What is Long Term Travel?
From our experience, we’ve found that long term travel comprises a spectrum of lifestyles that all revolve around a want to see the world in an enduring and longer term capacity, either by living abroad, or dedicating months or years to exploring certain areas of the world.
Typically referring to those who have been able to make an income through their travels, long term travellers are able to sustain their lifestyle financially while making their way around the world, either working across different countries, working remotely, or relying on various assets and investments to fund their adventures.
This being said, there are other types of long term travellers who do so in set periods of time, relying on savings they have accrued, making the most of gap years, sabbaticals, strategic transitional periods, or flexibility within their jobs that sees them having large blocks of time off each year.
Although sharing a common theme, people who travel long term live very different lifestyles, the day to day being very changeable depending on who you speak to.
One of the best things of living abroad is having different ‘backyards’ to explore on your time off. Our working pattens remained similar, but we would find ourselves having new places to see on our evenings, weekends and holiday days.
The Lifestyle of Long Term Travel
Long term travellers can be referred to as a number of things; expats, vagabonds, slow travellers, backpackers, digital nomads, semi-retirees, the list goes on. Although we’re all on the same spectrum, these lifestyles can look vastly different; luxury or budget, static or nomadic, and day-to-day can look like work, holiday, or a combination of both.
We’ll be elaborating more on what the different types of long term travellers do for work/ how they fund their various lifestyles in future posts within our series (see below). Just to give you an idea on how diverse long term travellers can be, here are a few examples:
A seasonnaire who works the ski season in both the Northern and Southern hemisphere,
A travel nurse who relocates every other year to a new hospital abroad,
A small online business owner who works off their laptop out of Central America,
Semi-retirees who take off in their camper for four months a year to travel full-time,
A teacher who heads to Asia or the Middle East to work within an International School,
Backpackers who choose to explore South America for six months.
All of these people, whether their travels are more temporary or permanent, will have a completely different lifestyle than the next, but will all have long term travel at the core.
One of the perks of the world becoming so much more technologically advanced is that some careers now have the opportunity to work entirely online, and this has been tried and tested even further with many working remotely during the pandemic. In this way, if you find the right position, you could work from anywhere in the world.
For us, even though we’ve tended towards the working travel route over the past six years (acquiring working visas, staying in countries for many months or years at a time, and saving and investing as we go), our lifestyle has looked very different depending on where we were at the time and what we were doing. Although we were working for most of it, we have dabbled in quite a few of the other types of long term travel, and our days have varied from the mainstream to the hectic to the likes of a holiday.
We’ve personally loved having such a changeable lifestyle because it’s suited what we really wanted at the time, while still enabling us to work towards what we wanted from our future. In our twenties, working travel really suited us because we enjoyed seeing new places, but also like having a base, feeling sometimes overwhelmed when we only have a finite amount of time to explore a new space.
We know that as we change and evolve throughout our lives, our way of approaching travel will continue to change and evolve with us, so we fully expect our travel patterns to adapt now that we’re approaching our thirties.
All things Long Term Travel
Our new namesake series will explore all of the ins and outs of long term travel and all the different kinds of ways that you can go about doing it. We’ll be writing about what kinds of long term travellers there are out there, how you can live and work abroad (including how to do this and keep your career), all kinds of tips and guides on how to approach finding the best visa, and how to budget and save if you are looking to travel for a set amount of time
We hope to answer questions about this kind of lifestyle on a whole, whether you’re in it already, want to travel more, or are simply curious about it.
Have any questions or topics on long term travel that you want us to cover? Send us a message on our social accounts or email us at hello@thelongtermtravellers.com
Happy travels,
Sam + Steve
More on living abroad….
Youtubers Keith & Dev are on a year-long adventure backpacking post-Covid around Europe and showing the realities of long term backpacking through their channel. Our spotlight includes how they fund their adventures, what challenges they’ve faced, and what their advice is for travellers looking to have a similar experience.