As many of you already know, one of the ways I support my travel addiction and vagabondish lifestyle is by developing iPhone applications. We all have to earn a living, and as far as it goes, iPhone development gives me the freedom and mobility I want in a job.

One project I’ve been working on since the beginning of the year and only just wrapped up in Charleston was called Big Sticky, which tells the story of a purple frog prince searching for his lost princess through a giant sentient castle. It was a blast to work on, and my artist partners at Big Bad Brush have the level of talent and dedication needed to make a great game.

As of today, Big Sticky is officially available for download, and is currently only $1.

With prices like that, you can’t resist. In addition, I get a percentage of that dollar. So when you’re thinking that a dollar is maybe too much to spend (*cough*tightwad*cough*), or you’re considering telling your friends about that new taco place instead of this awesome new game, just call to mind an image of me, shivering and cold in a ditch, because I can’t afford a warm place to sleep at night. Have a change of heart, buy, tell your friends, and you’ll keep me traveling and writing well into the future!

If you’re interested in hearing what it’s like to work regularly while on the road, stay tuned; I’ve been now a week and a half in Bruges, Belgium, working every day, and the main subject of my next post will be what the work environment is like for a digital nomad like myself.

Now, loyal readers, go forth into the world and spread the good news, because Big Sticky is here, and it’s here to stay.

Hostels

Might as well start with the obvious one first. Hostels can be great, mediocre, or downright obnoxious, often depending on where they’re located, who they’re run by, and who else happens to be staying there at the time. In more touristy areas that cater to younger crowds, especially during the summer or spring break, there’s a good chance your hostel will have a number of loud, oft-drunk, close-knit groups of college kids just looking to party. If partying is your thing, by all means go with it; if (like me) you prefer conversation and a bit more quiet, you might want to look elsewhere during those times.

On the other hands, there are some truly amazing hostels out there, where you’re likely to meet a number of other like-minded travelers. Check out reviews and especially travel blogs for tips on good places to go. The one other major advantage hostels have is that you can usually find one with a bed available for a decent price even late at night, and they often tend to cluster with other hostels in a given neighborhood in a city. If you arrive in town late, with no reservations, figure out where the hostels are and you should be able to find a cheap place to sleep.

Hotels

Staying in hotels really depends on your budget and on what you’re willing to sacrifice for cheap privacy. In many parts of the world a dingy room with no hot water costs more than a clean bed in a hostel dorm; then again,  in many parts of the world there are no hostels to be had, especially after you get out of the main city hubs. I’ve found hotels to be largely useful according to region; eastern Turkey, Syria, and Georgia all had affordable hotels, for instance. Hotels are usually safe, but boring. If you’re desperate enough for a cheap price, though, you may find yourself staying in, say, a defunct Soviet luxury establishment with no electricity, heat, or furniture larger than a cot.

When it comes to hotel staying, the middle East has impressed me most. Arabic hotels tend to have an included (or at least very cheap) breakfast of olives and cheese and eggs and fruit, and many of them offer pallets on their rooftops for very low rates. And if you find one close to the old towns of a city like Aleppo or Damascus, the views can be fantastic.

Short-term Apartment Rentals

This is something I’ve mainly seen in Eastern Europe and parts of Greece — let me know in the comments where else you’ve witnessed it. In Bosnia or Serbia or Croatia you’ll often be met at the bus station by a crowd of touts hawking rooms, or occasionally whole apartments, for pretty decent rates. This especially becomes affordable when you’re traveling with a few friends; myself and two others were able to get an apartment in Mostar for five or six euro each per night. I’ve yet to try this for an extended length of time (say, a few weeks or months), but I’m considering doing so at some point next spring.

Long(ish)-term Rentals

On that note, long-term travelers may occasionally want to settle down for a month or two to get the feel for a place. Again, this isn’t something I’ve done personally, but is something I’ve researched fairly thoroughly. From what I can tell, if you don’t speak the language, a good place to start is at a local language immersion program or university — most such establishments have bulletin boards displaying housing ads for English-speaking students, and you might be able to finagle a place for yourself that way.

