Leanne Argyle - The Expat Chattheexpatchat.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Expat-Chat... · 2016-01-13 · no holidays, couldn’t travel affordably even if ... are the first generation

20CHIANG MAITHINGS TO LOVE ABOUT

REVEALED

EUROPE’SEXPAT CHATTHE

INTERVIEWS WITH THE WORLDS LEADING TRAVELLERS

JANUARY 2016 | ISSUE 01

COVER STORY:relocating their job from

to

MEET THE KIWI COUPLE WHO TURNED A VILLAGE IN LAOS ON IT’S HEAD

THE CANADIAN COUPLE LIVING A MILLIONAIRE LIFESTYLE ON LESS THAN $C2000 MONTH

LIFE WITHOUT ICE CREAM: REMOTE GROCERY SHOPPING IN MEXICO!

HOW TO BUILD A GREAT TEAM TO HELP YOU TRAVEL

JANUARY 2016

WWW.THEEXPATCHAT.COM

TRAVELLING6 SUPER TECH

PIECES TO PACK WHEN

HOW TO BUILD A

TRAVEL FUND

SUCCESSFUL

CHICAGOCOSTA RICA!

BEST LOW COSTAIRLINES

2 EDITOR’S NOTE

3 COVER STORY: HOW TO TAKE YOUR JOB FROM CHICAGO TO COSTA RICA

15 WORLD FESTIVALS

17 HOW TO BUILD A TRAVEL FUND

20 FROM CORPORATE LIFE TO A CAFÉ IN LAOS

36 HAVE OUTSOURCERS WILL TRAVEL: WHY BUILDING AN ONLINE BUSINESS DOESN’T MEAN HAVING TO DO IT YOURSELF

39 20 THINGS I LOVE ABOUT CHIANG MAI

43 LIVE LIKE A MILLIONAIRE FOR FREE

58 GROCERY SHOPPING IN XCALAK, MEXICO

61 MY 6 PIECES OF TECH GEAR THAT HAVE MOST IMPROVED MY TRAVELS

64 EUROPE’S BEST LOW COST AIRLINES

68 THE LAST WORD — MARGO PAIGE

STAFF

LEANNE ARGYLE editor

LEAH SARAH LIMCANGCO editorial assistant

CRISANTO DOMINGUEZ graphics and design

EXPAT CHATTHE

january 2016 | ISSUE 01 CONTENTSWELCOME TO

THE VERY FIRST EDITION OF THE EXPAT CHAT MAGAZINE!

IN THIS ISSUE:

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR:

“As this content includes directly transcribed interviews and

regional language variations, some grammar and spelling will

differ accordingly”.

Got questions? Thoughts? Dreams of Travel?

We would love to hear from you!

CONTACT [email protected]

[email protected]

THIS MONTHS CONTRIBUTORS

BRENDAN LEESAM PATTON

DIANA EDELMANCHUCK ROSDEIDRE MIZEDAVE DEAN

Love our Magazine? Check out

THE EXPAT CHATPODCASTOn itunes

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http://theexpatchat.com/

"Inspiring tales from people living the life of

their dreams through travel"

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THE EXPAT CHAT | ISSUE 1 January 2016 | All Rights Reserved.1

https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/expat-chat-lifestyle-travel/id1039954169%3Fmt%3D2

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W e are really excited about bringing the world to your inbox (and your ears through our Podcast) by talking to expats, digital nomads and roaming retiree’s about

their new lifestyle either on the road or moving to an entirely different country. Each one has a different story, a different ‘why’ which as humans now living in a world where more and more is possible, we find intriguing and find ourselves wonder-ing whether we could ‘do it too?’

Our mission with both the magazine and the podcast is to dispel the myths around travel being: not safe, too expensive

The world in which we live is chang-ing – faster, it seems than it ever has before. With it can come chaos, uncer-tainty and change on a global scale…but with all change comes re-birth and the creation of new opportunities.

We now live in a world that our grand-parents can only have imagined. Many of them worked a 60+ hour week, had no holidays, couldn’t travel affordably even if they wanted, and worse forced to work until they could work no more. Life was about survival.

Some say that the baby boomers are the first generation to really

enjoy life; to do more than just sur-vive – and it would be fair to say that we have embraced the opportuni-ty wholeheartedly – travelling more, buying more and doing more than our parents ever could.

But are we happier?

Research tends to say no – but for some the answer is a definitive yes. Not everyone has embraced the post war millennial consumeristic boom that has taken over our society. For some it is about living for their passion and doing what they want because it feels right and it makes them happy.

Many have found happiness follow-ing their travel dreams – be it as ex-pat retirees enjoying the simple things of life far more affordably in another

HI EVERYONE!

culture, or the new generation of digi-tal nomads whose income is tied to a computer but not to a desk – free to roam the world, docking in wher-ever they can get good internet.

Then there is the perpetual traveler – worldwide wanderers who enjoy the experiences most spend two weeks and several thousand dollars to grab but have mastered the art of doing it for cents in the dollar.

In this issue we share the experienc-es of Junior and Jackie Minchillo who had enough of the winters of Chicago and chose to relocate their jobs and their lives to sunny Costa Rica. We meet Andrej and Karen Brummer two corporate kiwis now living in Laos who teach the locals how to make western foods and give all the profit to local schools; who after doing a vision board together, realized they weren’t living their passion and Michael and Yvonne Bauche, a fantastic Canadian couple housesitting in the Caribbean living the millionaire lifestyle without the cost!

If you’ve been enjoying our podcast episodes we’re excited to be bringing you this publication. Look forward to more issues soon.

Leanne Argyle Editor

Welcome to the very first issue of The Expat Chat e-magazine!


How long would it take you to get tired of Chicago winters and two weeks holiday per year? For Illinois couple Jackie and Junior Minchillo it wasn’t long. The corporate life of all day meetings and working into the night proved to be too much and in April this year they made their move to sunny Costa Rica with their pet dog Harvey.

After some initial problems with the first house they stayed in they have now settled

into a local expat community in Playa Langosta a small beachside community of less than 1000 people near the town of Tamarindo and they haven’t looked back.

Their new life now gives them the best of both worlds with their income in US dol-lars while their costs are in Costa Rican colones giving them far more spending power for their dollar. We caught up with them both for a recent chat.

HOW TO TAKE YOUR JOB FROM

COSTA RICACHICAGO to

An interview with JACKIE and JUNIOR MINCHILLO


Tony (Argyle): We’re with Jackie and Junior Minchillo today who are coming to us live from Costa Rica. Hi guys! How are you?

Jackie (Minchillo): Hi Tony! How are you?

Tony: I’m great. Thank you very much. Thanks for asking. First ques-tion, describe your surroundings. Where are you sitting and what are you looking at at the moment?

Jackie: Well,we live in Playa Langosta, Costa Rica, which is the north-western coast of the country in the Guanacaste region; so it’s very hot and sunny here. I mean outside of our window—we live in a building, so we get to look at the pool and palm trees. We’re on a dirt road. We’re about a 5-minute walk to the beach, and we can kind of hear the ocean from our balcony; so we like to sit out there in the mornings, and we can see the sunset in the evenings from our balcony, which is awesome

We’re technically supposed to be in the rainy season right now, but

we’re actually in a really

Colourful Downtown San Jose

severe need for rain in this area. It’s only rained a few times, and so we’ve been in a bit of a water shortage late-ly. And—I don’t know… Do you have anything else that you would add about the surroundings?

Junior (Minchillo): No, I really en-joy looking at the palm trees outside and the sun and the blue skies.

Tony: Well, thanks, because I’m sit-ting in the middle of a wintry day in Australia here, so if you want some rain, I’m more than happy to send it across to you.

Jackie: Well, we feel your pain. We moved here from Chicago, Illinois, in the United States; so we’re very fa-miliar with harsh, cold winters.

Tony: What made you choose Costa Rica?

Jackie: A lot of people ask us this question. We’ve actually said, ‘We should probably figure out what our exact answer is to that’, because a lot of people ask us. It was somewhat random.

We started talking about moving to another country in general. We real-ly needed change. We were looking for the experience of really immersing ourselves in a different culture; so we started watching this YouTube show on expats, and that kind of tipped us off to Costa Rica first. We saw an epi-sode with this couple who was living here, and they just seemed to be lov-ing life.

We also had a friend that came and stayed for 3 months in Tamarindo, and he also raved about the area and loved it. What else?

Junior: But we did our own re-search in terms of location. We looked at a couple of different things. We looked at the language, the cost of living, where in the world we were going to live.

Language, because they speak Spanish here—I do speak Spanish—so it was a little bit easier for us in-stead of, let’s say, Thailand or go-ing to Italy or some other country in Europe or even somewhere else in Asia.

4 January 2016 | All Rights Reserved.THE EXPAT CHAT | ISSUE 1

We looked at cost to travel back and forth. Because we are pretty close to the US, the cost to fly is relatively cheap.

Also because I’m from Brazil—it is right in the middle of, in between the US and Brazil.

Those were some of the things that we looked at.

Obviously, the biggest one was weath-er. It was a requirement to be warm and be close to the beach.

Tony: Well, it keeps you out of those cold Chicago winters, doesn’t it?

Tell us a bit about your old life, because you haven’t been there very long, which was one of the great reasons I want to talk to you today… about the freshness of your experience. What was your old life like before?

Jackie: I would say our life was a typical description of the rat race. We’re living in Chicago – big city, very busy, lots of people. I worked in an agency and spent a lot of my day and a lot of my night working all of the time. And just kind of that expec-tation in general, in the United States, that we both kind of got caught up in in terms of not really having a lot of time off, being expected to be avail-able via email or phone all of the time. We were a bit lost. We were living to work vs working to live; and it just was exhausting.

Junior: I’d have to agree with what she just said.

Tony: Yeah. That’s a common story that a lot of people say. Did you reach a point where you just decided ‘that’s it’ or was it a gradual transition? How long have you been thinking about shifting before you did it?

Junior: I guess we did it pretty quick.

Jackie: It was pretty quick.

Junior: Once we started talking about it, I would say it was within 4 to 5 months.

Jackie: That we moved, yeah.

Junior: That we moved, yup. We started talking about it. We said, ‘You know what? We gotta make a change. Let’s do it.” “Okay, let’s do it”. And then the next day, we started doing our research. And now 4 months later, we are in Costa Rica.

Jackie: Yeah. . I mean, I would say, kind of the tipping point —Junior already mentioned that he’s from Brazil—so the tipping point of us, kind of starting to talk about it and start researching it, seriously was actually, when we were trying to plan a trip to Brazil and we were getting really frustrated, because for me, I only had two weeks of for the entire year that I was allowed to take off work.

And for us, living in Chicago, that really limited us. It didn’t really make sense to take a trip to Brazil for less than two weeks. But if we did that and took the full two weeks, that takes away any possibility to go visit home for the holidays or take a 3-day weekend over the summer. So that was really frustrating, and we just had this epiphany of ‘there are people that make travel a priority all over the world, so let’s figure out how they do it so that we can do it too’.

Junior: Yeah, and two weeks is just not a long-enough—if you like travelling and you want to explore the world, two weeks out of the year is not long enough.

Tony: I picked up on that, Jackie. You said you only get two weeks and then your holiday at your old job?

Jackie: Yeah. I mean I would say that that’s pretty typical in the United States. Some companies are now getting a little bit more progressive about it, and some companies will have programs where you can accrue extra paid time off the longer that you work for the company and things of that nature; but to the best of my knowledge, two weeks is still pretty typical on average across the country. And so, I mean that definitely does make it tough; and it limits you for sure in terms of what you can do in a given year.

Tony: Yeah, for sure. So you guys, when did you move to Costa Rica? It hasn’t been that long ago, has it?

Jackie: Well, we moved on April Fool’s Day, April 1st of this year.

Tony: I hope that wasn’t a bad omen.

Junior: Believe it or not, it is true.

Tony: So it’s obviously a fresh experience. What, I suppose, trials and tribulations did you go through during that travelling process? What did you do wrong? What did you do right? What recommendations would you have for people?

Jackie: Oh gosh, everything has been an adventure.

Junior: Yeah. You just learn so much. It’s a completely different place; and the way people live and the way things are done here in terms of shopping, in terms of how you talk to people and bargaining, and in terms of prices, it is a little bit different. I mean… I don’t know. Do you want to—Jackie?

You know what? We gotta make change….

Let’s do it!

‘‘‘‘


Jackie: Yeah.I mean in terms of the research process, if we just even start there, it was pretty tough to find the information just in general. I mean if we’re talking about Costa Rica specifically, it’s still a developing country in a lot of ways; and a lot of businesses are really operating kind of the old-fashioned way – on word of mouth, and they’re happy serving the local community and the tourists that come through; but they don’t do a ton of advertising and don’t have a lot of information available online for example.

So when we were trying to research areas and figure out ‘okay, if we lived here, what would be around us? What would be close to us?’ That kind of stuff is super difficult to figure out because not a lot of businesses have websites or they have websites that don’t have a ton of information or haven’t been updated in a long time.

So we actually spent a lot of our time during the research phase reaching out and connecting with other expats

that we found on Facebook or that we found online one way or another that were already living here just to say, ‘Hey, we’re trying to figure out X. Do you know how to do this or where we should go to find the information?’ So that was kind of tricky.

And I guess probably the biggest—oh, go ahead.

Tony: Sorry, I was just going to say, ‘Did the shifting process go quite smoothly for you?’

Jackie: Our first house that we lived in in Costa Rica was an experience that we’ll never forget, and we did something that I wouldn’t recommend to other people. And that was we found this house online. It was close to the beach, which was one of our requirements, and it was within our price range; and we talked to the owner of that house one time and just asked him some questions about accessibility, and we saw one photo of the house; and we said, ‘Okay. We’re there. We’ll do it. Sounds good.’

When we got there, it was quite an-other story. We ended up quite in the middle of nowhere in an extremely rural area—

Junior: Without a car.

Jackie: Yeah, no car. The owner advised things were in walking dis-tance, but it was about a 45-minute walk for example to get to the nearest store to buy anything; and he knew that we wouldn’t have a car. So that was a challenge. The house was very much… I don’t even know what you would call it – rustic living I guess. No windows, just open air, no locks on the door.

A typical Neighbourhood in San Jose


Junior: No bathroom door.

Jackie: Yeah, no doors in the house, no bathroom doors. So that all was a huge shock to us; and we ended up making it one week in the house, and then we just kind of had a heart-to-heart with the owner and said, ‘We re-ally apologise. We really thought that we were going to stay longer, but we just can’t do it. We need to move closer to town. For us, this is beyond culture shock. I don’t know if we’re going to be able to figure out how to live out here’, kind of by ourselves in the middle of no-where in the Costa Rican country side.

Tony: Well, the good thing about those experiences, they’re no fun at the time; but they make great coffee cup stories for later on, because you always remember those moments, and you can laugh about them after-wards; but at the time, they just don’t seem very funny, do they?

Jackie: Oh yeah. We say that all the time – about how we’ll be telling that story for years.

Tony: Okay. So let’s just look at cost of living in Costa Rica. I understand it’s reasonably affordable. How does it compare to the US?

Jackie: For us, it’s a night-and-day difference from living in Chicago; so it’s kind of two extremes. Chicago is an expensive city to live in, so it is by no means the average. I would say it’s on the higher end in terms of United States’ cost of living

And then the area that we now ended up in in Costa Rica, we now learned it is also on the higher end for the country; so you can find places to live in Costa Rica that are a lot cheaper than where we’re living. This is just where we decided to be because it made the most sense for us, and we liked it the most.

For example, we cut our rent in half basically. In Chicago, we were paying 1,325 US dollars for a one-bedroom

apartment in the city. Here, we’re paying $750 for a one-bed, two-bath condo.

And then in terms of utilities, it’s be-tween $150 and $200 a month I would say. In terms of utilities in Costa Rica, by far, the most expensive is going to be your electricity from running the air-conditioner; so if you can be more conservative with your air-condition-er, you’ll probably save a lot of money on cost of living.

And then we kind of sat down the oth-er day and took a look at this and fig-ured we’re spending around $500 a month on groceries. I mean from my perspective, from our perspective, I would say $2,000 a month is a really comfortable budget in Costa Rica in the area that we’re in.

Junior: I think the biggest thing that helped us was cutting all of our expenses – not all of them, but most of them – when it comes to car payments, car insurance, health insurance, all these different things we’re being charged on a monthly basis that really we don’t need. And when you’re in the US, you think, ‘Oh, this is good. This is what I want’, and then you come here, and you realize, ‘Oh, I really don’t need all those services.’

We cut down on that. We cut down a lot on all these expenses.

Tony: Just talking about health cover there, Junior, how do you cover yourselves, and what’s the quality of health care like in Costa Rica?

