So the other day I got another question about how to travel around the world and to make it work for you financially. And emotionally. And logistically. And, you know, all those details related to moving and planning and organized stuff like that. And I hated to burst the mystical bubble around the traveling and working your way around the world thing. It’s that I can’t tell you in detail, just yet, how to do it.

I travel. I research. And I write. That’s how I make living on the road happen: I do freelance writing projects and I do contract research projects online. This keeps me on the travel trails indefinitely. There’s no secret trust fund or private donor who sponsors me. No one is supporting me financially in any way whatsoever. My ability to travel and move to other countries is possible only through lots of hard work on my part, years of research and of trial and error, and my 100% dedication to living the travel dream.*

But my style of traveling and moving around usually exceeds the level of economic risk most people are willing to take.

Cuz I just wing it. Always! I’m no role model here.

That’s why these questions always surprise me. If I were to give logical advice to someone on how to do these things, I’d probably have to say things like, “Always have at least $3000 in the bank.” (I once found myself in the middle of China with no more than $200 in my account, no job, no outside support, and no idea where to go next. It happens.) and “Never, ever sell all of your stuff before you leave the country because you might just come back within three months.” (True story. I did that and came back home, where I had to start building up my furniture inventory from scratch all over again.) Or “Always have a back up plan.” (I don’t do back up plans. Having a back up plan usually means that I don’t have enough faith in what I’m doing. Personal philosophy.)

This is what makes me not a true travel role model because I suspect that most role models keep an extra stash of cash around. They do keep their stuff in storage just in case something falls through. They do have a back up plan so they have somewhere to go and something to do if their trip or move doesn’t work out. As role models, they give you sound advice on how to go about doing things in a safe and well-planned manner. Winging it doesn’t fit into a role model’s plans.

Besides, winging it gives a lot of people metaphorical headaches and stomach aches and other unknown aches.

Basically, it scares the living hell out of them. So I never, ever, ever go into details about how I do things. Because I don’t want to be responsible for causing heart attacks and other physical illnesses.

It’s that, for me, all that planning is such a hassle. Looking up the flights and talking to the hotels and organizing your trip and packing your bags and looking for an apartment and finding friends of friends of friends who live there or lived there and talking to them first or whatever, etc, etc, etc. For months and months. And all those conversations: “Honey, should we go to Mexico or to Guatemala? What will happen if we go to Guatemala? I heard it’s dangerous. How about Panama? I hear it’s pretty good.”

“I don’t know. Maybe we should do some more research on that.”

Aggh! Boooorrrrriiiiinnnnggggg. Wow. It bored me just typing that. But maybe that has to do with my attention span for these things.

I just want to get my travel on. So I do.

And I rarely read a travel guide before I go. The only time I read one beforehand was when I first went to South Korea and then I had to actively unlearn all of the blatantly incorrect things the guide had told me. (Which, by the way, is more work than it’s worth! Travel guides are not the way to go here. But I digress.)

In short, my plan is the non-plan plan. I do minimal planning and then I hop a plane, train, or bus and head on out, never really knowing where I will land and what will happen when I get there. I might plot, plan, map out a route, pick every single spot where I’m going to stay. But that’s when, you know, I miss out on some of the best parts of traveling, like hopping a random bus to head out some strange place you’ve never been before. And then running into some super stellar people that you probably never would have met in your life if you hadn’t gotten off the beaten trail. So that’s what I do.

Like that time a few years ago when I hopped a flight to Indonesia just because some friend of a friend had a house out there and offered to let me stay there. So I did. I didn’t know him and I knew absolutely zip about Indonesia. And, I guess since I was right in the middle of a Master’s degree in journalism, I should have been writing or studying or something scholarly like that. But I wanted to explore. So I did. And while I was there, I learned Indonesian, traveled the island of Bali and made friends with a group of people I never would have run into anywhere else. Plus, I got see Hinduism done Bali-island style. It’s not the same as regular old plain vanilla Hinduism. It’s got that funky indigenous island flavor to it that makes it just that much more delicious.

And then there’s the time that I first went to Korea, like ten years ago, because I met some random dude at a job hunting center and he introduced me to another random high-tech recruiter dude who told me that he didn’t think I was a corporate-type person (he was right!) and that I’d probably be happier if I just went on over to Korea and checked out the scene there. He was in t.v. there, he said, and he could get me a spot in t.v. there too. Well, that didn’t happen, but Korea did when I sold all of my stuff, packed my suitcases and flew on out there. By myself. It was great!

Or that time a couple of years ago when I came to Costa Rica because I had been on a phone conference with a chic who was working online and living in Costa Rica. And everyone on the phone conference said, “Wow! You’re living down there. How did you do that?” And she said, “Isn’t that the point of working online anyway?” And I thought, “Well, damn, if she can do it, so can I. ” So I did.

But I didn’t like Costa Rica the first time I passed through. Too Americanized. Too many rude tourists. Too expensive. (It is still all of these things. But now it has a place in my heart along with Nicaragua and Peru, although none of those countries have the place in my heart quite like Colombia does!). But anyway, I decided that I needed to go somewhere else. Right now. Like, right that moment. Like, yesterday. What was I waiting for anyway?

