out of a suitcase time. For example, time. It doesn’t feel like living out of a suitcase if you stay in each place enough time, long enough time.
So stay longer when you love a place and leave when you don’t. Yeah, it just reminds me that when we are traveling, we have no agenda. We don’t have fixed plans. We just go to places where people want to go to retire overseas and we show them to you. For example, when in Guatemala, we fell in love in Antigua and we just stay there for a month. We didn’t know we would do that when we arrived.
Yeah. And we feel like that was not enough time in Antigua. We loved it so much we wanted to stay longer. So time is something you have to decide, but it won’t feel like living out of a suitcase if you find the right time for each place you want to stay. That’s why we never book an exit ticket before we arrive in a new place. We never book the next place until we have arrived somewhere.
When we go to a new place we always have an open exit date. We don’t decide when we will leave a place until we get there.
Unpacking: The second thing is, when you arrive in a place, it’s not living out of a suitcase if you unpack. We stay in Airbnb which is furnished apartments. They often have closets with drawers. We take our clothes and we put them in the drawers so we’re not actually living out of the suitcase.
Now if we’re only going somewhere for a weekend or four or five days, maybe we, we don’t do that. But if you’re unpacking, you shouldn’t be living out of a suitcase. And we are travelers, so we love to experience the local style and culture.
We are not just tourists trying to escape our normal life. We don’t just come touch and go on an escape. We are not constantly moving. When you’re getting to know a culture, you feel like you’re learning about a new place. We also travel with spices, pasta, coffee, knives, and openers, like bottles and can openers. So, it feels like we’re bringing a little bit of our world with us when we travel.
Downtime: I have to have coffee. It’s very important. Yeah, totally. So the other thing is downtime. How much downtime do you have? Like if you’re just go, go, go, go, go. When you get to a place and you’re trying to see it all within a week. That’s is gonna be hectic.
That will be living out of a suitcase and then boom, you’re out of there a week later. That doesn’t make any sense to me. So downtime is whatever you do in your home country that makes it feel like home? Do you go to the movies? Do you cook at home? Do you watch Netflix?
You have to include downtime in your travels, or it’s going to feel like you’re living out of a suitcase. When we find them, we also go to the cinema. Yeah. And also date night. We will find live jazz or live bands, and we go listen and people-watch.
Routines: When we arrive at a place we don’t have a full schedule. Our
Instead, we integrate our movement in a new country into our lives and we spend at least half the time, running our normal routines we would in our home country. And the other half would be exploring or other downtime just goofing off or whatever.
Every morning. Yeah. I go for a run. I hit the gym. I love to cook. And we, we do Netflix. We talk to our family on Zoom or whatever, Skype WhatsApp. And we also keep our traditions, like when it’s Christmas, we’ll pick up some goofy little Christmas tree we find in a store, put that on a table somewhere, get gifts, cook Christmas meals, that kind of thing. We keep a routine in our life.
We also go on vacation. We take vacations from our vacation. And we often spend our weekends like time off rather than thinking of that as travel time. So there are little things we do to make it feel like we’re not living out of a suitcase.
By the way, Qiang and I, just separated for about a month and at the end of this video, in the upper right-hand corner of your screen, you’ll find our video explaining why we spent a month apart and what each of us was doing.
Should we keep traveling?
So now that you know that we don’t live out of a suitcase, we can answer the question … Should we keep traveling like this or should we do something different?
Now I’ve been to 67 countries traveling the world like this over 16 years.
I met Qiang of Hobo Ventures in 2016. She joined me in 2017, and we’ve been to 23 countries together in the last six years.
And so should we keep doing this or should we get an empty bed somewhere? Go home each time we go to a new place. That’s kind of what we wanted to talk about next. So really you feel like you want to stay in one place?
No, but I thought I would explain to them why. Yeah, because they’re afraid we’re living out of a suitcase. They’re worried about that.
Just over the last two years, for example, we average about five or six countries per year. And over the last two years, we’ve been to Mexico, Dominican Republic Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Philippines, Malaysia, Guatemala, Indonesia, Thailand, Scotland, and Vienna, Portugal, Morocco.
So, should we establish a base where we have an empty bed? Some people say, oh, you’re traveling too much. You need to have a home base.
And then you stay at home for a few months and then you fly to a new place and then you fly back home. So we want to talk about what slow travel is and why we do it, and why we don’t keep flying home, like like many people do when they’re traveling. So, what is slow travel? And we wanna talk about that first.
What is slow travel?
We exhaust a country before we leave it. We don’t just fly to one city in a country, stay for a week and fly home. When we get to a country, we do a little research and we figure out every town we want to see in that country, or maybe the beach or mountains or whatever.