Junior: We actually don’t have health care here. We just chose not to have it. We have insurance in the US, and we looked at how much we spent in the US for the year; and on top of the payments, we had co-pays. So healthcare in the US, as of now, I don’t think it’s at a good place. Here, because we are pretty young, we are healthy, we keep ourselves active, we prefer to—if we need to go to the doctor, we would just pay for the visit out-of-pocket.

We haven’t really done a lot of research on how healthcare works here in Costa Rica. We just know that as of now, we don’t need it.

Tony: Okay. That’s interesting. The people I’ve been speaking to so far, I’ve always known the US’s healthcare as being quite expensive. What I hadn’t realized is it’s actually not that good compared to other parts of the world. There are lots of parts in Asia and probably through Central America where not only is it considerably cheaper, the healthcare, but the quality’s actually better, which is another reason why people are so keen to move I think.

Jackie: I think so.

Junior: We heard that too, yeah.

Jackie: Medical tourism is a term that they use here. There are lots of people that come to Costa Rica for—if they need some sort of surgical procedure or if they need dental work done, because like you said, they can get quality care for a fraction of the cost.

Tony: Can I ask a question? Obviously, you’ve thrown in your old jobs. How are you finding your lifestyle now?

Jackie: We both work from home, so… do you want to go first and talk about what you do?

Junior: Sure.. I work with web development. I was working from home for the majority of time in Chicago. I kept most of my clients from the US. That was one of the reasons why we said we are able to make the move. I can keep my clients, and I will have these clients for at least the next three months; and then we’ll see what happens.

I’m still doing the same thing. I get new clients now and then, and… yeah.


Jackie: And then for me, my background is in public relations and marketing. Actually, when I spoke with my boss in Chicago and let him know that we’re going to be making the move; we actually worked out an arrangement together. I spent some time consulting on public relation strategies still on a freelance basis for some of my same clients, and I started doing some work freelance writing as well since we got down here.

So, so far, it’s been working out really well. We both have kind of a steady flow of clients that are all based in the United States. And since we’ve been here, we kind of started networking with people. We’ve had some local businesses and local business owners that have expressed some interest in working on projects with us too, which is great because we would love to get more involved with people locally too.

So we’ve got our dining room converted into an office with our work stations, and we work from home.

Tony: That sounds like our dining room. We do exactly the same thing.

Hey, that’s interesting because you guys are really getting the best of both worlds there because you’re

obviously still earning US dollars but spending the Costa Rican cur-rency, which is considerably cheaper for you. So that’s a great one in it-self, but I think the other interesting thing about what you said, obviously what you do, Junior, that’s something that a portable business; but in your case, Jackie, you probably didn’t see the opportunity for that to become portable. And now, because you’ve spoken to your boss, you’ve actu-ally created a position that you can travel with which maybe didn’t exist before?

Jackie: Yeah, absolutely. I mean when we had talked about it, we had kind of had this whole conversation of ‘here is what I would like to do’. I’m going to have to quit my job. There’s probably going to be a period of time where I’m not going to be working and bringing in any income until I can figure out how to sort of change course. So we had kind of prepared ourselves for that, and then I end-ed up being pleasantly surprised by the opportunity coming up just to work remotely, and it’s worked out really well.

Tony: How’s affordability of flights from there? You mentioned about travelling down to Brazil. Is it com-parable to travelling from the US to Brazil?

Jackie: Surprisingly—we’re going to be going on a trip to Brazil in October, so I’ll just use that as an example. We found flights from San Jose, Costa Rica, to Sao Paulo, Brazil, for basi-cally the same price that you can buy them from Chicago to Brazil, which was surprising because we’re closer, we thought that flights would be more affordable; but I have a feeling it has to do with just the number of daily flights. They’re just not as many go-ing from Costa Rica as there are from some hubs in the States. So when we’re going in October, we’re actu-ally flying to Miami first, and then we booked a round trip flight from there; and it was less than half the costs

Tony: Wow. So that shows it pays obviously to maybe look at ratings out back through a US hub if you want-ed to go anywhere else in Central or South America.

Jackie: Yeah. I mean we haven’t re-ally looked into any other trips where we would have to take a flight yet, but it’s definitely something that we’ll look at, I think, moving forward for any trip because it surprised us.

It’s quite interesting just in general for us, even talking with family and friends about coming down here to visit us – you can definitely find deals out there and find affordable travel, but sometimes, you just need to get creative with it.

Tony: Yup. How’s safety for you? Do you feel safe living there?

Jackie: Yup.

Junior: I do.

Jackie: That would be the short answer. We haven’t had any issues whatsoever since we’ve been here. I think it’s like anywhere in the world really where you just need to use some common sense and kind of have your wits about you. Just from what we’ve observed and from what other people have shared with us, The climate in the mountains is perfect for growing and harvesting coffee


I think theft is probably the biggest issue in terms of crime here.

But again, I think it comes down to don’t necessarily be super flashy, make sure you lock your doors, don’t leave things in the car that you wouldn’t want someone to be tempted by, things like that. We try not to carry a lot of cash on us when we go out and about.

Junior: We don’t wear our rings.

Jackie: We don’t wear our wedding rings. We just leave them back home. So we do take precautions in that way just to protect ourselves and thinking about if something were to happen, what would upset us if someone took it basically, and then we protect those items. But again, we haven’t had

any issues. I feel totally safe walking around town here on my own. I’ll walk down to the beach with the dog by myself, and it’s not an issue.

Yeah, it’s been… people here have a very friendly disposition, and people say ‘hi’ when you pass them on the street; and it’s a small town, so there’s definitely a community feel here where, for the most part, you might not know everyone personally, but you pretty much recognise everyone that’s a local here.

Tony: So I guess you’re not really having to take any more precautions than what you might have done in Chicago anyway.

Junior: No.

Jackie: No.

Junior: We might have taken more in Chicago.

Jackie: Yeah.

Tony: I was going to say that, but I didn’t want to imply anything (laughter). So what do you miss the most about being away from the US?

Junior: I think it’s the same for both of us, right? I think it’s just being able to—it’s just the friends and the family that we left behind.

Jackie: Yeah.

Junior: When you move far from home to a different country or across the country, it is difficult to leave

Stunning scenery abounds in Costa Rica…it’s not just beaches


what’s your flight cost if you do need to return?

Junior: It’s about six hours I think.

Jackie: It’s about six hours total flight time, and there’s generally a connection in Florida somewhere.

Junior: Or Atlanta.

Jackie: Let me think about the flight costs. We did a round trip from Chicago to Liberia for $750 each. Most recently, we did a roundtrip from Miami to San Jose, and we found those tickets for $450 apiece; so you really need to shop around the air-lines, shop around where you’re fly-ing in and out of, and kind of do some comparison shopping.

I will say I’ve seen a lot of news in the past couple of weeks, and Southwest Airlines is newly flying into both San Jose and Liberia, Costa Rica; so they seem to be running some really awesome deals right now. So if people were, looking, I would definitely check them out.

Tony: A good opportunity to come down and have a look first, aye?

Jackie: Yeah. Definitely.

Tony: So internet coverage seems fairly good. We’ve had no problems on this call. Is it generally pretty reliable?

Jackie: Yup. I mean it’s generally pretty reliable. We do pay for an upgraded speed on our internet at home, and it’s not too expensive. I think the internet package is $80 a month, and that’s for 10 megabytes of speed.

Junior: Yeah. It might not seem much in the US, but for Costa Rica, usually, it’s about 2 megabytes – the average here, or what most people will have is 2. So 10, we feel like ‘oh wow. The websites are loading really fast’.

Tony: Yeah. And I guess given your businesses too, you need to have that reliability; and I guess that’s effective for people. When they do relocate, if

friends behind; but with time, you meet people, and that’s how—you make new friends.

We haven’t been here for too long, and we started making a couple of friends. I don’t know if they’re friends-friend, but the friendship is definitely flourishing now. So… yeah.

Tony: Is that with other expats? Is there an expat community where you are?

Junior: There is a huge, yeah, expat community. Most of them are from the US, but we’ve met quite a few locals that I play soccer with or play volleyball, that we just started talking, and we met.

Jackie: Our dog has been an excellent networking tool. I will say that. You meet other people that have dogs really easily.

Tony: Yeah. I can imagine that will be the case. How long does it take you to get back to Chicago and


they’re working online, that’s proba-bly the first priority almost, isn’t it?

Junior: Yes, absolutely.

Jackie: Oh yeah. Definitely. I mean there are days when the internet will go out, so if you’re from a place where you’re used to superfast, super reli-able internet, I would be prepared for a few days of frustration for sure. Like there have been times where the in-ternet goes out for a day, and there’s no one that’s going to answer the phone and give you an indication of when the internet is coming back on. You just kind of have to wait for it.

Junior: Usually, it’s not for a full day.

Jackie: Yeah, I mean I would—

Junior: Just for an hour, sometimes a few hours. It’s not for a full 24 hours.

Jackie: No.

Tony: I guess when you’re in Costa Rica, you got to be prepared for that. And most people are kind of living in ‘olden times’, for want of the better word. That’s part of what you pay about living there, and I guess the frustration. If you want something fixed, it probably takes a few days. Is that the case?

Jackie: Oh yeah.

Junior: Yeah.

Jackie: Yeah. Definitely. It’s a relaxed culture in general, and so… yeah.

Junior: So ‘tomorrow’ might mean ‘next week’.

Jackie: ‘Next week’.

Junior: ‘We’ll get it done tomorrow.’ ‘Oh okay, all right. I’ll expect to get it done next week then when you say tomorrow.’ We got used to it here.

Tony: That’s actually better than Australia. When you ring a tradie here and they tell you they’re coming tomorrow, you don’t see them at all… so.

Junior: Oh okay.

Jackie: Oh, we’re lucky then.

Tony: You are. You shouldn’t complain. Honestly, there are worse places, I can tell you.

Junior: There you go.

Tony: You’re over that ‘honeymoon’ phase now. What would you say has been the disappointment of having done it, and what’s been a pleasant surprise? Has there been things that have happened that were ‘oh, that’s really good. That’s better than I thought it would be’, and other things that have not been what you’re expecting?

Jackie: For me… Junior grew up in Brazil, and so a lot of things about the culture are somewhat similar; but for me, having always grown up and lived in the United States, I think sort of the thing that surprised me and that I really enjoyed was kind of how lax a lot of things are. We can take the dog with us into a restaurant. He can run loose on the beach and play with the other dogs for example, whereas in most places in the United States, you would not e allowed to do that.

It just becomes a matter of what it is that

I want to do every day that makes me happy.

‘‘‘‘You can grab a beer from a local restaurant, and if you’re not finished but then you’re ready to leave, you can just walk out with it and walk down the street with it. Things are very relaxed.

There are rules, but for me and compared to what I’m used to, it’s like ‘Woo, there are no rules here!’ like I can just be happy and relaxed and not worry and kind of do what I want to do on a day-to-day basis, and no one will say anything about it.

That was kind of interesting and fun and surprising all at the same time.

In terms of disappointments, I don’t necessarily think that we have been disappointed by anything, but just challenged in ways that we had never encountered before. Junior kind of already mentioned leaving the network behind. That’s definitely, for me, the hardest part too – you really have to put yourself out there in a way that you never have before, and you need to figure out culturally what is acceptable.

Everything from calling the cable company to what do you tip at a restaurant to when you meet someone local, what kind of questions can you ask them? Can you be inquisitive about their family or are there any cultural things that you should be aware of there? You have to figure out ‘where do we buy our groceries? Where can we go if something breaks? Who do we call for really anything that you need to take care of?’

And then friends, meeting friends – you just have to basically put yourself out on the line and say, ‘I’m new here. This is my name, and this is what I do’, and, ‘Let’s be friends.

Tony: Yeah, sometimes that’s where you get the enjoyment out of life – by being forced into those situations. You do feel more alive, I guess, as a result of doing that.

Jackie: Definitely.


Tony: The final question, I guess, for you guys is ‘how would you say what you’ve done has changed your lives?’

Jackie: It has completely changed our perspective. I think we now re-alise—when you go through the pro-cess, the way that we did, and the way I think a lot of expats do when they make a move like this is when we de-cided that we were going to come down here, we sold all of our stuff. We got rid of our car. We really shed our lives of everything extra. And now that we’ve done that, I think we realize essentially how much time and money and effort we spent on things that we really didn’t need, that didn’t really make us happy. It was more about keeping up with the status quo.

And I think now that we’re in this posi-tion, we can really recognize that and see it for what it is and kind of focus on the things that do truly make us happy

And then Harvey (our dog), he’s hav-ing a hard time being home right now, but I want Junior to answer that ques-tion too.

Junior: Sorry. I’m trying to contain the dog.

Tony: That’s all right. No problem.

Jackie: For you, how has it changed your life?

Junior: As Jackie said, you just re-alise how much stuff you had that you really don’t need; and it just becomes a matter of what it is that I want to do every day that makes me happy. For me, right now, I have to make the move; and for me, having an expen-sive car is not what I want. It doesn’t make me happy. I really enjoy going to the beach. We go pretty much ev-ery day. We walk our dog. We are outside every single day. I play vol-leyball. I play soccer. Those are the things that matter to me the most.

Being here, you realize ‘oh, these things really make me happy’ and ‘that’s what matters to me’.

Tony: Awesome. Guys, it’s been great speaking with you today. You are indeed inspiring expats.

If people want to get hold of you, I know you got a couple of websites. If they want to know more about mov-ing to Costa Rica and what’s involved, how do they get in touch with you?

Jackie: Yeah. I started a blog just before we moved to kind of document our experience and share what we learned along the way, and the URL is DayWellLived.com. There is a con-tact form right on the website where people can get in touch with me, and that goes directly to my email address.

People can see photos and videos and read about some of our adven-tures. I try to include information and facts along the way too – just about different cost-of-living things, how we are able to accomplish certain things, and kind of some of the things that we’ve talked about today just in terms of things that came up that we’re sur-prising or scary or funny. Lots of fun-ny things have happened.

Junior: And I would highly recom-mend to watch the videos about the first house we lived in.

Tony: Ah, yeah.

Jackie: We’ve got a tour of the house there.

Tony: That’s like the warning video, isn’t it?

Junior: Yeah, it certainly is.

Tony: ‘If you don’t plan ahead…’ What about you, Junior? Have you got a website?


http://www.DayWellLived.com

http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click%3Fid%3DN14wfIQJPlQ%26offerid%3D343625.44%26subid%3D0%26type%3D4

WHAT WE LEARNT FROM JACKIE AND JUNIORS INTERVIEW:1. Check out blogs before you go. They struggled to find information

from local businesses before they made the move but the expat community was a source of great help. It emphasizes the need to reach out to people in the locations where you want to go. All expats have been in the same situation and you’ll find no shortage of people ready to help you out, both online and when you arrive.

2. Your job may be more transportable than you think. Although Juniors web design work was portable Jackie expected to have to throw in her job as a public relations consultant and start fresh, but once she spoke to her bosses they discovered a way she could continue to work remotely from Costa Rica. Is your job more transportable than you think? Don’t assume you have to give up the benefits of your day job. Jackie can continue to do the work she loves but with much better hours and a far more enjoyable and warm environment.

3. Look at hubs when planning any flights you take. Jackie and Junior found they halved the cost of going to Brazil when they planned a trip from Costa Rica via Miami to what it would have been to travel directly to Brazil from Costa Rica. We regularly find the same thing in Australia when we travel in Asia – a flight routed through the relatively cheap hub of Singapore to other Asian destinations is usually cheaper than going directly from Australia to the Asian country you have in mind.

Junior: Yes, we do have another website. It’s ExpatsKnow.com. It’s a Q&A website where expats—or if you’re looking to make a move and you have a question, you can just go in there, ask your question; and then we have other expats that go to this site every day, and they just answer the questions, and they share their knowledge.

Tony: So is that just based around Costa Rica or is that general?

Junior: As of now, it is just in Costa Rica. We do have plans that once the site gets to a point where we have a lot of members in Costa Rica, we

already have plans to expand to oth-er countries – and eventually, maybe the whole world. We’ll see.

Tony: Global domination. Love it. It’s great, guys. We’ll post those links up on the page. You made a good point earlier on – you did your research, you got in touch with people in Costa Rica before you went, which is obvi-ously one of the best sources of infor-mation. So these blogs and the web-site that you have, I can say they’re very valuable to people.

Guys, thanks so much for your time today. We really appreciate talk-ing to you. This is the first time I’ve

spoken to anybody who lives in Costa Rica, and I’ve learned a few things. It sounds like an exciting place. It sounds well worth visiting. So we really appreciate your time, and thank you to both you; and I’m sure our listeners appreciate listen-ing as well.

Jackie: Thank you.

Junior: Thank you.

Jackie: We appreciate it too.

