How we became digital nomads

anna-redhead (54)in #travel • 7 years ago

A digital nomad is a term used for online workers who like to move from place to place. So first of all you should love to travel to become one of them. I've got that covered pretty early – my parents were started taking me on trips down to Black sea when I was about 3 years old – it was train trips for about 18 hours from my hometown and that was some of my brightest memories from childhood.

So when I was studying in a university and thinking about what I want to do with my life, I thought that it would be really cool to travel the world and have a blog or something. Then in the next couple of years I forgot about that and was just thinking about programming. I figured out that I want to make websites, because it seemed more interesting than “Delphi” or “c++” languages.

I found my first freelance project when I was scrolling through a social network VK – some guy was looking for a programmer for his website, and I thought that it's time to try! It worked out quite well and I got my first $300.

I met my future husband Artur shortly after that. A friend invited me to a bus tour to "Rock above Volga"- a famous festival in Samara region (about 16 hours drive), Rammstein was the headliner that year, it was awesome. And our bus broke down in the middle of nowhere. It took an hour to wait for some spair parts to fix it, so I had plenty of time to get acquainted with other passengers and thanks to that I met Artur.

Later that year he offered me to go to Thailand with him, and I thought – why not? It was our first trip to South East Asia, we spent a month there and after we came back to Russia we thought that we want to come back and become digital nomads in SEA. Artur was a web developer too (and more successful than me, hehe). We worked hard all winter and next spring we bought one way tickets to Bangkok.

Now we're already 3 years in SEA, a lot happened since that time, it was pretty easy the first year, but then russian currency (ruble) devalued more than 50 percent – and since we're making websites for russian clients, we had to look for additional sources of income. That's when we started to make photos and videos to sell on stock footage websites like shutterstock.com etc. It's not enough to live just from stock yet but combined with web development it's ok.

We spend most of the time in Thailand because it's pretty cheap, and damn awesome, of course. We lived in Bangkok enjoying the big, bustling city where you can buy anything you need, unlike tropical islands. And we lived in a village in jungle 10km away from Takua Pa town where we enjoyed nature and simple life. About $700 is enough to live in Thailand. When we manage to earn more than that, we travel to nearby countries.

We spent a month in Cambodia (when we were low on cash) and enjoyed wonderful beaches and cheap food in Sihanoukville cafes. And of course there's also ruins of Angkor – I think everyone should visit it even if you low on cash – find some way, it's amazing! By the way, have you seen those pictures of freelancers with laptop working at the beach? It's a nice way to show off, and it's too hot to work like that of course... But we actually had to do that sometimes when wifi went down in our guesthouse, because there was free wifi on a beach if you order some drink. 😆

And when we have more cash we love to go to Bali – it's one of our favourite places even despite that it's overcrowded already. This island have everything – beaches, rice fields, mountains, jungles and balinese culture with all of those temples they build everywhere makes it so beautiful! By the way, it's important to rent a place with kitchen there – it allows to save a lot on food 😏

Of course there's downsides to this lifestyle too, like being never sure about what's your situation will be next month, having difficulties maintaining long-distance relationships with friends and family back home, having to limit your belongings to a minimum of 1 backpack, etc. I could rant about that for a while, but who wants to hear that, right? 😉

Anyway, this is the kind of life that gives me an opportunity to share our travels here, on Steemit, and I hope you will enjoy that! 😊

All photos taken with Canon 550d and Canon 650d. Except the one with the rice fields - that one was taken with Sony a7s.
Stay tuned for more!
Next up - "Our trip to thousand-year-old ruins of Angkor"