And we exhaust it all, meaning we see it all before we leave a country. We eat all the food before we leave you also. And we travel around by ground. Take buses, we take trains. We don’t fly from city to city. Often, cities are just a few hundred miles apart. So, we just take a train or take a bus.
Once we’ve seen everything we want to see in a country, we go to nearby countries and we exhaust all the countries near it that we want to see before we fly to a new continent.
And then when we move between continents, we don’t fly across the world to another continent. We go to the next nearest continent and we look at and see everything inside that continent before we fly to another nearby continent. So what we’re doing is, we’re creating the shortest line, if you think about it, to see everything we want to see in the world.
So what does that do? It minimizes how much money we spend on travel. Because those intercontinental flights are very expensive. They’re expensive. So that’s why we don’t leave an area of the world until it is exhausted.
So if we had an empty bed waiting for us in a home base, we would be paying double rent since we are not wasting our money flying home between countries. Why should we pay for an empty bed we have no intention of flying back to any time soon?
I have some rentals, but they are rented out. We don’t have an empty bed anywhere in the world. We just moved slowly forward through the world, taking buses and trains.
Once in a while, we buy air tickets between places if they are cheap and the land route isn’t interesting or isn’t a big saving. And we don’t fly back anywhere. We just slowly move forward.
If we get tired we just go for a spa or a massage. That is still so cheap in Asia. So we don’t feel like we’re living out of a suitcase and we don’t fly back to an empty bed. It saves a lot of money and we get to stay longer in places we love because we don’t have a return flight booked.
Maybe we’ll stay for a month. Maybe we’ll stay for six weeks. Why do we wanna rush home? Why do we wanna buy a two-week ticket, a round-trip ticket? It doesn’t make any sense.
Where should we go next?
So where should we go next? Well, I have no idea. Maybe you can share about where you want us to go next. Where do you want us to show you? So we can go and check it out for you.
In general, as you know, we’re visiting the retired cheap in paradise countries around the world. We’re showing you what food costs, what rent costs, and what buses and trains cost to do things.
Do the locals speak English? What do we do if they don’t? You have to use your Google Translate and communicate with them like what we do in Vietnam. We, usually end up using Google Translate or other tools. We just open Google Translate on our smartphone and speak English questions, and Google translates and speaks the translation into a foreign language of our choice.
And we hold that up to the person we’re trying to communicate with. Or, we can type the question and let them read the text translation. So, you don’t necessarily need to speak all of these languages. We average about 6 countries per year but we don’t learn six new languages per year.
Here are the places where foreigners retire overseas. And as you know, we’ve hit most of them. I have been to 67 countries. We have to retire cheap reports in most of the major places where ex-pats or Western people or anyone really retires overseas.
But these are the places we need to visit. I’ve been to many or most of them already, but that was before I started my Information business that teaches what I have learned over the last 16+ years. So we need to go back and write reports about the cost of living and all that.
So for example we would have already gone to Eastern Europe if the Russian war had not started. So we are waiting for that to end.
Many Europeans like to live in Eastern Europe because it’s very beautiful and older and it’s cheaper. Yes, it wasn’t blown up in World War I or World War II because the ground was covered quickly by the attacking enemies, so all the buildings weren’t burned to the ground are bombed to death like they were in many parts of Western Europe.
In eastern Europe, Georgia Armenia, Romania, Turkey, Albania, Croatia, Serbia, Romania, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.
In Europe, we want to see Italy, Greece, and Spain. And in South America, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia. And then in Asia, there are many more places we still want to see, such as China, India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Taiwan, Laos, Myanmar, and more of Indonesia. So those are the places we will slowly travel to. We’d love to meet you at one of our meetups if you are in any of the countries we have mentioned. Make sure to jump on our email list.
Looks like we’re headed to the Philippines next week. We’ll be there for about six months and we’ll share more about that later. We’ll let you know where we are headed in case you’re in the Philippines, so stay tuned.
We already have 20 retired cheap reports in the Philippines, but we have about eight more places we want to see. Yeah.
So that’s why we keep traveling. We love the world and we bring to you.
And we have written reports about all these places we visit and also have courses on how to retire overseas and how to make money online, in case you’re not making enough money to retire yet. Come to VagabondBuddha.com to see all the reports and courses we have.
And right now, please click in the upper right-hand corner of the screen and watch our video that explains why we were apart for 30 days and what we each did for those 30 days.
Thanks for reading our report, on the dark side of travel-should we quit living out of a Suitcase?
Please subscribe to VagabondBuddha.com or our Youtube Channel to watch us move around the world, 16+ years and 67 countries so far. Make sure to grab a free copy of my eBook, How I Fired My Boss and Traveled the World for 15+ Years. It has most of my best tips and tricks.
This is Dan of Vagabond Awake, the Youtube channel for VagabondBuddha.com. Thank you for stopping by. The world is your home. What time will you be home for dinner?