Junior: Thank you so much.


http://www.ExpatsKnow.com

Before heading out to the worldmake sure you have the right technology, grab your copy of

HARD DRIVESBy Dave Dean

CLICK THIS LINK

Before heading out to the worldmake sure you have the right technology, grab your copy of

HARD DRIVESBy Dave Dean

CLICK THIS LINK

14

http://toomanyadapters.com/hhd/?aff=7

December 29 - 31: Rhythm and Vines Festival New Zealand Rhythm and Vines is New Zealand’s premier New Year’s Eve festival. The first festival in the world to welcome in the first sunrise of the new year. Come celebrate with friends.

December 30 – January 01: Hogmanay Street Festival Edinburgh, Scotland

WorldFestivalsDecember 25: Full Moon Party Koh Phangan, Thailand 10-30,000 people rock it out at the Full Moon Party in Koh Phangan ...every month! If you are in the area it will be worth a look!

HARBIN INTERNATIONAL ICE & SNOW SCULPTURE FESTIVAL, CHINA Date: Starts January 5thChilled by the Siberian winter, Harbin, in northeast China, plays host to the largest ice and snow festival in the world. Starting in January and running for over a month, activities include ice slides and hacking the sculptures to pieces with ice axes at the end of the festival.

photo credit: beautifulnow.is

Tamworth Country Music Festival NSW Australia…15-24 January

If your boots are made for walking make sure they head to the Tamworth Country Music Festival in New South Wales, Australia. In it’s 44th year, the festival is a bustle of buskers, live shows and the famous Gold Guitar Awards…y’all come back now ya’hear!

photo credit: www.tcmf.com.au

SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL, USADate: January 22 to February 1Fancy the Movies? The Sundance Film Festival showcases its latest offerings when Independent film makers flock to this Utah town for networking and showing their films. Keep you eyes peeled for a few Hollywood stars checking it out too!

TAPATI RAPA NUI, CHILEDate: January 30 to February 14, 2015This famously isolated island is bet-ter known as Easter Island. In the traditional triathlon, local men run around the lake of the Rano Raraku volcano carrying a hand of bananas.


PINGXI SKY LANTERN FESTIVAL, TAIWAN Date: February 27 to March 15This is Taiwan’s new year festival, when thousands of lanterns are sent into the sky. Pingxi is a small moun-tain village an hour from the capital of Taipei.

NAKED MAN FESTIVAL, JAPANDate: February 21Not too sure about this one but just so you know….The Naked Man festival in Okayama culminates in a heated one-hour struggle among 9,000 men wear-ing only loincloths to grab two lucky sticks thrown by priests from above. The winners of the sacred sticks are guaranteed happiness for the com-ing year…mmmm think I would rather search for a four leaf clover!

RIO CARNIVAL, BRAZILDate: February 13 to 17Whoohoo! This is sooo on our buck-et list! Join the crowds and get ready to party in one of the biggest, most fun parties in the world! Book tickets in advance for a grandstand view and don’t forget to get your feathers and glitter on and join in the carnival spirit!

BATTLE OF THE ORANGES, ITALY Date: February 14 to 17People are put into groups to throw oranges as part of a re-enactment of a Middle Age battle in an annual car-nival battle in the northern Italian town of Ivrea….sounds like a juicy battle!

MARDI GRAS, NEW ORLEANSDate: February 17Also known as Fat Tuesday, Mardi Gras traditionally follows carnivals around the world. Parades and jazz bands mark the event in New Orleans’ French Quarter.

CHINESE NEW YEAR, CHINADate: February 19In each part of China, the festivities vary, but in all of them the Chinese honour their gods and ancestors. Red lanterns will be hung and firecrackers set off. Dragon pro-cessions can be seen in cities with Chinese communities around the world.

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photo credit: “Ivrea carnevale” by Attilios - Own work.

Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons -

HOLI, INDIADate: March 6Also known as the festival of co-lours, Holi is the religious Hindu fes-tival which heralds the beginning of spring season and is marked by revellers throwing coloured paint at each other.


We need money to travel. Fact. However, you probably

need less money than you think. I’ve rented apartments for $6

a day, eaten delicious food for $2 a meal and bought bottles of

drinking water for 15 cents. As long as you follow the advice

below, there is no reason money should stop you from travelling.

HOW TO BUILD A

by BRENDAN LEE

T he first task of any aspiring traveler is to save a travel fund.

Most world travelers I have met have similar stories of saving for two, three, maybe even five years before setting off around the globe. While it’s possi-ble to leave home with very little mon-ey, I would never recommend it. My personal opinion is that your first trip should be about enjoying the world, not hustling for nickels and dimes.

Save, prepare, and then go and enjoy your journey. It’s the best way. Saving is nothing more than a simple 3-step process:

1. Spend less money than you earn.2. Put that money into a savings

account.3. Don’t spend it.

Yet, despite its simplicity, the majority of people struggle to follow it. When the iPhone 6 comes out, we just can’t resist buying it, despite the fact that our iPhone 5 (and 4 and 3) still work perfectly. For some reason, we can’t wear the same shoes every day, and just have to buy a second and third and fourth pair. It’s no wonder none of us have any money to travel. So, how do we do it? Defining your Needs and Wants In the personal budgeting world, we separate everything we purchase into two groups: Needs and Wants.

Your Needs are the things vital to your survival – things like rent, elec-tricity, water, food, insurance, etc. Your Wants are things not vital to your survival. These include things such as Doritos, new shoes, sunglasses, and cable TV.

Taking time to define these lists is important, because they will under-pin your entire saving process. Every time you are about to spend money, you need to ask yourself, “Is this a Need, or a Want?” If it’s a Want, don’t buy it. Save that money instead.

Sound simple? It is. Yet you’ll find it’s a concept extremely difficult to live by. Nonetheless, this mindset should be the meat and potatoes of your saving

TRAVEL FUND


strategy, and if you are able to follow it, it will be practically impossible for you to not save money.

Let’s take myself as an example (which, I’ve learned, is an example not different from many people on the road). I spent just over three years saving for my initial round-the-world trip. I avoided going out on Friday nights with the workmates; I didn’t buy a single new cell phone during those years; I didn’t own a smartphone or iPad; I owned one pair of work shoes, one work suit; I didn’t take many hol-idays; I didn’t have internet on my phone; I rarely ate out for lunch; I didn’t own any fancy clothes. For the most part, I lived within my means, and that provided me the nest egg I needed to quit and start my adventure.

Despite the fact Wants give you gid-dy bursts of excitement when you buy them, they are, in fact, obstacles which push your travel dreams further away. People often see travelers and think, “Wow, they’re so lucky, look at how ex-citing their lives are!” But few realize the years of preparation that were nec-essary to get there: the long Monday afternoons slumped over desks, and the paychecks that were not used for Friday escapes but were boringly stuffed away into a savings account.

Your adventures around the world are born long before you step on the plane.

Every dollar you spend is a dollar less you will have for the road. How badly do you want to travel? I’ve found that for many people, travelling more is simply a matter of buying less stuff so you can spend that money on travel in-stead. This means travel must be a pri-ority. Are you willing to give up a $4 dai-ly Starbucks if it means you can trav-el? This one simple sacrifice will save you $1,500 a year. To put that in travel terms, that’s enough for six months’ rent in a private, fully furnished stu-dio in Thailand, an entire year of hos-tel accommodation in South America, or twenty plane tickets around Europe. Just imagine how much you could save, and travel, if you gave up cable, Friday night drinks, your cell phone plan and your private apartment.

Within a couple of years, you would surely have enough saved up to trav-el for several months, if not years.

Internalizing this link between saving and travel is important. As you try to save, you are inevitably going to miss out on shiny things back home. Giving up your private pad to move in with roommates, spending Friday night reading instead of being out at the bar – this is not easy. Understanding that every dollar saved brings you one step closer to travelling the world is the motivation you will need when trying to resist buying the shoes.

Remember, as travelers, we are min-imalists. We collect moments, not things. What things will you give up to travel? How bad do you want it? If you’re serious about seeing the world, you need to make it a priority.

Brendan’s Top 7 ‘Save Money’ for Travel Tips1. Set a target. As we discussed earlier, everybody’s travel style is

different.2. Split your target up into smaller goals. You need to break it

down into more manageable and measurable goals.3. Set your rewards. It’s important to pat yourself on the back every

now and then.4. Set up an offline savings account. This is a key step in avoiding the

temptation to spend. You need to make it as difficult as possible to spend your money.

5. Move your “target savings” to your savings account on payday. A simle solution to prevent spending from happening is to do your savings at the beginning of the pay cycle, rather than the end.

6. Record everything you spend. This is a habit you will need to get used to. Before you spend money on anything, write it down.

7. Analyse your spending. This is probably the most important step of them all. At the end of the month, take your statement (or your notebook or your spreadsheet) and sit down with a highlighter.

Brendan Lee

.... is a former accountant who knew after his first 72 hours that a desk wasn’t for him. He has spent the last 4 years traversing the globe. You can check out his travels at www.brenontheroad.com

Brendan Lee ....


http://www.brenontheroad.com

19

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NOT MANY PEOPLE are willing to leave suburbia, head for the jungle and run a business that gives all its profits away,

but today’s guests are the exception to the rule. Andrej and Karen Brummer said goodbye to two well-paying jobs and left their western lifestyle to head for Luang Namtha , Laos 4 years ago. They swapped their big city lifestyle for an environment of jungles and temples on the edge of the Thailand border and have become an important member of their local community

thanks to their western style café that not only provides training in hospitality and English for the local staff but helps fund the nearby schools in the town in which they live.

We caught up with Dre and Karen and discovered what made them choose Laos as the place they wanted to spend their life, how the jungle lifestyle has changed their purpose in life and how you can use your own unique skills to enjoy an authentic lifestyle experience for free.

A CAFÉ IN LAOSFROM CORPORATE LIFE TO

Andrej and Karen Brummer


Tony (Argyle): Hi, Dre and Karen. I better make sure I pronounce your name right because I’ll probably get that wrong, but nice to have you on the show, guys.

Karen (Brummer): Thank you. Nice to be here.

Andrej (Brummer): Thanks, Tony. Nice to be here.

Tony: Firstly, tell us where you are right now. What’s the view from where you’re sitting and which part of the globe are you in?

Andrej: We are in Northern Laos, the mountains of ba-sically the Golden Triangle kind of between Myanmar, Thailand, and Laos; and so the view outside our door is coconut palms, mountains, trees, flowers.

Tony: [Chuckles]

Andrej: Yeah, it’s quite pret-ty actually.

Tony: Sounds exotic.

Andrej: Oh man. It’s simple.

Tony: How come you chose Laos? Because I don’t know a lot about the country, but from what I’ve gathered, it doesn’t seem the easiest place in Southeast Asia you could have gone to; so you really sort of stepped off the cliff with this. Why Laos?

Karen: [Laughs] A little bit of insanity [laughter]. No, we re-ally fell in love with the place, and we actually travelled Southeast Asia for about a year and a half – travelling around, stopping in places that we liked, and we just keep coming back to this place. We just really, really liked it. We fell in love with the nature and the people and everything that sort of goes on here.

So it was kind of just a grad-ual progression into living here. It wasn’t like one day we made the decision to do it. It’s like we came for a month and then another month and then another month, and it kind of just turned into living [laughs].

Andrej: It’s kind of like the place in Southeast Asia where you can really get off the beaten track, where you can take a motorbike or a bi-cycle and go and visit 7 dif-ferent minority tribes. They all have different costumes and different ways of living, and everyone kind of wel-comes you like a family mem-ber. There’s rice paddies and mountains and forests to ex-plore in. It’s really beautiful, and the people are like very, very, very nice, very giving.

The climate’s amazing too.

Tony: I kind of imagine it to be like almost a step back in time as to how other parts of Southeast Asia might have been 40 years, 50 years ago?

Karen: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It’s pretty rustic, yeah. [Laughs]

Andrej: They say it’s like Thailand 50 to 100 years ago.

Karen: Yeah.

Tony: Wow.

Andrej: Our manager in the shop just got electricity in her village three weeks ago for the first time ever.

Tony: So you guys obvious-ly don’t mind roughing it too much.

Andrej: Well, that’s the amazing thing. You don’t ac-tually have to rough it, be-cause in the middle of the small city, you can still get super fast Wi-Fi, nice hotels, good restaurants; and so that’s all there in a tiny little centre; but even a kilometre away from the centre, people are living in bamboo hous-es and foraging in the jungle and stuff like that. So it’s kind of like the best of both worlds amassed.

Karen: Yeah.


Tony: It sounds like a real contradiction.

Karen: Yeah. We sort of got the comforts of coffee, pizza, a big, 4-bedroom house and stuff.

Andrej: Cocktails.

Karen: [Laughter] And then you just, literally, 3 or 4 min-utes away is just an ocean of rice field and mountains and stuff. So yes… yeah, it is the best of both worlds for us.

Tony: It’s interesting what you said before. You’d been there for a few times beforehand. I think that’s obvious-ly something that’s a pretty important step for people to take rath-er than committing to a country that they’ve not been to before.

Karen: Yeah, absolutely.

Andrej: Yeah, definitely.

Karen: Yeah. I mean I know one time, maybe the sec-ond or third time we were here, I was talking to my mum on the phone and she said, ‘Are you guys going to stay there?’ I was like, ‘No.’ [Laughter] But then it hap-pened [laughter].

Tony: Just didn’t want to break the bad news to her, did you?

Karen: [Laughs] Well, we didn’t think we were, at that point. We didn’t realise how sucked into the place we were getting.

Tony: So how long have you been there for now?

Andrej: Basically 4 years, haven’t we?

Karen: Yeah, 4 and a half years.

Andrej: Four and a half.

Karen: Yeah.

Andrej: We kind of spent 3 weeks of the month in Laos and then 1 week in Thailand and then visit other places like Philippines and Borneo and Malaysia and stuff like that – so constantly on the

move, but this is our base.

Tony: Okay. And the reason for your travel, is just as part of your exploring that you’re doing or is it Visa reasons or…?

Karen: Oh, no. Just for fun.

Andrej: Yeah, just for fun.

Tony: That’s the great thing about Asia too. I mean you can get around there so cheap. It staggers me how

affordable airline flights are once you get to Asia as your base, and you can go elsewhere, isn’t it?

Karen: Ah, yeah. Absolutely.

Andrej: And there’s such a huge diversity like volcanoes, coral reefs, forests, amaz-

ing cities. There’s everything like in a short distance. And all the countries are so differ-ent, so it’s amazing – a melt-ing pot.

Tony: Okay. So in terms of where you guys are out there, and obviously it sort of sounds as though you reached the point where you just decided you’d had enough. Is it sort of how it worked out for you?

We just decided that we didn’t really want to live

the life anymore that had sort of been sold to us

Karen Brummer


The Bamboo Lounge Restaurant…Karen & Andrej’s café in Luang Namtha, is the only western hospitality training restaurant in town. The staff also love learning English here.

Karen: Yeah. We just de-cided that we didn’t really want to live the life anymore that had sort of been sold to us. You grow up, and you’re taught to go to school, get a job, work for your whole life; and maybe if you’re lucky, you get a couple of weeks a year off. We just thought there had to be a better way, and we didn’t want to do that anymore. We just got sick of it really.

Tony: So no regrets so far?

Karen: Oh, not at all.

Tony: So, tell us what you’re doing there now, because I’m quite fascinated. Basically, you have a café that you’ve set up, but none of the profits are kept for yourself. Is that right?

Karen: Yeah. A few months after being in Louang Namtha, we set up a training restaurant where…

We sort of became known in the town as the Kiwis who were here; so we used to get a lot of tourists approaching us, and the question they all asked was ‘where can we get Western food?’ and our an-swer was always ‘nowhere’. So we thought, ‘Well there’s an opportunity.’

So we decided to, yeah, to set up a restaurant; and we

take local women from the ethnic minority tribes, and we teach them everything they need to know. When they came to us, they don’t speak English. They’ve never made

a sandwich before. They’ve never seen a pizza before. They’ve never even seen a knife and fork before usual-ly. I mean they literally come from out of the jungle.


And yeah… I mean a couple of years of really hard work for that, but now, it’s sort of all systemised to the point where our most experienced staff member runs the place. She manages all the staff and the customers. She does everything. She does the sal-aries and everything, trains the new staff. I mean most of the staff who are there now have been there like a few years because it is a really good workplace for Lao.

And then we donate the prof-its from the restaurant to the local Books in Schools Program, so at the mo-ment—well, before we start-ed it, there was about one text book per three students in the school; and so far, a few of the schools now are fully stocked with textbooks, and we’re working on doing more – as we speak actually.

Some of the local Children from the school

Tony: Wow. So how big is the café, like how many staff do you have there?

Karen: We’ve got six staff at this time of the year. At the busy time of the year—

Andrej: High season, we’ve got 12.

Karen: Yeah. It’s usually about 10 staff in the high sea-son. And it sits about 35 or 40 people in the restaurant.

