My Journey to a Life of Travel – How I Made Travel My Lifestyle

First published in 2016 and updated in 2025

This is the most personal post I’ve ever written, a part of me doesn’t like to talk about the past, the days before I took a leap of faith and let travel change my life.

But I’ve realised that it’s all very well writing about how the cheapest places to travel or the most amazing experiences you can have in India, but most of the emails and comments I receive ask how afford to travel so much and it helped me remember that the hardest part is making that first leap and I want to help you do that!

So I thought it would be useful to explain more about myself so that you know exactly how I came to be living this lifestyle, my background, my story and what inspired me to leave everything I knew in the UK behind and set out on an indefinite adventure back in 2012.

Update: Nowadays, many people are familiar with terms like travel bloggers, working online, digital nomads, and remote workers but in 2016, when this post was first written, this wasn’t really even a thing yet and it was much harder to travel full time and to sustain yourself.

Why I decided to make travel my lifestyle and how I made my dream come true.

Why I Travel

I’ve realised that different people travel for different reasons. Some travel on an all inclusive 2 week cruise to escape their regular lives, some go on a whirlwind tour ticking off the big bucket list sights but others, like me, decide to make long term, independent travel their lifestyle and to make the whole world their home. This is the travel that really changes your life.

I believe that travel is so much more than simply seeing the sights – that travel, and the things you learn from it, especially when you travel slow, can really change your perspective and change your life.

I travel to grow as a person, to meet others who inspire and educate me and to (hopefully!) do the same in return, to have my life enriched by the beauty and diversity of this amazing world and to have my eyes, mind and heart opened wide.

I travel to make the most of my time on earth, to make every day count, instead of counting down the days till the weekend or to a 2 week vacation – because life is simply too short for me to live it any other way!

But most of all I travel for freedom – to live life on my terms, to be in charge of my own destiny, to give myself the biggest luxury – time. Time to pursue my passions, dreams and ambitions instead of spending the best years of life day dreaming out of a rain streaked window working all day for someone else’s dreams.

Some may say that long term travel is running away from ‘real’ life but for me I’m traveling to experience everything that life has to offer – I’m traveling not to escape life but so that life does not escape me!

How I Caught the Travel Bug

While at university in Sheffield, England I often had a little dream of traveling the whole world one day in the back of my head, but I honestly never really thought it would amount to much.

The summer I graduated from university my best friend and I spontaneously decided to extend our student overdrafts and escape to Europe in a last bid for freedom before we returned to the UK to start our graduate careers. This 6 week whirlwind inter railing trip around Europe was my first big independent trip and kickstarted my travel bug.

Europe is so amazing in the way that you can hop on a train and within a few hours be in a different country, surrounded by different and new cultures, history, language, architecture and food. I enjoyed learning new things everyday and was fascinated by the history and different cultures. Most of all I relished the freedom and loved the diversity and randomness of it all.

I was addicted – life was never really the same again after that first trip,  all my views and values changed as well as my perceptions about the world around me and the part I wanted to play in it. I couldn’t go back to living a life in only one place after that trip.

After Europe

Coming home after traveling can be a real come down. When I came back from Europe to start my graduate program job, life in England just felt so dull, shallow and meaningless. The job in the luxury hotel that I went back to was boring but most importantly it didn’t mean anything. Traveling around Europe had drastically changed my ideas of what I wanted from life. When I came back to my own country it seemed alien to me and the work, consume, drink, buy a house and have a baby routine lifestyle felt so vacuous and meaningless.

I knew I wanted something more, something different. I yearned to explore more about the world and it’s people and try and help them if I could.

Down and Out

A couple of turbulent years followed as the economy in the UK collapsed, despite having a 1st class degree I found it difficult to gain employment and had a large hole of student debt (and debt from the Europe trip overdraft!) in my finances. When I did gain an adequate job and the company would go into administration and then I endured a few torturous spells in life-sucking call centers. I shudder just thinking about those times.

By this time all my optimism of an interesting and challenging career after leaving uni and ideas of traveling the world had fallen by the wayside and my dreams faded into the perpetual struggle of the daily grind of just getting by, finding enough money to pay the bills, getting through the day without breaking down and generally feeling like a complete failure before after a while I would find myself back being unemployed and broke and unable to pay off debts and bills.

There Must be More to Life Than This!

But there was always a feeling in the back of my mind that that life was passing me by, I could do better than this. I was poor, in debt and unhappy. I wasn’t achieving anything but I knew I wouldn’t be happy with a regular life of 9-5 job, mortgage and kids anyway.

The last time I remember being truly happy was exploring the Colosseum, the waterways of Venice and admiring the Sagrada Familia on that Europe trip. As I started to lose people close to me it was the shake I needed as I realized how short life is.

As Christmasses came and went with less presents to buy each year and birthdays came and went and I got older the feeling that I was wasting the best years of my life kept gnawing away at me but I didn’t know how I could turn things around.

