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Copyright © Mark Manson, 2012 All Rights Reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical or electronic, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission for or further information on usage of this document should be addressed to:
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iDoc.co Introduction: How I Travel the World For Less Than You Pay to Stay at Home
Welcome to Escape Plan. This is a guide to extended world travel. Long-term, perpetual travel is the dream of many. But surprisingly, for such a popular desire, few people realize how accessible it is. When asked what people are working all of their life for, a common answer they give is, “To retire and go live on a beach somewhere, lay in the sun, and do what I love every day.” This is both admirable and sad. It’s admirable because they have a genuine desire to enjoy their life to the fullest. It’s sad because they don’t have to work their entire lives to do it. In fact, I lived on one of the most beautiful beaches in the world last year (Nai Harn, Thailand) and I was only 27 years old. And I had only had a steady-paying job for three or four years. Friends of mine have lived on Borocay (Philippines), Caborete (Dominican Republic) and Bali (Indonesia). None of them are retired either. On my Facebook profile, I have photo albums of dozens of countries: Ecuador, China, Indonesia, Australia, Russia, all back-to-back-to-back. I get messages and emails all the time from old friends, college classmates, acquaintances and people who read my website asking the same thing: “How do you afford to live like this?” It’s as if they think I discovered a pot of gold somewhere or won the lottery. They don’t realize that 1) I work just as hard as anyone else for my money and 2) those places can be enjoyed for a fraction of what they suspect. You know how much living on that beach in Thailand cost? Hold on a second; let me help you out here with some more info. It was a beach that’s often rated in top 10 lists for most beautiful beach in the world. The weather is perfect year-round. I had my own studio apartment with a kitchen, bathroom, balcony, fully furnished with satellite TV and wireless internet. I had a housekeeper who came every day, lived down the street from half a dozen local Thai restaurants, and would rent a motorbike 2-3 times a week to go on joy rides around the island. Want to take a stab at how much that cost?
OK, make sure you’re sitting down for this:
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About $1,000 per month. Why would you work your ass off your entire life, buying and selling expensive crap over and over again, when you could likely go and live on that beach right now the way I did? Right this minute. And even if you don’t have the money now, scrounging together a few thousand isn’t the hardest thing to do in the world – especially after you’ve read this book. Have a full-time job? If you work for a major multi-national corporation, getting re-assigned all over the world is often not much harder than asking. Or you could switch professions to something that allows you to travel more. You could get a job abroad. You could start a business. You could volunteer for an organization. A good friend of mine who is a consultant, after seeing how easily I lived abroad, decided to take a stab at finding clients in foreign countries. He now spends 10 months a year outside of the US, enjoying a much higher quality of life than he did within the US for less money. If this all sounds a bit ridiculous or pie-in-the-sky, then this book should show you how straightforward it can actually be. You just need to be willing to work hard and stomach a little bit of risk. My Story In November of 2007, I started an online business on a whim. I did it primarily because I enjoyed it and it was a way to make some money on the side. I was still convinced that I was going to follow a typical career track in finance. In June of 2008, I quit my day job to focus on my internet business full-time. In September of 2009, I gave up my apartment and most of my possessions and began living in various parts of the world, working and living off my internet business. I’ve been to 45 countries and lived in nine of them for more than a month. I speak four languages and I’ve seen some of the most spectacular locations in the world and met hundreds of fascinating people. In the beginning, I actually made little money. In fact, to travel through Europe in 2009 I had to scrounge up clients as I went. And I also crashed for a few weeks at a friend’s house and then another couple months at my mother’s. In fact, my lifestyle back in Boston before I began traveling around the world was actually more costly than my new nomadic one. My cost of living in Boston hovered around $40,000 per year before I took the plunge and pursued my internet income. And in a city as expensive as Boston, I was not exactly living well: my
apartment was small, I rode a bike everywhere, I ate at crappy restaurants and didn’t have iDoc.co much money to go out and see friends. The main premise of this book is that you can live a higher quality of life by spending less money and fulfilling your travel dreams at the same time. I’m about to prove that point. Take a look at the list below. It’s a list of everything I did in 2011. As you read through it, keep in the back of your mind how much it likely cost. Yes, that includes ALL expenses (visas, airfare, insurance, lodging, etc.) Spent three weeks studying Spanish four hours per day in Guatemala with a private tutor. Took salsa lessons. Hiked volcanoes. Had a two-floor apartment with a spiral staircase. Learned to surf on the beaches of Costa Rica, spent 10 days with my own room on the beach. Spent three weeks in England (London and Bristol). Three weeks in Prague, Czech Republic in the center of the Old Town. Went out and partied almost every night. Lived for a month in St. Petersburg, just off Nevsky-Prospekt (their version of Broadway) and studied Russian with a private tutor every day while I was there. Met up with a friend to travel and party through Budapest (Hungary), Odessa (Ukraine), Berlin (Germany) and Ibiza (Spain), all for a week apiece, going out partying and eating out almost every night for more than a month straight. Visited Barcelona, Amsterdam and Dublin on my way back to the US. Met with a client in Miami and stayed on South Beach, visited friends in Chicago and Boston, and then visited my brother briefly in Seattle. Lived in an apartment on a tropical beach in Thailand for three months with multiple visits to Singapore and Bangkok and Chiang Mai. Spent three weeks traveling around India: New Delhi, Agra, Gaya, Goa, Bangalore, etc. Spent two weeks in Beijing, China. Saw the Great Wall, Forbidden City, and Mao’s Mausoleum. Short stopover in LA to meet with a business contact and see friends. Partied in Hollywood. Flew to my mother’s in time for Christmas. To put it in more statistical terms: 17 countries 32 cities Lived on two world-class beaches, visited three others. Rented furnished apartments in the best part of town everywhere I went. Studied Spanish, Russian, salsa and surfing with private teachers. Ate out most nights. Partied my ass off. Saw some of the most famous tourist sites in the world: Taj Mahal, Great Wall of China, Hermitage, Berlin Wall, Sagrada Familia, Westminister Abbey, etc.
So if you were to add up everything, my entire year, how much do you think I spent? All of those iDoc.co crazy experiences, all of those flights, all of those lessons and apartments, how much do you think it ran me? The answer? … Less than $33,000. That’s a full 20% LESS than it cost me to live in a dingy apartment in Boston with no car. Chances are that is less than it currently costs you to live in your home country too. That is a VERY modest middle-class income back home. That cost of living will get you a small condo in a shitty suburb of most US cities. You may be saying, “Well Mark, you don’t have car payments and you’re not saving for retirement.” You’re right. I’ve eliminated all unnecessary expenses and items from my life in order to afford my experiences. I also see no point in saving for retirement when I’m still young, single and healthy. Why would I tuck money away to do all this stuff when I’m in my 60s or 70s when I can just do it now? If I’m doing what I love, why would I ever want to retire? I realize this is not a common life decision, but it’s mine, and I ask you to consider it. I lived like a king. I saw some of the most amazing sites in the world and ingratiated myself in a myriad of foreign cultures. I tried new food, spoke new languages, laid on beaches and climbed up mountains. I made new friends, learned new skills, partied my ass off, ate amazing food. And I did it for the same amount of money most people spend eating Hamburger Helper and watching CSI reruns every week after work. This book will show you how. Whether you’re a student who wants to take some time abroad, an activist who wants to explore and volunteer in uncharted parts of the world, an internet entrepreneur who wants to find cheap, amazing locations to set up shop, or someone who just wants out and needs some time off, whatever – I will show you how to cut corners and maximize every dollar (or pound or euro) when it comes to experiencing the pleasures of living abroad. In the beginning, we’ll cover the fundamentals: how to minimize and simplify your lifestyle and expenses, how to find cheap airfare and affordable places to stay. From there, we’ll jump into each of the world’s regions – not in depth, but we’ll look at the
important aspects of deciding whether to go there or not: cost of living, quality of life, culture, iDoc.co safety, etc. We’ll then talk about your options to get abroad (working remotely, volunteering, studying, etc.). Plenty of resources will be provided. From there, we’ll dig a little deeper and get into what experiences to expect once you actually arrive in a new country. We’ll talk about culture, making friends, planning activities and learning languages. Finally, the book will wrap up with some discussion on the major benefits of international travel on a personal and emotional level and how you can expect a lot of your experiences to influence you in the long-term.
Chapter 1: Priorities
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As with any major life decision, before you set out it’s important to establish what your goals are. And not only your goals, but your constraints as well. Some of you reading this will be aspiring internet entrepreneurs who want to earn passive income while living remotely around the world. Some of you will have a bunch of savings and want to take a year off and make the most of it. Some of you have a certain budget and perhaps a month of vacation each year that you want to take advantage of as much as possible. Others of you may be completely broke and have no clue what to do, but you know you want to travel and get the hell out of wherever you are. All of these are fine and very viable situations. It’s just important to know which category you fall into before we start out, because it’s going to determine your options and priorities quite a lot. Which region of the world and which countries you want to focus on are largely a product of your goals and constraints. If you want to have as much fun as possible and don’t mind being broke, that changes things versus an alternative such as, say, if you want to see the 7 Wonders of the World and enjoy some luxury cruises and spas. So before we move on to the nuts and bolts of global travel and living abroad, sit down for a moment and answer some questions for yourself: (You can write down your answers to these questions if you feel it helps.) 1. What is your timeframe? Are you looking to travel for a month, six months, a year, three years, indefinitely? The longer your timeframe, the more you’re going to need to rely on passive income and/or working at each of your destinations. The shorter your timeframe, the more you’ll be able to rely on savings and budgeting. Speaking of which…
2. What is your current budget (if any)?
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You may have a large amount of money saved up for a big trip. You may have no money saved up, but a job or source of income. You may have no money at all. You may even have no income at all. Any of these are fine, we just need to know what we’re working with. When I picked up and went to Europe in the Fall of 2009, I had a little more than $1,000 left in my bank account after I bought all of my plane/train tickets. At the time, I was earning perhaps $400 a week in passive income. By the time I came back six weeks later, I had about $700 in my bank account. Not bad for a six week trip through Europe. Granted, I did it on a shoe-string budget, but I made it work. Obviously, the more money you’ve already got in the bank, the more flexibility you’re going to have, and the more you’ll be able to plan in advance. If you’re relying on passive income or counting on finding some odd jobs once you’re there, then you’re going to be a lot more inflexible in terms of what you can do and where you can go. That’s fine, it’s just something to be aware of. For instance, if you’re making a passive income of $250 per week, and you don’t have a lot of money in your bank account. Then you’re going to have to stop and plan your destinations very carefully as you go. If you’re only able to find jobs that pay a small wage, the same issue applies. 3. What kind of experiences are you looking for? Are you a history nerd who wants to visit all of the most famous tourist sites around the world? Do you love museums? Or are you a beach bum and party animal? Maybe you’re a foodie. Maybe you want to learn a language and live somewhere long-term. What you’re primarily interested in will be the primary factor in deciding where you go and what you focus on. For example, if you enjoy nature and want to see amazing natural landmarks, then eastern Peru and Bolivia will be a very worthwhile trip. If you’re more interested in having an active social life and partying, then you’re going to be bored to tears there. Paris is one experience if you have a lot of savings and love gourmet food. It’s a completely different one if you’re broke and don’t care about tourist sites. Think about what you want, what your goals are. If you’re mostly interested in living in another culture and integrating yourself as much as possible
into it, then take time to consider which culture appeals to you and why. A lot of cultures that sound iDoc.co fascinating on paper can be a real pain in the ass to deal with day-in, day-out. What are you willing to put up with and what are you looking for? Some people love the politeness and subdued cultures of Asia. Others love the passion and affection of Latin America. Every place has its pros and cons, so know what you’re getting into before you commit to spending months or years in a region. ***** Like I said, the answers to these questions are going to determine your priorities and decisions going through the rest of this book. If you have $4,000 saved up and want to stretch it for three months, then gondola rides through Venice in between Italian operas is probably not an option. Certain regions of the world are going to naturally stick out to you based on your budget and interests. I personally love big cities with a lot of things happening and have some slightly expensive hobbies. I prefer living in developed cities and/or countries. But some people love living in undeveloped countries, they love the countryside, they love a quiet and quaint travel experience. Tastes differ. To me, a four-month trip through major European cities enmeshing me in the culture, eating good food and partying all night sounds like heaven. To others it sounds pretentious and like a waste of money. To some, spending a few months hiking through the Incan Trails of Peru or up the mountains of Chile, camping as you go, sounds absolutely divine. For me? No thanks. Budgets and options are going to differ a lot between these two “dream” trips. So hopefully you have a vague idea of which parts of the world you’re interested in what your financial options are going forward. Considering What You Own Planning a long trip abroad is always a good opportunity to evaluate your possessions and get rid of some excess crap back home. This not only helps you travel lighter (which you should always do) but it can also raise some good money for your upcoming trip. I’ll spare you the soapbox speech about happiness and possessions versus experiences. I’ll just say one thing: in the three-plus years I’ve been traveling and living a nomadic lifestyle, every year I’ve unloaded more crap and sold more stuff, and never do I miss any of it. Every time I do it, within a few months I’m amazed that I used to think I needed this stuff. But not only did I not need it, but the idea of going back and buying it again sounds like a waste of money. How extreme you want to go is up to you. If you’re young, plan to be abroad for a long time, and need every extra dollar you can scrounge together, then fuck it, sell it all. Seriously.
If you have a house, are married and/or have a family to consider, then you can get by justiDoc.co selling some excess stuff around the house or giving away some extra clothes. If you’re single, rent, and have a bunch of useless stuff lying around, well, then go nuts. When I took off in 2009, I got rid of as much as I could stomach. Some of it was painful. I sold my trusty bike that I rode everywhere in Boston. I sold my exercise weights, all of my CDs, many of my books, a very fancy poker chip set I won in a tournament (pride made it hard to let go, but I don’t miss it), all of my video games (surprisingly don’t miss them), an old laptop, a bunch of clothes, etc., etc. What I couldn’t bring with me I shipped to my mom’s house and had her pack them into the back of a closet somewhere. Everything else, my necessities, I took with me. And within a month it was clear I packed about twice as much crap as I needed. There’s a school of thought called “minimalism” which is particularly popular among world travelers. It’s the belief that you should only own what is absolutely necessary for a baseline level of happiness, nothing else. Some people take minimalism to an extreme. Blogger Tynan wrote in his book “Life Nomadic” about how not only did he give away ALL of his possessions (minus backpack, two changes of clothes, and his laptop), but he sold his car, sold his furniture, even sold his house, before embarking on his multi-year, around-the-world trip. I’m not that extreme. I enjoy a few extra changes of clothes, but that’s really only because I like going to nice restaurants and nightclubs. I don’t own a house or a car either. It would honestly hold me back more than anything at the moment. So I invite you to reconsider what your priorities are. Again, it will depend on your trip. If you’re just doing a big one-month vacation, before coming back and returning to work, then you won’t want to offload a whole lot. But if you’re going for broke (no pun intended) and want to live the nomadic lifestyle, bouncing from country-to-country, surviving on some combination of internet income, odd jobs and savings, for extended periods of time, then I highly recommend selling everything you can stand to sell… …And then sell a little bit more. You’ll thank me later. The Golden Rule I’ll wrap up this chapter with the golden rule of travel: “Whatever you think you need to pack, bring half. Whatever money you think you’ll need, bring
double.”
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I don’t know of anyone who’s ever arrived somewhere and wished they had packed MORE. The complaints I always hear are of how much crap people are lugging around and how much of it they don’t need. If you’re going somewhere for a while, consider the following: you can use towels, soap and shampoo in most hotels and hostels; you can buy a swimsuit and towel at the beach for a fraction of the amount; specialty gear or clothes are often provided by tour companies and/or easily available once you get there; if you’re bouncing around locations a lot, no one is going to notice that you wore the same thing twice; there are cheap laundry services in almost every country. There’s a staggering amount of stuff that can be purchased, found or borrowed wherever you go once you get there, and often for a much cheaper price than wherever you came from. And as for the spending, well, anyone who’s ever traveled knows it’s true. Unforeseen adventures crop up all the time, whimsical decisions to splurge on expensive dinners, extra-long nights out, and of course, the rationalization of, “Well, I’m on vacation,” drain your wallet faster than anticipated. Just as an example, this is a list of everything I own and carry with me as I travel. Please note that 1) I’ve been traveling and living nomadically for over three years now and 2) this is much less than what I started with, although probably far more than I actually need. Regular Ralph Lauren backpack: Laptop: MacBook Pro iPad iPhone 4S (unlocked) Sony HD video camera (for recording videos for my websites) Portable Philips pocket audio recorder (same) Two passports (old one has visas still) Power cables and peripherals Pens Basic medicine: painkillers, stomach antacids, melatonin (sleep aid) Eiffel medium sized suitcase: Six T-Shirts Four dress shirts Four gym shorts Seven pairs of underwear Six pairs of socks Gym shoes
Dress shoes Flip flops Sportscoat Two pairs of jeans Scarf Peacoat Wool sweater Hoodie Belt Swimsuit Toothbrush and toothpaste Deodorant Hair/skin care Backup Hard Drive Language books and notebooks Sunscreen Shaver
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Notable omissions: Towel (Almost every hostel/hotel/furnished apartment comes with them) Soap/Shampoo (Same as above; buy little travel bottles where I go or borrow from other people) Laundry Detergent (Laundry services all over the world for cheap) Any extra clothing whatsoever (go for quality of clothes, not quantity) Books (HUGE drag on a suitcase, buy an e-reader). Iron (most hotels have one, or use a laundry service) Photos/pictures/frames (There’s this thing called Facebook)
Guide to Travel Preparation: http://www.travelindependent.info/
Other Resources On Minimalistic Living: Guide to Wealth: http://postmasculine.com/wealth Minimalism: http://postmasculine.com/minimalism Life Nomadic: http://tynan.com/lifenomadic
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Chapter 2: Nuts and Bolts of World TraveliDoc.co Making the decision and mental commitment to spend a large amount of time abroad can feel overwhelming. There are a lot of things to prepare, and a lot of questions to have answered. How are you going to keep in touch with people back home? What should you take with you and what kind of bag should you take? How do cell phones work abroad and what should you do about them? What about international bank accounts and credit cards? Visas? Passports? Insurance? The list goes on and on. This chapter will rundown of the most fundamental items and services you need to consider if you’re going to spend a lot of time abroad. Passports and Visas Obvious, I know, but there are a few minor things worth mentioning: If your passport is within six months of expiring, many countries will not grant you entry. If your trip is going to continue into that final six-month period, then you should renew it before you go. If your passport is beat up, torn, been through the washing machine, border patrols will give you hell (especially in the English-speaking countries). They REALLY don’t like this. The last 3 pages of your passport are used for special notes and annotations, not for stamps. It may appear that you have three empty pages left, but you do not. Some countries will still put stamps there anyway, but they’re not supposed to. When you renew your passport, if you have visas in the old one, which are still valid (Brazil, Argentina, etc.), tell them to send it back. If you don’t, they will destroy your old passport and the visas with it. You’ll have to get those visas again which is a huge pain in the ass, not to mention another few hundred dollars. For US citizens, if you fill your passport up, any US embassy will add more pages for you. Be sure to schedule online in advance though. For US citizens (again), you can have duplicate passports under special conditions. You must send in an application and letter explaining why you need two passports. Supposedly proving you travel a lot or are a writer/journalist of some sort is sufficient, but I haven’t tried it. Forms and application can be found here: https://pptform.state.gov/
iDoc.co For a perpetual world-traveler, your passport is the most important item you own. Guard it with your life. Pick a safe and secure spot and always keep it there. I have seen a lot of people lose their passports for DUMB reasons – they left it laying out, it fell out of their shorts pocket, they put it in shopping bags or grocery bags. Don’t be one of those people. Take care of it. Visas are more complicated. Visas can be a bureaucratic pain. Visa policies also tend to vary widely based on which nationality you are. Europeans tend to be the best off with visa situations. Americans, Australians, Japanese, and a few other developed nations have it well off too, although a lot of us have reciprocity policies that cost us a lot of money. Also, we can only stay in the EU for 90 days at a time (whereas if you have an EU passport, you can stay in any EU country as long as you’d like). With that said, here’s a quick breakdown on most visa situations. As always, consult government websites to know for sure. Tourist visas to any country almost always come in 30-, 60-, and 90-day varieties. Know which one you’re getting when you arrive. Most countries will have “visa on arrival” which means you’re given a tourist visa on arrival for free or a small fee. Usually it comes with the stamp on your passport, but occasionally (like in many Asian countries) they will plaster a big visa taking up a whole page. The stamp/visa will tell you how many days you’re allowed to stay in the country before needing an extension or renewal. You can almost always pay for visa extensions in the country once you’re there, but the cost varies quite a bit depending on where you are. Sometimes you’re better off just leaving the country and coming back (i.e., Thailand). If you want to stay in a country for an extended period of time longer than the tourist visa period (30, 60 or 90 days), you can “border hop” to automatically renew a visa. This simply means that you leave the country on a jet plane, and then go back again. Border hopping is nice in regions where airfare is cheap and there are cool places nearby to check out. When I lived in Thailand, I loved hitting Singapore for a few days each month. Be warned though that some countries (South American ones I know for sure) have a limit on how many total days you can spend in the country in any given 365 day period. For instance, you can go to Brazil, use your 90-day tourist visa, border hop, come back for another 90 days. But once that 180 days are up, you have to wait until next year. Many/most countries will not let you spend more than 180 days (six months) per year in their
country without some sort of residency permit or extended student or business visa.iDoc.co Some of these are very difficult to obtain (i.e., Brazil). Others require little more than some fees and/or bribes (i.e., Colombia). You can apply and get visas in countries other than your home country. For instance, if you’re American, you can get your Brazilian visa at the Brazilian embassy in Argentina, you can get your visa to India at the Indian embassy in Bangkok or Singapore, and so on. So you don’t have to always plan everything ahead. Heads up: Australia requires you to register your visa over the internet before you arrive. If you’re traveling to Europe and you’re NOT an EU citizen, you must understand what the Schengen Area is. Basically, all of the countries within the EU treat themselves a single entity to foreigners. The benefit of this is if you arrive in Spain and get stamped, and then fly to Italy, you don’t get another stamp and you don’t have to go through immigration again. The downside (and it’s a huge downside) is that if you use up your 90-day tourist visa in Spain, then you CANNOT hop over to Italy and start over. In fact, you have to leave the entire Schengen Area (more or less the entire EU) for 90 days before you can come back for another 90 days. The Schengen Area is the all of the EU countries, MINUS England and Ireland, but PLUS Norway, Switzerland and Iceland. So you CAN hypothetically do 90 days in France, then 90 days in England, then 90 days back in France without ever getting more than a tourist visa. But you CANNOT do 90 days in France, then go to Norway or Iceland, even though they’re not part of the EU. As a permanent nomad and someone who loves Europe, the Schengen Area sucks. More info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schengen_Area AND FINALLY, do not overstay your visa. I’ve never done it before, but I’ve heard some horror stories – red tape, bribes, fines, deportation. Be smart.