Tony: Okay. So this is ob-viously a reasonably busy place as a lot of Westerners come through?

Karen: Yeah. In the high season, pretty much all those seats are full every day. At this time of the year, it’s a lot more quiet and chilled out; but there are still people com-ing through.

Andrej: It’s because it is like a big trekking mecca. It’s like we have a massive, mas-sive national protected ar-eas; so this is a really good place that people can come and trek into the Lao jungle and the primary forest and go and stay at different minority tribes. So it’s a very big eco-tourism magnet, and that’s kind of one of the reasons why we’re here as well.

Tony: Oh, okay. So in terms of economic impact you’re having, can you sort of put that in context? How much money does the café make a year, and how far does that spending go? You’re talking about more than a few text-books. How many schools are you supporting, and rel-atively speaking, how much money is it putting back into the community?


Karen: Oh. Well, it’s different every year. We’ve got about 10 schools at the moment that we’re giving textbooks to. We’re also working with the schools to get things like desks and chairs because a lot of the kids are just sitting on the dirt floor at school, and getting things like chalk and whiteboard markers for the teachers, stuff that we just consider in the West being the most basic of necessities that they just don’t have.

I mean the most recent thing we’ve done is we’ve just put about $5,000 into a few of the different schools. But I mean… it’s kind of like a multi-facet question [laugh-ing] because all of the staff, they support their whole vil-lages usually. It’s not just

their salary for themselves. It’s their salary for their fami-lies and usually their villages as well, so it’s… yeah.

Andrej: Yeah, our staff are some of the highest paid people in the area.

Karen: Yeah [chuckles].

Tony: Right. So it’s not just economic impact of your profit. It’s the jobs as well, etc. that’s going to make a big difference to things.

Andrej: Basically, we’re the only place in town that teach-es hospitality training and it’s English. Our staff spend all day at school, at vocation and college, and they come and spend time with us and say, ‘Oh I learn so much more in

here now with you than I do in the entire week at school, because our staff can actual-ly speak English better than their teachers.

Tony: That’s cool. That’s cool. You’re just affecting things at so many levels. That’s great to hear. So obvi-ously, that leads to the ques-tion, if you’re giving the café profits away, how are you guys feeding yourselves? What do you do to earn your living while you’re there?

Karen: We’ve got a cou-ple of online businesses, so we make our money on the internet.

Tony: Okay. Do tell more [chuckles].

Karen: Do you want to talk about Saltwater?

Andrej: Yeah. Well, like… how many years ago now?

Karen: Eight.

Andrej: Eight years ago, yeah, Andrew and Daryl Grant, who are fantastic peo-ple, I turned up to a seminar of theirs and kind of learned a little bit about their e-book model and just how to find a niche online and how to build an information product and how to sell it. And so I kind of started doing that and came out with a couple of different e-books. My most successful

Swimming with Whale Sharks in the Philippines.


niche was saltwater aquari-um. Now I think I have… how many e-books for that?

Karen: Eight.

Andrej: Eight different e-books with different aspects of coral keeping and setting up saltwater aquariums and providing the perfect environ-ment, and so I sell those. It’s just one of the many things that we do, isn’t it?

Karen: Yeah [laughs]. One of the other things we do is a website called Swap Work for Travel. When we first came to Luang Namtha, one of the first things we did was we helped a lot of the lo-cal businesses just for free,

just for fun; and as we grow our business, we started to tap into a network of travel-lers who wanted to help other businesses like ours for free if we gave them food and ac-commodation. So basically, we take care of all their living expenses and they take care of whatever we need doing in the business.

As that kind of grew and grew, we started a website, Swap Work for Travel, where we now provide a service for travellers who want to make a difference with businesses who need someone to come and make a difference in their business but can provide food and accommodation in exchange. So yeah, we got

quite a following on that now as well.

Tony: Okay. So basically, if you got a skill set and you want to travel overseas but don’t want to spend the mon-ey staying, you can trade your skill set when you’re there and basically work on the location and have a work-ing holiday.

Karen: Yeah, exactly. I mean it works—

Andrej: It’s very rewarding too.

Karen: Yeah, and it works quite well because usually like 5 hours a day, and the people work for 5 days a week; so if you start at 8:00, you finish by 1:00. You’ve got the whole afternoon and eve-ning to kind of explore a des-tination or hang out with peo-ple or do whatever you want to do.

So it’s kind of like the best of both worlds. You get to expe-rience the destination through the eyes of a local really be-cause you’re there usually a bit longer term than just a few days or whatever. And then you also get to make a differ-ence someway and start to feel good factor as well.

Andrej: Yeah. And some places are quite fancy. We re-cently went to Philippines and stayed in a place in Bohol.

Karen in ‘the office


The woman who owned the big apartment building want-ed a website built; so Karen helped her with that, and we got to stay in a fully-furnished, brand-new apartment that had a pool. It was amazing, a beautiful place to be.

Karen: Yeah [laughing].

Andrej: It was fun.

Karen: Yeah. Some of them are really nice.

Tony: So this is obviously an international site when I’m just talking about Laos here. So people from any coun-try could employ people to come. People from any coun-try can go anywhere pretty much. Is that right?

Karen: Yeah, that’s right.

Tony: Cool. Coming back to the cost of living, because obviously, what you need to earn will depend on where you are and what it costs; but what does it cost you guys typically per month to live in Laos?

Karen: Again, it’s kind of a curving question because ac-tually, when we live in Laos, it doesn’t cost us anything because the restaurant pays for the rent and for the house that we live in because we share it with a couple of the staff—they live downstairs;

we live upstairs—so the res-taurant pays for that. We eat at the restaurant every day. So actually, if we’re re-ally extravagant, we can usu-ally spend $100 in total in a month [laughs].

But in the real world, when we’re in Thailand, or for ex-ample if you rented our house, the cost of renting our 4-bedroom house which has got a big garden and it’s looking onto the palm trees and mountains and stuff, it’s about $2,000 a year.

Tony: $2,000?

Karen: Yeah [chuckles]. So a couple of hundred dollars a month for rent. And then… yeah. I mean when we’re out and about, we usually spend sort of $1,000 to a couple of thousand dollars a month when we’re travelling, don’t we?

Andrej: Yeah. To eat in Laos, it’d probably be $10 a day maximum. You’d struggle to eat and drink enough beers to spend more than that.

Karen: Yeah.

Tony: Well, that’s a really im-portant question, Dre. What’s a beer cost?

Karen: About $1.50, $2.00.

Andrej: $1.50 for a longneck.

Tony: About $1.50 to $2.00 for a beer.

Andrej: For a longneck.

Tony: For a longneck, okay. That sounds like a place to go and drink. So obviously, what you’re doing, you’ve taken a fairly large plunge with it. What fears and con-cerns did you have before-hand and have those come to fruition?

Andrej: Well, it was sort of like ‘could we make it work? Could we really quit our jobs and then spend the rest of our lives travelling and get enough money to do so with-out having to go back to our jobs?’ And we always knew that if worse came to worst, we could go back to our jobs; but that obviously didn’t hap-pen, so we must be doing something right.

Tony: So had you spent a bit of time building up the Saltwater Aquarium business before you took the leap or did that come afterwards?

Andrej: Yeah. We’ve changed the business model a few times; but the thing is, being in a place like this with-out the confines of work, you got a lot more time to spend on other things and new proj-ects. So it’s quite fun to tweak things and play around with things.


But yeah, it was built up, and many things changed; and so we changed the model of the site and the model of the business around it as well.

Tony: And I guess some-times too, it’s the old story. When you burn your bridges behind you, you kind of got a force forward; and if you’re still doing what you were do-ing before and then just dab-bling in it—you maybe didn’t commit the same—but on this basis, an online busi-ness, you got to go for it full-on, haven’t you?

Andrej: Yeah.

Karen: Exactly. Yeah, you got to put your faith in yourself

Karen & Andrej spend a few months a year travelling around SE Asia – 4 Rivers Floating Lodge, Cambodia

and you got to just go for it and do it.

Tony: So what are your plans long term? Are you planning to continue your stay in there or have you got plans to move on?

Karen: Yeah, I mean this year, we’ve only spent a few months in Laos. We probably spent about 4 or 5 months travelling so far, like around Philippines, Borneo, Malaysia, Thailand, Myanmar; but moving for-ward, we’ll probably just spend like a few months a year in Laos, and we want to spend a few more months a year in New Zealand be-cause we’re missing our fam-ilies quite a lot too. We’ve

been going home for about a month or two every year; but now, we’re starting to feel like maybe we need a bit more. So spending a few months in New Zealand, maybe a cou-ple of months in Laos and a couple of months travelling.

Tony: Okay.

Karen: Yeah.

Tony: Cool. Healthcare is obviously a big issue and a lot of people have a concern they have. And I know you’ve had a couple of incidents yourself. What’s the health-care like in Laos? I mean is it something people need to be concerned about?

Karen: [Laughs] Yes [laughter].

Tony: Thank you for your honesty [chuckles].

Karen: Yeah. We live near Thailand. That’s our saving grace. I mean in Thailand, everything is world-class and cheap and…

Andrej: The healthcare in Thailand is American standard.

Karen: Yeah. Or better even really. In Laos, they really don’t have the education to really provide good health-care; and it’s not the doctor’s fault. It’s literally just that they don’t have the education.


Andrej: Or the equipment.

Karen: Yeah. So anything…

Andrej: So minor scrapes and bruises and like illnesses and stuff, you can go to the hospital here, but anything more severe, you would defi-nitely go to Thailand.

Karen: Yeah. So we’re only like 3 hours from Thailand, 3 and a half hours. So it’s not a huge deal for us.

The Main Drag…Luang Namtha

Tony: So how big is the pop-ulation of where you live?

Karen: Well, it’s about 20,000, but that includes all the people who live in the jungle, so.

Tony: Oh okay.

Karen: Yeah.

Tony: So generally, if you get to a bigger centre, you’ll find slightly better healthcare; but obviously in Laos, you’re better off to get across the border.

Andrej: Yeah. I think Luang Prabang has got some pretty good clinics as Vientiane, but Thailand is really good.

Karen: Yeah.

Tony: What about safety? Do you feel safe living there?

Karen: Oh, absolutely.

Andrej: Much, much safer than Australia.

Karen: Yeah. I mean actu-ally, this is basically a crime-free country. There’s no like theft or murders or anything like that.

Andrej: Everyone’s happy and honest.

Karen: Yeah. That’s a really good point.

Andrej: Very safe place with children and single women, and everyone’s really caring and loving. It’s amazing.

Tony: So do you have any trouble with communica-tion with people? Because I guess that can be the source

of issues from time to time. I mean it’s obviously a whole new language. Have you mastered it since you’ve been there or do you find that more people are learning English and you don’t have to?

Karen: Oh, we have to speak Laos here. The first couple of years were pretty interest-ing because everybody we


were teaching couldn’t speak any English and we couldn’t speak any Laos, so that was a big learning curve.

Andrej: Everyone wants to learn English as well, so we spend most of our time teach-ing people to speak more English. So our Laos doesn’t really get that much better because everyone wants to practice English with us.

Karen: Yeah, but we speak enough Laos to have conver-sations; and I couldn’t talk to anyone about politics or any-thing, but all the basic stuff we’ve got mastered.

Tony: Okay. Is it a hard lan-guage to learn?

Karen: Ah, yeah, pretty much.

Andrej: It’s pretty much like Thai.

Karen: Yeah.

Andrej: It’s tonal. Yeah, their tones are pretty hard. It’s like the word ‘cat’ has five dif-ferent meanings related to the tone; and most of the time, I can’t even hear the difference.

Karen: Yeah [laughs].

Tony: Okay. And being out-side of your home country, have you had to give up any-thing in terms of your pen-sion status or Medicare ben-efits or superannuation ben-efits? I guess hand-in-hand with that, do you have to leave the country on a reg-ular basis because of these

requirements? What’s the re-strictions on that?

Karen: We’re pretty lucky in Laos with the Visas, like we have like one year Visas that we just renew every year, and we don’t have to leave every year. I mean we do anyways—we travel—but we don’t have to.

In terms of super and Medicare and stuff, our super accounts are still just sitting there in Australia. Medicare, I can’t remember exactly how that works now. But I think once we’ve been gone for like 2 years or something, then it got cancelled; but it can be reactivated if we go back to Australia.

A favourite spot….

30 THE EXPAT CHAT | ISSUE 1 January 2016 | All Rights Reserved.

Tony: Okay.

Karen: Yeah.

Tony: So not really losing any benefits from your expe-rience. You can pretty much return at any stage and hope-fully pick up where you left off?

Karen: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I mean that’s the thing with healthcare too that I should have said. It’s like if something really major hap-pened and you wanted to go home, you just get on a plane, don’t you? And you’re always going to be treated for stuff in your home country.

Tony: Yup, true. So, I guess some of the food you have there might be fairly interest-ing. What’s the most interest-ing thing you’ve eaten?

Karen: [Laughs]

Andrej: Giant rhinoceros beetles stuffed with lemon grass and chilli. [Laughter]

Tony: Well, I like lemon grass and chilli, but I don’t know about the first thing you said.

Karen: Actually, they’re real-ly good! [Laughs] Surprisingly good.

Tony: Are you going to tell me it tastes like chicken I suppose, are you?

Andrej: They’re tasty actually.

Karen: Well it just tastes pretty much like lemon grass.

Tony: [Laughs] Was it crunchy?

Andrej: No, because they take their wing cases off.

Karen: Yeah.

Tony: Aw, that’s thoughtful of them [chuckles].

Andrej: And bats on a skew-er, like barbecued bats, silk worm omelette, ant eggs or ant egg salad.

Karen: You had made a few crazy pizzas for people with ant eggs and rats and things like that.

Andrej: Lots of people in town eat dog, but really, we couldn’t eat any dog.

Tony: But you’ve eaten rat?

Karen: No.

Andrej: It’s a different kind of rat. It’s bamboo rat, which is kind of like a giant hamster.

Tony: Ah, okay. [Laughs] That doesn’t sound much better [laughter]. I’m glad it’s your stomach, not mine anyway.

Karen: We haven’t eaten that either. We’ve just had customer requests in our res-taurant for it [laughs].

Tony: Really? Okay. So I can see why you set up a Westerner style café, be-cause a lot of people travel-ling through would struggle to cope with a lot of these meals.

Andrej: Especially after a 3-day trek in the jungle.

Karen: Yeah.

Tony: So what do you miss most about being away from Australia and New Zealand?

Andrej: Probably the ocean.

Karen: The Ocean, friends and family. Sometimes, we miss normality, which we do get in Thailand quite a lot; but life here is so different that, 99% of the time, it’s abso-lutely awesome and a load of fun. And then sometimes, you’re like, ‘Oh my god. I just wish like I could have a nor-mal conversation with some-one about something that everybody understands.’ [Chuckles]

Andrej: But pretty much be-tween here and Thailand, we can get everything we had back home; so we al-most lacked nothing, like


people send us marmite and vegemite over, and that’s it. That’s all we need.

Karen: We’re pretty lucky.

Tony: Oh, I didn’t ask you if you’re missing those things. That’s what most people say that they miss.

Karen: Yeah, and I don’t miss those [laughs].

Tony: So obviously, with modern technology, I mean home’s really a Skype call away; but how do you find the internet? We’ve had a couple of dropouts during this call. Was it a bit of an issue there or is it generally pretty good?

Andrej: It’s generally pretty good.

Karen: Generally, it’s good, yeah. I mean we do have oc-casional days where it just doesn’t work or there’s no power or something; but most of the time, it’s really good.

Andrej: Yeah. We get like the best package. Our inter-net service provider, they’re just a phone call away; and so anytime we have a prob-lem, we’d call them; and they come over immediately be-cause they want to take care of us because we’re foreign-ers and stuff.

Karen: [Laughs]

Andrej: It’s all good. But we watch movies and stuff all the time. I always Skype and video calls; and most of the time, it’s really, really good.

Tony: So even on the worst day, do you see yourself ever going back to doing what you’re doing before?

Karen: No [laughs].

Andrej: Yeah, I don’t know if we’d go anymore. Life is just too… too relaxing these days.

Tony: And obviously what you’re doing is perfectly sus-tainable. I mean health allow-ing, you can continue to do this for years if you want to.

Karen: Yeah.

Andrej: Yeah, exactly. Well, we have a restaurant that runs by itself, and that pays for us to be in Laos. And our internet business kind of gives us pocket money to travel anywhere we want and do whatever we want. So it’s pretty good.

Tony: It does sound pretty good. So final questions, how would you say what you’ve done has changed your life? What would you say to some-one considering what you’re doing?

Karen: Oh, just do it. It’s changed our lives so much for the better, like just so many… I actually pinch my-self honestly nearly every day. We go up to the temple in the morning and look at

“It might be 11am on a Monday, and I don’t even know it because it doesn’t matter” says Karen


the view and just think, ‘Oh my god. I’m here. I’m living this life.’ It might be 11:00 on a Monday, and I don’t even know it because it doesn’t matter. I’m not worried about going to work. It’s so good.