If you do speak the language, of course, check out local real estate offices. Check out Benny the Irish Polyglot’s site for an example of someone who does this really, really right.

Bed and Breakfasts

There are a surprising number of bed and breakfasts out there at affordable rates, catering to more or less any budget level and luxury requirement, from tiny upper-story garrets in Paris to fully-equipped flats in New York. I haven’t done much of this yet, but after looking through the directories over at Airbnb, I intend to. If you just want to browse through some really cool places available around the world, check out their iPhone app as well.

Camping

This one’s not for everyone, and depends somewhat on your comfort level. Most European cities have campgrounds, but in my experience, most of them are located a fair distance out of town. Corsica had several great campgrounds, one in one of the prettier towns I’ve seen.

And if you’re really, really in a jam, or happen to be someplace fairly rural in Scotland or Norway where such things are accepted, there’s always “free camping,” a.k.a. “sleeping in a ditch.” For campgrounds and free camping, I carry an ultralight sleeping bag as well as a shelter and groundcloth that together weigh less than a pound; I’ve used them to sleep for free in Scotland, Italy, Greece, Croatia, Macedonia, and Turkey. If you’re going to do this, I’d recommend getting something low-profile — that neon yellow dome tent is probably visible from space, let alone the closest road.

Couchsurfing

In this case we’ve definitely saved the best for last. Couchsurfing is one of the best travel innovations of the internet age, and is an excellent way to meet new friends in a new city, even if you plan to be staying in a hotel, hostel, or bed and breakfast. You usually have to send your requests at least a week in advance, more for high-demand areas like Rome in the summer, and it’s often a good idea to contact several potential hosts at once to increase your chances. Avoid form letters, though — be personable, interesting, and interested in the hosts themselves, and show that by reading and commenting on their couchsurfer profiles, and you’ll significantly increase your chances of getting hosted and getting hosted by someone you’ll get on well with.

While I don’t think I would want to do this all the time, some of my best travel experiences have been couchsurfing, and I’m still friends with some of my hosts and fellow guests to this day.

How about you? Do you know of any good ways to sleep on the road without spending too much money?

Though I’m generally content to live a lifestyle with few possessions and little material impact, the one case where my consumerism becomes rampant is when it comes to books. I can look at a leather sofa and feel not a twinge, at a new car with only the slightest stirrings of avarice, at a fifty-six inch plasma-screen television with no more than placid admiration. Get me on Amazon, though, or lead me through a used bookstore, and twenty minutes later, heart pounding, I’ll find myself the proud owner of a Robert Frost anthology, a collection of Russian folk tales, and a wide-margined volume on the use of game theory in social evolution.

This is one vice which I have no interest in giving up. When I look at a $3000 surround sound system, I think: I could buy 300 books for that amount. A good 2500 if I hit the right places with a suitcase full of cash and a delivery truck.

So when the time comes to pull up stakes and live the life nomadic for a few years, I have a problem. How am I supposed to read on the road, without severely weighing down my pack? What happens if I find a book I want to keep, but am in Mongolia? How, in other words, am I to maintain my library?

The Informal Network of International Bibliophiles

The cheapest option is often also the most interesting. This method requires accepting a certain transience to your books, and having an open mind. Knowing a few extra languages helps, too.

Nearly every traveler you’ll meet will have a paperback or two along, and you’ll meet quite a few who’ve finished what they brought at about the same time you finish what you’re currently reading. Places like hostels can become informal book exchanges, as well as good places to exchange book recommendations.

Other than direct exchanges with other people, there are a number of places that allow book exchanges, sometimes with a small added fees. A number of cafes have books available for exchange (or even free, sometimes). Hostels often have exchange libraries, and many used bookstores will have some kind of exchange system in place. So keep hold of that paperback you just finished — it might come in useful. This was the method I used on my last long(ish) trip, and  the resulting reading list included a story about a walk across Africa, Jose Saramago’s “The Double,” Plutarch’s Lives, Ray Bradbury’s “Dandelion Wine,” T.E. Lawrence’s “Revolt in the Desert,” and the autobiography of Sydney Sheldon. Keep in mind that the further you get off the beaten track, the fewer English-language books you’ll be able to find for exchange. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing — I would never have looked twice at Sydney Sheldon’s book, but everything else in my Trabzon hotel was either in Turkish or German. The book was fantastic.