Lists of Visa requirements for various nationals: United States: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_United_States_citizens Canada: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_Canadian_citizens United Kingdom: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_British_nationals Australia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_Australian_citizens
New Zealand: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_New_Zealand_citizensiDoc.co France: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_French_citizens Germany: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_German_citizens Insurance Do not assume your health insurance will cover you while you’re abroad. Many policies will cover trips of short periods (vacations) under specific circumstances. If you’re planning a short stint abroad of less than a month, you’ll likely be fine, depending on your policy. If you plan on backpacking, hopping around for a long time, have no idea where you’re going to end up, or are going to travel perpetually and indefinitely, then you need to drop your domestic insurance and get international insurance. Surprisingly (or not), international health insurance is often cheaper than it is back home (especially if you’re American). I spend about $500 a year TOTAL on health insurance and I’m covered in every non-US country. Back when I lived in the US, my health insurance ran me over $200 per month for similar coverage. I use and recommend World Nomads: http://www.worldnomads.com/ I haven’t had to use them for anything major (knock on wood), but I have been happy with them. Other international health insurance providers: IMG Global Medical Insurance: http://www.imglobal.com/img-insurance/international-health-insurance/global-medicalinsurance.aspx Integra Global: http://www.integraglobal.com/ Lonely Planet Travel Insurance: http://www.lonelyplanet.com/travel-insurance/ General Information and Reviews: http://www.internationalhealthinsurers.com/ Sidenote: Most health insurance does not cover scuba diving accidents. If you’re a scuba diver and want to be covered in foreign countries, check out DAN: http://www.diversalertnetwork.org/ Also keep in mind, if you’re going to a developing country, often doctor visits and minor trips to
the ER can be so affordable that it’s not even worth reporting it to your insurance company. A iDoc.co friend of mine recently sprained his wrist in Colombia, and the trip to the ER, x-rays, cast, antibiotics, the whole deal, ran him about $80US. My last doctor’s check up in Thailand cost me less than $15. As long as you’re considered a “tourist” in every country you go to (and since you’re going to be under tourist visas 99% of the time, you will be considered a tourist), then there’s not sense in worrying about getting insurance in a country locally. Another Sidenote: Never, ever take the insurance airlines offer you on flights. Quite frankly, it’s a scam. Even if you somehow miss your flight or change your plans, there are so many rules and minor regulations that you’re very unlikely to cash it in. Airlines cash in on people anxious about spending a lot of money on big trips. Don’t bother. It’s never worth it. Cell Phones First and foremost: do not ever, under any circumstances, use your cell phone provider’s international calling services. They are a massive rip-off. PLEASE don’t do it. (I once got lost looking for a friend’s place in Sydney, Australia, and in a moment of desperation pulled up Google Maps to figure out how far away I was. I figured it was Australia and I was only using a little bit of data. That simple location check cost me over $65.) When it comes to cell phones abroad, you have two choices: you can get an unlocked phone and buy SIM cards as you go, or buy a throwaway phone for each country you go to. Throwaway phones: Cheap and easy. Pretty much every country you’d ever want to go to has a cheap, basic cell phone. These phones are like the one’s we had back in 2001 – alphanumerical texting, smiley face icons, cheesy ringers – but hey, they get the job done. You can usually buy a throwaway anywhere from $10 to $25 depending on the country. A SIM card is usually another $10 or so and then you buy minutes and pay as you go. Minutes are usually in the vicinity of ten cents per minute in most countries, sometimes less. Text messages are treated as a single minute. So for as little as $30, you can be set up with a phone number and 100 minutes. (It’s important to note that minutes are only counted against you when you call or text, not when you receive calls or texts.) Buying throwaways everywhere you go is often the best option and it’s what I happily did for years. You show up the first day, drop about $30-40 the first day and you have a functioning phone until you leave (and also if you come back).
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Unlocked Phones: When you go to a cell phone store and buy a normal phone, that phone is “locked” and only usable with that particular cell phone company’s service in that specific country.
So if you buy a Verizon phone in the US, you can only use it with Verizon and in the US. If you buy an Orange phone in the UK, it’s only usable with Orange and in the UK. An unlocked phone is a phone that works for any service and in any country, thus making it a fully international phone (there are nuances to this which I’ll get to in a minute). Some cell phones can be hacked using software you download online. The old iPhone 3s were famous for being unlocked fairly easily, although the new ones can’t be. But unless you’re the techie type, you just buy an unlocked phone. Either the cell phone store has a technician who unlocks them or the manufacturer themselves unlocked them and you buy them directly. Once a phone is unlocked, you buy SIM cards (small computer chips), which tell the phone which service to use in every country you go to. So instead of having a Colombia phone, a Spain phone, a Germany phone, you have one single unlocked phone and a Spain SIM card, a Germany SIM card, a Colombia SIM card, etc. From the SIM card, you purchase minutes and again, pay as you go. For smartphones, you can also get monthly data plans, often for far cheaper. In fact, just to go on a little rant about the US cell phone industry, most cell phones in the US are incredibly cheap. What are actually $400-$800 phones can be purchased for as little as $50 or $100 IF you sign on for a one-year or two-year contract. Basically, you save maybe 75% on the phone up front, but get locked into a horrible contract, paying $90 per month for the next two years, whether you actually use the phone or not. You save $350 or so upfront, but end up paying $2,300 over the next two years. Whereas if you shelled out the extra cash for an unlocked phone up front, and paid for monthly data plans (often as low as $30 per month), then you end up paying maybe $1,200 total over the next two years. You spend half as much in the long run. You just had to be willing to pay extra up front to forgo the contract. The other shitty part about the US cell phone industry is that they lock you into their contracts and it costs money to break them. So if you have nine months left on your US contract, but you want to go live in Tahiti for a year, then it still costs you up to 50% of those nine months to break your contract. It’s kind of insane to pay a company to STOP using their service. Anyway, that’s enough of my rant. I’ve been bent over and told to grab my ankles by both the US
cell phone and insurance industries enough the past few years that I’m a little bitter, and that will iDoc.co undoubtedly come out in this book. Hopefully reading this guide you won’t make the same mistakes I did. Unlocked phones are the way to go if you have the extra money lying around and plan to hit enough countries. More and more manufacturers are selling them directly now. Apple now sells the iPhone 4S unlocked. It comes with a whopping $800 price tag, but honestly it’s one of the best purchases I’ve made in a long time. I can practically run my entire business from my iPhone, and it doesn’t matter if I’m in the mountains of Colombia, the streets of São Paulo, the beaches of Jamaica or the subway in New York City. The final note about unlocked cell phones. There are two standards of cellular service: GSM and CDMA. The difference between the two is technical and has to do with how they turn sound into radio waves to transmit them. GSM is what is predominantly used by European carriers, CDMA is predominantly used by US carriers. The point is, is that if you buy an unlocked phone that only works on GSM networks, then you will not be able to use it in countries that only have CDMA networks. Luckily, most of the world is slowly converting over to the standard of GSM so this is going to become less and less of an issue. BUT, there are plenty of unlocked phones that can use both, and I recommend buying those. GSM networks also come in four different frequencies: 850, 900, 1800 and 1900 MHz. Instead of worrying which network has which frequency and which phone can handle which frequency, be sure to buy a quad band phone. That means the phone can function on every frequency. In fact, most quad band phones will work on CDMA networks as well. The unlocked iPhone 4S works on everything as do the new Blackberrys. If an unlocked phone works on everything it will say something like, “GSM/CDMA Quad-Band” in its description and specs. That’s what you want to look for. Anything else means that you may possibly be limited in certain countries or by certain carriers. You can buy unlocked cell phones online here: http://www.cell2get.com/ Bank Accounts and Currencies Most banks offer poor international services. Not only do they have large ATM fees, but they hit you with exchange rate fees AND sometimes lousy exchange rates. I learned this the hard way. My domestic bank account is Bank of America (absolutely horrible, by the way, do NOT use them if possible).
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I went to Israel in 2009. I didn’t have a ton of money, so I was on a budget of about $500 as spending money for the entire two-week trip while I was there.
When I came home, I had spent almost twice that. I couldn’t believe it. Then I reviewed my bank statements and this is what I found. $5 ATM fee for every withdrawal An exchange rate fee of about 5% for every dollar withdrawn. A crappy exchange rate where I was losing another 5% of every dollar I spent. All in all, I deduced that out of the $900 I spent, Bank of America fees counted for over $100 of them. Obviously, I still went over my budget, BUT A HUNDRED DOLLARS IN FEES IN TWO WEEKS?!?! A few months later, I planned a six-week trip to Europe, mostly France and Germany. This time, having learned my lesson from Israel, I decided to take a big wad of cash with me and exchange it once I got there. Once again, big mistake. Unless you’re exchanging multiple thousands of dollars, any currency exchange booth is going to hose you, and sometimes violently. Once again, despite looking at half a dozen exchange places in Paris, I could not find one that wasn’t skimming at least 4% of the market rate off the top. AND, of course, most of them had exchange fees of their own. So for every $100 I exchanged, I was still losing anywhere from $8 to $12, sometimes more. Still better than Bank of America, but not much. Once again, on a trip where I had budgeted around $1,000 for spending money, I ended up unnecessarily paying over $100 more in fees. The Solution: I keep two bank accounts, a domestic one which is tied to my business. And then an international one which I use while I travel. If you are going to stay abroad any more than a month at a time, then I highly, highly, highly recommend the following bank account. Charles Schwab Brokerage Checking Account. Go to: http://www.schwab.com/ Open a brokerage account with Charles Schwab. Last time I checked, you could do it online. When you open a brokerage account with them, they set you up with a checking account as well. The
benefits are amazing and are practically designed for the globetrotting entrepreneur:
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No ATM fees, anywhere in the world, ever. No currency exchange fees. Market rate conversions. Paid interest on any money in the checking account. Fraud protection (important). The customer service is uncharacteristically fantastic as well. And if you’re into trading or want to keep your account in foreign currencies instead of the US dollar, you can. If you want to keep 75% of your account in gold and the rest in US dollars, you can. It’s free to set up and there are no barriers to entry, BUT, unfortunately it’s only for US permanent residents. I’ve read that Metrobank of London has similar services for UK citizens, but you’re going to have to do research on the banks in your own country to find the best fit for you. https://www.metrobankonline.co.uk/ When you look at accounts, look for the following: 1. 2. 3. 4.
No ATM fees, or 100% ATM reimbursement No currency exchange fees. Market rate currency exchange rates All of the usual preferences such as minimum account fees or higher interest rates are desirable as well.
From what I understand, there are few banks in the world that offer the services of the Schwab account. Fortunately, there ARE more credit cards that offer these perks. In the US, Capital One offers credit cards with absolutely no international or exchange fees. Outside the US, you’re going to have to do your own research. If you’re staying in a country for a long period of time, then you may consider opening a bank account there. Unfortunately, you have to be a permanent resident in most countries in order to open a bank account there. I’ll discuss credit cards in more detail when we get to the chapter about hacking airline miles. International Calls and Mail These were a far bigger deal back in 2008 when I first read about living a nomadic lifestyle abroad. How do you make and receive phone calls? How do you send and receive mail?
In 2012, not only are there easy solutions, but these are much smaller problems.
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For starters, I have not received snail mail in two years now, and the worst thing that happened to me is I got hit with a $50 state tax fine for not submitting a form. My permanent residence is my father’s house and I’m fortunate that he’s kind enough to sift through (read: throw away) what’s sent to me. But I would say I get at most three emails from him a year asking me if something I received was important. The only hitch I ever run into is when I order new credit cards or bank cards. There’s paperless banking now, and there are services such as http://www.earthclassmail.com/ which scan your mail and email photocopies to you. You can then tell them to trash it, or forward it to you wherever you are in the world. This service is $20 per month. As for making calls, there’s Google Voice and Skype. Google Voice gives you your own phone number and free calls within the United States as long as you have internet connection. It also lets you make international calls for cheap. With Skype, you can video call any other Skype user in the world for free. Recently, my exgirlfriend Skyped my phone from her room in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, while I was in the airport in Quito, Ecuador. We had a nice 30-minute conversation for free. Skype can call and text regular phones internationally for obscenely low rates as well. My calls to my family’s cell phones back home run me about 9 cents per minute whether I’m in China, Italy or Mexico. You can also purchase your own domestic number from Skype and receive calls on your Skype account anywhere in the world. The service is $20 per month. Finally, if you’re rocking a smartphone, I recommend downloading the app called WhatsApp. There are versions for Android, Blackberry and iPhone. WhatsApp users can text each other anywhere in the world for free. I recently had a text conversation with my brother in Seattle from Colombia, while he was texting his girlfriend in South Africa and I was texting my girlfriend in Brazil. It’s a small world after all. Electricity/Adapters Unfortunately, not all electrical outlets around the world are made the same. In fact, there are four primary types of outlets which your electronics can plug in to. American: Small two-pronged plugs, one slightly larger than the other, and sometimes a third,
circular, grounding plug. Used in just about all of the Western Hemisphere, with Argentina and iDoc.co parts of the Caribbean being the primary exceptions. English: Fat three prongs spaced out into a disjointed ‘T’ shape. Used in England and a lot of former English colonies (parts of SE Asia, the Caribbean and Africa). European: Two circular prongs spaced wide apart. Sometimes a third prong is present in the middle (Italy). Probably the most common outlet type in the world: used all over Europe, parts of South America (Brazil and Costa Rica’s outlets accept both American and European plugs), parts of Asia and Africa as well. Australian: Goofy diagonally slanted two-prong outlets. Used in Australia, Argentina and a few other random countries around the world. The most rare kind of outlet. Aside from needing a physical adapter for your plugs, different countries have different voltages for their electricity. The good news is that most electronics these days have voltage converters built into them (for instance, pretty much ever laptop made in the last five years should automatically convert whatever voltage its plugged into). But just in case, you can buy a voltage converter along with the appropriate adapters. I recommend finding an all-in-one adapter for your plugs. They’re more expensive ($40-50 range), but it’s better than lugging around four (or more) adapters and possibly converters wherever you go. With an all-in-one adapter you can plug anything in to anywhere at any time without having to worry about it. Also, surprisingly in many countries, adapters can be a real pain to find, especially if you don’t speak a language. Nothing like ruining an afternoon walking around trying to figure out where an electronics store is. So save yourself the trouble and buy the all-in-one solution before you leave home. You’ll be glad you did. For a list of every country and which outlet/voltage it uses, go here: http://www.travel-images.com/electric-plugs.html I recommend the “Skross World Travel Adapter”. It accepts any input and plug into any outlet in the world. You can also get it with a USB port: http://www.amazon.com/Skross-World-Travel-Adaptor3/dp/B002UDA3IY/ref=pd_sim_sbs_e_1 Prescriptions, Vaccinations and Medications For those of you with medical conditions, it’s an important question whether you can get your necessary medications in each country or not. The answer is a tentative “yes.” It will vary a lot from country to country. Generally, you should be able to, BUT you should be prepared in case you can’t.
The important points to consider:
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1. Refill your prescriptions before you leave. If possible, get extra or however much you need to last you. If you need to, notify your doctor and/or pharmacist before you go to get the extra quantity. 2. Foreign prescriptions are not honored by doctors in MOST countries, especially the developed ones. So if you have a prescription in the US and go to a pharmacy in Germany, they are not allowed to fill it. You have to set up an appointment with a doctor in Germany and tell them of your condition and get a German prescription. This is not hard to do, but it’s certainly a hassle. 3. You can also have your pharmacy in your home country ship your medication to a pharmacy in the country which you’re staying, and then pick it up from the pharmacy there. This method will vary depending on the country, but should be reliable in most developed nations. You will have to pay for shipping. 4. In undeveloped nations, things get a lot more informal. In many countries (Thailand, Philippines, Colombia, etc.) you can walk into a pharmacy and buy almost anything over the counter without a prescription. And if that doesn’t work, getting a prescription from doctors isn’t a stretch in the least. Again just tell them about your prescription back home. 5. Make sure you have health insurance that covers trips abroad (important!) See above. Unfortunately, there is no definitive source on prescriptions and medications for travelers. Do your own research online and ask pharmacists/doctors in countries you go to. Another common question I get is about vaccines. I’m a bit cavalier about this stuff, but I know some people take it seriously. Consult your doctor if you’re worried about it. Highly detailed info here: http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/page/vaccinations.htm What’s written below is entirely my opinion and experience. I’m not a professional or an expert. Unless you’re going to Sub-Saharan Africa or near the Amazon, you don’t need most vaccinations. There are other tropical areas where you’ll want to take malarial medicine (Caribbean, etc.), but for the most part the insistence on vaccinations in the US before you go abroad is overblown. If you do the research you’ll find that there are few regions where it’s a significant concern. With that said, the big ones to be concerned about are Malaria and Yellow Fever. Yellow Fever: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_fever
Malaria: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Malaria_world_map_-_DALY_-_WHO2004.svgiDoc.co Yellow Fever vaccines are cheap and easy. If you’re going to a region with a high occurrence of Malaria, you can take some pills before you go to reduce the likelihood of getting it. But be warned, these pills have some unpleasant side effects. When Things Go Wrong Unfortunately, no matter how well you plan, there is always a risk of things going wrong while you’re abroad and it’s important to know what your contingencies are. 1. Missing Your Flight: If for some reason you miss your flight, the first rule is to continue on anyway. Sometimes you get lucky and the flight is delayed. Some airlines will even hold the doors for 5-10 minutes if they’re missing someone, especially if your connection came in late. If you’re late, RUN. Sounds obvious, but seriously, start running. Looking like an idiot and being out-of-breath is worth saving hundreds of dollars on possibly having to buy a new plane ticket. If you’re late, don’t be afraid to skip ahead in security. If you’ve egregiously overslept your flight or you’re just not even close, go to the airport anyway. Again, you never know, the could be massively delayed. It will depend on the airline, the person behind the desk, and the route, but the airline will often just put you on the next flight without any fuss. This is especially true if you have a lot of miles with them or are gold status or platinum status or whatever. 2. Getting Robbed: Fact of the developing world is that petty crime is much higher than it is in the developed world. In a later chapter, I will give you advice on how to make sure you DON’T get robbed, but if/when it does happen, the first move is to report it to the local police. Chances are they won’t do anything or be of any help, but you may as well tell them. From there, if you have travel insurance, then report it to them to hopefully get reimbursed. Insurance companies will often require that you send them a police report. 3. Legal trouble: If for whatever reason you find yourself in legal trouble in a foreign country, whether it’s a minor car accident, drug possession or violence, the first move is to always, always, always call your country’s embassy. Always. In the developed world, things will be pretty cut-and-dry. If you are arrested for public intoxication in Germany, chances are the procedures are going to be fair and efficient. In poorer countries, that’s just not the case. In fact, there are horror stories of foreigners having some pretty messed up accusations and problems leveled against them. These are countries that often don’t exactly have fair legal systems (or legal systems at all), and often don’t care if you did it or not.
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In many cases, depending on the country and the charges, your embassy can do nothing. There are a few famous cases in Indonesia, where drug possession is punishable by death, where some cavalier Australian kids were caught, sure enough, trafficking drugs. They were put to death and the Australian government could not do anything to prevent it.
In many of these corrupt countries it may simply come down to bribery. I know in the Dominican Republic, the drug dealers have a racket going on with the local police. The dealers sell drugs to local tourists and then turn around and go tell the police who they sold it to. The police come and arrest the tourists, who then have to spend hundreds, if not thousands of dollars, bribing their way out of jail. It’s a win/win for the dealers and cops, and a lose/lose for you. Which brings me to another point… 4. Don’t Buy Drugs Off the Street: Look, I’m not going to judge. I’ve had my fair share of good times. But don’t buy drugs from people off the street. If you really want to do something, find a local connection, ask around, make some local friends (as described in Chapter 8). When you buy drugs off the street, not only do you have no idea what’s in them, but you set yourself up for scams like the one above… or even worse. 5. Food Poisoning: If you plan on traveling through developing countries, get used to this. I’ve been traveling like this for three years. Like clockwork, I come down with major stomach viruses every six months or so. And the countries in which they happened is no coincidence: India, Brazil, Ecuador, Ukraine, Guatemala. The tap water thing is surprisingly not as big of a deal as people make it. You can drink the tap water in many countries you wouldn’t expect. And when you can’t, trust me, you can taste it. Brushing your teeth and showering in it are fine as well. I believe the problem is more the food. Our produce and food in the west is treated by a variety of chemicals, pesticides, strenuous cooking, kitchens with health codes, etc. This is simply not the case in the third world. If you get food poisoning, don’t panic. Just stay close to a bathroom. It may feel like death, but it’s not. Sadly, it’s actually quite normal. There’s a reason it’s referred to as Delhi Belly or Montezuma’s Revenge or some other nickname depending where you are. Because it happens all the time. 6. Medical Emergencies: Not rocket science: go to the hospital. Most countries, even poor, developing countries, have surprisingly good hospital care. Get it taken care of and then contact your insurance company. If it’s an extreme medical emergency, contact your embassy as soon as possible.
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iDoc.co Chapter 3: How to Fly For Cheap (Or For Free)
The steep cost of airfare – or even the thought of steep airfare – stops a lot of people dead in their tracks when they want to travel. They hear “Carnaval in Rio” and immediately think it’s going to cost an arm and a leg. Airfare can actually be one of the cheapest and most straightforward parts of your trip. You just have to know the tricks of the trade. This is a big topic, but it’s also possibly the most important topic. Finding cheap airfare and good deals can make or break your entire budget sometimes. What you’ll learn in this chapter is that airfare prices don’t make sense. None. They can change day-to-day, hour-to-hour, and the prices can change drastically depending on where you stopover and what hours or days you leave. For instance, I once flew to London from Austin, Texas for $297 with a single stop in NYC, whereas a ticket from Boston to London (with a stop in Dublin) ran over $500. I recently booked a trip from Colombia to Turkey. When I looked at a simple round-trip ticket from Medellin to Istanbul, it came out to over $1,700. But when I added Italy to the itinerary and searched for Medellin -> Rome -> Istanbul -> Medellin (with layovers in Madrid and Milan respectively), the entire trip came out to $1,100 – a total steal. Does this make sense? Not at all. The first part of this chapter will talk about how to search for airfare. There are some tricks that most people don’t know. Since airfare prices fluctuate so much, a knowledgeable person can try combinations and variations of a route to find cheaper tickets. You don’t always find one – in fact, I’d say you only find a ridiculously cheap fare ¼ of the time or so. But usually you can at least shave a few hundred dollars off the price you get on the first try. The next section of the chapter will cover miles and points and how you can “hack” your way around the world by earning free flights. Then, I’ll go over Round The World (RTW) tickets and the advantages of those for those of you who plan massive itineraries in advance. And then we’ll round out the chapter by talking about buses and trains. Not the ideal modes of transportation, but a godsend in certain regions (Latin America) and for people on a strict budget (Ecuador to Peru for $10? Yes, please.)