Andrej: There’s no stress, and we’re also in a very lucky position which we call like a win-win-win. We get to be here and live this really cool life. We also get to help and empower Lao people and teach them. And then also, Western travellers who want information or want some good-quality Western food or coffee or espresso or some-thing like that, they win as well. So it’s basically like the perfect scenario.

Tony: You use the term ‘lucky’ there, but you’ve made your own luck. I mean you’ve created this situation by your

own choice; and what you’ve done with the café, what you’ve done with your web-sites, you’ve created that en-vironment. You were willing to make the leap, which a lot of people are afraid to do.

And you’ve worked hard set-ting up what you did. I don’t envy you with the cafe. That must have been a lot of hard work trying to teach peo-ple something totally differ-ent. They don’t even speak English.

Karen: Oh, yeah. There were some days we’re just like, ‘Oh my god. What are we do-ing?’ But that was all fun. If it wasn’t fun, we wouldn’t have kept doing it.

So yeah, we did work—have worked really, really hard, but we are reaping the rewards now. It’s good.

Tony: Great. Guys, thank you for your time. You are both indeed inspiring expats. If people want to get a hold of you or find out more about, well, saltwater fish even or swapping work for travel, how do they get a hold of you?

Karen: Well that can go to our website, SwapWorkforTravel.com.

Andrej: Find us on Facebook.

Karen: Yeah, look us up on Facebook.

Andrej: Also SwapWorkforTravel.com.

Karen: Yup. Or you can email us on [email protected]. Yeah.

Tony: Sounds good. Well, we’ll post those links up on the page with this podcast as well so people can get a hold of you through that.

Karen: Oh, thank you!

Andrej: Awesome.

Tony: Guys, thank you very much. It’s been a real plea-sure talking to you today, and I know that your story is par-ticularly fascinating. I’ve been looking forward to interview-ing you guys ever since we set this up, particularly be-cause of what you do, where you’re doing it, and also the contribution you’re making back to society, which is ob-viously a great source of sat-isfaction for you.

Thanks for taking the time to-day. We appreciate it, and I know our listeners do as well.

Andrej: Sure.

Karen: Great. Thanks for calling!

There’s no

sTress, and we’re

also in a very

lucky posiTion

which we call

like a ‘win-win-win’

Andrej Brummer


http://www.SwapWorkforTravel.com

http://www.SwapWorkforTravel.com

https://www.facebook.com/swapworkfortravel/

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

Thailand introduces newMultiple Entry Visa for Tourists

The Bangkok Post recently reported that the Thai

government will be introducing new multiple entry visas for

tourists allowing visitors to come and go more frequently

during the period of their visa stay. The new visas come

into effect in November but still limit stayers to no more

than 60 consecutive days at a time. It does however give

stayers a greater opportunity to come and go during the 6

months validity of the visa, an upgrade from the option of

one or three entries under current visas. The restriction of

60 days is designed to prevent visitors from effectively

residing during the 6 month period of the visa. Thailand is

targeting increased visitor numbers, hoping to increase

tourist numbers to 28 million per annum from the current 24

million figure.

WHAT I LEARNED FROM DRE AND KAREN’S INTERVIEW:

1. It’s good to spend time somewhere before you commit. Laos is a big jump for many people and is not a decision that should be made lightly. Karen and Andrej spent quite a bit of time there, visiting more than once before they made their final decision to shift.

2. You can have the best of both worlds. Although they are living near a jungle in Laos they are only just across the border from the relative civilization of Thailand. This gives them the chance to return to a less primitive lifestyle and also access to better quality healthcare – something that’s not so easily available in Laos. Plus they can (and have) easily traveled through much of South East Asia from their base

3. Although Laos can be described as a step back in time these guys aren’t roughing it. They live in a comfortable home, have access to western food and pretty reliable internet. Laos is one of the most affordable places in Asia (try less than $2000 per annum for a 4 bedroom home!) and is a country with virtually no crime – far safer than anywhere in the west that’s for sure!

34

Do you ever just wanna go and get away from everything?

Learn how to #SwapWorkForTravel , you can get our free

guide here that tells you how:

SwapWorkForTravel.com/freegift

35

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http://swapworkfortravel.com/

The world is a global village - we’ve bridged continents and cultures to bring about a marketplace where you as a business owner can get any task you want done. Whether it’s an article you want written for your paper, an app designed for your business or marketing to lead customers to your services, somebody somewhere can get it done for you.

One of the easiest ways to tap into this global marketplace is via marketplace outsourcing websites such as Upwork, Freelancer or Fiverr.

Let me give you a rundown of how they work and how you can use them to grow your business.

HAVE OUTSOURCERS WILL TRAVEL:

DOESN’T MEAN HAVING

WHY BUILDING AN ONLINE BUSINESS

TO DO IT YOURSELFby SAM PATTON


http://www.upwork.com

http://www.freelancer.com/

http://www.fiverr.com

HOW THE MARKETPLACE OUTSOURCING WEBSITES WORKAt the basic level - these websites provide a platform where freelancers and those providing work can meet. There’s two main methods for getting stuff done; you can post a job de-scription and have freelancers offer a bid to do the work, or you can browse the applications of freelancers and send them a job directly.

The great part about marketplace websites is that you can access the previous ratings and the work history of the freelancers before you settle on a contract. That way, you can see how other employers have rated them and get a rough idea of what you’re getting yourself into. Once you’ve identified a freelancer, you can negotiate the price of the job.

It’s obvious - outsourcing has the abil-ity to save some serious costs by le-veraging the global economy, but that shouldn’t be your primary motivation. Generally speaking, if you’re hiring a highly rated worker, you can expect to cough up more cash - however, if the quality is a cut above - that may not be a bad idea. Projects are usually done on a contract or price-per-hour basis - it depends on you who you’re hir-ing. Most marketplace websites have some form of Escrow system to re-lease payments are completed when work is complete and approved - a bit of extra security when you’re dealing with people across the seaboard.

ARE THEY RELIABLE?A common question I’m asked when talking about marketplace outsourc-ing websites is “are they reliable”. Not to jump immediately for the politi-cian’s response but the answer is “it depends”.

GOOD TRACK RECORD If you find a good service provider with a good track record then gen-erally speaking, you’ll be fine. If you don’t do your due diligence and pick up the first person you see then you may be in for a world of hurt.

One thing to realize is that these web-sites don’t guarantee the quality of work, how fast it’s done, or even how much will be agreed for payments for projects. They simply provide the infra-structure for you to work together. The other side of this is that the websites also pocket a portion of payments paid, (somewhere in the realm of 10-15%) of the total cost. Each site is different, but the general principles are the same.

FLEXIBILITY FOR YOUR BUSINESSA feature of marketplace outsourc-ing is that you only have to hire peo-ple when you actually need them. If you’re in a growth phase in your busi-ness then you may need somebody full time (in which case I’d recommend against marketplace outsourcing), but for one-off tasks or individual projects these are a great tool in your tool belt.

In addition, you can tap into top quality freelancers from around the world at lower rates than what you’d expect to pay if you out-sourced local.

RUN YOUR SMALL BUSINESS LIKE A MINI-NATIONAL COMPANY It’s no secret - most businesses outsource at least some part of their work. In fact, outsourcing is no longer just a temporary solution to a short-term problem - it’s a permanent fix-ture in most organizations. Using Elance as an example, there’s over 30,000 new projects posted each month. Does that sound like an in-dustry that’s going anywhere?

Make sure you’re slow to hire and

quick to fire.

These marketplace outsourcing sites bring everyone together - from graphic designers, writers, artists, editors, IT professionals, photographers, web de-velopers and even marketing and me-dia professionals. You can have differ-ent aspects of your business done in Europe, Asia, Australia, US and even back home (wherever you are).

Of course it’s a cost effective ap-proach, but make sure you’re care-ful with whoever you tap to get into contract with. Sure, you may reject a project and not pay for it, but there’s a time cost for choosing incorrectly.

Sam Patton

“Preferring to travel most of the year, SAM PATTON is a Digital Strategist, Outsourcing Expert and Free-Time Enthusiast. When he’s not online, you’ll find him at the beach (or on his skateboard). Get more articles like this one at SaveTimeOutsourcing.com”

Sam Patton ....


http://savetimeoutsourcing.com/

Data courtesy of www.numbeo.com

CITY COMPARISON

$14.00 $6.44

Los Angeles, U.S.A Porto, Portugal

$46.32 $24.31

$1.77 $0.97

44.44 54.29

$1.00 $0.63

$13.50 $6.98

$21,250.00 $26,838.00

157.90 170.38

$3.97 $0.96

$1,700.00 $429.88

$0.90 $1.53

66.14 68.33

$2.81 $1.18

$46.98 $87.37

$113.84 $112.76

Meal in Inexpensive Restaurant

All $ are U.S. currency

Internet 10Mbps, unlimited, cable/ADSL)

Taxi 1km (normal tariff)

Safety Index (out of 100)

1 Liter milk

Cinema - International release

Volkswagon Golf Car

Quality of Life index

Cappuccino

Rent 1 br apartment city centre

Gasoline (per liter)

Health care index (out of 100)

Loaf of bread

1 pr Levi jeans (501 or similar)

Basic Utilities 85sqm apartment

Utilities, rent and internet are monthly

Comparison Snapshot – Los Angeles – Porto, PortugalEach month we’ll profile a comparison between two cities focusing on cost of living, safety, health and overall quality of life. Information is gained from the website Numbeo (www.numbeo.com) and is based on data provided by visitors to the website. All costings are in US currency. The safety, health and quality of life index are compiled across several variables for each. The information is an aver-age of the range provided by visitor submissions and it’s accuracy is relative to the number of submissions received. If you wish to provide costings for your city or country visit www.numbeo.com

Click hereand discover a

whole new world


http://www.numbeo.com

http://www.numbeo.com

http://dd65aq3fdv118cs3xe22n9x24s.hop.clickbank.net

A lot can happen in two years. And, there are plenty of lessons I’ve learned as those 24 months have

come and gone and left me, standing here, marveling at how quickly time passes. At how much life morphs and grows and condenses and grows again. It’s been two years of ups, two years of downs, and two years of sheer beauty in a place that draws awe from those who come in contact with it.

Life as an expat in Chiang Mai is not always easy. I’d be lying if I said there weren’t times where I have come home, crawled into bed and had a good cry. I’d be lying if I said there aren’t struggles. Living in a for-eign country and not speaking the language (although I can get by), not having my own transportation, not knowing anyone when I arrived, defi-nitely has its challenges.

20CHIANG MAITHINGS I LOVE ABOUT

by DIANA EDELMAN

THE EXPAT CHAT | ISSUE 139 November 2015 All Rights Reserved.

http://www.dtravelsround.com/2013/12/12/2013-life-changing-moments-expat-thailand/

head to the dog runs and spend time in one of the runs with my favorite pups, including Moshe, a one-eyed boy from the Bangkok floods.

Cats

I first met Mr. Lucky on my third day as an expat in Thailand. This tiny kitten, dying on the street, stole my heart. Today, he and I have a lovely little partnership. He moved in with me a little more than a year ago, and there are nights when he and I just sit to-gether, cuddling, grateful for each oth-er. At least that is my human emotions projected onto him have decided. With him and my other girl, Penelope, we’ve got this adorable little family.

Jungle beauty

I cannot escape the tropics here. The jungle and all of its beauty is around me, always. While the palm trees are reminiscent of my Vegas life, that’s it. The flora, the fauna, the hu-midity, quickly move me and remind me where I am and why I am here. I love the days when I am walking somewhere and the scent of flowers wraps around me. And don’t even get me started on the massive, beautiful trees. The roots, the intertwining of the body, wrapping itself around each oth-er … breathtaking stuff, I tell ya.

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In the two years here, I have made some of the best friends in the world. Friends who don’t even live here anymore, but friends who came into my life and never left. Thanks to the internet, its easy to stay connected. And, regardless of dis-tance, these friends have a hold of my heart. But those friendships have also proved some of the most challenging times for me here, because when these friends left, my life changed. It’s a roller coaster of relationships here. Being a city where people come and go so quickly, the revolving door of people I love, well, revolves. And, waking up to a city where just yesterday there was a sup-port group to a morning when there isn’t one is incredibly difficult. But, it also forces me to meet other people. To get to know myself better, so that’s ok.

I get a lot of questions about life as an expat, so if you have questions about what it is like living in Chiang Mai, please feel free to leave it in the comments. I will be putting together a post later to answer your questions.

Today, to celebrate my two-year anniversary, I want to share what it is I am grate-ful for. The things that chase away the expat funk and take me back to this beau-tiful world. What it is about this city, this life, that makes it just so damn amazing. And perhaps to inspire you to head to Chiang Mai (or tour through Thailand in general), if for nothing else, than at least a visit and a fruit shake with me!

I live in a city surrounded by a moat

On days when I start to feel down, the solution (aside from going home and having the ‘pity party’, which doesn’t make me feel better and almost always results in pathet-ic e-mails to my mom) is to go put on some shoes and walk the three minutes to the moat. There is noth-ing like putting my life here in per-spective than just standing, walking around this ancient moat.

My neighborhood is like “Cheers” but with more people

Sometimes, I yearn for privacy. To walk down the street and not know anyone. But, as I have mentioned before, the expats here — love them or not — are a family. At least in my neck of the woods. We all look out for each other. We all care about each other. There is some-thing so heartwarming about walking down the street (even on days when I feel antisocial) and having people wave and smile and ask how you are doing, and mean it. On my worst days, I have people here who will stop, make sure I am ok, and then make sure again. Just because. We’re all in this together.

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A bottle of water is around 20 cents

For 14 baht, I can get a liter of water. It is always one of the top reasons I give for never being able to go and live in America again. I can’t fathom spending more than that.

Elephants

Life with elephants is something I wish every person could experience at least once. I learn so much from them. To be at Elephant Nature Park regularly, to sit and watch these crea-tures whose lives used to be horrific, and see them now, happy, is one of the most beautiful and moving things in the world. The fact that I can go there and be with them, observe them, love them, is one of the most healing things for the soul.

Dogs

My office is home to about 10 dogs. The park is home to about 500 (note: if you’d love dogs, Elephant Nature Park Dogs is al-ways in need of volunteers). Like with the elephants, being around these pups just makes any day bet-ter. When I go and visit ENP, I always

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http://www.dtravelsround.com/2012/09/04/mr-lucky-the-street-cat/

http://www.dtravelsround.com/2014/03/24/questions-to-ask-before-becoming-expat/

http://www.dtravelsround.com/2014/02/09/5-ways-beat-expat-funk/

http://www.dtravelsround.com/2013/07/12/tips-expat-chiang-mai/

http://www.dtravelsround.com/2014/07/13/20-things-love-about-chiang-mai-thailand/%3Ca%20href=%22http:/wheresidewalksend.com?connect=11%22%20rel=%22nofollow%22%3EWSE%20Travel%3C/a%3E

http://www.dtravelsround.com/2015/08/11/truth-about-riding-elephants-in-thailand/

http://www.dtravelsround.com/2015/08/11/truth-about-riding-elephants-in-thailand/

The creative atmosphere here, thanks to the abundance of digital nomads

There is nothing I love more than call-ing up my friends and having weekend work parties at coffee shops. There is a huge digital nomad scene in Chiang Mai and a large support system which has been created to encourage meet-ings, mingles and more.

I can walk anywhere I want to go

Up until a few days ago, this was a major plus for me. Then, I totally bit it and totally hurt my tender ligaments in my ankle. When the doctor told me to stay off my foot and not walk for a few weeks, I burst into tears. Chiang Mai is incredibly walkable and there is nothing I love more than just put-ting on my sneakers, popping in my headphones and wandering. So, while I normally can walk anywhere, right now, I cannot. But, once my an-kle is healed, it is Game On.

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The gym is cheap

Generally, the cost of living in Chiang Mai is far lower than the western world. For a one-year gym membership, I am set back 9,500 baht (approx. US$266). My person-al trainer costs around 600 baht (ap-prox. US$17) a session. Sure, the equipment isn’t always the best, but I get to work out for cheap, have a trainer and get into some great shape for far less than I would back in America.

Food is cheap

30 baht noodle soup (under US$1). Sushi dinners for under 500 baht ( approx. US$14). Fruit shakes for 20 baht. I can eat well (and deliciously) and not have it break the bank. A def-inite bonus when trying to save up those pennies.

Rainy season

Coming from the desert, where I only get to enjoy rain a few days out of the year to Chiang Mai, where there is an entire season, scared me at first. I didn’t know how I was going to react to clouds and rain and wet. But, I love it. Absolutely love it. Those humid, sticky days that turn to thick evenings that lead to gorgeous thunderstorms that shake my little teak house just make me feel alive.Rainy season is, by far, my favorite time of year.