Moving Out but Moving On

In the autumn of 2011 things got so bad that I had to admit I couldn’t afford to carry on living in the small, 1 bed apartment my boyfriend and I shared.

Every month was a struggle to pay the bills but as another job didn’t turn out the way I hoped it would and I had maxed out all credit avenues I had to admit I couldn’t do it anymore – we had no other option really than to give up our flat, sell what we could, move in with his parents, find any job we could and sort out our debts and regroup.

Although it felt like a huge step back at the time I will be eternally grateful to them as, looking back, this move was the start of my travel dreams becoming reality. It allowed me some breathing space to get myself sorted and get my dreams back within reach.

I’ve financed all my travels myself but still I’m very fortunate to have such great support from my all of my family and friends, without their love, support and a place to crash it would have been so much harder to save for travel and knowing that I can go back anytime I need to keeps me grounded in this sometimes turbulent lifestyle. Thank you!

At the time, my dreams of travel had long been repressed and instead my intention was to save enough to move to London where I hoped I would be able to find a satisfactory job on the graduate career ladder. But, as I endured a mind numbingly boring entry level job with a large utility company slowly, with the small outgoings I now had, I managed to start paying back the debt and saving up some money for the rent on a London flat.

Life’s Too Short

Then I had a scare, a trip to the opticians resulted in a referral to the hospital and an operation on my eye to fix a detached retina that could have left me blind in one eye if untreated. Although I was scared, the operation put things in perspective and gave me the kick I needed to live my life for now.

Life really is too short to waste by spending it being unhappy or following someone else’s ideas of what you should do with your life. Life is too short to put off things, even in your twenties you are not too young to get sick.

Gaining Perspective

So, I allowed myself to dream again, to think of what I wanted to do with my life and started to make some plans for once I had fully recovered from the operation.

I kept saving like mad and realised that anything would be possible. I could go away and work and travel as long as I wanted. I started to realise that I don’t care if I don’t conform to society’s norm for me to consume and reproduce.

I don’t have to sit in a cubicle for 40 hours a week doing a mind numbingly boring and infuriating job just so that I could spend all that money on keeping a roof over my head and supporting a materialistic lifestyle.

I needed to get out of the cycle of work and consume and live my life fully. There must be something else out there? Another meaning to life …

Dream, Save, Plan, Go!

By this time I had been obsessively saving for 18 months now, I no longer went out or bought anything and tried to save every penny I could. I had paid off my debts and had £6000 in the bank and planned to travel for as long as possible for as little as possible.

With that in the Autumn of 2012 I booked a plane ticket to India as I wanted to experience a completely different culture from that of the UK. I had vague plans to see South East Asia and applied for an Australian Working Holiday visa to enable me to top up my funds once I got that far.

That was the extent of the planning, I’m a believer in only booking one way tickets, not being too limited to an itinerary and seeing where the journey will take you…

The Countdown

Once the ticket was booked, it felt like a great weight was lifted although I still found it hard to believe that I would actually go, that I could actually make my dreams of travel come true.

As the weeks slowly passed in what seemed like an eternity and as the goal got closer my dreams of travel became an all consuming obsession that I could no longer resist even if I had wanted to.

I counted down the weeks as the date got ever closer until I felt I could just about reach out and grab it with both hands willing it to take me away from those years of failure and unhappiness.

When the day came to get on the plane I had so many emotions running through my mind, excited, scared, nervous, anxious, sad, guilty, relieved, happy.

And then I was gone, and in some ways it was not as I had envisaged and in some ways it was better than I could ever have imagined.

How Travel Changed My Life

Somewhere along the way a change came over me slowly. I left the UK feeling depressed, but as I travelled, life and the world started to seem amazing, beautiful and radiant again – with the blue, sunny skies, the golden temples, emerald green rice paddies, turquoise seas and smiling, welcoming faces.

Whether it was the colours and chaos of India, or the serenity of a sunrise yoga class, the wild expanse of the Australian outback, or feeling the rush of humanity in some of the world’s busiest cities, or experiencing the awe and wonder at some of the oldest and most impressive monuments on earth.

Travel humbles you and is a good teacher – I have discovered so much about myself and the world. Travel is not just about seeing the world – it’s about experiencing it and learning from other cultures.

Travel can teach you a lot, not only about the world, but also about yourself. I have learnt a lot about history, culture and religion of different countries and about my own strengths and weaknesses (and that of the culture I grew up in.)

I have learned to be more patient, more adaptable, more compassionate and more decisive. I have tried out new things and learnt new skills and made new friends all over the world.

Traveling solo made me more independent and more confident and I am constantly humbled and surprised at the friendliness of people all over the world and the kindness of strangers.

Travel isn’t without it’s challenges but that’s part of the journey and things usually turn out OK in the end, so I have learnt to be more spontaneous, to worry less and take the leap of faith and have more trust in the workings of the universe that things will be alright.