Gaming the System
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Like I mentioned earlier, airfare is calculated in often strange and unpredictable ways. Sometimes these “glitches” in the way airlines calculate their fares benefit us, other times they hurt us. I have two theories on why more complicated or less obvious airfare routes can often be cheaper: 1. When booking a trip that involves flights from multiple airlines, the algorithms are imperfect and sometimes spit out bizarre prices that benefit you. For instance, my trip to Istanbul and Italy from Colombia involves Avianca (Colombian), Alitalia (Italian), and Iberian (Spanish). Not only are these disparate airlines, but they’re also in different airline alliances (which I’ll explain in a minute). 2. Airlines are constantly price-testing tickets. What that means is that they may show 20% of people a higher price and 20% of people a lower price to see which one sells quicker and ends up more profitable, especially if it’s a particular popular or unpopular route. This is why you can often search on Kayak or Expedia and get a price and a few hours later get a completely different price for the same flight. And then a few hours later, the original price comes back. The trick is to know what to look for and spend a few hours looking around to find the best possible fairs. Below is a rundown of the process I go through when I look for airfare. 1. There are two website which you are going to need to use in conjunction with one another:
http://www.kayak.com and http://www.skyscanner.com Kayak aggregates all of the airfares from every travel agency into one search result. So when you search for Los Angeles to Houston, you get the results from all of the airlines, Expedia, Vayama, Cheaptickets, etc., all in one place. Skyscanner allows you to do blanket searches from a certain airport to an entire country, or from one country to the next. So instead of checking all of the individual flights between the hubs between the east coast of the United States and Spain manually (i.e., checking NYC to Madrid, NYC to Barcelona, Washington to Madrid, Washington to Barcelona, etc.), you can just type in: “United States” and “Spain” and Skyscanner will tell you the cheapest connection available at that time. 2. Know your hub airports like the back of your hand. Hub airports are the largest airports in any given region and they’re determined by how much air traffic goes through them. They are chosen both based on population as well as geography. The closer to the center of a region or continent they are, the more air traffic they will get. For instance, one would assume Philadelphia Airport is a major hub airport, right? Actually, no. JFK Airport is, as is Newark, New Jersey, two airports within less than an hour
flying from Philadelphia. Whereas you never would suspect that Atlanta or Dallas/Fort Worth iDoc.co are massive hubs, but they are due to their central location on the continent. It’s important to know your hub airports because direct flights between hub airports are most likely to be your cheapest fares. For instance, NYC to London Heathrow is going to be cheaper than Pittsburgh to London Luton. Hubs are your starting point for finding the cheapest routes. Here’s a run down of the major hubs in each region (minus Africa). This is by no means conclusive. It’s just based on my observations and experiences. North America: Boston Logan JFK Newark Charlotte (US Airways’ hub to Europe) Miami (biggest jump-off point to Latin America) Atlanta (Delta’s main hub) Chicago O’Hare (Hub for mostly N. American destinations) Dallas/Fort Worth Toronto LAX (Always has best fares to Australia, Fiji and New Zealand) Seattle/Tacoma (Best fares to S. Korea, Japan and China Europe: London Heathrow (discount airlines are based out of Gatwick and Luton) Madrid (The primary hub between Europe and South America) Frankfurt (Mostly a hub throughout Europe) Berlin Brandenburg Rome Amsterdam Moscow (best connection between Europe and Asia) Middle East: Istanbul Dubai (biggest hub between Asia, Europe and Africa) Latin America: Mexico City (Surprisingly not that great of a hub)
Panama City Bogota Lima São Paulo Guarulhos Buenos Aires Santiago
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Asia: Beijing Tokyo Seoul Hong Kong Bangkok (regional hub) Kuala Lumpur (Air Asia’s home base) I’m sure I’m missing some. And there are a myriad of smaller regional hubs that I’m leaving out (i.e., Singapore, Denver), but those are the major ones that come to mind. 3. The reason hub airports are important is because the cheapest airfares go from one hub to another. The first thing you always want to look at is to see if daisy-chaining flights together manually saves you any money. For instance, if you live in Memphis, Tennessee and want to go to Valencia, Spain (two nonhub airports), you can use Skyscanner to find that the cheapest round-trip tickets from the US to Spain during your dates are from JFK in New York and Miami, both to Madrid. From there you can check the cost between the domestic locations and add them up. So for instance (and I’m just making this up), let’s say searching for Memphis to Valencia alone brings back a cheapest fare of $1,050 round-trip (RT). You may find a fare from Miami to Madrid for $620 RT, a $200 RT fare between Memphis and Miami, and then find a domestic discount airline in Spain (such as Vueling) that will take you to Valencia and back for $75. Suddenly, that $1,050 fare is $895, a 15% savings. There are two problems you’ll run into with daisy chaining flights. The first is that often you get ugly times and layovers. You find that the only $200 flight that gets you to Miami in time arrives five hours before the flight to Madrid and leaves at 7 o’clock in the morning. These days, I’ve started opting out of some of these ugly itineraries because I value my sleep and don’t mind paying an extra $150 to not feel like shit the entire way over. But when I was younger and more broke, I did a lot of trips like this. (Ah, memories of sleeping in Charles De Gaulle Airport as well as trying to catch a couple of hours on the cold floor of Lima, Peru before heading to my 6AM connection to Brazil.
Total sidenote: For some maddening reason many South American airports are open-air, and iDoc.co believe it or not, it gets pretty fucking cold in the Andes. It’s not all tropical bikinis all the time like you think.) The other problem with daisy chaining is that you have to collect your luggage and check-in again each time. Also, if one flight is delayed and you miss the next, since you’re on two separate itineraries, the airline may not help you out or give you another ticket for missing it. So it’s almost better to allow yourself extra-long layovers in between legs of your trip. Daisy chaining seems to work better in the developing world than North America and Europe. I think it’s because the airlines in the West are better networked with one another and are able to keep track of who’s flying where and adjust their prices accordingly. Places like Latin America and Asia don’t do this, so you can often find some crazy deals and itineraries if you hunt around enough. Daisy chaining works fairly often. Unfortunately, it rarely saves you more than 20-25% of the cost on airfare. So you’re unlikely to ever find ridiculous savings by daisy chaining. 4. Make a habit of checking “alternative” airports if you’re not getting a great fare at first. For instance, most major international cities have 2-3 airports, or often there’s a city extremely close with an airport as well and you can get a better fare. For instance, Frankfurt and Dusseldorf are very close to one another and are both large international airports. New York City has three airports (JFK, La Guardia, and Newark in New Jersey) within an hour. Honestly, it usually doesn’t make much of a difference, but it’s still worth checking. Services like Kayak have a “add nearby airports” button for their searches that will do this automatically for you. 5. The next “hack” to check out is multi-city flights. When you look for a two-city fare, often they’ll pin you with layovers. For instance, you search for flights from Houston to Rio de Janeiro and it takes you through Panama City or Lima, Peru. Strangely, if you look for a three-city fare and put in Houston, Lima and Rio de Janeiro, occasionally you’ll save money, and sometimes you’ll save big. I already mentioned above how I saved over $500 on a RT ticket from Colombia to Turkey by ADDING a stop in Italy (which, by the way, I plan on taking full advantage of and staying there for a week). I got a steal flying home from Asia last year by adding a stop in Beijing between Bangkok and Seattle, and then daisy chaining from Seattle to Austin (where my family is). The initial fare from Bangkok to Austin was pushing $1,400 for a one-way trip. When I daisy chained through Seattle it brought it down to around $1,100. When I added the stop in Beijing, it came down to slightly less than $900 total. Not bad. Another example of this when I bought a ticket from Colombia to Brazil and found that adding
Lima to the itinerary and staying there for a few days actually reduced the overall ticket price iDoc.co from $840 to $770. So I stayed in Lima. And bought a discount airline ticket to Cuzco to see Machu Picchu. Which brings me to… 6. Discount airlines. Get familiar with them. Most of them actually DON’T pop up on the travel agency websites and aggregators. You need to google “X discount airline,” where X is the country. Also check WikiTravel and LonelyPlanet for local discount airlines. Just to give you a recent example. That same trip to Turkey, every flight within the country from Istanbul to other major cities ran at least a few hundred dollars. The only airlines popping up was Turkish Airlines and an occasional Pegasus Airlines which wasn’t much better. But a quick Google search uncovered that there are two local discount Turkish airlines: Atlas Air and Anadolu Jet. You can often get absolutely absurd deals with discount airlines. I’ve scored a Bangkok to Kuala Lumpur flight for $40 and a Amsterdam to Barcelona flight for $35 in the past. Here are some discount airlines to look out for and the regions they serve: Spirit Air (North America) TACA (South America) Ryan Air (Europe) EasyJet (Europe) Wizz Air (Eastern Europe) Vueling (Spain) Berlin Air (Germany) Jetstar (Australia) Air Asia (SE Asia) Tiger Airways (SE Asia/Australia) Nature Air (Costa Rica/Central America) There are a few aggregator websites for discount airlines and only discount airlines. Check out: http://www.wegolo.com http://www.aireuropa.com 7. The time and day you choose to go will affect your fare significantly as well. Late at night or very early in the morning are always cheapest. Tuesdays and Wednesdays are the cheapest days and Fridays and Saturdays are the most expensive. Also, always be aware of holiday rushes – Christmas is obvious, but also Carnaval (South America – yes, other countries have Carnavals too), Victory Day (Eastern Europe), Ramadan or a royal wedding (oops).
8. Airlines and travel agencies are always testing price points, so you’ll often see airfare change iDoc.co prices not only over the course of days but also hours. If you’re looking at a fare and suddenly you go to buy it and it says the price is higher, come back a day or two later. Often times the price will drop back down later. 9. Once you’ve found a route you like, check foreign travel sites of the countries involved. They will sometimes offer the same flight for less (or more). For instance, if you’re flying from the US to Brazil, check the flight both from the US sites and the Brazilian sites. You’ll be surprised how much they vary. But to be able to do this step, you MUST have a good bank account with currency conversions. If you have a bank that hoses you on currency conversions (as in, they charge a 5% conversion fee), then you will eliminate any of the savings you may otherwise get. How do you find foreign travel sites, you say? Well, that’s what I’m here for. I would list some major ones here, but that would take forever. Here’s what you do: 1. Open up two web browsers. Take one to Google Translate: http://translate.google.com 2. In the other, do a Google search for “Google [country]” where the country is wherever you’d like to look at flights from. For instance, if we want to check the Brazilian prices on flights from the US to Brazil, then we’d type in “Google Brazil” 3. The first result will be Google’s version for that country. In this case, it’s http://www.google.com.br. Google has a site for every country. So for Turkey it’s http://www.google.com.tr, for Argentina it’s http://www.google.com.ar, etc. 4. In Google Translate, type in “Flights to New York” or wherever you plan on flying from. Then translate it into the language of the country you want to fly to. In this case, the phrase in Portuguese is “Voos para Nova Iorque”. 5. Copy and paste that translated phrase into the Google version of the foreign country. 6. The search results will return all of the online travel agencies and flight aggregators of that country. In this case, the first result for our US-Brazil flight IN Brazil is http://www.voosbaratos.com (the translation is literally “cheapflights.com”) 7. Most foreign travel agency sites and aggregators will have translators on the page themselves. But if they don’t on the Google results, click “Translate this page.” 8. Search for the same flight or itinerary, but this time search for it from the other country. 9. Currency conversions can always be found at www.xe.com. 10. Generally speaking, the further from the flight date you are, the cheaper it’s going to be. I think in years past this was a more surefire way of getting cheaper fares, but I’ve found the last year or two that prices are pretty stable whether I’m buying them four months in advance or only a couple weeks. I’ve heard that if you wait until the day before a flight to purchase it, you can get it at a ridiculously discounted rate. My experience with this has actually been the opposite. If you wait until the day before or the day of to buy a ticket, chances are you are going to be paying a lot of money, even if it’s a brief trip.
Racking Up Points
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Anyone who wants to travel for extended periods of time needs to be at least aware of the points and rewards systems out there that airlines run. Believe it or not, I actually don’t focus a whole lot on racking up points. But that’s because it doesn’t reflect my lifestyle well. I use a lot of discount airlines, and regularly have no idea where I’m going to go until a few weeks or a month beforehand. On top of that, I spend almost no time inside the United States, which is by far the best place to rack up your points. That said, if you’re reading this and you’re of the “I have a day job but just want to take awesome vacations once or twice a year” variety, then I HIGHLY, HIGHLY recommend paying attention here because if you know what you’re doing then you won’t have to pay anything on a significant amount of your trips. I know people who live and die by their miles and rack up some amazing free trips with them. My mother, for one (a travel agent of 20+ years), gets multiple free trips to Caribbean Islands each year for doing little more than using her credit card wisely. My girlfriend (from Brazil) has used her points to earn free airfare to the United States and Europe multiple times over the past few years. I think miles are better suited for people who want to do one or two large vacations each year, plan on staying in hotels and/or resorts and are comfortable planning months and months in advance. If you’re like me, and fly by the seat of your pants (no pun intended) and buy tickets from obscure Russian airlines and show up to airports forgetting which airline you bought your ticket from, then points won’t be as important to you. 1. Lesson number one for understanding frequent flyer miles are the alliances. There are three alliances: Star Alliance, Sky Team, and One World. Each of these alliances is a group of 10-25 airlines who share frequent flyer miles with one another, and most of them have at least one airline represented on each continent (although not always). As an international globetrotter, it’s therefore important to pick an alliance and make an effort to stick to those airlines wherever you go. Some major airlines in each alliance: Star Alliance: United Airlines, US Airways, Air Canada, Air New Zealand, TACA, TAM Airlines, Lufthansa, Singapore Airlines, Air China. Sky Team: Delta Airlines, Air France, KLM, Korean Air, Alitalia, Aeromexico. One World: American Airlines, British Airways, Cathay Pacific, LAN, Qantas. Full lists can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_alliance
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A frequent flyer number from one airline within an alliance can be applied toward earning more miles or rewards with another alliance member. For instance, racking up points with Air France means you can theoretically earn a free ticket from Delta and vice-versa.
2. Airlines regularly offer bonuses for flying during certain periods or buying from their sky mall stores (yes, those catalogs in the back of the seat in front of you are actually used for something other than blowing your nose). The big bonuses come when an airline wants people to sign up for a credit card through them. The US airlines have been particularly apt to do this the last few years. They often offer 25,000 miles or more for little more than merely buying some tickets with it and then paying the credit card off on time. Sometimes they’ll offer one bonus for signing up, and then double the bonus if you spend a certain amount of money with the card or continue to spend and use it for a certain length of time. But aside from the bonuses, each dollar you spend with the card will give you one mile with that airline. Or in some rare cases, even two or three miles per dollar spent. 3. There are non-affiliated credit cards that give you awesome deals as well. The big one in the United States is American Express’s business cards. Depending on the type of card you get, you can earn up to 2x or even 3x miles per dollar you spend with the card. https://amexforbusiness.ca/en/compare-american-express-cards.aspx? inav=ca_menu_cards_sb_view The Holy Grail seems to be the Starwood American Express card. This card is one of the only cards that can be applied to ANY airline the world-over. And any time you transfer more than 20,000 points from the card to an airline, you get a 25% bonus. So if you transfer 40,000 miles, you get 10,000 miles free, meaning 50,000 miles total. The Starwood Amex about/Starwood-Preferred
card:
http://www304.americanexpress.com/getthecard/learn-
Citibank also offers credit cards that apply to your American Airlines mileage account (One World Alliance). You sign up and spend $1,000 to receive a 30,000 point bonus. The good news is that they have both Visa and Mastercards, so you can sign up for both of them and receive both bonuses. https://creditcards.citi.com/credit-cards/aadvantage-credit-cards As you can see, most of your miles are earned on the ground. Sign up for some cards with good bonuses and start buying with them. Pay them off every month and collect the miles. Combine that with your regular traveling, and you can easily land a couple international tickets per year for free if you play your cards right (yuk, yuk, yuk).
A few side notes:
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Typically, 25k miles = free domestic flight; 50k miles = free international flight. Hitting certain benchmarks can give you “silver,” “gold,” or “platinum” status with particular airlines. Perks include free upgrades to business class, access to lounges, skipping lines, no baggage fees, and having your ass kissed by everyone at the ticket counter. Most miles expire after a certain amount of time. Usually a year. So plan ahead and use them. Many flights with large discounts don’t apply toward your miles balance. I found a great $650 flight from Seattle to Seoul, and it turns out it didn’t apply to my points balance because I got it at a special price. For busy or popular flight routes, airlines often won’t accept points if they believe it’s likely they’ll sell the flight out. Generally speaking, you need to use your points way in advance (at least a few months in advance). Points can be applied toward many hotels. I have not done this, but from what I’ve read, it’s generally a rip off. Airfare will always give you the best bang for you mile.
Round The World (RTW) Tickets Round The World (RTW) tickets are like buying in bulk. In one sitting, you can line up a series of one-way tickets traversing their way around the planet, and the airline (actually the alliance, more accurately) comes back to you with a single, “discount” price. I put “discount” in quotation marks because honestly, if you looked hard enough, you could manually find one-way tickets around the world for less, sometimes as much as 20% less (if you use discount airlines). RTW fares range anywhere from $4,000 to $8,000 depending on your destinations, the amount of miles and whatnot. Star Alliance and One World each have their own online RTW applications (FYI: they’re a lot of fun to play with): Star Alliance: http://www.staralliance.com/en/fares/round-the-world-fare/ One World: http://www.oneworld.com/flights/round-the-world-fares/ Each alliance handles it a bit differently. In Star Alliance, what you’re charged is largely determined by miles. The tiers are 26,000, 29,000, 34,000 and 39,000 miles per trip. There’s a limit of 16 segments and stopovers and you have to start and finish in the same country. Available destinations include anywhere a Star Alliance flight goes (which is more or less everywhere you can imagine). One World is based on segments and continents. One World also forces you to finish in the same
city in which you began, but they allow “surface segments” where you can travel from oneiDoc.co segment to another over land. One World doesn’t have as many options and far more restrictions. I’ll admit, I have never done a RTW fare. The reasons are the same as before: I don’t plan far in advance. And up until about a year ago I didn’t have a whole lot of money. I was working online everywhere I went, so dropping $6,300 for a year’s worth of traveling wasn’t exactly viable for me. So what are the advantages to RTW tickets versus daisy chaining your own one-way fares across the world? There are a few: RTW tickets rack up BIG miles. After a solid RTW trip, you’ll have enough miles for at least one free ticket on your alliance of choice. Flexibility. You can pick 12 cities and then spend as much time as you’d like in each one. If you’d like to change a segment, you just call up the airline and they take care of it. Not a huge deal. There are some “hard to reach” places in the world, that are simply not cheap no matter what you do – isolated islands, small, obscure countries, tourist sites out in the middle of nowhere, etc. RTW tickets can get you to these hard to reach areas without the surcharges since you’re being charged in bulk. (This seems to me to be the biggest advantage of RTW trips. A trip to Easter Island or some obscure island off the coast of Africa can cost a lot of money by itself. With RTW, it’s just another segment.) Similar concept applies if you’re taking multiple long, trans-continental flights. A RTW becomes worth the value if you are actually, for real, going “round the world.” For instance, if you want to go from US to Brazil to South Africa to Italy to Dubai to India to Thailand to Australia and back to the US, then chances are you’ll get an equal or better deal on the RTW ticket. Whereas if you’re doing shorter or more informal trips – i.e., US to Bangkok, then to Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Korea, back to the US – you’re wasting your money. That can be done easily through discount airlines and deals for a little amount of money Buses and Trains Overland transportation is either a nightmare or a godsend, depending what continent you’re on and how much money you have. The first thing I’ll say is, generally speaking, the romanticizing of “seeing the real [enter country
here]” by taking a train or bus across it, is highly overrated, at least in my opinion.
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Seeing “the real Argentina” by taking a bus across it sounded amazing. 11 hours later, I decided I had seen about nine hours more of the “real” Argentina than I would have liked. So if your goal with ground transportation is anything other than saving a lot of money or visiting some small towns on the way somewhere, then I highly recommend against it. Whether you should bus or train varies highly depending on where you are. The train systems in the Americas are almost non-existent. Buses in Latin America are insanely cheap (Ecuador to Peru for $10?). Europe, it’s the opposite. The train system is excellent, affordable and highly inter-connected. But with European discount airlines getting so insanely cheap recently, it’s probably only worth it if you want to visit smaller cities and aren’t going far. And just an FYI: EuroRail passes are a RIP OFF. They are a scam sold to unsuspecting American tourists. They’re meant for business travelers who travel to multiple cities every week for months on end. Don’t bother with them. You’d have to take a five-hour train ride every day to make them worth it. In Asia, you’re kind of forced to pick your poison. Buses are horribly unreliable and the roads are bad. Also, traffic in Southeast Asia is near-death experience after near-death experience. (Seriously, I know you think wherever you’ve been the driving was bad, but until you see India or Cambodia, you have never seen crazy driving before. Trust me.) The trains, unfortunately, don’t get much better. In India and China, they’re so crowded that you may find yourself standing up the entire trip… or even worse, sitting in someone’s lap or someone sitting in yours (not kidding). In the more developed countries of Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore, the train was fine. In Japan, obviously the trains are amazing – a tourist attraction in and of themselves. Like I said, it’s going to vary a lot. In both cases, buses and trains can be bought at the station when you get there. With the exception of holidays, you should never have a problem getting a ticket, even if you show up the hour before a bus/train leaves. Also, in really cheap countries (India, Ecuador, Guatemala), hiring out a taxi driver for the day is usually more than affordable. A taxi from Guayaquil to the beach of Montañita (about a 90 minute drive each way) in Ecuador ran us $30US. In India, a full day trip to Agra from New Delhi cost us $40US. Buses and trains are good tools to be aware of and consider at your disposal, but you should not make the newbie mistake of relying on them too much when you travel to a region.
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Use them as a tool for flexibility, something that you decide on once you get there, because unless you’re seriously pinching pennies, organizing your trip around them is not worth it. Beating Jetlag
Jetlag is the necessary evil of any major overseas trip and a true pain in the ass. Luckily, with a few strategies, one can overcome it quickly and relatively painlessly. Interestingly, not all jetlag is created equal: flying west is easier than flying east. There are two reasons for this: 1. Our natural circadian rhythm (or the so-called “biological clock”) is actually closer to 25hours long. This is why it’s so much easier to stay up late at night than it is to get up early in the morning. Flying west six hours means you are six hours “behind” the time back home. This means you merely have to stay up an extra six hours each night to adjust. For most people, this is much easier than waking up six hours earlier each morning. 2. The way flight schedules work out, flying east over oceans usually means overnight flights. For instance, a flight from Miami to Rome may leave at 6PM on Friday and land at 9AM on Saturday. Chances are you will sleep a few hours at most on the nine-hour flight over (since almost no one goes to bed before 10PM). Therefore you land in Rome not only having only slept three or four hours the night before, but you now have to stay up a full 12-hours to begin normalizing. Whereas if you fly from Los Angeles to Tokyo, you may leave LA at 8AM, land in Tokyo at 1PM but it will feel like it is 8PM to your body. To normalize, all you have to is stay up for eight more hours, or the equivalent of staying up until 4AM on a normal night. That’s a couple movies and no problem. The other thing about flying west is that it causes your body to naturally wake up early, like 5AM and feel spry and ready to go. For many (myself included), this is a very welcome change. I actually often become MORE productive when I fly west. But when you go east, you will find yourself regularly crashing and becoming exhausted around noon or 2PM, fighting to stay awake and then suddenly finding yourself wide awake and unable to sleep at night when it’s time to go to sleep. The rule of thumb is that for every hour of time zone difference, you need one day to adjust. So if you are from New York City, and you fly to Germany (six hours, depending on Day Light Savings) then you will need six days to adjust completely. If you are from Los Angeles and you go to Thailand (10-hour difference), then you will need 10 days on average.
I personally find that flying west takes me fewer days than the rule of thumb and occasionally going iDoc.co east takes me more. The golden rule of jetlag is to never nap until you’re adjusted. Just don’t do it. You’ll want to so bad, but don’t. What often happens is that “nap” is actually when your body is used to falling into a deep eight-hour sleep, so you end up waking up from your “nap” five hours later and it’s dark outside and your body is ready to go as if it’s a new day. And even if you do manage to get yourself out of bed after an hour or two, the nap makes you feel worse than you felt before you laid down. So just don’t do it. Use caffeine, walk around the new city, take a tour or two, and just don’t lie down. At night, if you can’t fall asleep or wake up and can’t fall asleep, use some sleep aids or melatonin. As for jetlag “cures”, a number have been touted lately. An article recently claimed that if you fast before, during and after your flight, and then only eat right before wanting to fall asleep (and eating a lot of carbs), you would not experience any jetlag. The theory goes that our body determines when it’s time to sleep partly by our eating schedule. Fasting resets that eating schedule and then breaking the fast makes us incredibly drowsy. I will say that I have noticed that eating on a normal schedule when jetlagged is highly advantageous. For example, if I’m in London and I’m on central US time, then I will get hungry at lunch, dinner and then in the middle of the night, but NOT at breakfast. If I just eat when I’m hungry, I’m keeping my body on its previous eating/sleeping schedule, whereas if I force myself to eat a normal breakfast, lunch and dinner, then I will adjust more quickly. Another “cure”: lab tests have found that Viagra (yes, that Viagra) reduces jetlag by as much as 50%. Don’t ask me how they tested that. And unfortunately I have no personal experience to vouch for this one. And finally, there are some new pills showing up on the market that you take while flying that, supposedly, prevent jetlag. No idea if they work. A friend of mine has taken them with good results though. Here are some: http://www.nojetlag.com/ http://www.jetease.com
Chapter 4: Accommodations
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There are a variety of ways to house yourself while traveling. What you go with will depend on the nature of your trip and as well as how long you’re going to be in one place. You have four options when staying in a foreign country: 1. 2. 3. 4.