So I talked to a couple that had been around these parts a while and asked them, “What’s the deal with Nicaragua anyway?” And they said, go to Granada. And so I did. And that one trip changed the trajectory of the next two years of my life. I hopped a bus, hopped to three more cities in Nicaragua and stuck around for about a year. Until an acquaintance said, “What about Peru?” And I thought, “Why not go to Peru?” So I did. And you know, it’s been all good, even the really bad stuff, which I mostly like to erase from my memory like it never happened while keeping all of the valuable lessons learned in mind – you know, hard-won knowledge and all that. Because in the end I’m finally living life on my terms. And isn’t that what life is all about?

Although my slow travel seems a little more like non-travel travel right now. Seriously, what’s up with that? I mean, there’s slow travel and then there’s, like, snail-paced travel or worse, staying in one spot, which is like the antithesis of travel. Maybe it’s time to pick up the speed here? It just might be. And it started raining here the other day? That is so wrong. This is dry season around these parts and I’m not down with the whole climate change thing messing up my travel plans along with the planet in general. Now I don’t even know how to pick a good weather spot because the weather isn’t doing what it’s supposed to be doing. But whatever. You plan around the weather. You don’t let it stop you.

In the end, I guess I’ll just wing it from here. Cuz the non-plan plan has always been the plan that works for me.

The planned plans just never go as planned and then I get all upset and bent out of shape. And I spend way too much time kicking the failed plan and cursing the failed plan and planning how to avoid facing other failed plans.

Until that gets boring. And then I go back to my natural state, which is the wing-it state.

So here’s to winging it while blazing your own trails in life.

Cheers and happy first week of Spring or Fall, depending on where in the world you are!

Sasha

PS: If you really do want to be making bank and creating your own online empire, check out these resources and get yourself online and on the road.

* Note: I’ve heard lots of talk that only single people without children can get their travel on because they are responsibility-free. Actually, that’s not true. Single people and people without children have just as many responsibilities as anyone else. The responsibilities are just different. I also personally know too many married couples and couples with children who not only live in other countries, but travel and move around the world with their families and they make it work. They either work online, find work where they want to go, or run their own businesses. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. If you’d like some help to get yourself and your life on the road, drop me a line for a one-on-one coaching session and get started on blazing your own trails. Contact me here for an appointment by Skype.

© 2012 Sasha A. Rae. All Rights Reserved.

So I’ve been in Latin America for two whole years. Without leaving even once. And I have been surrounded by Latin American dudes the whole time. Literally. What’s up with that anyway? I mean, seriously, you can’t not get a lot of attention everywhere you go cuz you’re female and foreign. I even dyed my hair a deeper shade of brown recently so I would “blend” more – yeah, like that worked! But I went to a coffee shop the other day to read the paper and to work on some stuff and all these professional dudes — dudes in suits — from wherever, not just from around here, were eyeballing me and trying to chat me up. And I don’t think it’s cuz I’m all that. That’s not it at all.

Being sexually harassed by men on the street, in the office, in your apartment building and pretty much any public place you go is a daily reality for women in Latin America. All women, not just women from other places. The amount of chauvinism in these places and the lack of respect for women present problems for women here all the time. It’s dehumanizing to be treated like an object and not a person. And frankly, it’s hard to be an independent chic in these joints since independent and female don’t seem to go together down here much either.

But it was like, what, am I at the gym or something? I mean, seriously, going to the gym is so painful because of all the testosterone-laden dudes hopping around to get attention. I don’t even like gyms back home, but at least when I’m on my home turf, I’m never in the center of unwanted male attention. There are too many scantily clad women vying for attention in the gym. Not that there aren’t here too … only they aren’t foreign.

Then there’s the guy that owns my apartment. He brought over some chairs for my front porch the other day and was going on about “how beautiful” I am. And so I told him, “You know what? Where I’m from, I’m just completely normal. Nothing out of the ordinary. And I don’t like you talking to me that way.” And he was like, “Whatever. You’re hot.” And I thought, dude, I think I need a break from the male attention … where can I go around here for that? Is it even possible? And is “you’re hot” really a conversation topic?

So frustrating. Because some of my best friends in the world are men. I love men! I have more male friends than female friends. And I miss my guy friends. All that respect. All that consideration. All that treating-me-like-I’m-an-intelligent-human-being. All those conversations about interesting stuff, like politics and economics and which superpowers you’d like to have if you could only pick one. (I still don’t know: invisibility, the power to move things with your mind or the ability to fly? Such a dilemma to choose just one!).

But whatever. Forget the dudes down here, the cafés that seem to be more like fresh meat markets for the perpetually dating or looking for a date, and the landlord guy, who’s married and should know better than to talk to me that way. I’m now in hot pursuit of something that turns me on a lot more than the “you’re hot” conversation: a bicycle. An actual one with two wheels that you can ride outside in the sunny warmness of summer. And the kind where you’re just going to be going too fast to hear anything that they say to you. They’ll have to catch you before they can even think about striking up another of these incredibly stimulating conversations about absolutely nothing. Cuz you’ll be way too busy getting your bike on. And that’s all that counts.

Catch you on the road!

© 2012 Sasha A. Rae. All Rights Reserved.

Photo used through a Creative Commons Free use license.