Traveling has opened my eyes to so many different places, cultures, religions and ways of life. I am finally able to be myself and live my life on my terms – doing what makes me happy rather than what the media and society tells me I should do in order to be deemed successful.

The world has opened up to me in so many ways, I have seen the beauty and the despair, marveled at the richness and diversity of it all and I have found inspiration to write and to be more open minded to different ways of thinking and doing things.

How I have been to able to afford to travel for over 10 years (2025 Update)

I started this site as a simple blog while I was on my first backpacking trip around India in 2013 to share my stories and experiences with my friends and family.

After backpacking across Southeast Asia I got a working holiday visa for Australia where I worked in an outback pub. I realised that I needed to find a way of making money online so that I didn’t have to go home back to a soul sucking corporate job so, during my time off, I started researching ways to make money while traveling and online and realised that I might be able to make enough from my blog to sustain my travels.

My original goal was to make $1000 a month, enough to live comfortably in India or Southeast Asia at the time, but it took a long time to make a full time income from the blog alone. At first I mainly relied on freelance writing, blogging has been a bumpy road, with a lot of new skills to master and constantly changing technology and algorithms.

To be a travel blogger you need to be good not just at writing but also photography, website design, SEO, marketing, social media. The list goes on and on.

But the main reason I can still afford this lifestyle after more than 10 years is because I am constantly reinventing myself and have built multiple income streams. I started off with freelance travel writing, and then made money with advertising and affiliates on my travel blog.

I also now work with tourism boards and travel companies, offer travel and itinerary consultancy and am working on adding products like travel guides and maps in the future.

Travel Burnout and Finding a Home in Goa

But you can’t travel full time forever, especially when you are working or trying to build an online business. In many ways I was a digital nomad before it was even a thing – full time travel was the best term I could come up with.

Anyway, most people who travel full time or are digital nomads experience burnout after a few years. I traveled full time for about 3 years until I got more settled in Goa, India where I spent at least 6 months every winter there for over 10 years.

This gave me more grounding than the average traveller or digital nomad and gave me time to write, make friends, become an expert on Goa, and feel at home there. Living in Goa gave me a great balance between traveling, being immersed in another culture and working.

The heavy Indian monsoons coincided with European summers so then I would travel for 6 months, usually to Europe or Southeast Asia, but I’d always end up feeling drained and home sick after 6 months and looking forward to going back to my little house in Goa.

Changing With The Times

In the last decade I’ve changed, travel’s changed, the world’s changed, visa regulations keep changing, so I have to keep constantly adapting.  The one thing I never wanted to be though was an influencer – I do feel a lot of pressure to make videos and reels but I’m much happier sticking to writing and still photography for now.

My travel style has changed over the years – from being a budget backpacker and shoestring traveller who loved to take long trips and write stories to being a professional travel blogger who needs a bit more comfort and prefers to take shorter trips and write useful guides for my readers.

Before, you could just grab a backpack, get on a bus, show up and pick a cheap guesthouse. Nowadays, with everything being online, planning and pre booking is much more important – so now I like to write itineraries to make the most of my time and energy and to help my readers do the same as I know not everyone has unlimited travel time.

And nowadays, I’m in search of a base that I can come to anytime of year – new visa regulations mean it’s not possible to stay in India for more than 180 days a year so now I’m in the process of getting a digital nomad visa for Thailand and maybe even Spain or Portugal if I can! I’d love to become European again!

Any Regrets?

So no, I haven’t got married, I don’t own a house, have a ‘real’ job, or any kids but you know what – I don’t regret it! I’m glad that I took that leap of faith when I was so young and full of energy instead of waiting and hoping that I’d be fit, healthy and wealthy enough to do it when I retired.

And even though I started traveling when I was young, I don’t think it’s ever too late to start traveling! I’ve enjoyed many trips with my Mum and enjoy helping to plan trips and itineraries for older couples too.

And although travel did not solve all my problems and this lifestyle isn’t a constant vacation – it has its stresses and strains and ups and downs like every lifestyle – it certainly opened my eyes, heart and mind, taught me so much and changed my life forever.

Even though now I yearn for a bit more stability – my life is still all about travel! Even if I’m not traveling full time – I’m always thinking about, writing about, dreaming about or planning my next trip – travel is still my lifestyle!

So this is my story of how I changed my life around to travel full time and become a professional travel blogger and digital nomad which has enabled me to afford to travel for over a decade.

There are many ways to make money online or make a living as a digital nomad. If you just want to make a quick buck, then I wouldn’t recommend starting a travel blog now but, for me, it’s been a lifelong passion project and a way to remember and document the places I’ve been, experiences I’ve had and people I’ve met – plus I’ve helped a fair few people do the same too! 🙂

It hasn’t been easy but it’s been worth it to live a life less ordinary and to be able to inspire others to get out and live their dreams too, or at least tick a few more places off your bucket list!

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