Get an apartment. Stay in a hotel. Crash in a hostel. Stay with somebody who lives there.
Here’s a breakdown of each type of accommodation and what you can expect from them. Finding an Apartment If I travel anywhere for more than a week, I usually get an apartment. This may sound excessive, but you’d be surprised how cheap it is to rent a nice furnished place for a week or two. In most parts of the world, it’s about as much as you’d pay for a hotel room, but you get more privacy and often a much better location. In many places, apartments can even be cheaper than hotels, particularly Europe, where hotels are insanely overpriced. If I stay anywhere more than two weeks, I always get an apartment. The trick with apartments is location, location, location. Hotels are usually located around sightseeing areas and the touristy bars and restaurants. Apartments, you can get one where the locals hang out, often in the nicest part of town. When I get an apartment, it usually means I’m dedicating a little more time to a city/country than usual. Since I’m spending more time in one place, sightseeing and tourist areas are a much lower priority, and finding a way to socially establish myself and make friends is a much higher priority. For that reason, I can actually often save money because I’m not looking to stay in the most expensive part of town. Apartments can be grabbed in a variety of places – in fact, they’re getting easier and easier to rent as the years go on. Hostel sites such as http://www.hostelworld.com and hotel booking sites such as http://www.booking.com now list furnished, short-term apartments on their sites. The best place to start, though, is http://www.airbnb.com/. The site is nothing but apartments, room shares and houses. Many of the people on there are locals who will rent you their spare room. This can be a great way to meet people first upon arrival.
In fact, moving in with a local roommate instead of getting my own place has always lead iDoc.co to some of my most enjoyable experiences in a country. When you first arrive somewhere, it can be lonely (especially if you don’t speak the language). Having a roommate or two to show you around and introduce you to people is a great way to start things off. Other sites to find apartments: http://www.craigslist.org (United States) http://www.easyquarto.com.br (Brazil) http://www.gumtree.co.uk (United Kingdom) http://www.gumtree.co.au (Australia) http://www.trademe.co.nz (New Zealand) It should be noted that it is somewhere between difficult and impossible to land a lease in a country in which you’re not a resident or do not at least have a bank account. If you’re staying somewhere for a long period of time, it’s best you negotiate some form of housing through your employer or institution. Usually businesses or schools will take care of leases for you. Otherwise, you are limited to sublets and month-to-month agreements. Hotels Hotels can be an excellent option but are almost always the most expensive option. If I’m only going somewhere for a few days up to a week, I’ll usually book a hotel. The benefits of a hotel are that you usually have all of the amenities you need. You have your own bed, your own bathroom, clean towels and sheets, TV, internet, a decent location and nice room, etc. The downside of hotels is that you’re pretty isolated and it’s harder to meet people when staying in them. I usually only pick hotels over hostels (next section) in two specific instances: 1) I’m only visiting somewhere for a couple days and am not really interested in going out or meeting anybody or 2) I already know someone who lives where I’m visiting and am meeting up with them. Where I am now as I write this is a perfect example of the first situation: Dublin. I’ve been here before. I did the hostel thing the first time. Nice city, but as someone who’s passing through for two days and has been here before, there’s honestly little to do or little that interests me. I’m here right now because taking a two-day layover saved me almost $500 on airfare back to the US. So I’m basically just killing time. Another example is when I was in Kuala Lumpur last year. I was there for 2 days, just to stop through between two other countries. Wasn’t too interested in doing a whole lot or meeting a ton of people so I stayed in my room and worked. The second situation is when I’ve got a friend or client who lives in the city I’m visiting. I’ll take the hotel because really the only advantage hostels have over hotels is the ability to meet people easily. If I don’t need to meet people, then I’ll do a hotel. Having my own room and clean bathroom is more than worth the extra cost to me. Where to book hotels: There are as many online hotel sites as there are travel sites. There are also a lot of deals to be had. Here are some of the more notable sites for hotels:
http://www.booking.com - This is the most popular European hotel booking site and what iDoc.co I often end up using. I simply find that it gives me the best rates more often than not. http://www.priceline.com - Interesting site where you book hotels anonymously. You search for hotels by price and don’t know exactly where you’re staying until after you book. Guarantees the best prices but are usually similar to other sites. Every once in a while you find a killer deal here though, so it’s worth checking, especially for large cities. http://www.agoda.com - From what I hear, offers excellent rewards for people who book through them. I don’t use them often, but I know people who swear by them and land free rooms every now and again. http://www.cheaptickets.com - One of my most preferred airfare sites, but I’m including here because they often offer crossover deals – i.e., if you buy a certain amount of airfare from them, then they will give you 20% off a hotel room or whatever. Hostels I’ve developed a love/hate relationship with hostels and the backpacker lifestyle. These days I prefer to avoid hostels in many cases, but they’re still great for what they are. I would say if you want to travel on a budget and/or you’re under 25 years old, you should absolutely do the backpacker/hostel thing at least for a while. It’s a great experience and I’m glad I did it. The benefits of a hostel are that it’s extremely easy to meet people. Hostels are like dormitories in college, except that everyone is a traveler and from a different country. You’ll often share a room of tiny beds with anywhere from 4 to 16 people in one room. You almost never have your own bathroom. They’re dingy, tiny places. But they’re cheap, and usually full of young people who like adventure and are excited to meet other travelers. It varies from hostel to hostel, but backpackers tend to be English-speakers and Europeans, aged 18-25, and are usually inexperienced at traveling. If you are passing through a city for a few days and want to meet people to hang out and have a drink with, see some tourist sites with, or just hang out with and talk, hostels are great. But hostels have drawbacks as well. The accommodations are usually small, cramped and not very nice. A bunch of drunk 19-year-old British guys seem like fun at first, but when you are woken up to them vomiting at 4AM all over the room, and oh, you have to get up in three hours to catch the bus to the airport, the charm quickly evaporates. I may just be getting old and elitist, backpackers are usually nice enough, but you can practically interchange them all for each other. They’re all young, all adventurous, all excited to see the world, all in between jobs or careers or schools back home. Then you get drunk with them and three days later never see them again. Then you meet another batch and go through the same half dozen conversations all over again. I have made some lasting friendships with people I met in hostels, but they’re the exception, not the rule. I guess the point is that the quality of your hostel experiences will vary widely based on a lot of factors. You’re always taking a gamble when you check into one. Some of my best travel
experiences happened in hostels. Some of my worst travel experiences also happened in hostels. I iDoc.co just recommend that if you have the money to book a private room, do it. Like I said, the hostel experience is something every traveler should do. But do it and then move on to apartments and really enmeshing yourself in the culture and people wherever you travel. In many hostels, it’s almost like the kids never left home. They drink the same beer, go to the same bars and hang out with the same people they do back home. They just do it in another country. Churchill famously said, “If you’re not a liberal at 20, then you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative at 40, then you have no brain.” I think I could say something similar for hostels: “If you don’t enjoy backpacking at 20 then you have no sense of adventure. If you don’t dislike backpacking by 30, then you’re immature.” Or you’re still broke. Or you’re a pot-head. Or you like creeping on college girls who don’t shower enough. Either way. I always book hostels through http://www.hostelworld.com The Guide to Couchsurfing Couchsurfing is a social network for travelers. The idea is that you sign up and let travelers sleep on your couch when/if they pass through your city. Then when you travel, other Couchsurfers return the favor. It may sound a bit creepy, but it’s developed a massive worldwide community and has been a raging success. My Couchsurfing experiences themselves have been pretty tame and lacking. I would only recommend actually staying at someone’s place if you’re absolutely broke and desperate to meet some cool locals. Typically, it’s more hassle than it’s worth, as people live in random parts of town, have day jobs, aren’t around, or could turn out to be weirdos. To Couchsurf at someone’s place you have to message them and request a couch and then they are free to receive you or deny you. The same goes for people when they visit your country. Surprisingly, many, many Couchsurfers are willing hosts. You would expect people to be far pickier about who stays with them, but a lot of my couch requests were returned and the people were hospitable. Some tips on landing a host: 1.Request someone of the same gender. Unfortunately, a lot of the men on Couchsurfing have developed reputations for just using it to pick up. 2.Be flexible with your dates and times. 3.Spend time making your profile cool. Show travel photos. Get people to vouch for you on the site who you’ve met before. Leave feedback for others and ask for it in return. 4.Offer something in return, perhaps a talent, help with a language, or even house chores. As with most social networking sites, the shotgun approach is best: shoot out 5-10 messages before you arrive somewhere. By the time you’re in transit you should have heard back from 1/3 to 1/2 of them. Make plans accordingly
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I personally prefer to use Couchsurfing to make friends. It’s a quick and easy way to link up with like-minded people of different countries. In major cities around the world, there are large meet ups every week or month with dozens of local people. This is often a great way to make some connections and find something cool and authentic to do with a local.
If there are no meetings, then just check out the local people and message whoever looks cool to meet for coffee or a drink. Sign up at: http://www.couchsurfing.org/
Chapter 5: Your Escape Plan
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Sonia was a 34-year-old lawyer from Canada. She had spent the last ten years busting her ass for her firm, often worked 80-hour weeks. In that time, she worked her way up and made herself indispensible to her firm. One day, she approached her boss and told him that she was taking a year off. He could either hire her back when she came back or she’d go find work somewhere else. Her boss agreed. She spent the next year living throughout Europe, in Italy, France, Holland and London, before returning back to her job. Jeff was a 26-year-old from the US. In 2007, he joined a volunteer organization through his university and spent the summer working in Kenya. He fell in love with it. Upon graduation he returned to Africa and took his hand at running a small organization himself. It was tiring but it paid off, as it got him into a prestigious graduate program in London. Between semesters he backpacked around Europe on the cheap. Upon graduation, before returning to Africa to head up his own organization, which he founded, based on his graduate thesis, he spent two months in India. Matt took advantage of a study abroad program to Shanghai in 2006. During that time he networked and was able to line up an excellent job offer in Seoul when he graduated. But after working there for a year, he decided the work culture of Korea was too much for him. He found another job in Beijing making good money and living a good life. He traveled around China on his off-weeks, learned some Mandarin, but still, he was making more money than he needed to live well in Beijing. After a couple years, he decided to quit his job, move to Bangkok, and start his own online business living off his savings. The most common travel-related email I receive is the following: “How do you manage to live abroad for so long, and how can I do it too?” Yes, very vague and general, because there are a million correct answers here. This chapter will cover viable “escape plans” – ways for you to get your ass abroad for extended periods of time without going broke and without screwing your life up irreparably. The first big question is what kind of traveler do you want to be? You can divide travelers into a handful of informal groups: tourists, backpackers, volunteers/foreign-workers, nomads and expats. The tourists are your stereotypical people on vacation. They crammed Rome, Paris and Venice into six days and get up early every morning so they can bury their nose into their guidebook and catch
every last site and landmark. These are also the people who stay in expensive resorts, check out iDoc.co fancy restaurants, and get spa packages. (There’s nothing wrong in being a tourist, by the way. I periodically drop into “tourist mode” when I’m only stopping in a country for a few days and there’s a site or two I really want to see.) Backpackers tend to be younger, they’re on a tight budget, they want to see and do as much as possible with as little money as possible, and they have a tendency to party a lot. Backpackers are all about the adventure and spontaneity. That may mean seeing the Eiffel Tower one day, and then getting lost in a small French village and making friends with a local baker the next. Backpackers tend to stay in hostels, clump together into ad hoc good-times committees, and retain questionable hygiene. Volunteers, aid workers, activists, teachers, all tend to get set up with their own housing since they’re going to be there long-term. Same with study abroad students. The perk of this situation is that you get to ingratiate yourself into the culture over an extended period of time while having your expenses, visas, logistics covered for you. The downside is that you have less flexibility in where you go and when. Nomads are like me. They may swing through a place for two days or two months. They may crash in a hostel and party for a weekend, or rent an apartment and spend three months programming a new web project. Expats are expats; they are permanent residents in the foreign country. So what should you pursue? Most of the answer to this question is going to depend on your work situation and how satisfied you are with it. I would break it down like this: If you have a job you like or you don’t want to quit, then focus on taking periodical vacations or extended sabbaticals as a tourist and/or backpacker. If you have some sort of independent income, a bunch of money in the bank, a gap year to kill, or you just want to vagabond it and see what happens, then you’ll be traveling in more of a backpacker/nomad style over a long period of time. If you have a lot of passive income, then you can live large wherever you go, whenever you want. If you’re broke, have no job, have no income, but still want to get the hell out of town, then you’re mostly limited to finding volunteer and teaching opportunities (or starting a new career abroad). We’ll start with the simplest escape plans (extended vacations, gap years, sabbaticals) and work our
way out to the more complicated ones (working or volunteering abroad) and finally finishiDoc.co with the most difficult one (creating passive income to live where you’d like). Throughout this chapter and throughout your planning, it will be very important to be able to estimate the expected cost of living of any location. There are a couple websites which are good for this: http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living http://www.expatistan.com/ Vacations, Gap Years, Sabbaticals These are the most simple to plan and are your classic travel situations. Pick a region you’d like to visit (refer to the next chapter for ideas/help), budget, pick the dates and then go. Availability of vacation and sabbaticals is going to vary from country-to-country and occupation-tooccupation. So I’m not going to venture to guess what your situation may be like. Whether you’ve got a month or a year to kill, figure out where you want to go, budget it out, and then do it. If you have money saved up and want to take time off work but you have no idea how to go about it, check out: http://www.i-resign.com/ It’s a website about quitting your job gracefully, taking a leave of absence, or going on long-term sabbaticals. The principle here is that you’re either choosing to take a break from your life (gap year, sabbatical) or to enter into a transition of your life (career change, quit job, go back to school, etc.) and you want to insert some extended travel into that transition. Sabbaticals are provided in some countries, but in many they are not – at least not officially. I opened this chapter with an example of a woman I met who received a year-long sabbatical for no other reason than she asked for it and was indispensable to her law firm. Are you indispensable? If so, then you could easily swing it. My girlfriend, as I write this, is planning on submitting a sabbatical ultimatum with her advertising agency. She’s confident that even if her boss doesn’t take her back, she’d have no trouble getting hired elsewhere. Other people get a bit more clever and parlay their traveling into career opportunity. Asia is particularly useful for this. There are a dizzying amount of career opportunities sprouting up in Asia, especially for people with western educations. It’s actually possible to schedule job interviews and get offers WHILE backpacking through Asia. One can even network ahead of time using LinkedIn and the internet. Some more info here: http://postmasculine.com/how-to-be-an-international-career-hacker
iDoc.co Study Abroad If you’re a college student, I highly, highly, highly recommend getting set up with a study abroad program of some sort if possible. I know it sounds daunting – four to six months in a foreign country, none of your friends with you – but do it. Everyone I know who did it in school reported that it was one of the best experiences of their lives, myself included. Finances are the biggest hurdle for most students. That or their school doesn’t offer any programs. Despite this, most college students ARE eligible for study abroad scholarships. You will need to have good grades though to qualify. You can find information about study abroad scholarships at the resources below: http://www.studyabroad.com/scholarships.aspx http://allabroad.us/funding1.php http://www.aifsabroad.com/scholarships.asp There is also the famous Erasmus program, which allows foreigners to study at European universities for one year: http://www.erasmusprogramme.com/ For those of you who have full-time jobs or careers, things get a bit more complicated and inflexible. Opportunities to live and work abroad are going to vary drastically between industries and companies. If you work for a massive multi-national retailer or in finance or in advertising, you’ll probably have some options – if not with your company, with another one within the industry. But if you’re in software development or manufacturing or the service industries, then chances are you won’t. There are some professions, such as doctors, nurses, and hospitality, where you can volunteer your time abroad for a short period of time. One such program: http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/ Also, keep in mind that, as of this writing, the emerging economies in some regions, particularly Asia, offer a LOT of professional opportunities for college-educated westerners. So moving your career overseas, even if only for a few years, could be more feasible than you think. More on this in a minute. Volunteering and Teaching There are countless organizations out there that are always looking for young, educated, western people to either volunteer or take basic teaching jobs in developing countries. And typically, the
more developing the country, the easier it is to get set up. So if you’re into the whole rustic, iDoc.co outdoorsy, don’t-shower-for-a-week, travel experience, it sounds like you may have found your calling. The first and most popular organization to volunteer for (assuming you’re from the US) is the Peace Corps: http://www.peacecorps.gov/ The Peace Corps was created in the ‘60s and sends college-educated Americans abroad to volunteer for two years at a time. All expenses are taken care of during that time and volunteers are provided a local place to live wherever they work. The problem is that you have little to no control over where you get sent. So you may be all excited to get your hands dirty in Latin America, but they send you to Ghana instead. But aside from the Peace Corps, there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of organizations looking for volunteers abroad. I recommend using http://www.goabroad.com/ to search through non-profits you can work for. You can browse based on country you’d like to go to, the type of work you’d like to do, and how long you’d like to stay. The limitations of volunteering are that you’re mostly going to be limited to developing countries. And like I said earlier, the rougher the country, the more they’re likely going to need volunteers. I know some people who have volunteered in Africa (Morocco and Tanzania, respectively) and both ended up spending some months alone, stuck in their one-room, dirt-floor homestays with nowhere to go and nothing to do for large periods of time. Not exactly exciting. The other problem with volunteering is your mobility and income will be limited. So if you get stuck in the middle of nowhere in Bolivia with no income, you may have trouble getting far. On the other hand, I know a girl who volunteered in Cambodia and loved it so much her family literally had to fly out to drag her home. Another friend of mine taught English in the Philippines and was in no hurry to get home either. These types of volunteer jobs tend to work best for people who love the outdoors and don’t mind getting a bit dirty, and for people who specifically love a certain culture or region. (Not to say that there aren’t some posh volunteering jobs in nice places. There are. They just tend to be more competitive and require more qualifications.) Then there is teaching English. Believe it or not, to teach English in most countries, you don’t need credentials beyond a college education. A TEFL certification to teach English is helpful and will probably land you the nicer jobs in nicer countries with more pay, but it’s not required.
I actually applied for a teaching job in Japan my senior year of college and got accepted toiDoc.co go there and teach for a year. But upon further research I found that the hours were long and the pay was crap. People who teach English abroad are often hit in the face pretty hard with reality: teaching kids is not easy in any language, much less one which you don’t know; teaching a subject you’ve never taught before is hard as well; and it is especially hard when you don’t know anyone and aren’t making a lot of money. Honestly, I hope you love kids. Again, there are people who love teaching English abroad, but almost everyone I talked to said there was a steep learning curve and it wasn’t exactly enjoyable, particularly in the beginning. For these reasons I ended up not taking the Japan job. That and I wanted to be based in Tokyo or Osaka but the company couldn’t promise me any specific location. There was a good chance that I’d get stuck out in the countryside for a solid year or more. I’m not a countryside guy, so I said no thanks. But if you do find a program that you’re interested in, teaching jobs are notoriously easy to land. These companies have such obscenely high turnover (for the reasons listed above) that it’s a seller’s market. Some good places to start in finding teaching jobs abroad: http://www.eslemployment.com/ http://www.worldteach.org/ http://www.languagecorps.com/ http://www.teachaway.com/ http://www.footprintsrecruiting.com/ http://www.goabroad.com/teach-abroad Those are just to get you started. If there’s a particular country you’d like to teach in, just google “Teach English in X” where X is that country. Teaching and volunteering can also be useful to get visas handled or deal with otherwise unsavory paperwork. Also, if you land in a big country with a lot of culture, then you can take the money you make to explore the rest of it, or explore some surrounding countries. I talked to a guy who taught English in Chile for a while, and then used that money to travel up through Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador. You can teaching English in this way to fund further travel and to eliminate a lot of red-tape hassles of typical tourist travel. For example, let’s say you want to go to China, but the visa and paperwork is a huge hassle. You could set yourself up to teach English there for a few months, earn some basic pay, get used to the culture, and then when you’re done, take off and visit the rest of the country and some of the surrounding countries on the money you saved up.
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Some teaching gigs do offer lenient vacation time as well, which you can take advantage of. And the more teaching experience you get in one country, the more teaching jobs in other countries will open up to you. Work Abroad What about finding a legitimate career-like job in another country and working there for an extended amount of time? There are two ways to go about this, and neither is simple. The first is to work for a US company (or wherever you’re from) that has branches or divisions all over the world and then request to be transferred to them. In some companies this is an easy process with a lot of flexibility. In others, it is not. The other option is to apply for jobs with companies directly in another country. This can be easy or difficult depending on the country’s work permits and the country’s economy/demand for westerners. For instance, the UK is incredibly uptight about work permits. I already have a job, but every time I go there, border patrol still bothers me about whether I’m going to get a job there or not. On the other hand, China and other growing Asian countries practically can’t hire educated westerners fast enough. There’s a perception in the west – particularly in the United States – that working in a foreign country, especially a developing country, means living worse off. In fact, the opposite is often true. Places such as Hong Kong, Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur, Bangalore – yeah, they hire you for a fraction of what you would make in New York City or London. But the cost of living and the perks are through the roof. A friend of mine visited a hotel owner in Kuala Lumpur who was looking for western educated managers. He said that he would take anybody with a degree from a western university, make them manager immediately, give them (yes, give them) their own penthouse in downtown Kuala Lumpur, and pay them the equivalent of making six-figures back home (comparable to cost-of-living in Malaysia). Now, you may be thinking, “OK, that’s nice, but who would want to live in Malaysia?” Actually, you’d be surprised at how developed and nice Kuala Lumpur is. It has the third tallest building in the world (Petronas Towers, taller than the Empire State Building), one of the largest indoor malls in the world (with an indoor rollercoaster), plenty of five-star hotels and restaurants, a vibrant nightlife, an efficient metro, tropical weather year-round, and all of the luxuries and
amenities you would expect in a world-class city.