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Mountains

Geography, in general, is sexy, and I cannot get enough of natu-ral beauty. The mountains here — so long as it is not burning season when they are cloaked by a yellow-gray haze — are stunning. Crisp and green during rainy season, thick clouds hanging over them as mon-soons roll into town. Love.

Proximity to the airport, and then BKK isn’t so far away either

I could walk to the airport if I want-ed to. Seriously. It is that close. With killer deals to other parts of SE Asia and beyond, thanks to budget air-lines like Air Asia and Nok Air, it makes impromptu trips a breeze. Plus, Bangkok is a quick hour flight so when the need for hustle and bus-tle strikes (which is rare for me since I love my laid-back city so much more than the crowded capital), it can be arranged.

The constant flowing in of friends

I don’t like the exit of friends, but it is pretty safe to say that when some-one leaves, a new person comes in. Or an old person comes back. The revolving door of Chiang Mai expats constantly keeps me on my toes, al-beit the “see you soon’s” definitely get old.

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http://www.dtravelsround.com/2013/08/09/rainy-season-chiang-mai/

Recent improved relationships between Cuba and the United States mayopen the door for improved travel for US citizens wanting to visit thecountry. Hostilities between the two countries have begun to thaw after 50years of standoff and there is a suggestion in some circles thatcommercial flights may open up in the foreseeable future. Travelerscurrently have to go via charter flights with restrictive baggage and longcheckin times the norm. An increase in US tourists will be an economicplus for Cuba and will no doubt hasten the development of the country. Ifyou’re wanting to experience Cuba as it is now you may be best to gosooner rather than later.

Cuban Holidays Could Now be On the Agenda for US citizens

Winter season

There is a tiny part of the year where the temperatures drop and layers are needed. In my old world, that would be called Autumn. But here, it is win-ter. And, thanks to that thin jungle blood, those autumn temperatures render me freezing and elated to don hats and gloves. Even if it is only for a few weeks. The air is crisp, the days are short, and I just want to watch a football game and drink a Bloody Mary. I don’t. But, still … winter in Chiang Mai is just bliss.

Health care

The stupid ankle injury last week required me to report to the hospital to get an X-ray. So, off I went to the west-ern hospital in town, Chiang Mai Ram. I was quickly placed through triage, met with a doctor, X-rayed, then met with the doctor again to find out what was wrong. After that, I was brought to the cashier, then the pharmacy to get my medicine. The entire visit cost me 1,400 baht. I was in an out in one hour. Last year, I had to get a medical check-up for my work permit. A full work up of my blood and a doctor visit cost me under 3,000 baht. I went to the dentist

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for a deep cleaning. The cost? 1,500 baht. It boggles my mind how inexpen-sive medical visits are here. Although, I should mention when the doctor told me I could get an air cast for my an-kle if I wanted to, he also said the cost was pretty ridiculous: 15,000 baht. Of course, I passed.

Massages

Every street has a massage shop. I’ve found my favorites in town (and will be telling you all about them) and try to make it in for a head/neck/back/shoulder/arm massage at least once a week. For 200 baht for 60 minutes, I really should be going more.

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Incense

I know this is kind of weird to put on my list, but I love how Nag Champa floats through the air in he mornings when everyone makes their offers to their spirit houses. It reminds me I am in Thailand, in an-other world.

Culture

The wats. The holidays. The monks. The smiles. All around me, the beau-tiful Thai culture thumps and pulses. It is intoxicating and inspiring and un-like anything I have ever experienced in my old life.

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Join Diana and her travels on her blog www.dtravelsround.com

...recently lived in Chiang Mai, Thailand and volunteered full-time for Save Elephant Foundation, an organization dedicated to rescuing Asian elephants and educating travelers on responsible tourism. She is the co-founder of the Responsible Travel & Tourism Collective, which include #RTTC, a weekly chat on Twitter about the topic and its many facets and also tapped as a speaker for elephant tourism.

Diana Edelman ....


http://www.dtravelsround.com/2013/12/18/winter-thailand-blood-jungle/

http://www.dtravelsround.com/2013/12/18/winter-thailand-blood-jungle/

http://www.dtravelsround.com/

MICHAEL AND

YVONNE BAUCHE

Can you really sustain a lifestyle caring for other people’s houses and never have to go home again? Today’s guests are living

proof of the fact.

Michael and Yvonne Bauche gave up a comfortable but stress-inducing lifestyle in Vancouver Canada 3 years ago and they haven’t looked back. Their income is lower but so is their living costs giving them the opportunity to live a millionaire’s lifestyle on less than $C3000 per month all without having to eat into their savings.

They’ve met interesting people and made new friends for life. They’ve housesat in many parts of Europe, Central America and the Caribbean and

now spend over 70% of each year minding houses, often for repeat clients who have them back. They have so many requests in fact that they have built up a network of fellow house sitters who can take care of the clients they can’t get to!

But the best part is they have their freedom back. In today’s interview you’ll discover just how easy and cost effective housesitting can be and the opportunities it can open up for you to live your life to the fullest.

If you’d like to know more about housesitting check out their website at http://thebauches.com or you can grab their free report at http://yourescapeblueprint.com/free-housesitting-report/

LIVE LIKE AMILLIONAIRE

FOR FREE


http://thebauches.com

http://thebauches.com

http://yourescapeblueprint.com/free-housesitting-report/

http://yourescapeblueprint.com/free-housesitting-report/

Tony (Argyle): Well, wel-come to the show Michael and Yvonne. Lovely to have you here today.

Yvonne (Bauche): Thanks for having us, Tony.

Tony: Paint the picture. Whereabouts are you at the moment? We know you’re house sitting. Tell us a little bit about your location and what you can see from where you are?

Yvonne: We are just around the corner from Marigot Bay in Saint Lucia. Although we can’t see Marigot Bay it-self, we’re actually on a lit-tle promontory with a bay on either side of us. We’re perched quite high up over the cliffs, and we have an amazing view of the ocean – and the sunset, which is go-ing to be quite spectacular tonight.

Tony: Right. Well, you’ve just depressed everybody now. Thank you very much for that [laughter]. I’ve seen the photos of your previous experiences in Saint Lucia, and it just looks like a stun-ning place. You’ve obviously been there quite a few times, haven’t you?

Yvonne: We have. This is our…

Michael (Bauche): This would be our third time here.

Yvonne: Yes, with intentions to return.

Tony: So tell us about how did you get involved in house sitting? What was your previ-ous life like?

Yvonne: We did the rat race, the 9:00 to 5:00 in Vancouver, BC. It’s a beauti-ful place to live, but we were working long hours just to stay ahead.

What happened was a very dear friend passed away from a serious illness, and we asked ourselves, ‘If we only had 6 months left to live, would we still be doing what we were doing?’ Well, the answer was no. So we tried to figure out a way to escape, to travel, which is what we really wanted to do; and we figured that out. We turned our home into an as-set, and we’re using house sitting to reduce our living costs, and we’re able to live for less than we used to back in Vancouver.

Tony: So what were you both doing before in terms of your work?

Michael: Okay. Well, Tony, I was a professional engineer. I was working in the oil and

gas business as a consul-tant. I had several lucrative clients such as Chevron and Imperial Oil, which is a sub-sidiary of Exxon, so I was ba-sically working in a refinery as a mechanical engineer.

Tony: And what about your-self, Yvonne?

Yvonne: I bounced around from various, different ca-reers. I was a newcomer to Canada as you might be able to tell. I’m English originally. And so I’ve reinvented myself a few times. I’d most recent-ly been working in the finan-cial industry, and the crash of 2008 sort of put an end to that; and so I was looking for a new direction.

Tony: Okay. We’ll get into a bit more about your cost of living because you obviously

we asked ourselves, if we

only had 6 monThs lefT To live, would we

sTill be doing whaT we were

doing...

—Yvonne Bauche


mentioned that what you’re doing now is not earning as much, but it’s costing you significantly less. We’ll talk about that shortly, but what year did you first start do-ing this? How long have you been doing it for?

Yvonne: We’ve been do-ing this just over 3 years. It was end of April 2012 when we waved goodbye to rainy Vancouver.

Tony: So you’re spending, I think, about 40% of the year now doing house sitting. Is that right?

Michael: No, we’re actual-ly doing more like 75% right now. So we are travelling full-time, and we have been travelling full-time for the last few years. On average, it’s working out to about 75% of our time that we are actually house sitting.

Yvonne: Yeah. I think the first year, it was probably 40%; but now we’re actually booked until January.

Tony: So you’ve gone from being semi-professionals to full professionals.

Yvonne: Pretty much, yeah.

Tony: [Chuckles] The thought of doing this, I mean it must have been a little bit

scary for you. What were the concerns you had be-fore leaping into it? And have those concerns become real?

Michael: Well [chuckles], I think, Tony, with something like this, the biggest fears are the ones that you con-jure up in your head before you go. I know from my per-spective, I’d spent 5 years in university getting a degree and 20 years working in a career; and the idea of jetti-soning that, some people will say throwing away a good career was pretty daunting. At that point, I had a lot built up in my identity as being a professional; so letting that go was a big hurdle for me.

Tony: Funny you say that because I hear that from a lot of people. A degree is so highly regarded and high-er education is so highly re-garded. You’re almost looked at by people as ‘what do you think you’re doing?’ when you make this sort of deci-sion, don’t you?

Yvonne: Yes.

Michael: However, I can say that the skills that I learned not only in university but also in the 20-year professional career, all those skills I take along with me. I mean that information, that knowledge, and those experiences are

not wasted. There are things you can take along with you and apply to whatever new venture you’re looking at tak-ing on.

Tony: Yeah.

Yvonne: Yeah.

Tony: So just to make every-body feel really depressed now, tell us all the countries you’ve been to and house sat.

Yvonne: Okay. Off to you, Michael.

Michael: Okay. Well, since starting full-time in 2012, our first house sit which re-ally solidified it for us was in Tuscany, near Lucca – Tuscany, Italy. Then we were in Spain, the South of Spain. From there, we moved on to look after a vineyard in the South of France. From there, we went to London, England, where we had friends who decided to leave town while the craziness of the Olympics are going on. So we have their 15 century house looked after while they were gone. So that was basi-cally our Europe sojourn.

And then we shifted gears and went over to Central America, where we house sat in San Jose, Costa Rica. We house sat in Boquete, Panama.


Our very first housesit in Tuscany in 2012, solidified housesitting for us says Michael.

Yvonne: Placencia, Belize.

Michael: Yeah, in Belize. We had two house sits in Belize.

Yvonne: And one near Belmopan.

Michael: And then from Central America, we were planning on heading down to South America; but in the middle of last year, we kind of got sidetracked to our first house sit here in Marigot Bay. We had been here house sit-ting for over a year now, and I’m not sure if—

Yvonne: When we’re going to ever escape [laughter].

Tony: It’s a living hell, isn’t it [chuckles]?

Yvonne: In the Caribbean, we’ve been bouncing around between the Grenadines, Barbados, and Saint Lucia.

Tony: Okay. Well my next question was going to be ‘what do you enjoy best about house sitting?’ but I don’t think you need to an-swer that. I think the places you’ve described in them-selves, it’s obviously a fan-tastic experience.

Yvonne: I think, really, what we enjoy about house sit-ting is we’re not staying in hotels or hostels. You’re ac-tually staying in somebody’s home. You usually get ac-cess to a car. They tell you the best places to shop. They usually introduce you to some of the locals so you

get the lowdown on what it’s really like to live there as a local. And because you’re shopping and cooking for yourself, it’s a different per-spective than just going as a tourist.

Tony: A more authentic ex-perience of it.

Yvonne: Yes, and you really get a feel for it. One of the reasons for setting up and travelling was we know we don’t want to retire and set-tle down in Vancouver. We don’t know where that’s go-ing to be yet; but this way, we can get a really good feel for those places we would consider.

Tony: Yup. So what would you say has been the best experience you’ve had while you’ve been on the road?

Yvonne: Hmm. That’s a tough one. I think we both would agree that our favou-rite house sit was the first one in Lucca in Tuscany. I think that’s mainly because of where the house was lo-cated and the style of the home. The owner was very artistic, and she had a beau-tiful garden, amazing views, 300-degree views out over the valleys. I think what real-ly was the highlight of those sits was taking cooking les-sons, which is a lot of fun.


We love our furry housemates!

Tony: So a lot of your ‘busi-ness’, for want of a better word, would be repeat cus-tomers now. Would that be fair to say?

Yvonne: Ninety percent is repeat customers. Well, ac-tually, 100% is repeat cus-tomers or referrals right now.

Tony: Right. And I guess once you get yourself started, you can easily build into that situation over a period of time.

Yvonne: Absolutely. We turn down house sits all the time. We’ve turned down 3 in the last 3 weeks!

Michael: Yeah. That is the biggest challenge about what we’re doing. Once you set yourself up and get a good reputation for your-self, the problem is not being able to be at 3 or 4 places simultaneously. So we’ve started setting up a network of people that we can refer to our clients as a value-added service; so yeah, if we could be 3 or 4 places at once, that would be wonderful.

Yvonne: But we haven’t fig-ured out how to clone our-selves yet.

Tony: That must be tough making a decision some-times out there.

Yvonne: Yes, it is. One in-stance is we got asked to house sit this Christmas in Barbados about 18 months before it was due, and we didn’t really want to make the commitment because we weren’t sure we want-ed to go back to Barbados or not. But the reality is that she was pushing for an an-swer, and so we said, ‘Yes, we would do it.’ And then once we’re committed, that’s it – we’re committed. Even if we’re better off with what comes up. It’s like, ‘No, we said we’re going to do this.’ So once we said yes, that’s it. It’s done.

Tony: Yeah, fair enough.

Michael: We also tend to keep travel costs down. We tend to pick a direction of travel and then pick house sits that suit the route we’re going. We do know house sitters who fly around, go from Australia to Canada to Barbados; and unless you have a fortune to spend on airfare, that can get pret-ty expensive. So we tend to pick a direction of travel and then plug in house sits to suit the region and/or the direc-tion that we’re planning on going.

Yvonne: Yeah.


What’s not to love? Our Spanish housesit.

Tony: Okay. Well, let’s talk about cost because you touched on the fact at the beginning of this conversa-tion that you’re basically now living for considerably less than what you were before. If you don’t want to divulge too much, that’s perfectly fine; but I understand from look-ing through your blog and stuff, that you guys are real-ly only looking at a cost of a couple of thousand dollars a month to sustain yourself. Is that right?

Michael: That’s correct, and it does depend where we are travelling and how much house sitting we have to sub-sidise our cost. When we’re in Europe, we actually rented a

car for 3 months; so that was a bit of a cost. I think our av-erage cost in Europe where we house sat 70% of the time with the car worked out to about C$3,400 a month.

And then once we got into Central America, our house sitting was down to about 40% of the time; but with the cheaper cost of living, we were averaging about C$2,000 a month.

And in the Caribbean which has a reputation for being quite pricey and rightly so; right now, we’re house sitting 75% to 80% of the time, and we’re managing to live very, very well for about C$2,000 a month.

Tony: Okay. So you’re not eating into your savings at all with this? You’re able to cre-ate enough income to keep yourself going?

Michael: Yes. At this point, C$2,000 a month, it’s finan-cially sustainable for us. We have some real estate back home that the renters are paying the lion’s share of our travel cost; and then also with the travel writing and the work we’re doing on the side, that basically gives us our beer money.

Tony: Yeah. I think this is a thing that a lot of people don’t appreciate, particularly if you’re coming from a more expen-sive Western country – and I’m


in Australia here which is one of the dearer places to live. When you leave, the amount of rent you get will more than cover you in most other parts of the world, won’t it?

Yvonne: Yes.

Michael: That’s been our ex-perience. I mean, for us, liv-ing in Vancouver—which The Economist Magazine listed as one of the most expensive cities to live in North America in 2013—we were spending just to maintain our lifestyle, about double of what we’re spending now. We were spending C$4,000 a month to keep the house going.

Yvonne: Two cars.

Michael: A couple of cars, groceries.

Yvonne: Things.

Michael: Yeah, just what people would normally con-sider to be the necessities for daily living.

Tony: So you’ve halved your cost. In terms of the quality of your life, how much has that increased by?

Yvonne: [Laughter] Oh, tri-ple? Quadruple?

Tony: [Laughs] Can’t put a number on it.

Michael: That’s how to quan-tify. I mean going from a 9:00 to 5:00 career where you’re in the rat race to living the lifestyle where we’re basical-ly retired. I mean we do work and projects because we feel like it, not because we have to. We’ve been living in the last 3 years in some really, really wonderful places.

And really, we’re living the life of millionaires without having to have a millionaire’s…

Yvonne: Without having to invest millions.