Note for those at home or possessing permanent mailing addresses: the book exchange idea has been catching on among the interwebs, with services like BookMooch supplying access to hundreds of thousands of books via mail exchange around the world.

Buying on Location

If you have no books to trade, buy local! One of my favorite things to do in a new city is explore its used bookstores and other places of book-selling. In certain districts of Istanbul, for example, there are open air covered markets with tables upon tables full of used books, and subway entrances and underpasses in Tbilisi are full of musty old Russian volumes sold from carts for a few coins each. Even if you don’t need a book, a search for bookstores can add an interesting new element to your explorations.

The Electronic Option

I never thought I’d be one for the assorted e-readers that began appearing on the market in the wake of the Amazon Kindle. But, having finally bitten the bullet and bought the new 3G Kindle, I have to say I’m quite impressed. An electronic copy will never hold anywhere near the value of a solid physical volume, in my opinion, but the ability to carry a hundred or so books in a thin, lightweight device is a huge bonus to the traveler. In addition, out-of-print books from Amazon and outside sources like Project Gutenberg are often provided for free (or at least very cheaply), giving you access to thousands of classics at the click of a mouse. The screen’s quite good too, with none of the glare or eye strain normal screens cause, and in a decent cover it shouldn’t attract to much attention. Also useful for the traveler is the fact that the Kindle 3G comes with free data service through local cell towers in upwards of a hundred countries, allowing you to send and receive emails about lodging and the like without access to a WiFi network — quite valuable in an emergency.

So there you have it. Do you have any advice for keeping in your books while traveling?

For the casual traveller, especially one from the linguistically isolated United States, learning other languages fluently is usually not necessary. A two week vacation to Italy will be met at every stage with English-speaking touts, hotel owners, waiters, and ticket sellers. In fact, nearly all major tourist areas in the world will have a high number of English-speakers working in the tourism industry — even in countries like Syria, where visits by native English speakers aren’t as common. That’s because English has become the de facto language of travelers, the one common language known by young, affluent people throughout most of the world.

Good and Lost, though, is not written for casual travelers. For the lifestyle traveler, who’s interested in talking with people not trying to sell something, and who’s also interested in getting off the beaten path to areas where English will not be nearly as common, becoming multilingual is a necessity. But where to start? Learning a new language is no easy task, and underestimating the difficulty involved may well lead to giving up early. After rather ineffectively picking up a few words in Italian, French, Turkish, and Arabic, I decided to systemize my approach to language learning.

Levels of Mastery

The first thing to do is predict the amount of fluency you want to achieve in any given language. If you’re going to be living stably in a given area for a long time, fluency in the local language would be a good idea; if you’re only passing through, a basic knowledge will do. I change my approach to learning depending on what I’m looking for, according to the following categories:

• Mastery. As I tend to move around a lot and not settle down to often, I choose my “fluency-desired” languages based on how widespread use of that language is. For fluency, practice is required while not in the speaking area of choice, which includes reading books in that language and finding conversation partners online. More on this shortly.
• Basic Conversation. Basic conversation is for when you’re only going to be a country for a relatively short period of time, but when you also plan to be getting away from the main tourist locations. For this, I learn a basic vocabulary, tailored to my own life (for instance, words about my profession, interests, family, etc., as well as useful conversational questions), before I enter the country. Then, I focus on picking up more vocabulary and syntax as I travel. It’s important for this reason to always keep a notebook close at hand. I use one as a wallet.
• Navigation. This is just a list of perhaps 20-40 vocabulary words that can be used to get around. Basic numbers, “right” and “left,” “where is,” and such necessities as “hotel,” “toilet,” and “bus station.” There are a number of pages online that give vocabulary guides to specific languages, and the CoolGorilla line of iPhone language apps are great for this.
• Courtesy. This is for when you’re going to be traveling in an area where the vast majority of the population speaks a language you’re already familiar with, like many parts of India. Learning language at this level is solely for the purpose of making friends with local people, by showing respect through taking the time to learn a few useful words. This works especially well where speakers of a local language are in the minority. Knowing a few words of Kurdish in eastern Turkey, for example, sparked a number of interesting conversations. I suspect other languages like Basque, Romani, or Gaelic would be useful in similar ways.