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Not to mention it’s the hub for AirAsia, meaning you have quick, cheap flights to anywhere in Southeast Asia at your fingertips. The beauty of transferring your typical, run-of-the-mill banking or accounting or medical job overseas, depending on the country, is that you immediately become an high-roller. When I lived in São Paulo, I met a lot of guys my age working down there in finance. Back home, in Chicago or New York or Boston, they had been lowly grunts, number-crunching monkeys. But in São Paulo, they were all-stars. And they were set up with amazing lives in the biggest city in South America, in one of the coolest countries in the world! Can’t complain about that. The best way to start plotting your career abroad is to hop online and start researching it yourself. I have no idea what your needs or goals are, so I’ll let you feel those out yourself. http://www.overseasjobs.com http://www.overseasdigest.com http://www.emergingmarketcareers.com (specializes in Asia)
Working Remotely and Passive Income The Holy Grail: being able to earn money from anywhere in the world. The best is what is called “passive income”, basically income you make without ever lifting a finger. Some popular professions that allow you to live remotely around the world: Stock/options trader Freelance writer/blogger Internet Marketing/Copywriting Poker Player Search Engine Optimization Web/Graphic Designer Programmer/Software Engineer Consultant To develop passive income, you need to build some sort of asset. This could be as simple as a small web project that generates some advertising money each month, or owning an entire business. It could be the interest and dividends you collect on your investments. The unfortunate aspect of all of these professions is that they all have a steep learning curve and
require suffering through a few years making little to no money before you start having aiDoc.co sustainable income. I started as a blogger who did internet marketing projects on the side as well as took on consulting clients for their dating lives. For the first two years in 2008 and 2009, I basically subsisted and that was it. By the end of 2009, I had enough online products and projects bringing in passive income, and I was able to charge my clients a lot more money because I had spent two years building a reputation for myself. At the end of 2009, I was able to take off and start living and working abroad. But even then, I was very limited in where I could go and how much I could spend on my cost of living. And that was after working two years full-time on my internet business. If there’s anything people don’t seem to get, it’s that it’s a long, hard road to develop locationindependent income. It’s a road measured in years, not months. But it’s worth it. Whichever of the above skills you gravitate to is going to depend on your skill-set, your interests and how much money you’re starting out with. Blogging requires no money to get started, but you have to get comfortable writing A LOT. I.e., 3,000 words per week. And it needs to be high quality. And you need to do it for at least a year or two before you start getting some regular readers. And even then, there’s no guarantee that you’ll be able to monetize. Blogging is often the first thing new web entrepreneurs gravitate to, but it may be one of the most difficult things to make money off of quickly. Programming on the other hand requires a lot of prior knowledge or experience, but if you know what you’re doing, hopping right in and developing some clients is quick and easy. The same goes with marketing, although marketing is a much more subjective field and requires a lot of networking. If you’re looking to get into the freelancing biz, then you have to start somewhere. And unfortunately, that starting place means taking a lot of low-paying, crappy gigs. The goal here is to build three things: 1) experience, 2) a client base, 3) a network. This takes time. This means hopping on www.elance.com or www.odesk.com and taking some crappy jobs for $10 per hour for a few months and being aggressive about netting return clients and networking to find more opportunities. Once you’ve built up a solid reputation for yourself and have some regular clients, then you can up your rates and continue to expand. The goal is to eventually only take on a small amount of highly qualified, big ticket clients –
whether it be copywriting, design or programming.
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It often takes a few years to get to this level. In fact, even if you’re already the best in the world at any of the skills above (which you’re not), it’s going to take you a couple years to really build a solid business for yourself where you’re making a respectable income regularly. I don’t mean to dishearten you. In fact, quite the opposite: what I’m telling you is to start NOW. And the thing is, you don’t have to wait until you have your business built up completely before you go, you can build it as you travel. For instance, when I went to Europe in 2009, I was only making about $1,000 per month in passive income. That is not even close to enough to live off of in Europe – in fact, it was about half of what I needed to survive. But, I had been living with my girlfriend at the time and so I had a few thousand dollars saved in the bank. I also knew that I had a lot of business connections in Germany, so I made a point to try to grab some clients while I was over there. I did. I got three new clients while there, which almost paid for the entire trip by itself. So, even though I had half of the passive income I needed to survive in Europe, I knew I could probably grab a couple clients there, and even if that didn’t work out, I had a small safety net in the bank, just in case. People over-estimate how much income is required to live in some amazing parts of the world. As I said in the introduction of this book, it’s usually cheaper than you think. Below is a “best bang for your buck” list. These are some of my favorite places and places where I believe you can get the highest quality of life for the lowest cost of living at the moment. The numbers are assuming you have your own furnished apartment in a good location with your own bedroom, internet, are eating normally and have a social life. Obviously, if you want to give up any of the above amenities, you will save money. Amount per month required to live comfortably in each location (all numbers are estimates): Buenos Aires, Argentina -- $1,500 per month Medellin, Colombia -- $1,250 per month Chiang Mai, Thailand -- $850 per month Bali, Indonesia -- $1,000 per month Berlin, Germany -- $2,000 per month Puerto Vallarta, Mexico -- $1350 per month Kiev, Ukraine -- $1,350 per month
Prague, Czech Republic -- $1,500 per month Cebu, Philippines -- $750 per month Bangkok, Thailand -- $1,250 per month Beijing, China -- $1,500 per month
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Just for reference: Boston, USA -- $3,000 per month London, UK -- $3,500 per month Austin, USA -- $2,750 per month As you can see, you can easily get a higher quality of life outside of the US for a fraction of the price of what it costs to live and remain inside the US. And tack onto this cheaper health care costs, no car payments or parking, etc. Some resources to help you get started: Apply for Freelance Work: http://www.elance.com http://www.odesk.com http://www.rentacoder.com (for programming) Other places to find online work: http://www.locationindependent.com http://www.locationrebel.com Internet Marketing: http://www.warriorforum.com/ http://forums.digitalpoint.com Search Engine Optimization: http://www.seomoz.org http://www.seobook.com Poker: http://www.twoplustwo.com http://www.cardrunners.com Programming/Software: http://code.google.com/edu/ http://www.codecademy.com Web Design: http://www.w3schools.com http://www.htmldog.com Trading: http://www.tradingacademy.com
General Resources: http://noexcuselist.com/
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A quick note about taxes: When you work or earn income abroad, this income is not taxable by your home country. This is FANTASTIC news for people who want to live or work abroad. The glaring exception is if you’re from the United States. Yes, the United States is the only major country in the world that still taxes its citizens, even if they never step foot or make a dollar inside US borders. There is a sizeable tax exemption though for US expats. If you spend more than 330 days outside of the US in any given year, you are allowed to write off the first $91,500 you earn that year. For most people, this is more than you’ll ever have to write off to owe nothing. But despite that, Uncle Sam DOES require every citizen, no matter how long they’ve been living abroad, to submit a tax return – yes, even if you owe nothing. How Much Money Do I Need? This, more than anything, is the critical question. Unfortunately it’s impossible to answer with a single blanket answer. As I mentioned earlier, the more money you have saved up, the less income you need. The more income you have, the fewer savings you need. There are three costs to consider when living abroad for extended periods of time: living costs, transportation costs, and tourism costs. Living Costs: This one is perhaps the easiest. Here’s a breakdown of where you can live in the world for various monthly prices. $500 per month or less: Rural Africa, rural India and SE Asia, rural parts of Central America. $500 to $1,000 per month: India, Philippines, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, rural China, rural South America, most of Africa, parts of Central America (i.e., Guatemala, Nicaragua) and the Caribbean countries. $1,000 to $1,500 per month: Thailand, Malaysia, Bali, mid-sized cities in China, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Colombia, Paraguay, Ukraine, Moldova, and Central Asia. $1,500 to $2,000 per month: Rural United States/Canada, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Northeast and Amazon Brazil, Cities in China (minus Shanghai and Hong Kong), South Africa, Most of Eastern Europe and Russia (minus St. Petersburg and Moscow), Spain, Italy, Greece, Israel. $2,000 to $3,000 per month: Most cities in United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Europe and Brazil.
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$3,000 to $4,000 per month: Boston, Miami, Los Angeles, Rio De Janeiro, São Paulo, Shanghai, Toronto, Stockholm. $4,000+ per month: New York City, London, Moscow, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney, Oslo, Zurich, Dubai.
(Note: The list above is by no means complete or 100% accurate in all locations at all times. These are just estimates circa 2011-2012. For more accurate estimates, refer to the cost-of-living websites referenced previously in the book.) Transportation Costs: Also varies depending on region and means of travel. If you plan on hopping around a lot, obviously the expenses add up. If you plan on living in the middle of a city with good public transport for months on end, then your transportation expenses will remain low. With the exception of Europe and Asia, most one-way airline tickets are $150-250. In Europe and Asia, the discount airlines can often take you for $100 or less. Trains and/or buses are almost always cheap. The high end is around $50-100 per ticket in the United States and parts of Europe. The low end is just a few dollars in places in South America or Southeast Asia. Tourism Costs: One of the big reasons that I recommend NOT traveling like a tourist is because you save so much money by not being one. Prices are hiked anywhere tourists are: airports, bus stations, famous tourist sites, tour companies, major tourist cities, etc. The same pizza in Venice, Italy will cost three times as much as it does in a small town nearby. Sodas can be as much as $5 at major tourist sites. And, of course, don’t forget all of the souvenirs, trinkets, guidebooks, pre-paid photographs, and the actual tours themselves. Another example is that transportation, lodging and guide for Machu Picchu cost me over $350. It took over 48 hours and the tour of the ruins lasted all of two hours. For $350, a person could live well for 10 days in Cuzco, Peru. Including tourist sites into your itinerary will bump up prices considerably – not just for the tours themselves, but getting to the site, eating at the site, and getting back from the site. Be warned. And finally, a note on developing countries: the general perception in the west about non-Western countries is that they’re festering shitholes. OK, that’s not totally accurate, but people tend to believe that they don’t have the same amenities that we do. Or that the quality of life isn’t as good. This is just flat out false. Yes, in developing countries, much of the population lives far worse than we do. But one can achieve the same or even better quality of life in a place like Thailand, China or Colombia for a fraction of the price back home.
There’s a great TED talk about this here: http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html
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Basically, the gap between the rich countries and the poor countries has narrowed significantly, in some places almost to the point that it’s not even noticeable. People often ask me if certain countries felt dangerous. Or sometimes they ask me really ignorant questions like how I went to the bathroom or what I ate. They don’t understand that Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia is closer to Dallas than it is The Heart of Darkness, or that Beijing and Moscow have beautiful metros that put ours to shame. I can say that I’ve been consistently surprised, again and again, with most of the countries I go to and how much nicer they are. And you will be too.
Chapter 6: Regional Guides
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So you’re all pumped to pick up and go, but you’ve never traveled abroad much and have no idea what to expect in different parts of the world. This chapter is designed to give you a very basic cultural understanding of each region in the world. Note: Simplifying entire regions of the planet into a few pages of pithy observations is going to result in a lot of stereotypes and generalizations. I get it. Don’t take this chapter as gospel, just as some general guidance if you’ve never been to a certain part of the world before and want to get a feel for what it will be like. Another note: These observations are colored by my personal experiences and biases. I will try to be impartial as I can, but nobody is perfect. So please don’t start flooding my inbox unless I make a factual error or am just plainly misguided. OK, glad we got that out of the way. I’ll also note that, at the time of this writing, I have not been to EVERYWHERE that I write about below. But I’ve met hundreds of world travelers over the years, read hundreds of threads on travel forums, read travel sites for years and researched some of these areas quite a bit. So although not EVERYTHING here is from first-hand information, most of it’s from trusted sources. But, just warning you ahead of time, don’t take this stuff as gospel. Like I said, I’m painting a few generalizations here to help you get an idea of where you may want to visit. That’s all. North America Since most readers of this book are going to be natives of North America, and because everyone else is overly-familiar with our culture through movies and television, I’m going to keep this brief. Two things make North American culture stand out globally more than anything else: consumerism and pop culture. The United States, primarily Hollywood and New York, is the epicenter of the world’s popular culture. Even though most major countries and regions have their own sub-set of popular culture, almost all of them mimic and at least keep tabs on what comes out of the US. North Americans are also quite materialistic in comparison to their European counterparts. Big cars. Big houses. Big TV’s. Big couches. Big clothes. Big meals. Big everything. And more of it
too.
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The rampant American consumerism has its benefits as well as its problems. The problems are well-documented (obesity, environmental issues, entitlement attitudes, etc.). But the benefits, unless you’ve lived outside of the US for a period of time, are easily overlooked. And that is namely service. You will not get better service anywhere in the world than in the US. The service is so good, it often borders on annoying (“How is everything?”) The other big benefit is that you can buy anything, at any time, anywhere, any day of the week, and likely get it delivered. 24 hour stores make so much sense I still have no idea why the rest of the world hasn’t caught on yet. In places like Barcelona and Buenos Aires they party all night, but every restaurant, store, and public transportation is closed. But in the US, if you need to buy a suitcase at 4AM, or you feel like going out for ice cream at midnight, it’s no problem. Americans, in general, tend to be a little bit ignorant of the rest of the world. This is a widely known stereotype that is unfortunately true. Our education system is not the best, and although you will meet plenty who are extremely knowledgeable, the majority are not. Americans can be incredibly friendly though. In fact, it’s almost an extension of the service we provide. We’re friendly but we can also be pushy and aggressive. What passes as normal American social behavior violates a lot of more cultured European mannerisms and can come across as rude or crass. But typically we mean well. When visiting the US/Canada, aside from the handful of world-class cities, your biggest and most impressive destinations are going to be nature. The North American continent has a wide array of geography and as a result, we’ve been blessed with some incredible sites: The Rocky Mountains, Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Yellowstone, Niagara Falls, Petrified Forest, Redwood Forest, etc. The historical sites are of some interest in Washington D.C., but unless you have some specific interest in American history then there’s not a whole lot to see history-wise. Warning: I have met a lot of foreigners through the years who share a common dream of one day driving all the way across the United States. The Great American Road Trip has been idolized and idealized in various movies and classic books such as On the Road. But please, don’t do it. I’ve driven across most of the US. I’ve been to about 40 of the 50 states. I’ve driven from Texas to Wisconsin, and Philadelphia to Chicago. For the majority of the country there is nothing to see. It sounds romantic and interesting, but the truth is that the West Coast is cool, the mountains are cool, and then you have about 3,000 km of absolutely nothing but cornfields, cows and strip malls. It’s mind numbing. If you want to do a road trip in the US, keep it in the western states. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
The cost of day-to-day living (food, transportation, etc.) in the United States and Canada isiDoc.co surprisingly lower than pretty much all of the other developed countries. Again, it’s because of our rampant consumerism – we have a lot of competition driving prices down and a lot of large retailers. Also, our food is subsidized, allowing us to keep it cheap (and keep us fat). The biggest problem with spending large amounts of time in the US or Canada is the transportation situation. North America was built for automobiles, not for wagons or walking like most of the Old World. Unless you’re in New York City, Boston or Chicago, the public transportation is going to suck. If you’re also not in Washington DC, Seattle or San Francisco, then public transportation is more or less non-existent. You will have to rent a car to get around almost everywhere or spend a small fortune on taxis. As with all of the English-speaking countries, the US and Canada aren’t exactly super friendly bureaucratically. Both border patrols are stingy and there are a lot of visa requirements and hoops to jump through. Throw on the terrorism paranoia and the god-awful (and completely useless) TSA machines, and traveling to/from the US is a headache at the moment. Western Europe Western Europe is home to the largest concentration of important historical sites in the world. In cities such as Paris or Rome, you can spend weeks on end sightseeing and still not see everything. Visiting and/or living in Western Europe definitely has its advantages over the rest of the world. For one, the transportation is fantastic in almost every city, and traveling by train between any two major cities is easy, quick and cheap. Europe is overflowing with discount airlines now, making traveling within the EU incredibly affordable as well. The drawback of Europe is its cost-of-living. It’s easily the most expensive continent in the world, with almost all of the countries in Western Europe being more expensive than the US, some significantly so (Norway, Sweden, England). The good news is that there are some “hacks” to get around the high prices. For one, Europe is covered in hostels. Also, in many European cities, renting rooms in apartments is often much cheaper than hotels and easy to get ahold of. European cities also have fantastic public transportation and are very walkable. Many of them are so beautiful, you find yourself wanting to take the 30 minute walk to get to your destination (Paris, Amsterdam, Prague, Madrid). Unfortunately, food is expensive and portion sizes are small (especially by American standards). Even in supermarkets, produce is more expensive, and meat is much more expensive than in other parts of the world. Good news if you want to lose weight! There’s a reason pretty much every American who goes on vacation to Europe comes back skinnier than when they left. Europeans dress very well and are generally more polite than their American/Aussie counterparts. They come from a long history of social class and one can detect some residue of this kind of
social hierarchy in their society.
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Generally, they’re extremely helpful and friendly to foreigners (exceptions: Paris, Rome, lesser extent London). The countries and cultures are so intermingled that they’re probably some of the most tolerant countries on earth, which is good news if you’re a minority. And despite the rumors, they do not hate Americans and you do not have to put a Canadian flag on your backpack to travel through there. Yes, you may get an occasional, “You’re not a Republican, are you?” But you can easily just decline the conversation if you’d like. Honestly, most people just don’t really seem to care and the political differences are really blown out of proportion. Europe is highly seasonal. During the summer months, getting around the tourist sites in the big cities can be a complete nightmare. I hear Rome and Venice are particularly hellish during the summer. Again, it’s hard to generalize an entire continent with dozens of countries each with hundreds (or thousands) of years of history. But here are some very general and basic differences between the different sub-regions: Scandinavia (Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark): people are a bit more reserved and shy. Very blond. Prosperous, socialist countries with very little crime or income inequality. Pretty girls. Heavy drinking culture. Horrible winters. White nights during the summer. Also extremely expensive. Everyone speaks English. England/Ireland: Funny accents, heavy drinking, shitty weather and dry, sardonic humor. Fairly expensive. Nice countryside. More boisterous, outgoing, drunk and promiscuous than most mainland Europeans. Central Europe (Belgium, Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Austria): The people are very tall, rational and well-spoken, but also a little bit stand-offish. The best beer in the world. Relatively expensive, but not as bad as other parts of Europe. Berlin, in particular, is relatively cheap. A significant amount of people speak English well, but not everyone. Romance Countries (France, Spain, Portugal, Italy): The people are more passionate and expressive. The language barrier also gets quite a bit higher in these countries. Fun nightlife (especially in Spain). Beautiful women and more aggressive men. Warmer weather. Siestas. Much more family-oriented culture, where families will stay out until 11PM at night having dinner together. Nice beaches. My personal favorites are Spain and Germany. Eastern Europe Eastern Europe is the former Warsaw Pact (communist) countries of Europe. Once you hit Prague and Budapest, continuing east, you’ll notice clear differences in culture, architecture, attitude, food,
and everything else.
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I’ll start with the exceptions, and then we’ll move on to the main cultural indicators of this region. Prague and Budapest: two global cities that have a confluence of both Eastern and Western European indicators. Both cities are historical cities and absolutely beautiful (like, staggeringly beautiful if you catch the right view at the right hour). Unlike the dregs of the former Soviet bloc, many of the old architecture is still intact in these two cities and so you are treated to some beautiful vistas and not just cold communist concrete. The people also seem to be a bit more open and friendly than the people farther east. The food is better as well. But once you get east of western Poland and Prague, Eastern Europe is not an easy place to travel. Almost nobody speaks English. The architecture is ugly and not everything functions efficiently. People are crass and often rude. The service is terrible and the food is worse. The weather is a nightmare (Stalin famously claimed his three best generals were “December, January and February”). And although the cost of living is significantly lower than Western Europe, in many places it’s not exactly cheap (St. Petersburg and Moscow are both very expensive). With that said, I love Eastern Europe. It grows on you in a bizarre way if you let it. It shows you that things you once considered necessities are merely conveniences. The people strip away all of the empty pleasantries and you’re left with some of the most open and genuine conversations you’ll come across, for better or worse. And although not courteous or friendly to strangers, Eastern Europeans can be some of the warmest and most passionate people in the world once you get to know them well. Also, if you’re a history buff, you’re in for a real treat. Not only has Eastern Europe (primarily Russia) had possibly the most tumultuous 200 years in the civilized world, but also it’s amazing to see that their stories don’t always line up clearly with what we learn in school in the West. When I lived in St. Petersburg, my Russian teacher and I had many interesting conversations discussing Cold War history (something I studied a lot of in college) uncovering all of the mismatches and misinformation that didn’t line up between what we had both learned. The longer your trip to Eastern Europe is, the better. Except for a few notable locations (St. Petersburg, Budapest, Prague, Warsaw), it’s not a glamorous place to be and it’s difficult to just drop in for a few days and get your money’s worth. But if you stick around, adapt to the way of life a little bit, meet some locals, pick up some words in Russian or Polish, you’ll eventually be exposed to a completely different way of relating, and if you’re like me, you’ll get a bit hooked on it.
Oh, and the women are gorgeous (most beautiful in the world, in my opinion) and everyone parties iDoc.co their asses off, if that’s your thing. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for the men. They’re a bit brutish, drunk too often, and not respectful. If you’re female, you may want to proceed with caution. Finally, Eastern Europe is very seasonal. Although not the biggest tourist destinations in the world, you definitely do not want to get caught in Moscow or Estonia in the dead of winter. St. Petersburg experiences the famous “White Nights” in June and July (truly remarkable, I only slept a few hours a night and felt great). And the beaches of Croatia on the Adriatic Sea get hopping in the summer time as well. Prague gets overrun with tourists and backpackers and many of the locals leave the city in the summer. So it’s the one exception that is better to visit in the fall or spring. Oh, and a word of warning, the more Slavic countries (Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine) have a reputation for being a bit racist, particularly against Middle Easterners, but also black people. I’m white, so I didn’t experience this, and I’ve heard the racism concerns are blown out of proportion, but there were very, very few minorities in Russia when I was there. Just something to keep in mind. Latin America I’ve spent most of my time in Latin America since living abroad. Of its 22 major countries (not counting small countries in the Caribbean), I have been to 14 of them with long-term stints in Argentina, Brazil and Colombia and multiple visits to Guatemala, Mexico and Costa Rica. Culturally speaking, it’s my favorite region on earth, particularly South America. The people are extremely passionate. Everyone wears their hearts on their sleeves, both men and women. The food is (usually) great. And you have every kind of climate and geography you could ask for. Latin America is also one of the more dangerous regions in the world. Of countries with the highest murder rates in the world, Latin America occupies 5 of the top 10 spots, and 10 of the top 25 (almost every other spot belongs to African countries). These countries are also rife with petty crime: pickpockets, mugging, ATM rip offs, etc. But as long as you stick to the nicer areas of Latin America (which you will be), you’ll be fine. I’ve found that the statistics can say whatever they want, but by and large, the majority of the population of the world are good people and won’t hurt you. In all of my time in these countries, I’ve never been robbed and have only met a handful of people who have bad stories to tell. If you are a woman, it’s worth knowing that the men in this region can be incredibly aggressive, jealous and clingy. Although I don’t think I’ve ever seen outright violence or blatant disrespect towards women here, the men are not shy and they’re definitely not as relaxed as Western men are back home. Some women like and prefer this. But you may as well know up front.
If you’re blond in particular, get ready to make some new friends.
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While there are more English speakers in Latin America than in Eastern Europe or Asia, there still are not many. And generally the further away you get from tourist sites; the less you’ll run into. Spanish is spoken everywhere with the exception of Brazil, which speaks Portuguese. Luckily for us, Spanish and Portuguese are probably two of the easiest languages for English-speakers to learn. Since this is such a large region, and since I know it in a bit more detail, I’m going to go through it chunk by chunk. Let’s start with the Caribbean. The Caribbean countries have a lot of beautiful beaches and shady people. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of prostitution and drug-dealing that goes on in places like the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and, from what I’ve heard, Cuba. The Caribbean countries are quite poor and have a large African influence. In Haiti, the poorest of the countries, they speak French. Jamaica, Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago speak English (although they’re not of Latin heritage). Suriname they speak Dutch. The rest of the countries speak Spanish. If you’re a US citizen, the US government prevents you from visiting Cuba. Well, they don’t prevent you, but it’s a $10,000 fine if they find out you went. You can still go though, you just have to fly there from either Canada or Mexico. When you arrive, be sure to have them NOT stamp your passport and instead stamp a printed out sheet. Also, do not take or use American dollars. There’s quite a bit of American vacationing going on in the resorts of Mexico: from Cabo to Puerta Vallarta to Cozumel, and of course, Cancun. The southern part of Mexico, along with Guatemala, and to a lesser extent Honduras and Nicaragua, are currently being torn apart by violence from the drug trades. In Mexico, the amount of violence has escalated to the point of civil war and Honduras leads the world in homicide rate for 2011, with Guatemala not too far behind. I’ve been to these places and never felt that unsafe, but I did hear stories, some of which were a little too close for comfort. So keep your wits about you. These countries/areas are known mostly for their Aztec/Mayan ruins, their fantastic food, and that’s about it. The cost of living is amazing and the people are quite hospitable. But I wouldn’t recommend staying in this region longer than necessary unless you’re there volunteering or working. Moving down to Costa Rica and Panama, you get the two most Americanized and possibly safest Latin countries to visit. Whenever people tell me they want to experience Latin America, but they’ve never been abroad before and want to know where to start, I usually point them to Costa Rica and Panama.