Tony: Yeah. So tell us a bit about your business, be-cause you are advising or helping house sitters in get-ting started really, aren’t you, that’s one of the businesses you have?

Michael: Well, basically, I guess our business is trav-el writing. What we’ve done is we’ve written a book on house sitting for internation-al living, and they’re market-ing it now. Also on top of that, Yvonne’s been doing free-lance writing. I’ve been sell-ing some photographs that go along with the writing. So I would say that at this point, Tony, our business is basi-cally that of a travel writer.

Yvonne: Yeah, a publisher I guess.

Tony: Okay.

Yvonne: We do offer coach-ing for people that want some businesses in house sitting, but for a start would be our free report we got out now, I would say.

Tony: Okay. So just tell us how do people get hold of that report?

Michael: Our report, you can go to our house sitting web-site. This is basically a web-site that we set up to adver-tise our house sitting servic-es; but along with it, we also have a free report called ‘What Everybody Ought to Know about House Sitting.’ It’s basi-cally a 10-step guide showing people how to do what we’re doing basically, how to mar-ket yourself, how to find the best positions, and how to cut through the competition and land up on jobs that we’ve been doing for the last 3 years.

Yvonne: Yeah.

Tony: Well, you’re a living endorsement. I don’t think anybody’s going to doubt what you’re saying. That’s for sure. We’ll talk a little bit more about that soon, but I guess everything’s got a downside. What would you say has been the down-side of living the lifestyle you’ve got?

Michael: Well, I think when you have the house sits lined up one after the other,


there’s really not a down-side. I guess psychological-ly, it might not be for every-one because you’d have to be willing to live with a sense of insecurity because some-times, you don’t know where you’re going to be travelling next or where the next op-portunity is going to arise. If you’re the type of person who is willing to live fluidly or be able to roll with the oppor-tunities as they come along, then it’s not really a problem at all.

Yvonne: Yeah. I think what Mike’s trying to say is that if you’re an adapt-able type of per-son, it’s not a prob-lem. If you like ev-erything structured and like to use all your own stuff, then house sit-ting probably won’t work for you.

Tony: And I guess that can be a learned skill too, can’t it? I was interviewing some-body recently, and they said that they came from a cor-porate lifestyle where every-thing was structured to hav-ing to adapt to the flexibility; but they actually found it to be invigorating in the end because not knowing where they’re going to be next week initially was hard work, but they eventually came to love that freedom factor, and

that’s the best part of the trade-off, isn’t it?

Yvonne: Yes. It is. It’s very liberating. It is. And it’s quite strange. Even though we travel full-time, our sched-ules are probably more struc-tured than they were back home, especially our travel schedules.

Tony: I guess that’s some-thing you’ve got to like now, haven’t you?

Yvonne: Yeah.

Michael: Another trick is to be able to—I mean we live out of 2 carry-on suitcas-es [laughter], and that’s a learned skill as well. I mean we went from the 4-bedroom house filled to the brim with stuff which we basically di-vested ourselves of, and we now live out of 2 carry-on suitcases. That takes a bit of an adjustment as well.

Yvonne: I guess that brings to the feminine downside - is not having all your things.

Tony: [Laughs] I was just go-ing to say, Michael, you found the perfect woman if you can get her down to a carry-on suitcase. I think there’s men all over the world who’d love to meet a woman like that.

Michael: Yeah, I’ve done it right, Tony. [Laughter]

Yvonne: No high heels in my suitcase, Tony.

Tony: You’ve got to be practical, haven’t you? So, you’ve obviously been to a

lot of countries. If you had to pick one to settle down in, what would have been your favourite?

Yvonne: Ooh… Ooh. I don’t know if we can pick one right now. I think there’s proba-

bly 3 contenders, and Mike might disagree with me. I love Grenada. That’s in the Caribbean. I really love that little island. We both love Tuscany, but they have win-ter. And I like Belize too.

Michael: Yeah. I would agree. I think part of the problem we have answering that question, Tony, is really, we have a life goal of visit-ing 100 countries; and we’re both around the 70-country mark, so we’re getting close. We have a lot more travelling

“we wenT from The 4 bedroom house filled To The brim wiTh sTuff ...

now we live ouT of 2 carry-on suiTcases... ThaT Takes a biT of adjusTmenT.”

—Michael Bauche

January 2016 | All Rights Reserved.50 THE EXPAT CHAT | ISSUE 1

Bequia, St. Vincent & the Grenadines.

to do, so we’re not quite in the mindset yet of putting down roots; but as we’re house sit-ting in different countries, we are taking notes.

I think when the time comes to put away the carry-on suit-cases, we will have a pretty good idea of where that place will be. But right now, it’s kind of hard to put a thumb down on it.

Tony: Okay. So in terms of practicalities, how do you get on things such as your healthcare travelling around a lot, and insurances, and also I guess going hand-in-hand with that, the rights you might have as Canadian citizens in terms of your tax status, Medicare, pension funds, etc.? Is there any is-sue around that with being out of the country so much?

Michael: Yeah, there defi-nitely is. As far as the tax

status goes, because we still have real estate in Canada, we’re deemed residents of Canada tax-wise; so we still have to file income tax re-turns on an annual basis.

The really trickiest part for us is, like you mentioned, is the healthcare. In our province, we’re allowed to be away for 7 months of the year and still be covered by our provincial medical system. Since we’re away longer, we’re taking ad-vantage of a leave of absence from that program which we can reinstate that at any time within a two-year period.

But we are very strong be-lievers of carrying adequate health insurance, and we can speak from experience because just this January, the 2nd of January, we were with friends in our hometown, Vancouver. I’m in my mid-40s, pretty good shape, no health issues, and I woke up

one morning and got rushed off to the hospital because I had developed deep vein thrombosis and had a mas-sive pulmonary embolism.

So one day, I was perfect-ly healthy; and then the next day, right out of the blue, I had an emergency room doctor telling me to my face, ‘Michael, you’ve got a life-threatening illness; and this is very, very critical.’ I ended up spending 2 weeks in the hos-pital getting that taken care of, and I am so grateful for the Canadian healthcare system, that it was there for us.

The scary thing is, two days later, we were go-ing to be flying off to Miami, Florida, which has world-class healthcare but also has world-class…

Yvonne: Price.

Michael: … price tags as-sociated with that health-care. And then a couple of days later, we were planning on being in the Bay Islands in Honduras. We’ve been to Utila before, and we know the condition of the health-care system there; and all I can say is I’m very happy that I didn’t get sick there.

So I think if you can’t afford adequate travel insurance, you can’t really afford to be travelling. However, on the flipside, I do think that you


cover your financial risks. I think insurance is a financial decision. You can cover the risks against the biggest po-tential losses; so if you get sick somewhere, it’s not go-ing to bankrupt you.

And then a lot of the ancillary coverage such as baggage losses or trip insurance, that sort of thing, we decided to go naked and self-insure ourselves; but we just make sure that we’re covered for any catastrophe that could wipe us out financially.

Tony: I guess travelling with hand luggage, it makes it reasonably easy for the rest of that insurance. You don’t have a lot of risk at the end of the day, do you? So it cer-tainly helps things.

How do you find language barriers? I guess a lot of the Caribbean is English speak-ing. What about Central America?

Michael: Well, we’ve never really had any issues with lan-guage. I mean when we were travelling in Central America, I was practicing my Spanish. I do know a little bit. I know enough to get into trouble and maybe get out of trouble [chuckles]. I can function.

And like you said, the Caribbean is—they can speak English if they want to, but they’re going to also

turn the Creole on and lose our English speakers.

Yvonne: The biggest lan-guage barrier was actually in Europe. Because we were bouncing around quite a bit, there’s no way we can learn German, French, Dutch, Swedish, Swiss; but most Europeans do speak English, so it wasn’t a problem.

of tourism, the working lan-guage is in English; so even if you go to a country where English is not widely spoken, places where you would rent a car or find a place to stay, those are the people who speak English. They cater to foreign tourists.

Tony: So what do you miss the most about being on the

This housesit came complete with Live in Maid!

Tony: Yeah. And we’re very fortunate in that regard real-ly, aren’t we, in terms of most countries of the world, they can be very accommodat-ing towards understanding English far more than we are at understanding other lan-guages too.

Yvonne: It makes it a lot easier.

Michael: Yeah. I think the reality is that the business

road? Obviously other than high heels, Yvonne.

Yvonne: [Laughs] I don’t think I really miss—actually, there’s one thing I miss, and that’s having a garden. I like to garden, and I get to dabble in other people’s gardens. But I don’t get to see the combi-nation. You’re planting seeds and harvesting them, stuff like that. So I guess that’s the only thing I really miss: the continu-ity of having my own garden.


Tony: I haven’t thought about that. You don’t see the fruits of your labour really, do you, unless you go back again later.

Yvonne: Well, we will in so many cases.

Michael: Yeah. Typically, our house sits are anywhere from 3 weeks to 3 months. So the garden, we don’t re-ally see—if we do plant a lot of seeds, we don’t get to see the fruit.

Yvonne: No. But we get to eat fruit sometimes from Italy.

Michael: Yeah.

Tony: That’s from some-body else’s labour. That’s even better.

Yvonne: Yes.

Michael: Yes, exactly [chuckles].

Tony: Now, you mentioned at the start of the call about internet coverage. How have you found that most of the places you’ve gone? Has it been an issue at all?

Michael: No, not really, be-cause we’re house sitting. A lot of the places we’re house sitting, our clients have very good internet coverage. That is actually a prerequisite for us because we basically do all our business and banking online. We need to house sit in a place where we have ad-equate coverage.

And in terms of the band-width and the speed, it’s been more than adequate everywhere we’ve gone. I think one of the only technical issues we have

sometimes is on the islands here because the internet I believe is with satellite up-links. If you get a storm go-ing over, then the internet coverage will drop; but one of the beauties of being on the Caribbean is it’ll rain for half an hour, and then the sun comes out again.

Tony: I’m sure I know the answer to this question, but are you planning to return to the rat race at any stage soon?

Yvonne: [Chuckles] Nooo. No way, Jose.

Michael: No. No way. We’re quite happy being roving re-tirees for the foreseeable future.

Tony: I think the key thing is what you’ve done is set up a sustainable situation, haven’t you, where you can continue to do this because the income covers you.

Yvonne: Yeah.

Tony: And really, health al-lowing, you can do this in-definitely for the rest of your lives I guess.

Michael: Absolutely. Yeah. I think another challenge is that having come from a pressure-cooker career and something that’s intellectual-ly challenging, it’s also impor-tant to take up activities while

Deliciousimo!


you’re travelling to keep your gray matter going; and that’s what we’ve been doing with the writing and with the differ-ent projects that we’re doing – just looking for challenges to keep our brains going ev-ery day and keep things ex-citing and interesting.

Tony: Do you have any par-ticular hobbies or anything that you’ve had to try and find how you can continue to do it as you’ve travelled? Or have you picked up new hobbies?

Michael: Well, really, that was an easy one for us be-cause we both love scuba diving; so that’s something we partake in while we’re travelling.

And we both love to cook. So the cooking and the travelling

just go hand-in-hand be-cause we love to go to the local markets. We love to try the new food. Sometimes it is a challenge being in differ-ent places because you can’t get the ingredients you want, so you have to make do with what you can get.

Really, the lifestyle that we’re pursuing right now was real-ly fitting with what we love to do. We love to write. We love to read. We love to cook. And we like to walk and scuba dive. So it’s a really good fit for us.

Yvonne: And we like pets too.

Tony: I’ve noticed that with your photos. Obviously, you’re more than happy to do houses with animals.

Michael: Yeah. Ninety per-cent of our clients have pets. And really, that’s the main driver behind house sitting, is looking after people’s pets.

Tony: I guess the final ques-tion for you guys: how would you say this has changed your life?

Yvonne: How has it changed—well, I’m going to use Mike as an example. He’d get up at 7:00. He’d have a glass of water, clean his teeth, get dressed, and roll out of the house to be at work for 7:30. And then he would

stuff up on coffee all morning. And then when he got home at about 4:30 because he’s working a short day, he was just so hyped on coffee and stressed that he would take him at least an hour to wind down if he ever did.

He’s a different Michael than what he was now. We get up in the morning probably when the sun comes up, a little bit afterwards (it depends on the schedule), walk the dogs or whatever it is we have to do, a half cup of tea or coffee, and then decide what we’re going to do for the rest of the day. So the stress level I think is the big difference. There isn’t really any.

Michael: Yeah. I think to add to that, our job right now is to enjoy life; and we enjoy it at our own pace. So really, we don’t have a lot of stress in our life at all right now, which is a good thing; and I think it’s a much more healthier way to live than what we were do-ing back home working the 9:00 to 5:00 in a real high-pressure type of a career.

Tony: Guys, it’s been awe-some talking to you. Just for somebody who’s listening to this who’s thinking of getting into house sitting and they’re wanting to take the plunge, they’ve got concerns, where do they begin? Your report probably sounds like the best place to start. Is that right?

One of our favourite housesits has the gorgeous Elle…


WHAT I LEARNED FROM THEIR INTERVIEW:1. If you’re serious about housesitting travel

light. Both Michael and Yvonne exist with hand luggage only and don’t really feel they miss anything from doing so (Yvonne even confesses to not carting heels with her!). It helps they have mainly focused around warmer climates but if you want to make life easy (and save on luggage costs and insurance ) then travelling light helps

2. Housesitting offers a far more meaningful way to enjoy an area. You can be treated as a local. Michael and Yvonne encourage their hosts to set them up with a network of people when they arrive which makes the whole process far more comfortable for them

3. Don’t spread yourself too thin. The Bauches concentrate on housesitting in regions resisting the urge to leap around the world and incur bigger travel costs.

Michael: Yeah, I would think so. I mean we’re a little bit bi-ased. We wrote the report. But yeah, we have a free report on our website. The website is www.TheBauches.com, and the report is called ‘Everything you ought to know about House Sitting,’ and that is a 10-step guide that shows how to do what we’re doing. It’s a pretty com-prehensive report.

Yvonne: It’s a good starting place, and it just gives some of the websites that we’ve used and some tips for build-ing profiles and things like that.

The reality is that the best place to start is to decide to do it and take action towards making it happen.

Tony: I will just spell Bauche for people who are listening to this. B-A-U-C-H-E, is that correct?

Michael: That is correct.

Yvonne: That’s correct.

Tony: Excellent. At least I’ve got my spelling right even though I did mispronounce it earlier. We’ll be putting a link to that up on our podcast anyway, but thanks guys! It’s

been a real pleasure talk-ing to you today. I’ve learned a lot about house sitting, things I didn’t know about it. I’m sure most of the listen-ers have too. We really ap-preciate you putting the time in to share your experiences. Thanks again for that.

Yvonne: You’re very wel-come, Tony.

Michael: Our pleasure.

Yvonne: And your listeners.


http://www.TheBauches.com

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We live in xcalak, a town of 400 people that sits on the border of Belize and is an extremely remote part of Mexico. This means that we’ve had to adjust to things taking longer to do, longer to get to and overall being

quite a bit less convenient. Like grocery shopping. The days of a quick stop at the store to pick up bread or milk or beer? Hah! Where we live now, spontaneously deciding what’s for dinner is not an option. We have to do planning and preparation if we want to eat.

GROCERY SHOPPING IN

by DEIDRE AND JASON MIZE

XCALAK, MEXICO


And we do. So how do we go grocery shopping in Xcalak?

Leading out of the actual town is a one lane dirt road known as the beach road. There are quite a few houses stretched along this beach road, in-cluding ours. We live in the last house on the road, about nine miles from town and about a mile from the next closest house. So like I was saying, remote. We typically don’t mind the privacy and serenity that comes from being at the ‘end of the road.’ That is until we get hungry.

Thankfully there is a food truck that drives up and down the beach road that sells fresh fruits, vegetables, meats and a few other odds and ends. The food truck announces its arrival by honking their horn at the front gate. There are actually quite a few vendors that announce their pres-ence with a horn or by playing mu-sic. Kind of like the ice cream man. Unfortunately though, there is never

any ice cream for sale – too hot to de-liver (boy do I miss ice cream).

For most of the road, a food truck comes by daily. But because we’re pretty far down the road many grocers don’t want to drive this far so we typi-cally only get a food truck 2-3 days a week. That might sound like a lot, but the food here doesn’t have many pre-servatives or chemicals added so ev-erything turns pretty quickly. It’s best to only buy what you think you’re go-ing to eat in the next day or two.

The selection on the truck is surpris-ingly good. We pretty regularly buy

papaya, pineapple, mangoes, car-rots, melon, bananas, eggs, tortillas rice, chicken, tomatoes, peppers, cu-cumber and zucchini. But planning meals based just on what you get from the truck can be difficult. The in-ventory is never the same from day to day. One day our truck guy has loads of lettuce, then the next three times he comes by he has none. It could be that there was none where he picked up the food from to deliv-er, or it could be that everyone else on the road bought all the lettuce be-fore he got to us. I can typically get ¾ of my list crossed off, but that might be only ¾ of the things needed for a


meal. So we’ve had to find some oth-er ways to supplement what comes on the food truck, and to satisfy some of our cravings.