The vast majority of your time will be spent achieving fluency; it’s possible to achieve basic conversation (“me writer, my name Tim, you?”) after only a week or so of reasonably devoted study, while it months to achieve any kind of fluency, especially if you’re not living in a country that speaks that language on a widespread basis.

Achieving Fluency

Philosophies differ on the best approach to learning a new language. I’ve heard a number of people sing the praises of packaged programs like Rosetta Stone, and of course taking classes will always help (find one taught by a native speaker, preferably one who has a good understanding of how language works). If you’re poor and not geographically stable, though, you may want another solution.

In my experience, the most useful thing you can do is to start looking for people to practice language with, first by email (giving you time to compose and translate your messages), and then by instant messaging and voice chat. My Language Exchange is an excellent resource and can be either free or very cheap, depending on how you use it. My advice is to get several conversation partners for any given language, as that will give you one or two letters a day to work on, and will force you to keep up with your language (apathy can be a problem if you’re teaching yourself and not taking a class).

All of those letters will be useless, however, if you can’t remember what you learn from them. For this, I suggest either making flash cards by hand, or, my personal preference, using a computer-based system. By far the best I’ve found is Anki, which includes a system of quizzing you most on new cards and cards you have trouble with, allows you to create your own cards, and also lets you download several deck made by other users from a common database. My personal method is to have one deck of flashcard for each language I’m practicing. When I run across a new word in my conversations, I enter it into my flashcard database. Within a week, that word has become part of my vocabulary more or less permanently.

Because I live in rural Montana at the moment, chances for one-on-one interaction with speakers of most languages is almost nil outside of online correspondence. This can be a problem when it comes to pronunciation, especially with difficult (in terms of pronunciation) languages like French, Chinese, or Arabic. A good way to get around this is to simulate immersion, by downloading films in your language of choice. A quick google search will generally turn up a number of good options in any of the major languages. Another method is to use Kató Lomb’s method and read literature in your language, and supplement that with an audiobook that lets you hear pronunciation by a native speaker. And finally, while not quite as reliable, Google Translate‘s newest iteration has a feature that will read you a given phrase out loud, which at least gives you the basics of pronunciation (equivalent to what you’d get by a decent voice synth in English).

It’s also useful, especially if you plan to learn (or partially learn) a wide range of languages, to pick up the basics of linguistics. I began studying linguistics as a hobby a couple of years back, and was surprised at how much it improved my ability to learn. Linguistics helps you understand even in the very early exchanges of learning a language at a bus stop (I’ve had this experience in cafes in Georgia, as well as bus stops in Turkey) exactly which words work in what ways. It also helps you understand elements of language that aren’t used in English, like the multisyllabic word modifiers used in Turkish or Georgian, the three letter roots used in Arabic and Hebrew, and the case-modified clauses of Russian or Greek. The sense of history and heritage you gain in understanding the connections between languages and cultures is well worth it in itself.

Finally, check out the wide range of “language hacking” methods available on blogs across the internet. One of my favorites is Benny the Irish polyglot, who has truly perfected the art of picking up new languages.

What to Learn

If you’re going to spend a lot of time (and possibly money) in gaining fluency, it’s a good idea to choose well from the outset. As I said in the first paragraph, English is by far the most useful language for travelers to know, but since you’re reading this article I’ll assume you already know it.

The next step is to determine which languages are going to be spoken most widely in the regions you plan to spend a lot of time in. For the more nomadic travelers (like myself) that could cover a lot of ground. A key realization is that language use shouldn’t be measured in population, but in geographic area. You’re going to need to know the local dialects as much (probably much more) in rural areas as in cities. Here are a few of the big ones.