Both have nice beaches, friendly locals, large tourist industries, decent English-usage and iDoc.co are still relatively cheap compared to the US. Panama is quite developed and Panama City could pass for a US city if you didn’t know better. Entering northern South America, Colombia and Venezuela are more culturally alike to one another, while Ecuador and Peru are more alike. Colombia is not nearly as dangerous as it used to be and is actually quite developed these days. It’s where I live as I write this guide. The people are very outgoing and fun and the women are stunning. It’s also the so-called salsa dancing capital of the world. Both Colombia and Venezuela are undergoing a lot of civil strife at the moment and it’s NOT recommended that you stray too far from the big cities for extended periods of time. Ecuador and Peru are both mountainous and a bit more commercial. They’re also poorer. They each get more tourists and they also suffer from more petty theft than most other South American countries. Chile and Argentina are more culturally similar while Paraguay and Bolivia are probably the poorest and most un-exciting countries on the continent. Bolivia has the salt flats, but that’s about it. Argentina is famous for its wine and beef. Buenos Aires is a massive cosmopolitan city with a lot of culture and great nightlife. Be warned that Chileans and Argentineans speak the most indecipherable Spanish in the world. Their accents are thick and strange. Patagonia in the southern tip of the continent offers plenty of amazing nature, glaciers, mountains and can consume weeks of your life if you let it. And finally, there’s Brazil – an incredibly diverse country. Expensive, beautiful, and with one of the most vibrant and fun cultures in the world, Brazil is often listed as one of the favorites of many world travelers (it’s one of my favorite countries in the world). It’s almost impossible to not make friends and have fun when you’re in Brazil. The language barrier can be tough and everything is overpriced, but it’s often worth it. Despite this, even Brazil still has a lot of petty crime and corruption going on. Also, be warned that Brazil requires a visa before you go there. It’s expensive and onerous to obtain. Argentina has a visa as well, but you can purchase it on arrival (for a paltry $120). Argentina gets all of the hype for its food, but I honestly think the food in Brazil is better and probably the best on the continent. Colombia possibly gives you the best bang for your buck in terms of quality of life for cost of living. Machu Picchu is absolutely worth seeing if you can make it but requires a bit of investment to get up there. Bolivia is the cheapest country. Uruguay has some beautiful beaches with great party scenes (where
rich Argentineans go in the summer to live it up). Most of the countries offer Amazon forest tours iDoc.co to some extent or another, but the logistics are complicated depending on where you are. I recommend doing them either from Peru or Brazil. For whatever reason, airfare throughout Latin America is uncharacteristically expensive. For the distances crossed, prices in South America are often twice as expensive as they would be in Europe or Asia. I’m not positive, but I believe this is because the corrupt governments levy major taxes on air travel. The consolation is that Latin America has a cheap and reliable bus system. Many of the buses are quite comfortable as well, with televisions, electrical outlets and seats that recline all the way. So even though you may be riding 12 hours between Peru and Bolivia, you are at least doing it in some sense of comfort. There is a solid backpacker scene in Latin America, primarily in Argentina, Peru, Ecuador and Costa Rica. Brazil tends to be on the expensive side for many backpackers, and places like Venezuela or Nicaragua are deemed too dangerous, so many of this skip over them. Asia It goes without saying how diverse Asia is. There are distinct and different cultures, often times a mere few dozen miles apart from one another. I’ll throw out some over-arching generalities about the continent. And then like with the Latin America section, I’ll move through the region countryby-country and give some of my observations and experiences. But first, let’s make some general statements about Asia: By and large, the cultures are more subdued and passive. Asian cultures also place a lot more emphasis on professional and intellectual success. The stereotype of smart Asian kids in the US is not a coincidence, they take their education very seriously in many Asian countries (primarily Japan, S. Korea and China). Because of the emphasis on education and professional success, white people are generally highly regarded. There is a pro-Caucasian racism throughout a lot of Asia. If you’re white, and have light features and blond hair, don’t be surprised if people take photos of you in rural/nontourist parts of many of the countries. Asian cultures seem to be more comfortable with objectifying their interactions more. You will get hassled to buy crap, ripped off and solicited by prostitutes more in Asia than any other region. Prostitution is not only far more widespread in Asia, but it’s much more socially acceptable. In many Asian cultures, there’s a belief that if a man is not going to commit to a woman (i.e., he’s not interested in marriage), then she needs to be compensated for the time she sacrifices to be with him. Whether she likes him or not is often besides the point. There’s a large spectrum of
gray-areas, but casual relationships in Asia can often be transactional one way oriDoc.co another, whether overt or not. Asia has some of the highest quality-of-life/cost-of-living ratios of anywhere in the world. I saw a forum post today by a programmer who is living in Saigon, Vietnam with his wife. They have a fully furnished apartment and housekeeper, they live in the center of the city, eat out for every meal and spend a lot of time in the local cafes. He reported that they were only spending $300 on rent per month and were living there for less than $1,000 easily. The food in Asia is varied and great. Cheap as well. And while, yes, in some areas they eat strange things like scorpions or dogs, it’s by no means common. Most places you go, it’s chicken on the menu. Speaking of food. It is SPICY. Do not fuck around with this. Most places they know that you’re a westerner and to tone down the spices, but if they ask you if you want it spicy and you say yes, don’t say nobody warned you. A lot of people are cavalier about this. I grew up in Texas and grew up eating spicy Tex Mex and Barbeque my entire life. The first time I asked for “spicy” food in Thailand, my eyes teared up and my entire mouth went numb. I couldn’t finish my plate. Asia is CROWDED. The population densities are quite a bit more than you’re used to. Rooms and apartments are often going to be smaller than you’re used to. In Hong Kong, my room had a bathroom that was basically a toilet inside a shower and that was it. OK, let’s blast through some of these countries and regions. Japan is the third richest country in the world and the most expensive country in the world to live in at the moment. Tokyo is also the biggest city in the world as of this writing. Japan is crowded and clean and their culture values respect and courtesy almost to a fault. In fact, if you can learn a few phrases of Japanese before you go, this will win you a lot of brownie points with the locals because it demonstrates a lot of respect for their culture. Most Japanese people have studied a lot of English and can speak some, but they are shy about using it and often won’t unless you stumble through some hackneyed Japanese first. Japanese is also home to the best transportation in the world, both their metro systems and their high-speed rail are something to behold. Taxis are ubiquitous but incredibly expensive. South Korea’s culture is most analogous to Japanese, although it seems to be a bit more conservative and insular. South Korea is also always on alert that the nutcase to their north is going to drop a nuclear bomb at any moment, so the culture seems a bit more wound up in general. Military service there is compulsory (similar to Israel) so that affects the culture quite a bit. Seoul is the third largest city in the world (the second is Mumbai, India) but unlike Tokyo, it’s far
more spread out.
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A couple quirks in these cultures as well: In Japan, there’s a deep affection for karaoke (to a lesser extent in Korea as well), while in South Korea, people watch video game competitions the same way we watch ESPN. China is the most populated country in the world and the cities are quite polluted. Depending what time of year you arrive, there may be an orange haze leering over Beijing. This is not fog. It’s pollution. And although their cities are very impressive and modern, the quality of life for the average citizen is not that great (overworked, under-nourished). I have not been to interior China, but I’ve heard there are some horribly polluted rural areas with people who are extremely poor. Hong Kong has a large expat scene, since it’s both a major trade port and financial center. In fact, if you stay on the island, you can forget you’re in China at times because there are so many westerners. Hong Kong is amazing, extremely cosmopolitan and a lot of fun. It’s also quite expensive by Asian standards. I also don’t recommend taking a train through China if you can afford it or there are flights available. You’re likely to end up standing up for 12 hours crammed between a dozen Chinese people six inches shorter than you. (This goes for India as well.) Unfortunately, both of these countries (China and India) are so large and still lack some infrastructure in the rural areas, that if you want to get to some of the more remote parts of the country, you will not have a choice. Southeast Asia is the favorite haven of many internet entrepreneurs and permanent nomads. It’s harder to find a better quality-of-life to cost-of-living ratio than in Thailand, Vietnam or the Philippines. You get some of the best beaches in the world, fantastic food, great service, friendly people, tropical weather, all for maybe ¼ of what you would pay back home. There are more and more business opportunities springing up in Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur as well. And then there’s Singapore, one of the most expensive countries in the world, but absolutely pristine and 100% safe. It’s a favorite destination of mine. There’s also Bali in Indonesia – another internet entrepreneur hang out, as well as one of the most overrated party scenes in the world. Bali is world famous for its surfing and its drunk Aussie kids. Know what you’re getting into before you go (I didn’t). And finally, there are the Philippines. As a US colony, the Philippines are largely influenced by US culture and many of them speak English well. Aside from having some of the most beautiful beaches in the world and being incredibly cheap, many parts of the Philippines are dirty and impoverished. Avoid Manila.
Air Asia is a discount airline that serves all of Southeast Asia and I recommend it if you want to get iDoc.co around (that or Tiger Airways). You can often get flights between Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur or Singapore and Jakarta for as little as $100 and often less. And lastly, there’s India. India is a polarizing country that some people love and some people hate. I hated it. Although I recognize there are amazing parts of the country and it has some amazing people, the degree and magnitude of the poverty was simply too much for me. You can read my (harsh) take on it here: http://postmasculine.com/a-dust-over-india It should be noted that a lot of Asian countries require visas before you arrive (China, Vietnam, India, etc.) and a few others require you to pay for one upon arrival (Indonesia, Cambodia). So if you plan on hopping around quite a bit, make sure you have room in your passport. I ran out of free pages for a visa in Indonesia and I almost got turned away at the airport. As far as languages go, Asian languages are some of the hardest in the world for English speakers. In my opinion, it’s not worth the time unless you plan on spending a lot of time there (a year minimum). Most people speak some pidgin English, and anybody who works in tourist areas or in high-end service industries is going to be able to communicate with you a bit. Australia and New Zealand Both countries’ cultures are fairly analogous to other English-speaking cultures. Both countries are also naturally beautiful, clean, developed, safe, and often listed near the top of “Best places to live in the world” lists. Australia has its beaches and a little bit more going on in its major cities. New Zealand has some of the most beautiful nature you’ll see anywhere in the world and great mountains on the south island. Most of the action in Australia happens on its east coast, from Cairns all the way down to Melbourne. Cairns is typically considered the best jump-off point to dive on the Great Barrier Reef. Further south, just north of Brisbane, you have the Whitsunday Islands which are reputed to have some of the most beautiful beaches in the world (I was underwhelmed, but hey). Then of course you have Sydney, the financial and business center of the region, and then Melbourne, a city that’s often referred to as the best city to live in in the world by all sorts of sociological metrics (crime, climate, health care, community, etc.). Even though much of Lord of the Rings was recorded on New Zealand’s north island, the south island is where the nature gets ridiculous. Queenstown looks like it’s right out of, well, right out of a movie. And some of the fjords, glaciers and mountains down there have to be seen to be believed. The north island has the major cities. New Zealand is fairly unpopulated, with hardly four million people in the entire country. So even its “bustling” metropolises of Auckland and Wellington are fairly tame and quaint by international standards.
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New Zealand is considered the adventure capital of the world. It’s where bungee jumping was invented. And they have this thing called “zorbing”. It consists of putting you in a gigantic plastic, see-through ball, spraying water inside, and then throwing it down a giant hill, with you in it of course.
Don’t ask. It was fun as hell though. On top of the bizarre adventures and the sheep, there’s lots of great hiking, rafting, skydiving, spelunking, rock climbing – one of the few countries where you could visit a beach and a mountain in the same day.
Middle East and Africa I can’t say too much about these regions because other than Israel and Turkey, I’ve never been. But here are some (very) broad generalizations to keep in mind. For women, you will run into more misogyny and disrespect here than anywhere else in the world. Not that it makes the traveling experience unenjoyable, but just don’t be surprised when it happens. Traveling with a male companion, whether friend or boyfriend is advisable in many places. Also note that you’ll be expected to keep yourself covered in Muslim countries. Women who wear shorts or sleeveless shirts are seen as disrespectful in many Muslim countries, and yes, I know, it’s 110 degrees (43 Celsius) every day over there, but they do still expect you in a long dress and long sleeves. Not that it’s mandatory, but you can expect a lot of unwanted attention if you don’t comply. My ex-girlfriend is a director of a non-profit in Tanzania. And she related stories to me that men often wouldn’t even speak to her at meetings, despite the fact she was the director of the organization giving them money. These same men would then solicit her sexually after the meeting. Africa is corrupt and the most violent continent in the world. I probably did not have to tell you that. It also has some of the most beautiful nature and wildlife in the world. Probably didn’t have to tell you that either. Northern Africa is similar to Arab culture while sub-Saharan Africa remains quite tribal in many ways. The Muslim countries, although also misogynistic and strict, the people can be very hospitable. Some of the countries are next to impossible to travel to due to insane visa restrictions by both our governments and theirs (Iran, Saudia Arabia, Yemen). Despite all of the violence going on over there, I’ve heard from travellers that day-to-day travel is fairly safe, as it is in most parts of the world. Dubai is a large exception in the Arab world. It’s a strange mixture of Las Vegas and Manhattan, in
that it’s the financial capital of the region (and has some of the most impressive modern iDoc.co architecture in the world), but it’s also where the Arabic population (read: men) go to blow off steam and get away with doing things that they can’t do back in their home countries – you know, like drink alcohol and bang prostitutes. Do note that if you visit any Arab countries, you cannot go to Israel. And if you get an Israeli stamp on your passport, you cannot enter some Muslim countries. Lame, I know. But just a heads up, you’ll need a second passport if you want to hit more countries than just Israel. Africa is the easiest place to get volunteer and aid jobs. I would just suggest doing some research on the country and not to romanticize the poverty and natural lifestyles over there. Said exgirlfriend, before working in Tanzania received an offer from an organization in Malawi. Upon further investigation, she would have more or less been camping for six months without any modern amenities whatsoever. Not that rural Tanzania was much better, but at least she had access to a large, somewhat modernized city in Dar Es Salaam and the beautiful beaches of Zanzibar nearby.
iDoc.co Chapter 7: How to Learn Languages Quickly
If you’re going to spend any significant amount of time in a foreign country, then you’re going to want to be able to communicate at least the bare essentials to people. My personal rule is that no matter what country I go to, I learn how to say “Hello” and “Thank you” in their language. No exceptions. It takes 5 minutes to learn them and it’s amazing how much those simple words will accomplish on their own. As if by magic, people immediately lighten up and become friendlier. You can learn these two words in any language within minute online by using: http://translate.google.com/ If the translation is in another alphabet (Cyrillic, Mandarin, etc.), there’s a button in the bottom right that pronounces the word out loud for you, so you can practice for a couple minutes until you get the hang of it. When I started traveling in 2009, I knew no other languages. I knew a little bit of Spanish from studying it in school, but just enough to order food in a restaurant or ask where the bathroom was. I hated language classes in school. I was terrible at them. I always assumed I was someone who was just “bad at languages.” In 2012, as of this writing, I am highly conversational (quasi-fluent) in Spanish, conversational in Portuguese and low conversational in Russian. That’s all in less three years. What I discovered is that what I believed about languages and my ability was bullshit. Most of it comes down to motivation and immersion – two things almost none of us get when we’re growing up. But with the right attitude and a consistency of study, anybody can become conversational in any language in anywhere from a few weeks to a few months. I’m convinced of that. How Hard? How Useful? (Note: this following section is partly based on email conversations with a friend of mine who speaks 13 languages and is fluent in nine of them. He agreed to let me use some of his advice for languages that I’m not familiar with.) Which language is most useful to learn first? Obviously, this is going to depend on your travel goals. If you plan on living and working in Shanghai for the next five years, then you should probably start studying Mandarin, and fast. If you love the beaches of South America, then Spanish
is going to be on the menu, although you may not need to be fluent.
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But first, it may be worth taking a moment to make a point about English. English is the global language. I love languages, have spent hundreds, if not thousands of hours studying them, but it's way too p.c. to ignore the fact that you already speak the language that is by far the most useful in the world now. It is the de facto – and often, de jure – 2 language in all travel situations (airports, hotels, etc.) in essentially any country you'll ever visit. nd
And as far as deeper, social interactions, there's the reality that many – if not the majority – of the people you'll meet and want to know will speak English, and their level of knowledge will range from decent to fluent. BUT, this is not an excuse to not learn another language – I’m merely mentioning that you should be able to at least get by almost anywhere in the world purely on English. It may be a struggle at times, it may get awkward, but you can always get by. So why go through the pain of learning another language? The answer is that it opens up far greater social opportunities, social opportunities that will lead you to experiences that you otherwise never would have had because you wouldn’t have been able to communicate. I can tell you from experience that there are few things as exciting or memorable as making friends or having adventures with new people in an entirely new language that you never would have been able to have had you not spent all of that time studying. As someone who speaks Spanish, I can tell you that the differences between my social opportunities in Colombia and in China (where no one speaks English and I don’t speak Mandarin) is night and day. It was practically impossible to meet people in China to hang out with. In Colombia, I hardly even have to try. Locals hear my Spanish and immediately become intrigued and welcoming. So learning languages is a legitimate social concern wherever you go – it absolutely amplifies your experiences and travel opportunities. And honestly, when you’re using a language daily with new people and having fun with them, it makes it a hell of a lot more fun to study grammar and vocabulary. That being said... which languages? The “usefulness” of a language really depends. Obviously, the longer you'll spend in one place, the more useful that language is. But there's more to it. In some countries, most of the people speak English so well that it's ridiculous to learn their language, unless you plan to spend many years there (and even then, it's debatable). I'd put into that category all the Scandinavian countries and Holland, and possibly the Baltic countries and Israel if you limit it to city-dwellers.
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And then there are the multi-lingual countries where English is the main language of government, business, and of communication among local people who don't speak each others' language: India, South Africa, most African countries, Singapore, Malaysia. That right there is about 20 languages we can cross off the list. No Swedish, no Estonian or Icelandic, no Malay, no Dutch or Afrikaans. So what are we left with? Here’s my take on the major languages and their usefulness. Spanish Usefulness: Very useful. Even educated Central/South Americans generally don't speak great English. The elites and those with close ties to the U.S. will speak better, but even that's not a given. The level of English knowledge in Spain is a bit better, but not much. Even among young people, the knowledge isn't great. The best part about Spanish is that it’s a “gateway” into the other romance languages. Not only is it possibly the easiest romance language, but it’s also the most structured. So jumping from Portuguese, Italian, or even French, after learning Spanish will be MUCH easier. This is true of the other romance languages as well, but Spanish seems to have the most in common with all of them. Ease to Learn: Very easy. From grammar to vocabulary to speaking and comprehension, it's the easiest foreign language for a native-English speaker. Three months of intense study should have you fairly conversational. Portuguese: Usefulness: Essential... but only if you're planning on spending any time in Brazil. Brazilians speak even less English than the rest of Central/South Americans. They usually can figure out what you're saying if you speak slowly in Spanish, but the problem is that you won't understand a word they're saying back to you. Brazil is one of my favorite countries in the world and many other long-term travelers say the same thing. In my opinion, it’s worth it. Oh, and it will help you get by in Portugal and Angola as well. Ease to Learn: The nice thing is that if you already know Spanish, it's not too much work to learn enough Portuguese to get by. It took me a few hours a day for about a month to get to the level where I could have conversations with people (messy, error-filled conversations, but still). Starting from scratch, the difficulty to learn is probably a tad higher than Spanish. Basically the same grammar and vocabulary, but much harder pronunciation and a lot more idiomatic expressions. French: Not necessary in France, but highly useful. I would say if you plan on spending more than a few
weeks in France, then taking the time to get the basics down is worth the trouble.
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It is true French people speak a decent amount of English, but it’s also true about how unhappy they are to speak English. French is also still used in many random parts of the world due to their former imperial ways. So not only will you stumble across it in places like French Canada and Algeria, but random spots like Cambodia and Laos as well. Ease to Learn: Hardest of the romance languages (minus Romanian), but still not that hard. Pronunciation and spelling is a bitch at first, but you get used to it. Lot of cognates and shared words with English. 3-6 months of solid study should get you there. Less if you speak another romance language. Italian: Can be useful if you'll be spending time there. English knowledge is pretty low, even in many young, urban circles. Similar difficulty as Portuguese. Fluent Spanish will help a lot in learning Italian and you’ll be able to already understand chunks of it without studying it at all. 1-2 months and you'd be able to get by quite decently, 3-6 months and you'd be licensed to kill. German: Usefulness: Debatable depending on your purposes. On the one hand, most young, educated German-speakers will speak English anywhere from decently to really well. On the other hand, if you spend any amount of time there and get to know groups of locals, you will always be at a communicative disadvantage. It’s an investment, but if you intend to spend a significant amount of time in the region, then it’s probably worth it. It will also create an in-road to Dutch, or Danish if you’re interested in those. Ease to Learn: German is hard, but not impossible. It’s spoken in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and is the second-language of choice in a lot of Eastern Europe. It still retains enough in common with English and its sounds aren’t completely unreasonable (such as Russian cramming four consonants together) that English-speakers can still pick it up with enough study. On the other hand, the grammar is a significant step up from the more western languages with three genders and the introduction of cases. Polish, Czech, Hungarian: Usefulness: With a few exceptions, the level of English throughout Eastern Europe is very, very low. In any non-touristy store, no one will speak English, not a word. Even in some hotels it can be rough going. On the other hand, if you're hanging out with educated, young urban people in Poland, Czech, or Hungary, at least some will speak very good English (the others will speak so-so but probably be pretty embarrassed to speak it unless they're drunk).
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Ease to learn: Czech and Polish very hard, Hungarian ridiculously hard. All things considered, it actually is worth learning a little if you plan on spending more than a few months in one of those countries, but otherwise there are enough English-speakers to hold you over if you just plan on staying for a couple weeks or less.
Russian: Usefulness: Mandatory if you plan on spending any time at all in Russia and/or Eastern Europe. In Russia itself, as well as Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova, Kazakhstan, Georgia, over 90% of the population will speak nothing else. In places like Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and even Poland, another significant portion of the population will speak it. Russian is also closely related to Czech and Polish, so it’s a good starting point if you want to learn those languages. Ease to learn: Russian is pretty hard, definitely the hardest of the major languages in Europe, although it is an Indo-European language, so the grammar won't be totally foreign, there are lots of cognates, and the writing is pretty easy (compared to Chinese, say). Still, 3-6 months of hard study before you can realistically understand simple conversations on the street, 1-1.5 years before you can sit down with a stranger and have a full conversation of an hour or more. Mandarin/Cantonese: Usefulness: Mandarin is very, very useful in Northern China, Cantonese is very useful in South (Canton). Very few normal people speak a word of English. The English level of the elites in cities ranges, but even many of them don't know enough for a basic conversation. It's one country where English is not the de facto lingua franca (Mandarin takes that role outside Northern China). In the mega cities, making local friends isn’t too hard because they make themselves known and will often be hanging out with other English-speaking foreigners. Outside of mega cities, meeting locals without knowing the language is really, really tough. Ease to learn: It's hard. Really hard. Really, really hard and it'll take huge amounts of time. Grammar isn't so bad, but the writing is a nightmare, tones can be hard, and there are no cognates to help in memorizing vocab. Japanese: Usefulness: Debatable. Level of English is weird: everyone has studied 10 years or more of English, so they all can read and write surprisingly well, but lots of people have problems speaking and understanding. You definitely can get by with English in daily life, although you will likely be limited when it comes to longer conversations or making friends. Ease to learn: The writing is an absolute mess and incredibly frustrating, but the language itself is surprisingly not so bad. And pronunciation is a breeze. Definitely easier than Chinese after you get
past the initial shock of the writing.