Once in a while someone comes by selling meals out of the trunk of their car. It’s an odd version of a drive-thru, but the food is SOOO much better and often includes empanadas, salbutes, tamales and, our favorite, cochinita pi-bil – pork that is marinated in a citrusy sauce and roasted in a banana leaf.

But the food truck and the food deliv-ery people don’t have everything. They don’t have some necessary house-hold supplies and foods that we crave from the United States. And they defi-nitely don’t have a lot of variety. It does get monotonous eating tortillas, rice and beans on a regular basis. So if we want additional items or need any-thing more than what the food truck and the people selling food from their cars bring it requires us to get in our car and drive. And drive. And drive. It is not as easy as a quick run down the street. There are a couple abarottes, or corner stores, in the town of Xcalak but not a grocery store. Our next clos-est option to buy groceries is in the town of Mahahual which is about an hour away. There are several specialty stores and restaurants here and while there is still not a traditional grocery store, the corner stores are a lot big-ger and have a much wider selection.

And if you can’t find it in Mahahual? You keep driving. The closest real grocery store to us is in the city of Chetumal, the state capital, which is

about 2.5 hours away. Here there are several grocery stores and…. yes, a Sam’s Club.

If we’re going to drive that far for gro-ceries, we’re going to stock up. And Sam’s Club is the place to do that. About once a month we take a day trip and drive to Chetumal to replen-ish our supply of food items that we want and crave. Sometimes we REALLY want something besides tortillas and rice. So when we go, we make it count. Kalmata olives! Cheddar cheese! Meatballs! Chicken with the head already cut off!

As with many things here in Xcalak, grocery shopping can be time-con-suming and a challenge. And from time to time we do miss the ease and convenience of being able to run down the street to pick up that one item we forgot we needed for dinner. But we have enjoyed eating extreme-ly fresh food, trying new food and get-ting creative and coming up with new recipes based on the food we have on hand. Sometimes the recipes work, sometimes they don’t. We’re having fun trying. And so no ice cream, but I’m pretty sure there’s a spare Dos Equis around here somewhere.

Deidre and Jason Mize

....from Kansas we were enjoying lucrative corporate careers, had a house, a couple of cars and were surrounded by stuff. So, so, much stuff. But at the end of each day, week, month and year we’d typically find ourselves stressed, unhappy and never really sure where our money had gone, (probably to buy more stuff). With the realization, and several reminders, that life is not a guarantee, we decided not to wait until retirement to live our lives and begin to make some changes. We quit our corporate jobs, started a new business together, sold almost all of that stuff, packed the rest into our remaining car and drove off with plans to live, work and explore different parts of the world. We currently house and pet sit throughout the world. We try to share the good, the bad, the exciting and the disappointing and we try to share it in a way that is honest and, hopefully, entertaining. http://www.awolamericans.com/

Deidre and Jason Mize ....


http://www.awolamericans.com/

I travel, and I write about tech. The end result is, typically, a bottomless pit of gadgets trying to burst out of my backpack, most of which don’t really

justify being there in the first place.

Now and then, though, I find something that’s genuinely pretty great. It doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, is robust and reliable, and simply makes my travels a better experience in one way or another.

These are the half-dozen pieces of tech gear that fit all of the above criteria, and have made the biggest difference to me in the last year or two on the road.

MY TRAVELS

THE 6 PIECES OF TECH GEARTHAT HAVE MOST IMPROVED

by DAVE DEAN


SMARTPHONEThe first one’s obvious, but it’s true — buying an unlocked smartphone has vastly improved my travel experience. I’ll admit that in the past, I’d often be afraid to explore too far from wherev-er I was staying, or walk off the edge of the map in my guidebook or tour-ist brochure, because I might not be able to find my way home. It’s a lame excuse, in some ways, but it’s true. Now, I’ll happily wander anywhere for hours, knowing that the magic blue dot will guide me home.

I don’t usually carry a camera when ex-ploring cities any more, since the one on my phone is good enough. Podcasts and playlists make long travel days pass more quickly, while still leaving my eyes free to gaze out the window. Tripit has replaced a binder with my itin-erary, I use Skype, Whatsapp or email rather than hunting out a payphone or Internet cafe, and ebooks and Pocket instead of paper guidebooks — and that’s all before I even factor in trying to run a business from the road.

I started out with an Apple iPhone 3G, moved to a Samsung Galaxy S2 and now carry a Google Nexus 5. They’ve

all been great, and each one has cost less than the one before. You can now pick up a perfectly usable un-locked smartphone for under $250, and a pretty damn good one for un-der $400.

They come with downsides, of course, and there’s always a battle to stay engaged in the moment rather than the screen. On balance, though? My phone is the travel gadget I’d be least happy to give up.

PORTABLE BATTERYSmartphone prices may have come down and usefulness may have gone up, but the battery life still sucks. Long travel days still leave my phone and other gadgets gasping for pow-er before I can get anywhere near a mains socket.

Recently I started using a 7800mAh Mazzo Powerdrive, which lets me charge my phone a couple of times and still have enough juice left to get my Kindle or GoPro fired up again too. It’s changed the way I use my gear, es-pecially the phone — no more ration-ing screen time and keeping it in flight mode just to nurse it through the day.

The Powerdrive also provides extra storage for mobile devices, so it costs a bit extra, but you can pick up decent por-table batteries for under twenty bucks.

CHARGING CABLESAfter travelling for a while, and buying gadgets wherever I happened to be at the time, my cable situation was a mess. US, UK and Australian plugs, a dozen standard USB cables plus an Apple 30 pin version, dedicated char-gers for things like cameras, and all kinds of other junk. I ended up with a big, tangled bag of electronic acces-sories, and it was annoyingly difficult to charge everything at once due to needing multiple plug adapters.


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In the end, I declared cable bank-ruptcy and started again. Out went all the power cables with non-US plugs, replacing them with US versions in-stead. The cheap, crappy USB cables went too. I donated the old iPhone I carried as a spare, and the 30 pin ca-ble that went with it, and bought a uni-versal charger for things like camera and spare phone batteries.

That simple process cost very little, halved the size and weight of my electronics bag, and made charging everything much less painful. Ok, so it’s not technically a single gadget — but consolidating cables has definite-ly made my travelling life a whole lot easier. I think it counts.

MICRO-USB CABLES (PLENTY OF THEM)Speaking of those USB cables, I have just one more than I need of each type, carrying only high-quali-ty versions of different lengths. With micro-USB, for instance, I have one that’s a few inches long for charging my phone from a laptop, or that porta-ble battery in my pocket. This way, it’s less likely to get caught up and bro-ken, and it’s not so bulky either. The rest are longer than average, so they can reach comfortably from a power socket halfway up a wall, or behind the bed.

It sounds like a small improvement, and it is — but the simple decision to have a spare of every kind of USB ca-ble, and the right length for the job, is something I appreciate every single day. Never more so than last month, when my phone’s charging cable died right as I was about to leave for the airport.

TRAVEL-SIZED POWER STRIPPicking up a travel-sized power strip has made a huge difference. Now, I only need one plug adapter for the power strip, rather than a bunch of them rattling round in my bag for each device. It’s not perfect — it re-ally could do with a bit of extra cable

length, since I try to keep as much weight as possible off the power socket, especially when using plug adapters that are always ill-fitting.

Instead, the power strip just ends up hanging from any power socket that’s more than a few inches off the floor. Still, it’s small, cheap and otherwise very useful, so I’ll let it slide.

INTERNATIONAL MULTI-USB CHARGERIn the same vein, having a multi-USB charger for the last few months has been a godsend. The model I’ve been using has four sockets that can charge phones, tablets and oth-er USB gear, is light and compact, and comes with clip-on plug attach-ments for most countries in the world. It’s such a simple idea, I don’t know

why (a) more companies don’t make them and (b) I haven’t picked one up before.

The combined output of the charger is 4.8amps, so I couldn’t charge four tablets off it simultaneously, for in-stance. Luckily I don’t own four tab-lets. I’ll often charge my phone, por-table battery and Kindle from it, how-ever, and there’s no problem at all.

Best of all? It costs around thirty dol-lars. Bargain.

So those are the gadgets and cables that have made the most difference to me, day after day on the road. Other than the phone, buying something similar won’t cost more than about $30. Improving your travels doesn’t need to cost a fortune. Who knew?

Dave Dean

Traveller, freelance writer and a founder of Too Many Adapters, Dave has been a wanderer for over 15 years and a geek for even longer. When he’s not playing with the latest tech toy or working out how to keep his phone charged for just a few more minutes, he can probably be found sitting in a broken down bus in some obscure corner of the planet. http://toomanyadapters.com/

Dave Dean ....


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EUROPE’S

AIRLINESBEST LOW COST

Long term, sustainable travel means you have to make your dollars (or euros or pounds) stretch as far as you can. When it comes to air travel, in the states our choices are pretty much limited

to Southwest, JetBlue, and a couple of others that might be categorized as “budget” airlines. But in Europe there seems to be a much more comprehensive list of options. Here are the ones we’ve identified and bookmarked.

Note that, like here in the states, there are a couple more airlines that might be considered budget airlines that I haven’t listed: it’s just our bookmark list, not a comprehensive sampling. And I’m only including those airlines that obviously market themselves as low-cost.

BY CHUCK AND LORI ROS


AirberlinGermany-based (duh) with great cov-erage all over Europe, but rarely the cheapest.

An important tip! Be sure to read all the fine print and understand all the fees. Expect to pay extra for your luggage, in-cluding (on some airlines) your carry-on bags. Generally it’s better to pre-pay for any extras like luggage or meals. Watch out for “hidden” fees like getting charged to print boarding passes at the airport.

Indicates an airline you should bookmark!

AtlasJet Based in Turkey, with decent cover-age within Turkey and to London, and a few places in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

Condor This German-based airline is part of the Thomas Cook airline network and of-fers not only great coverage across Europe, but crosses the Atlantic with flights to JFK, Baltimore, Las Vegas, and more. Not to mention, Condor has great coverage in the Caribbean and even Asia and South America. Condor might just be the first global discount airline; this is definitely an airline you should bookmark.

Croatia AirlinesObviously concentrated in the Balkans, but with connections to ma-jor cities across Europe.

EasyJetWe took EasyJet from Barcelona to Pisa once: it was an “ok” experience. Great holiday/vacation type coverage across Europe.

FlybeUK and Western Europe destinations mainly.

Hop, by AirFranceGreat coverage in France, as you might expect, plus destinations in Italy and Prague.

Jet2Holiday-centric, with lots of beach and sun destinations.

Livingston Based in Italy, this airline has good coverage all around the Med, with a few destinations in the UK and Ireland.

Monarch Quite possibly our favorite to get to/from UK and the continent. Monarch has destinations across Europe and flies to the Canary Islands.

Norwegian Great coverage all across Europe and one of the first of Europe’s discount airlines to fly across the Atlantic. They offer connections between Orlando, JFK, Las Vegas, Fort Lauderdale, and Oakland to Europe at “mid-week” prices. We haven’t flown them yet, but we’re keeping an eye on them.

Onur AirTurkey’s 2nd low cost airline (behind Pegasus), with connections from some major European gateways (Amsterdam, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt, Paris, Vienna) and Istanbul (as well as connections from there to the Middle East).

Pegasus Turkey’s number 1 low cost airline, your best bet in and out of Istanbul and to the Turkish Aegean destinations like Bodrum and Alanya. They also get our award for the best safety video. If Turkey is on your travel wishlist, book-mark Pegasus.


http://www.airberlin.com/

http://www.atlasjet.com/

http://www.condor.com/

http://www.croatiaairlines.com/

http://www.easyjet.com/

http://www.flybe.com/

http://www.hop.com/en/

http://www.jet2.com/

http://www.livingstonair.it/

http://www.monarch.co.uk/

http://www.norwegian.com/

http://www.onurair.com/

http://www.flypgs.com/

RyanAir The best known of the European budget airlines. We’ve taken them a half doz-en times or so before, even though they leave you feeling a bit “used”. Beware their fees (like most of the discount air-lines), especially the luggage fees and be sure to print your boarding pass before you go to the airport. Play their game and you can save a lot of money.

SmartWingsDecent enough coverage across Europe, also going to Tel Aviv and Dubai.

Thomas Cook Airlines Holiday-centric airline branch of the venerable travel company, they have good coverage to fun & sun sorts of destinations, plus a few US des-tinations (JFK, Vegas, Miami, and Sanford/Orlando).

ThomsonAnother holiday-centric airline with lots of destinations in the UK and lots all around the Mediterranean.

Transavia Amsterdam-based, these guys are probably our best low-cost expe-rience to date: we flew them from Venice to Amsterdam once, but un-fortunately haven’t flown with them since. They offer “sun and fun” type destinations across Europe.

TuiFly Another german-based low cost air-line with a great global footprint. They offer transatlantic connections to Europe from Fort Lauderdale, Las Vegas, and Seattle, and they fly to South America, Asia, anda (naturally) all across Europe.

VuelingBarcelona-based with good cover-age across Europe; we’ve flown them only once, from Barcelona to the is-land of Ibiza. It was a good experi-ence and we›d readily try them again.

Chuck and Lori Ros

A few years ago, life changed dramatically for us: both of Chuck’s parents passed away, we sold our company, both our kids moved out, and Chuck shed 80 pounds! With a passion for travel, exploring, drinking wine, making new friends and having great conversation, we hit the road in June, 2014. We returned home in March…just long enough to sell our house so we can keep traveling. We’re full-time, fully-committed, middle-aged nomads now! – Catch up with our travels at http://www.chuckandlori.com/

Chuck and Lori Ros....

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http://www.ryanair.com/

http://www.smartwings.com/

http://www.thomascookairlines.com/

http://www.thomson.co.uk/

http://www.transavia.com/

http://www.tuifly.com/

http://www.vueling.com/

http://www.chuckandlori.com/

https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/expat-chat-lifestyle-travel/id1039954169%3Fmt%3D2

BECAME AN EXPATMOVE TO WHY?

IF YOU

WHERE WOULD YOUAND

When I become an expat I would start in Istanbul because it's on the border of theMiddle east, Europe and Africa. The food, the friendly people and thousands of years ofculture. What a place to begin !!!

The Mrs. and I have been in the casino industry for a decade. We would love to retire toPlacencia Belize and work the tables there part time.

Moving to Playa Largardo, Costa Rica. Why? For a quiet, peaceful life. And becauseCosta Rica is symbiotic with nature and one of the greenest countries on earth.

I think I would have to say we would move our address annually. The "Year in ----"fill in blank would add a wonderful sense of adventure and satisfy the wanderingurge to be global citizen.

La Rochelle, France - sea, beaches, temperate, good food, oysters (!),and a great vibe.

Cherie Jaillet

Stefan Leach

Lyn Opiela

Andrew Matheson

Mary Kay Brautigan

We asked our Facebook Fans this very question... here’s what our Top 5 picks had to say....

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Washington DC (in transition to the US after years as an expat in Germany) What do you love most about travelling the world?Seeing the world from a different perspective – whether it’s by way of conversationswith local students in Vietnam, panoramic views from a hiking trail in Switzerland orplunging into a plate of mofongo in Puerto Rico.

What place or experience is on the top of your bucket list?Cuba. With the changing political landscape visiting is finally an option!

Which country has the friendliest people? Portugal!

What has been the most useful item you've bought for travelling?Zip storage bags to compartmentalize luggage.

What's the best piece of travel advice you've received?The joys of RyanAir and Airbnb. Both make travel within Europe incredibly affordable.

What's the worst piece of travel advice you've received?The importance of seeing the Mona Lisa.

What is the best experience you have ever had?Recently while in Vietnam a student offered to make me dinner in order to practice herEnglish. I immediately agreed and she brought over tins of homemade roasted duckand chicken to my hotel that night. We chatted for hours and I was so inspired andimpressed with her drive and determination to learn my tricky native tongue. It’smeeting people like her that highlight the true purpose for travel.

What advice would you give to people contemplating this lifestyle?Personal growth only happens when you push yourself. If you’re content with whereyou’re at right now then stay put but if you’re looking for more, then you must go. Thedetails will work themselves out.

THE LAST WORD

Margo Paige www.theoverseasescape.com

Where are you currently?

Name - Margo Paige Age - 29 Hometown – Roanoke, Virginia

What year did you start travelling? 2009

Follow Margo on her bloghttp://www.theoverseasescape.com/

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Leanne Argyle - The Expat Chattheexpatchat.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Expat-Chat... · 2016-01-13 · no holidays, couldn’t travel affordably even if ... are the first generation