Spanish, Portuguese

Spanish and Portuguese are fairly similar (as is Italian), so fluency in one will translate well to learning the others. Spanish will get you through most of central and South America, as well as Spain and parts of Northern Africa (like the separatist Moroccan region of Western Sahara). Spanish is also the second language of Brazil.

Portuguese will get you through Brazil, Venezuela, and Portugal, as well as Macau, Angola, and Mozambique.

French

French is spoken widely as a second language in Europe, especially in regions bordering France, and is a common language to encounter when talking with other travelers. In addition, you’ll find it spoken in eastern Canada, much of northwestern Africa (like Niger and Cameroon), Haiti, and Belgium. French also has the dubious benefit of being the language of a relatively recent colonial empire, which means you’ll also find French speakers in places like Syria, Egypt, and Madagascar.

German

German will be useful throughout northern and eastern Europe, as well as in former German colonies in southern Africa like Namibia and Burundi. This is another major language of fellow travelers, and is useful for that reason in its own right. It’s also widely spoken in Turkey.

Russian

While much harder to learn than any of the above languages, Russian allows you to travel over an extremely wide swath of northern and central Asia and eastern Europe, where (unlike Europe) there are often very few English speakers, even in the tourism trades. In any part of the former USSR, older people will be able to speak Russian — just make sure to clarify up front that you’re not actually Russian, in those cases (like much of Georgia) where the separation from Russia wasn’t a friendly one.

Beyond the simple fact of widespread Russian, the Cyrillic alphabet is particularly useful, as many other European languages, like Serbian and Mongolian, use it. Cyrillic is fairly easy to learn for users of the Latin alphabet.

Arabic

Another difficult but widespread language, Arabic will get you through the entire middle east as well as nearly all of northern Africa and much of Africa’s eastern seaboard. In addition, Arabic is the sacred language of Islam, and so many devout Muslims throughout the world will know at least some Arabic. The Arabic alphabet is very difficult for those who don’t also know some of the language, as many vowel sounds are left out. Still, it’s at least useful to learn how to recognize city names in Arabic script. Note that many Arabic countries use the eastern Arabic numeral system, which functions identically to the one used in English (which actually came from Arabic originally), so it’s useful to learn.

Chinese

Chinese has the highest number of speakers by population, and (from what I hear) can be very difficult for westerners to learn, based on the Chinese usage of tonal inflection to modify meaning. It is, however, spoken over a wide area and has a rich cultural history. In addition, the basic written character set is also widely used in Japan (Kanji), though the spoken languages are very distinct.

Hindi, Bengali

Due to India’s staggering linguistic diversity, English is very widely spoken as a common language. However, Hindi and Bengali are still widely used, and the Devanagari script is a widely useful one. For more reasons to learn Hindi, check out this great article by my friend Shreya Sanghani, writing over at Matador Travel.

Malay

If you’re going to be traveling a lot throughout Indonesia the south Pacific, Malay will be useful. Note, though, that if you’re American, your stay in Indonesia is limited at any given time to a month, so seek fluency in Malay if you’re going to be spend rather more time there than that.

Have you learned another language? How did you go about it? How long did it take? How useful was it? Answer in the comments!

Disclaimer: making money for nothing is actually impossible, unless you win the lottery, have extremely wealthy and generous parents, or discover a money tree.  If any of these is the case, I suggest you go someplace like this, as sustainable vagabonding won’t be a problem for you.

For the rest of us proles, travel costs money, and money has to be earned. But what if you could get all of your work out of the way before you leave, or in focused bursts along the way? What I’m talking about here is passive income, or money that comes into your bank account every month without requiring any serious time investment on your behalf.

This kind of income is different from many of the options I suggested in my last post on money. The key to generating passive income is to generate intellectual property, that you can then collect royalties from. Royalties are key, as that means you get a small amount of money every time someone buys a copy of your property. A magazine article, for instance, doesn’t generate passive income, since most article writers are paid a flat fee on publication. A book, on the other hand, would generate royalties.