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Plus, it's a cultural thing, but Japanese people will give you huge credit if you can even say a few basic words, so you can get a big chunk of the praise without doing much work at all. Korean: Usefulness: English knowledge in South Korea isn't as good as in Japan, but elites speak well. People are a bit colder and harder to know, so probably more important to know if you plan on spending time there than Japanese. Tagalog (Philippines): Usefulness: English knowledge is very high in cities, and completely fluent among elites. And you can get by with English even outside those circles. English-only doesn't limit you too much in terms of meeting people, and Filipinos aren’t shy, especially when it comes to meeting foreigners. Ease to Learn: Tagalog is relatively easy, but I don’t know why you would bother. Thailand: Usefulness: There are so many tourists that you can forget it's a real country. Even uneducated older people often speak a little basic pidgin English. Millions of foreigners pass through, thousands are living there, and very, very few can speak a single word of the language... so you don't need to worry about it much. On the other hand, surprisingly few people outside the tourist industry and the elite speak enough English to have an in-depth conversation. So if you really want to integrate yourself, then you may want to take it on. I lived in Thailand for over three months and had trouble making long-lasting friendships with locals, I’m sad to report. Ease to Learn: I don't know enough to really say, but I'd put it in the same league as Mandarin, although the big advantage is that the writing is phonetic. The following link is the Foreign Services Institute’s (a branch of the US State Department) estimate of how much time it takes to become fluent in any particular language: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Language_Learning_Difficulty_for_English_Speakers Tips on Language Learning 1. Conversation, Conversation, Conversation. If there’s a “secret” or “hack” to learning a new language, it’s this: hours and hours of awkward and strenuous conversation with people better than you in that language. An hour of conversation (with corrections and a dictionary for reference) is as good as five hours in a classroom and 10 hours with a language course by yourself. There are a few reasons for this. The first is motivation. I don’t care how cool your study guide is, you’re going to be far more invested and motivated to communicate with a live person in front of
you than a book or audio program on your computer.
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The second reason is that language is something that needs to be processed, not memorized. I’m no expert on language learning, but in my experience staring and memorizing a word in a book or with flashcards 100 times does not stick the same way being forced to use a word in conversation a mere two or three times does. I believe the reason is that our minds place more priority on memories which involve actual human and social experiences, memories which have emotions tied to them. So, for instance, if I look up the verb for “to complain” and use it in a sentence with a new friend, chances are I’m always going to associate that word with that specific interaction and conversation I was having with her. Whereas I can blow by that same word 20 times with flashcards, and even though I may get it right, I haven’t actually practiced implementing it. It means nothing to me, so it is less likely to stick with me. 2. Intensity of study trumps length of study. What I mean by this is that studying a language four hours a day for two weeks will be more beneficial for you than studying one hour a day for two months. This is a reason why so many people take language classes in school and never remember anything. It’s because they only study 3-4 hours per week and often the classes are separated by multiple days. Language requires a lot of repetition, a lot of reference experiences, and a consistent commitment and investment. It’s better to allot a particular period of your life, even if it’s only 1-2 weeks, and really go at it 100%, then to half ass it over the course of months or even years. 3. Classes suck and are an inefficient use of time and money. All things considered, you get a really poor return for your time and effort in group classes. There are two problems. The first is that the class moves at the pace of its slowest student. The second is that language learning is a fairly personal process — everyone naturally learns some words or topics easier than others, therefore a class is not going to be able to address each student’s personal needs as well or in a timely fashion. For instance, when I took Russian classes I found verb conjugations to be simple because I had already learned Spanish. But an English classmate struggled quite a bit with them. As a result, I spent a lot of my class time waiting around for him to catch up. I also had a German classmate who had already been exposed to cases, whereas I had no clue what they were. I’m sure he ended up waiting around for me to figure it out as well. The larger the classroom, the less efficient it’s going to be. Anyone who had to take a foreign language in school and retained absolutely none of it can tell you this. 4. Start with the 100 most common words. Not all vocabulary is made the same. Some gives you a better return on investment than others. For instance, when I lived in Buenos Aires, I met a guy who had been studying with Rosetta Stone for months (not recommended). I had been working on and off with a tutor for a few weeks, but I was surprised by how he could not follow even the most basic of conversations despite months of study and living there. It turns out, much of the vocabulary he had been studying was for kitchen utensils, family members, clothing and rooms in a house. But if he wanted to ask someone which part of town they lived in, he
had no idea what to say.
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Start with the 100 most common words and then make sentences with them over and over again. Learn just enough grammar to be able to do this and do it until you feel pretty comfortable with all of them. 5. Carry a pocket dictionary. This made a much bigger difference than I expected. I carry an English-Spanish dictionary app on my phone and I used it all the time when I live in Spanishspeaking countries. My first two weeks in Brazil, I was lazy and kept forgetting to download an English-Portuguese application. I struggled in my conversations A LOT during those two weeks, despite knowing basic Portuguese. Once I downloaded the dictionary, there was an immediate difference. Having it on your phone is great, because it takes two seconds to look something up in the middle of conversation. And because you’re using it in conversation, you’re that much more likely to recall it later. Even something that simple affected my conversations and ability to interact with locals a great deal. 6. Keep practicing in your head. The other use for your dictionary is that you can practice while going about your day and not talking to anyone. Challenge yourself to think in the new language. We all have monologues running in our head, and typically they run in our native tongue. You can continue to practice and construct sentences and fake conversations in your head in a new language. In fact, this sort of visualization leads to much easier conversations when you actually have them. For instance, you can envision and practice a conversation about a topic you’re likely to have before you actually have it. You can begin to think about how you would describe your job and explain why you’re in the foreign country in the new language. Inevitably, those questions will come up and you’ll be ready to answer them. This may be the first time since you were five years old where having an imaginary friend is an advantage. If you have no tutor or anyone to practice with, you can construct conversations with your new words and grammar in your head. You can do it while you’re eating lunch, sitting on a bus, shopping for groceries, wherever. 7. You’re going to say a lot of stupid things. Accept it. When I was first learning Spanish, I once told a group of people that Americans put a lot of condoms in their food. Later, I told a girl that basketball makes me horny. Um, yeah… It’s going to happen. Trust me. 8. Figure out pronunciation patterns. All Latin-based languages will have similar pronunciation patterns based on Latin words. For instance, any word that ends in “-tion” in English will almost always end in “-ción” in Spanish and “-ção” in Portuguese. English-speakers are notorious for simply adding “-o” “-e” or “-a” to the end of English words to say Spanish words they don’t know. But stereotypes aside, it’s surprising how often it’s correct. “Destiny” is “destino,” “motive” is “motivo,” “part” is “parte” and so on. In Russian, case endings always rhyme with one another, so if you are talking about a feminine noun (such as “Zhen-shee-na”), then you know that the adjectives and adverbs will usually rhyme with its ending (“krasee-vaya” as opposed to “krasee-vee”). 9. Use audio and online courses for the first 100 words and basic grammar. After that they should only be used for reference and nothing more. There are a lot of study materials: Pimsleur, Rosetta
Stone, Berlitz, DuoLingo, etc. These courses are great for getting you from absolutely noiDoc.co ability in a language to being able to speak basic sentences and phrases within a few days time. They’re also good for teaching the most fundamental vocabulary (words such as: the, I, you, eat, want, thanks, etc.). But the weakness of study materials is that they don’t allow for much useful practice. The greatest return on investment in language learning is forcing yourself to speak and communicate with others, and when you’re sitting in your bedroom with a book or a software program, you’re not being forced to formulate meaning and significance in the new language on the spot. Instead, you’re encouraged to parrot and copy concepts and patterns you’ve observed elsewhere in the materials. As mentioned before, I feel that these are two different types of learning and one is far more useful than the other. 10. After the first 100 words, focus on becoming conversational. Studies have shown that the most common 100 words in any language account for 50% of all spoken communication. The most common 1,000 words account for 80% of all spoken communication. The most common 3,000 words account for 99% of communication. In other words, there are some serious diminishing returns from learning more vocabulary. I probably only know about 1,000 words in Spanish and in most conversations I never have to stop and look a word up in my phone. The basic grammar should get you speaking fundamental sentences within a matter of days. “Where is the restaurant?” “I want to meet your friend.” “How old is your sister?” “Did you like the movie?” The first few hundred words will get you pretty far. Use them to get as comfortable as possible with grammar, idioms, slang and constructing thoughts, jokes and ideas in the new language on the fly. Once you’re able to joke consistently in the new language, that’s a pretty good sign that it’s time to expand your vocabulary out. A lot of people attempt to expand their vocabulary too quickly and too soon. It’s a waste of time and effort because they’re still not comfortable with basic conversations about where they’re from, yet they’re studying vocabulary about economics or medicine. It makes no sense. 11. Aim for the brain melt. You know how when you do a lot of intellectually-intensive work for hours and hours on end, at some point your brain just feels like a lump of gravy? Shoot for that moment when learning languages. Until you’ve reached brain-gravy stage, you probably aren’t maximizing your time or effort. In the beginning, you’ll hit mind-melt within an hour or two. Later on, it may take an entire night of hanging out with locals before it happens. But when it happens, it’s a very good thing. 12. “How do you say X?” is the most important sentence you can possibly learn. Learn it early and use it often. 13. One on one tutoring is the best and most efficient use of time. It’s also usually the most expensive use of time, depending on the language and country. But if you have the money, grabbing a solid
tutor and sitting with him or her for a few hours every day is the fastest way to learn a newiDoc.co language I’ve ever found. A mere two hours a day for a few weeks with a tutor in Brazil got me to at least a respectable conversational level — i.e., I could go on a date with a girl who spoke no English and maintain conversation throughout the night without making too much of a fool of myself. Speaking of which… 14. Date a someone who speaks the target language and not your native language. Talk about investment and motivation. You’ll be fluent in a month. And best of all, if you make him/her mad or do something wrong, you can claim lost in translation. 15. If you can’t find a cute guy/girl to put up with you, find a language buddy online. There are a number of websites of foreigners who want to learn English who would be willing to trade practice time in their native language for practice in yours. Live Mocha (http://www.livemocha.com) is a great resource of this (I’m not a huge fan of their lessons, but the ability to video chat with other members is priceless). 16. Facebook chat + Google Translate = Winning. 17. When you learn a new word, try to use it a few times right away. When you stop and look up a new word in conversation, make a point to use it in the next two or three sentences you say. Language learning studies show that you need to hit a certain amount of repetitions of saying a word within one minute of learning it, one hour of learning it, one day, etc. Try to use it immediately a few times and then use it again later in the day. Chances are it’ll stick. 18. TV shows, movies, newspapers and magazines are a good supplementation. But they should not be mistaken or replacements for legitimate practice. When I was getting good at Spanish, I made a point to watch a couple movies each week and read an article on El Pais (http://www.elpais.com) each day. It was helpful for keeping me fresh, but I don’t believe it was as good as use of my time as conversations. 19. Most people are helpful, let them help. If you’re in a foreign country and making a complete ass out of yourself trying to buy something at the grocery store, ask random people for help. Point to something and ask how to say it. Ask them questions. Most people are friendly and willing to help you out. Learning a language is not for shy people. 20. There will be a lot of ambiguity and miscommunication. Fact of the matter is that for many, many words, the translations are not direct. “Gustar” may roughly mean “to like” in Spanish, but in usage, it’s more nuanced than that. It’s used for particular situations and contexts, whereas in English we use “like” as a blanket verb covering anything we enjoy or care about. These subtle differences can add up, particularly in serious or emotional conversations. Intentions can be easily misconstrued. Nuanced conversations over important matters will likely require double the effort to nail down the exact meaning for each person than it would between two native speakers. No matter how good you are in your new language, you’re not likely to have a complete grasp over the slight intuitive differences between each word, phrase or idiom that a native speaker does without living in the country for years.
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21. These are the phases you go through: First, you’re able to speak a little and understand nothing. Then you’re able to understand far more than you speak. Then you become conversational, but it requires quite a bit of mental effort. After that, you’re able to speak and understand without conscious mental effort (i.e., you don’t have to translate words into your native tongue in your mind). Once you’re able to speak and listen without thinking about it, you’ll begin to actually think in the foreign language itself without effort. Once this happens, you’re really hitting a high level. And the final level? Believe it or not, being able to follow a conversation between a large group of native speakers is the last piece of the puzzle to fall into place. Or at least it was for me. Once that happens, and you’re able to interject, come in and out of the conversation at will, you’re pretty set. After that, there’s not really anywhere else to go without living in the country for at least a year or two and reaching complete fluency.
22. Finally, find a way to make it fun. As with anything, if you’re going to stick to it, you have to find a way to make it fun. Find people you enjoy talking to. Go to events where you can practice while doing something fun. Don’t just sit in a classroom in front of a book, or you’re likely to burn out fairly quickly. Talk about personal topics which you care about. Find out about the person you’re talking to. Make it a personal, life experience, or else you’re going to be in for a long, unenjoyable process which will likely end up in you forgetting everything you learned. Additional Resources There are a lot of free resources online to help you with your language learning. Below are some recommended ones. Foreign Service Institute (FSI) language courses (Free online language courses that the US State Department gives its employees): http://fsi-language-courses.org/Content.php Memrise.com (For vocabulary): http://www.memrise.com/welcome/ BBC Languages (Free courses and vocabulary): http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/ Visualizing Japanese Grammar: http://www.gwu.edu/~eall/vjg/vjghomepage/vjghome.htm Pitch Perfect Pinyin (Mandarin Pronunciation): http://www.laits.utexas.edu/ppp/learning.php?unit=0 Busuu (Online language lessons and exchange): http://www.busuu.com/enc/ LiveMocha (Online language lessons and exchange): http://livemocha.com/ Open Culture: http://www.openculture.com/freelanguagelessons Duolingo (Online language lessons): http://duolingo.com/
Go Vocab (Online language lessons): http://govocab.com/ Lang-8 (Online language exchange): http://www.lang-8.com/ Fluent in 3 Months (My favorite language blog): http://www.fluentin3months.com/
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iDoc.co Chapter 8: Making Friends and Avoiding Enemies
Moving to any new city is difficult when you don’t know anybody. The inevitable loneliness, frustration, disorientation – it takes weeks or sometimes even months of struggle to finally feel like you landed on your feet and have some cool people to hang out with and lean on. Now imagine dealing with those same challenges, except doing it while fighting through language barriers, cultural barriers, and foreign institutions. Not going to lie, long-term travel has its moments of profound loneliness. It can be frustrating and tiring, especially if you’re not used to it. The first place I moved to live was Buenos Aires, Argentina. I lived down there with an American friend of mine, and, being a bit naïve, I basically treated my social life the same way I did back in Boston: I went out to bars and drank and danced a lot. Unfortunately, whereas in Boston I had a wide social network and knew a ton of people, in Argentina I knew exactly one person. So this didn’t exactly work. In fact, I’m embarrassed how long it took me to discover how ineffective bars and parties were for making actual, lasting friendships. In fact, during that three-month period, the only friendships I built were with other travelers who came and went within a couple weeks. By the time I left, I had become fairly lonely and disappointed. It was a disappointment that inspired me to reevaluate how I approached my social life in new countries I go to and to begin putting conscious effort into making friends. I take making social connections very seriously wherever I decide to stay and live for a while. In fact, I often make it my absolute top priority the first two weeks I’m in a place, because I found it enriches the entire experience while I’m there. For instance, if you go to a country for two months and spend the first couple weeks doing touristy things, getting some work done, finding a tutor, or hanging out with backpackers and tourists, then you’ll suddenly find yourself not making friends until it’s finally time to go. But if you gather your efforts and make those friends in the beginning, putting off the touristy stuff and the partying, then those new friends will enrich the entire two months you are there. People I meet are often surprised to hear that I don’t visit tourist sites until right before I leave a location. The reason is because the tourist site is always going to be there, making friends has a time limit attached to it. Not to mention, visiting a lot of sites is often far more interesting when you have a local to show you around or advise about which places are worth it and which ones
aren’t.
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This chapter will hopefully give you some tools and ideas to navigate a new country and culture and find yourself in good company before you know it. What is Friendship? This may seem like a trivial question and it’s one that I never had to seriously evaluate until I began moving to a new city every 3-4 months and starting over each time. It’s interesting to look at which relationships last and which ones fizzle out. Often it’s unpredictable. The people you feel closest to in the moment, you often look back later and realize you had little binding you together other than superficialities. Whereas some people you just naturally stay in touch and seem to genuinely connect on a deeper level no matter where you are in the world. Some random observations I’ve made about friendships the world over: 1. Shared interests bring you together. Sharing interests with someone is the gateway to establishing a friendship with him or her. The more unique and specific the interest, the more likely you are to establish that bond. The shared interest could be playing football together, obscure French literature or something as simple as going out to the same bar and drinking every weekend. Being single is often an immediate shared interest between men and one of the easiest ways to bond quickly. Shared interests are what create the opportunities and the potential, but they don’t solidify the friendship by themselves. They merely open the door. To determine the longevity and significance of a friendship, you have to go a bit deeper and get into values. 2. Shared values keep you together. Beneath the shared interests and hobbies, to make a friend you really click with you need to find common ground in your values and worldview. Usually passions play into this. Maybe they’re an artist and you’re a musician. Maybe they’re a political activist in their country and you’re volunteering for an international non-profit in their country. Whatever it is, there needs to be something deeper and a bit more profound aligning you together. This can actually be a hard bridge to cross between two disparate cultures, as your values are often likely to be so different. 3. Shared experiences give the friendship more longevity. You can have similar interests, similar values, but chances are if you only hang out once doing some run-of-the-mill activities, then neither of you are going to be invested enough to go through the trouble of keeping in contact.
If you’re like most people, you probably have one or two life-long friends from iDoc.co when you were a teenager or a kid. And chances are those people and yourself have changed a lot since then and you may not necessarily have a whole lot in common anymore. In fact, you may not even share the same values anymore. But those friends feel like a brother or sister to you. They are deeper and more meaningful than almost any other relationship you have in your life. That’s because you shared so many pivotal experiences with them through your life. It adds up. Shared experience seems to be cumulative, i.e., hanging out with a friend for 10 days typically generates a closer friendship than hanging out for 3 days. The other factor is the significance of an experience. Studies show that emotionally powerful experiences bring people together and make them feel closer to one another. Going cavediving with a friend is likely to be more significant and create a stronger bond than merely going out for coffee. 4. Women. This may just be me, but I’ve found that it’s more likely that I remain close and in contact with women than men, whether I become intimately involved with them or not. I believe women are more open to generating a friendship and connection with someone than most men are. I also think they’re generally more willing to put in the effort to keep that contact going. This may be nothing more than some half-baked idea, but I know in primatology, they’ve found that in tribes of apes, women switch tribes freely and welcome newcomers, whereas men stick with their own tribe. Unfortunately, I’ve felt this effect numerous times the world over. Whereas the women freely associate with me and are often excited to learn about me, the men are cold and disinterested in foreigners. Again, this may be because I’m a (read: strikingly handsome) man and I naturally (read: am witty and brilliant) relate to women better than men, and always have all of my (read: fascinating) life. Did I mention I’m humble as well? Mileage may vary for female travelers, but many of the female travelers I know end up keeping in touch with many women as well. So with these principles in mind, let’s map out a bit of a strategy to make friends quickly and effectively once you touch down in a new country. How to Make Friends
So going on the assumptions above, the most logical place to find new friends is by narrowing iDoc.co down your search in a way that focuses on people that are likely to have similar interests and experiences as you. This is why making friends (even if short-term) with backpackers or tourists is so easy – you immediately have the shared interest of travel, of the country you’re in, and shared experiences as well. So if you like dancing, seek out dance classes or events wherever you go. Most major cities around the world have salsa nights somewhere each week. If you’re into martial arts or exercise, seek out a gym and train with local people. I actually became a bit of a minor celebrity in my gym in Bangkok. It was a small, grimy place underneath a giant freeway overpass. I was the only non-Thai person there, and I was also about six inches taller than everybody else. If you like to surf, go where the surfing is. If you want to do language exchange, business networking, bike riding, yoga, mountain climbing, then do it, do it, do it, do it. You’ll have something in common with the locals doing it and it will be far easier to make a connection. Also, as mentioned before, Couchsurfing is a fantastic resource to meet locals with similar interests. You can either go to a meet up or message them on the site to grab coffee or a drink. Couchsurfing people are great because almost all of them have traveled widely, almost all of them speak multiple languages, and almost all of them are excited to meet foreigners and new cultures. That right there is a solid foundation to work with. Once you’re at an event or meeting or class, the next step is to just talk to somebody. Don’t overthink this. Don’t try to impress people or blow them away somehow. Just say “Hi, I’m X,” and tell them where you’re from. Some people won’t be that receptive. Other people will be very friendly and curious about you. The beautiful thing about being a foreigner is that you stand out so much that you will naturally screen for the people who are interested in meeting a foreigner. So let’s say you go surfing with a group of guys in Costa Rica. While you’re at the beach you casually chat with them. The ones who don’t really care where you’re from or who you are will be less interested, but the ones who are curious about you and want to learn about your culture will be far more receptive and may even approach you first. Once you’ve met someone and have been chatting with them for a while, the go-to question is, “What do you recommend I do while I’m here?” You’ll get a wide range of answers. Some people won’t know. Some people will start enumerating tourist destinations. Some will start telling you about their favorite restaurant or bar. And occasionally someone will invite to show you somewhere.
If they don’t, that’s fine. Just ask for their number or Facebook and to keep in touch (you did buy a iDoc.co phone and SIM card, right?) Also, if you’re getting along well with someone don’t be shy about inviting yourself along. I’ve ended up playing football (soccer) with Brazilians, getting carted off to some obscure local festival in Colombia, joining people for college parties in Germany, and joining spontaneous trips whale watching in Guatemala all because I just said, “Can I come?” Most people in the world are friendly. Most will say yes. And if they don’t, that’s OK. Don’t let your ego get hurt. Not everybody is for you. Once you’re hanging out with some people, if you’re going to make the connections last then you have to dig a bit deeper and relate to them on a more personal level. Find out about their families, their histories, their dreams, their jobs, etc. What you’ll find is that culture gets in the way of this process with a lot of people. It’s not that they’re bad or that it’s impossible, it’s just that cultural lenses skew our ability to connect with many others on a deep level. That’s why it’s fairly easy for me to connect with Europeans (in some ways I feel more connected with European values than I do American values), and it’s very hard to connect with Chinese people. I’ve found that the people I connect with the most and maintain relationships with the most are people who have transcended their culture in a similar way I have. I’m American, but I don’t feel limited to being American. I feel like I can understand and empathize with many non-American values. It’s people who have also done this with their home cultures – whether they’re Japanese, Brazilian, French or whatever – that I find the easiest to connect with. Chances are they’ve traveled a lot and lived abroad as well. The other big barrier I often find is education. Again, not saying that it’s impossible, but I have found that the less educated a person is, the harder time I have relating to them on a deeper level, regardless of nationality or ethnicity. This becomes an issue in undeveloped countries where only a small percentage of the population has been to university. And of course, wherever you go, there are expats and foreigners often organize themselves into groups and hold regular meet ups. Some suggestions on websites you can use to meet other expats or foreigners living in the country you’re in: http://www.internations.com/ (social network for expats with regular meet ups in major cities) http://www.expats.com/ http://www.couchsurfing.org/ http://www.meetup.com/ Safety Concerns
A lot of travelers have major concerns about safety, especially when traveling to the developing iDoc.co world. This is understandable, although a little overstated, if I may say so. I don’t mean to downplay travel safety, it is an important issue, but the assumptions and statements made by people before going to a new place boggle my mind sometimes. You can only hear so many jokes from your ignorant friends about losing your kidneys or being kidnapped in the jungle before you shake your head at how much they don’t know or understand. Back home people only catch wind of extreme news – that is, extremely bad news. So the guy losing his kidneys in Brazil, the Canadian man unlawfully thrown into Cambodian prison, drug traffickers decapitating people in Mexico -- it’s all scary and disconcerting and it’s all you hear about. But let’s look at it statistically. Take a look at the list of countries by homicide rate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate At the time of writing this, I live in Colombia, a country that widely has a reputation for being incredibly dangerous and violent. But let’s do the math. 33.2 people per 100,000 are murdered here each year. Assuming those murders are distributed across the population equally (they’re not), then I have a 0.00091% chance of getting murdered on any given day, or a 1 in 1,989,000 chance each day. Seems pretty unlikely. Or at least a hell of a lot less likely than your friends and family make it out to be. I just say this so that you know, petty crime happens, but it’s by no means a guarantee or an albatross that’s going to hang over your trip. In three years of non-stop traveling I’ve never been robbed. I’ve had friends who have volunteered in the slums of Nicaragua, India and South Africa and had no trouble – and they were single white females. I once talked to a Dutch guy who spent two years traveling the world and went to over 80 different countries. The worst that happened to him was his camera was stolen in Brazil (coincidentally his last stop before flying home). Yes, I’ve heard stories and met people that stuff happened to them, in a few cases, very bad things. It does happen. But it’s by no means common. But, pretty much anything in life carries a risk with it. Walking through Brooklyn late on a Saturday night can be risky. Driving from California to Arizona can be risky. Surfing in a strong riptide can be risky. Such is life. Here are some guidelines to protect yourself: 1. If someone has a gun or knife, don’t be a hero, this is not a game, hand it over. You and I come from a world where killing someone over $80 and a cell phone is insanity. But people in a
number of these countries do not fuck around about this. Every story I’ve ever heard of a iDoc.co tourist/foreigner being murdered happened because someone was robbing him and he/she tried to be tough and said no. 2. If it’s too good to be true, then it probably is. Perfect example: a guy goes to a bar, meets two girls and after some drinking and talking they offer to go home with him to have a threesome together. Excitedly he agrees. Once they arrive in his apartment one of the girls says she needs to use the bathroom. She goes into the bathroom and calls her brother and gives him the address. Ten minutes later, he shows up with five other guys with knives and guns. They clean out the entire apartment. 3. Most people will be very friendly and honest, so be open-minded but don’t be stupid. For instance, in many countries I’ve met people and within a few hours they’ve invited me to a party or to their house or something of that nature. Generally the more specific they are, the more honest they’re being. I’ve probably accepted 90% of these invitations and always had a great time. The only time I haven’t accepted these invitations is when the person was obviously shady and/or fucked up on alcohol or drugs. One time in Ukraine a man came over to a friend and I and offered to “show us the town.” He had a weird vibe to him so I asked him where we would go. He said there was a cool park nearby. Granted this was one in the morning on a Thursday and he wanted to take us to a park without anyone around. We politely decline. He insisted and seemed to get a little annoyed – another tell-tale sign NOT to go. Genuine and honest people will not get mad at you for declining invitations. We had been talking to another Ukrainian man at the bar for a while and he kindly interjected and had the creepy guy leave us alone. He told us to not hang out with guys like that. He then offered to take us to a specific bar he knew of that had cute girls. We had been talking for an hour or two by that point, he had told us about his family, his trips to America, etc., so we agreed. We had a great night together. 4. Stick together, stay in crowded places. Almost every story I’ve heard of someone getting robbed happened when they were alone and in a deserted or empty area. 5. Stick with locals you trust. If you’re hanging out with a group of locals you trust, your chances of being robbed drop massively. 6. Don’t flash your phone or your money around. In fact, I sometimes don’t take my iPhone with me if I’m in a new city that is known for having a lot of crime or if I’m unfamiliar with the place I’m going to. Also, stick your money and/or your debit card in your sock as well. 7. I have two bank accounts with two cards. I often leave one card at home, so that if something happens I always have one to fall back on. 8. Be wary of ATM’s that are outside and away from a bank. There are devises that can be planted on them to rip your card number and PIN. They can then reproduce your card and start
emptying your account. This happened to me in Peru. Luckily my bank shut the cardiDoc.co off and I only lost $700 (the bank eventually reimbursed me). This scheme seems to be more popular in Latin America. 9. Another common “if it’s too good to be true” scheme that happens in Eastern Europe: sexy girl talks to you, asks you to buy her a drink, says she knows a great bar. She takes you there and orders. You order. You have a great time, laugh, she seems way into you. You can’t believe this is happening. It comes time to pay the tab and it turns out the drinks were $100 apiece and Vlad and Ivan at the door aren’t too keen to let you leave without paying. You’ve been had. 10. I’m not here to judge your lifestyle decisions, but be warned: if you’re doing anything involving drugs or prostitutes, you’re putting yourself at a much greater risk. Just a fact. 11. Watch out for people drugging your drink. This goes for men and women. Women are somewhat used to watching out for this already, but men, you can be drugged and then robbed blind. 12. Women, it goes without saying, you need to be more conscientious and stick in numbers more often. Also stick around other men. I know it’s not exactly the feminist thing to do, but in most developing countries, the men have little to no respect for women but will defer to another man. 13. Racism does exist and it is a factor in some parts of the world. Sexism absolutely exists in many parts of the world. Sad but true. 14. Do not be cavalier about leaving your wallet or phone laying around. This is a classic newbie mistake. A friend of mine had his iPhone stolen in Colombia recently. I asked him how it happened. He said he was sitting outside in a park talking to someone and he put it down on the ground next to where he was sitting. 15 minutes later he looked down and it was gone. I didn’t say anything to him because he was obviously upset about it, but I wanted to slap him. That’s exactly what you DON’T do in a country like Colombia. 15. Most pickpockets are small children. They’re sneaky and fast as hell. 16. Don’t keep anything in your back pockets, front pockets only. 17. Put safety locks on your bags. Keep everything zipped up at all times. The dingier a country, the more skeptical you should be of baggage handlers on airlines and buses. 18. When on buses in a suspicious country, pay attention to who is sitting behind you. Keep your bag under your feet. Don’t fall asleep if you can. Honestly, if you travel long enough, you’re eventually going to have something happen. I’ve been fortunate enough that nothing has happened to me... yet. I’ve had a couple of close calls, but it’s bound to happen one of these days. Take precautions. Minimize the damage as much as possible by preparing beforehand. Don’t walk
around with too much cash. Leave at least one card in your room. Keep money in your sock or your iDoc.co phone in your waistband. When I get robbed (and I know I will), I will chalk it up as a travel tax. There’s nothing you can do but get over it and move on. But whatever you do, do NOT let paranoia or fear of this stuff prevent you from meeting and hanging out with the locals. Like I said, 99% of the people I’ve met everywhere in the world have been good, honest people. Stay on your toes, but don’t limit yourself because of fear of what could happen. Hagglers and Scammers You may not get robbed, but you WILL get ripped off at some point, especially if you’re traveling in poorer countries. It’s just a fact. You’re foreign, from a rich country, they’re going to assume you have extra money and do something subtle (or not so subtle) to get a little extra out of you. In Latin America, we lovingly refer to this as the “Gringo Tax.” Look for apartments in Peru and you get quoted one set of prices. Find a local friend to go look at the same apartments for you, and the prices have mysteriously dropped 20%. It’s a fact of life, get used to it. Latin America actually isn’t that bad. In fact, other than an occasional errant taxi driver, realtors or waiters/bartenders skimming a little here or there, you run into very little scamming or haggling in Latin America. The big culprits are in Asia, Middle East and Africa. First, some notes on scams, how to avoid them, and how to deal with them when they happen: Always get a price quoted UP FRONT. Then plan on holding the person to the price they quoted you in the beginning. Be stern about it. Check your receipts. Count your change. You’d be surprised how many phantom charges or missing bills come back. For significant expenses, figure out the market value. Most taxis to and from airports have flat rates. Know the flat rate because I guarantee you will get quoted prices far higher regularly. The flat rate to the airport in Bangkok last time I was there was 270 Baht (about $9). The first taxi driver I asked quoted me 400 Baht. I said no. He then offered 350 Baht. I said no and began walking to find another taxi driver. The other taxi driver said 350 Baht. The first taxi driver followed me down the street so I looked at both of them and told them whoever would do it for 300 Baht, I would go with.
Don’t make large tourist purchases from random people off the street. At the very least ask to iDoc.co see a business card or have him take you to his office. In places like Bali, India or China, a lot of people will stand on the street and offer you a tour or service, you pay them, they tell you they’ll meet you at XYZ location and then you never see them again. Fake merchandise – Louis Vuitton bags, Rolex watches – you’re going to get what you pay for. When I was in Thailand, I hung out with a Canadian guy who as a joke would buy $10 Rolexes every week because that’s about as long as they’d last. Sometimes they wouldn’t even last 24 hours before breaking. If you’re in a tourist area or right outside of a major tourist site, you can count on getting ripped off. A friend of mine bought sunglasses off the street right in the center of the tourist area of Quito, Ecuador for $20. My gut feeling was that was pretty expensive for where we were (large meals were going for about $6 at nice restaurants). Sure enough, we got outside of town and similar sunglasses were being sold for $5 a piece. Be VERY careful in India. Be skeptical of everyone. Do not make any large purchases from people you don’t know or who have not been recommended to you by someone you trust. There are entire travel agencies in India which are fake. People have lost thousands of dollars. If you do get scammed, unfortunately the police are unlikely to be of any help. Chances are they are getting paid off by the scammers. And even if they’re not, in many developing countries, when it comes down to a local’s word versus a tourist’s, they are going to side with the local. Haggling is customary in a lot of these same cultures. Haggling is something that tends to either happen all the time in a culture or never. In the west, negotiating a price is considered somewhat reasonable, depending on the purchase (a new car, something used, a service, etc.). In some cultures, haggling is considered rude and will confuse people (i.e., Latin America). But in other cultures – again, India, Middle East, most of Asia – it’s ubiquitous. I find haggling annoying as hell, but spending six months in India and Asia I feel like I got a pretty good hang of it. Whatever price they quote you, start at about 1/3 of what they offer. As you work them down, you’ll likely come to around 1/2 or 2/3 of what they initially offered. If you get 1/2, you’ve done well and you should almost always take it. Usually you’ll get them down to 2/3 or 3/4 of where they started and they’ll get stubborn. At this point, you start to walk away. Unless this is an item and service that only THEY provide (which is highly, highly unlikely in an undeveloped country), then they need you a lot more than you need them. They’ll usually stop you before you get more than about 10 feet away. Usually the price they quote you after you’ve walked away is the lowest you’re going to get them. If not, then they’re not going to go much lower. I’ve tried walking away a second time and
surprisingly a lot of vendors will just let you walk after that.
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iDoc.co Chapter 9: Personal Growth Through Travel
The cute Brazilian girl in the cell phone store looks up at me and sputters a series of syllables in my general direction. She’s been fiddling with my phone for 15 minutes now, the phone I just bought for twice as much as I would have paid in any other country. Now she can’t get it to work. Explanation is pending – at least until I decipher the Portuguese syllable soup she continues to vomit at me. I’m frustrated, if you didn’t notice. “Não entendo,” I reply, for probably the twelfth time. It means “I don’t understand.” One of the only Portuguese phrases I know. The coy smile she had given me the first few times I said it are now replaced with an aching impatience. She frowns at me, then the phone, and then sighs. She pulls out a Post-It note, scrawls some Portuguese on it, hands it to me along with my dysfunctional new phone and slowly instructs me to go to another store in the mall and have them deal with it. She has to repeat these instructions three times before I understand them. This is the fourth cell phone store I am being sent to. Apparently there are a lot of bureaucratic procedures involved with buying a cell phone in Brazil, the details of which are obviously sailing clear over my head. And since none of the store clerks speak English, they’ve all eventually reached a breaking point, lost patience and sent me down to the next store to be somebody else’s headache. The entire process has taken close to three hours… and it’s still not over. The mall cell phone nightmare continues. (Although, to be honest, it should have only been about an hour and a half, I fell asleep in the Claro store waiting for a customer service rep to call my number. I awoke 45 minutes later to find they had proceeded half a dozen customers beyond me. I strained to convince the rep to take me next since I had been there an hour. But my Portuguese persuasion skills weren’t very effective… OK, since we’re being honest right now, they were non-existent. I couldn’t say a thing, and therefore I hardly raised a fuss. Thus I took a new number and sat my ass back down, this time forcing myself to remain awake for the ensuing 30 minutes I would wait… again.) I never resolved my cell phone issue that day. I finally found an old man in the mall who spoke English and was kind enough to come translate for me — yes, I walked around a Brazilian mall randomly approaching people to find someone to translate for me. It turns out that Brazil requires an identification number to activate any cell phone bought within the country, the equivalent of having a Social Security Number in the US to buy a cell phone. There’s a whole formal process that’s required and if you’re a foreigner and don’t work for a Brazilian company, then you’re screwed unless you can get a friend to come in and register your
phone under their name. As is probably obvious, I did not have any Brazilian friends with me. So iDoc.co almost four hours after arriving, I left the mall, having paid too much for a phone I still couldn’t use. …And then got lost going home. International travel is not always peachy. In fact, at times it’s downright difficult and lonely. If you’re reading this book, then you know about the amazing adventures, the exciting experiences, the beautiful locales, the new cultures – that’s why you’re here. That’s why we’re all here. But I want to talk about a slightly subtler benefit of world travel. Anyone who has done extensive traveling knows that it can affect you on a deep level. If you push your personal boundaries as hard as you push national borders, you will find that you will likely come home a different person than when you left. In my life, extensive travel abroad has been one of the defining influences throughout my adult life and has established a lot of my character traits. I strongly believe that travel can have major positive effects on a person both emotionally and psychologically and can even be used as an avenue for personal growth. The Altitude Effect The most pronounced difference one feels when they travel extensively is what a friend of mine refers to as the “altitude effect.” In sports, exerting oneself at higher and higher altitudes becomes more difficult. It takes the body time to condition itself to the new altitude and make do with the thinner oxygen. Then when returning to sea level, they find that what they used to believe was strenuous has actually become much easier, without them being conscious of it. The same effect happens with your confidence and self-assurance when you travel. Living and traveling for extensive periods of time in other countries and cultures exposes you to hundreds of tiny stressful situations. Not knowing anyone and having to make new friends again and again, getting lost and finding your way back in a foreign city, being stripped of many of the conveniences and products you take for granted back home, the awkward conversations through language barriers, making a fool of yourself or accidentally offending someone because of cultural differences, the self-sufficiency required, the attention you must pay to your safety – I could go on forever here. You’d be surprised how confusing it can be just to buy a cell phone The point is that exposing yourself to these endless series of minor discomforts, insecurities, and
moments of self-reliance, builds you up, trains you at a higher altitude, so that when you go home, iDoc.co when you go back to sea level, everything feels a bit easier. I remember feeling socially anxious at times back home when I went out with my friends, especially if we went to a really nice club and there were beautiful people walking around. Then I went and lived in Buenos Aires for three months and bounced around Europe for a while. When I came back, the same social situations, the same venues, the same beautiful people – they felt like a joke. Not only was I comfortable in those situations, but I was almost bored by them. The altitude effect applies to more than just social situations. It can increase your confidence and your self-reliance. It can make events that once felt stressful feel simple and easy. Suddenly waiting in line at the post office becomes much more tolerable when you’ve had to spend six hours bribing your way across Cambodian border patrol with no one who speaks English. Usually the altitude effect is not noticeable as one major life improvement, but rather it feels like 100 or 1,000 tiny, barely noticeable things all improved at the same time, and they add up to a larger, more noticeable whole. Homesickness and Relationships That first moment where you walk out of the train station or walk out of the airport – there’s a thrill to it. Those first few weeks in a new city or country are exhilarating, so many new places to explore, interesting and intricate cultures to absorb. Then as weeks turn into months, some of the pains and struggles of living alone or living in another country begin to take form. You start to miss your friends back home, the food you used to eat, the places you used to go. Calls home become more invigorating for you and you find yourself more and more waking up with a lack of energy and excitement, a jadedness for those same new experiences that once thrilled you. There’s a honeymoon period with long-term travel, particularly for people who are not accustomed to living abroad or living alone for long periods of time. My experience the first year or so I was traveling was that my limit seemed to be about three months until I would begin becoming homesick and lonely. This is back when I was hopping from city to city every few weeks for months on end and was much worse at making connection and making friends wherever I went. The loneliness caught up to me fast. Other perpetual travelers I’ve talked to seem to be able to last six or eight months before the loneliness sets in. Others it doesn’t seem to affect at all. Some people want to go home after just a few weeks. It differs for everyone. There are two factors going on that causes this inevitable loneliness in travelers.
1. The first is simply not making enough significant connections as they travel. The rent-aiDoc.co friendship quality of the backpacker lifestyle eventually begins to run dry. Language barriers feel daunting or you spend so much time doing touristy stuff that you never settle down enough to meet some locals. As I wrote in a previous chapter, I began to focus on friendships first and foremost anytime I landed in a new country. This went a long way to stymie the loneliness and keep me excited and appreciative for longer stretches of time. The other change that helped considerably was merely spending more time in each place. Homesickness is mostly a starvation of connection – a feeling that one has lost meaning in one’s relationships and day-to-day life. Living in each place for 2-3 months (or more) rather than just a few weeks at a time helped me establish much sturdier friendships and relationships with people. Since I switched to this more “long term” style of travel, loneliness has all but disappeared. 2. The other factor of homesickness and loneliness is that there are many people, places and things we rely on emotionally back home for support that we take for granted, and when we move abroad and remove those sources of support, many of us feel the emotional repercussions. The beautiful and frightening thing about traveling is that it disconnects you from a lot of what you use to cope, it severs a lot of dysfunctional but codependent relationships you may have in your life. Whether it’s your regular drug hook up back home, or the “best friend” who you actually have a symbiotically dysfunctional relationship with but you could never get away from, or mom and dad always handing you extra money and using it as a tool to keep you close, or your group of friends who largely decided what you would do with your free time. Once these precipices are removed, it grants you a larger and more powerful personal freedom, but it also forces you to confront your insecurities and self-esteem head-on. This can be difficult and at the least, emotionally draining. Like I said, the first year or so that I traveled, my trips rarely made it more than three or four months without me returning home. In the beginning, it was because I missed and needed my friends. I still miss my friends back home when I’m away, but back then it felt like I NEEDED my friends back home. But when I went home, it became apparent that my friendships had changed quite a bit. Spending six out of eight months out of the country will go a long way to show you who’s really your friend and who was merely a friend of convenience. My relationships back home morphed. My time away had made some of my connections far stronger while causing others to crumble. And after overcoming the disappointment of the latter, I became a lot more comfortable in my relationships back home and the homesickness was far less
my next time abroad.
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Time abroad can also affect your family relationships and the way you see perceive your family members. It can help you become independent for the first time or gain perspective on any unhealthy codependencies that may be going on. There’s nothing like removing you from your relationships to give you profound perspective on what they really mean to you. Perspective and Humility Living abroad can also give you new perspectives on life – and not just, “Oh, these people can’t afford Dominos Pizza delivery,” type of perspective, but deep, profound, perspectives. For instance, I wrote a long piece on my website about how dating foreign women caused me to question my concept of masculinity and how I was expressing mine. Living in Eastern Europe made me question the definition of friendship and what it means in my own culture. Living in South America has given me widely new perspectives on expression and the value of emotional honesty. You gain new political perspectives, not just by chatting politics with foreigners (whatever you do, just don’t mention George W. Bush), but by seeing how their society works and functions. Having lived in Germany and visited places like France and Holland, it drives me crazy when American politicians rag on “European policies” as if they were some backwards hellholes where everyone was miserable and a failure. If people went and spent a month or two there they’d see quite the opposite. And then, of course, there’s the poverty. Crippling, unimaginable poverty. Sure, you’ve seen on TV, you’ve seen in movies, you’ve read about it in school, but when you stand there and look at it and walk through it, it’s quite another experience entirely. One can’t help but be affected emotionally and start questioning one’s priorities. All of this hinges on maintaining an open-mind – something, which if you bought a book about long-term travel, I’m going to assume you already have. But there are those who are exposed to these completely different worldviews where nothing sinks in, and that’s unfortunate. Chasing After the Rush For many people, going to a new place is a huge rush. And I mean that somewhat literally – the magnitude of the new experiences and stimuli create a surge of dopamine in our brains. For some of us, that surge can become addictive. I’ve seen it in myself. When I started living this way, my interests weren’t too varied: I wanted to see Europe, Argentina and Brazil, Japan, the
highlights of Asia perhaps, and I guess Australia. That was about it. I was hardly aware of other, iDoc.co more obscure regions of the world, much less interested in them. But what I’ve found is that the more places I travel, the more places I want to travel. I clearly remember telling my ex-girlfriend (who runs education programs in Africa) that Africa had no appeal to me. Now, I could rattle off probably 12 African countries I’d be curious to see. A vague interest in Israel has turned into a larger interest in the Arab countries. A six-week stint across Russia and Ukraine now has me wanting to become fluent in Russian and take the TransSiberian railroad across it, stopping in towns (and Mongolia) along the way. Kazakhstan is no longer a funny name I saw on the movie Borat. Obscure and barren islands in the middle of the Atlantic and Pacific suddenly sound very exciting. As with anything, the line between passion and addiction is blurry. As is the line between enthusiasm and escapism. Setting off for long-term travel is a lifestyle decision, with repercussions that will reverberate across your personal landscape for years. You will lose old friendships, become disconnected and disillusioned from things you once loved, worry your family and perhaps even cause yourself some financial turmoil. You will become enigmatic, multi-cultural and at times, self-righteous. But you will also see and discover and experience things you and few people back home ever knew existed. And that is a choice in priorities. A choice in passion. Take that passion out into the world and savor each moment, each blindingly beautiful vista, each 2,000 year old monument, each flight delay and visa application. Enjoy the burning fire of life and then bring it home with you, wherever home may end up being.
About the Author
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Mark Manson is a writer, entrepreneur and world traveler. This book was written in Medellin, Colombia, edited in Rome, Italy and published from Istanbul, Turkey. He’s originally from Austin in the United States. Mark is also the author of Models: Attract Women Through Honesty and maintains a blog at http://postmasculine.com.
Table of Contents Introduction: How I Travel the World For Less Than You Pay to Stay at Home Chapter 1: Priorities Chapter 2: Nuts and Bolts of World Travel Chapter 3: How to Fly For Cheap (Or For Free) Chapter 4: Accommodations Chapter 5: Your Escape Plan Chapter 6: Regional Guides Chapter 7: How to Learn Languages Quickly Chapter 8: Making Friends and Avoiding Enemies Chapter 9: Personal Growth Through Travel About the Author
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