But enough theory, let’s talk implementation. Here are some ideas you can begin to look into in order to set up your own passive income scheme:

Stock Photography

If you have a decent camera (you’ll at least need a DSLR, like the Canon T1i) and a basic talent for composition, lighting, and the like, you can sign up as a stock photograph seller. The biggest site I know of that accepts most photographers is iStockPhoto. You’ll have to fill out a basic application, including submitting a few sample shots, and you’ll hear back from them in a few days.

Travel photography is a great sell, but only if you get new locations (that are in high demand) or popular locations from new angles. Stock photography takes a different kind of eye than art or journalistic photography, as your photos will most likely be used in ads or on websites. Isolated images of famous landmarks from interesting angles make a good buy, as do clear images isolated against plain backgrounds, as these lend themselves well to post-purchase manipulation. People are an excellent subject, but you’ll need a model release form for all of your subjects.

The best-selling images are those that are creative, clearly shot, and which present a clear message. One example that was quite popular (and sold thousands of copies) on iStockPhoto a few months back was a photo of tiny tree held between two cupped hands (above). The creative concept, portraying a popular theme (the green movement), was a recipe for success.

I’ve so far only dabbled in stock photography, but you can see my portfolio of available travel images here.

Stock Video

This is something I’ve not done at all, as I only recently acquired a camera with HD video capability and am just now getting around to using it. But, stock video sells well, generally on the same sites as stock photography. If film is more your style, it might well be worth looking into.

Writing a Book

Don’t be afraid to dream big. If you take a trip that’s awesome enough and interesting enough that people keep asking you to write something about it, take a shot. From what I hear on the publishing grapevines, having a popular travel blog is a major factor in getting published in today’s travel market. If you decide to go the standard route of signing on with a publishing house, you’re going to need a literary agent. To get a literary agent, you’re going to need a very solid project plan, and if you’ve got a few chapters, all the better. It’s also very helpful to have some publishing credits under your belt for this one, so try submitting some articles to magazines and websites before going for the big one. Once you’re ready to find an agent, buy a copy of Writer’s Market, a brick of a book that has everything from magazine markets to book publishers to contests to agents. Don’t get your hopes up, though–finding an agent is notoriously difficult, and getting a publisher to read your work without having an agent is next to impossible.

Self-Publishing

For most of the twentieth century, self-publishing rarely went beyond the infamous vanity presses, where you paid a lot of money just to see your name in print and to be able to hand your magnum opus to your friends or the local bookstore. Thanks to the internet and internet-based reading platforms like the Amazon Kindle, though, self-publishing is once again becoming a viable business option.

Though it probably won’t be worth it to make a print run of your unpublished book, it might well be worth the time it would take to format it for the Kindle marketplace. You can get more on that at Amazon’s site, here. This is something I haven’t personally tried, but I may test it out within the next few months. If I do, I’ll let you know how it goes, and shamelessly ask you to buy a copy of whatever it is I’m selling.

Blog Advertising

If you’re a decent writer and have interesting enough travels, you might be able to write a travel blog and, if it becomes popular enough, monetize it. Once you set up your blog (I recommend using WordPress), your first step is to install Google Analytics. Once you have some interesting content, start advertising — post on forums (with your blog linked in your signature), offer to exchange links with other blogs, and exchange guest posts. Start a Twitter account. Set up a Facebook page for your blog.

It will take a while to build up traffic, but doesn’t entail as much work as some writers suggest. I highly recommend Tim Ferris’ advice on this topic, over at Four Hour Workweek. Once you’ve built a high traffic blog, it’s time to start getting into the ad-selling business. Google Adsense is probably the most popular tool for this topic, but there are plenty others. I’ll recommend again Nomadic Matt’s advice on monetizing your blog.

Other Income-Generating Websites

Of course, a travel blog isn’t your only option when it comes to making money from web content. You may want to keep your travel blog relatively pure of advertising, and set up some other sites instead. In that case, pick something people will want to keep coming back to, like a useful skill or useful information. For instance, aside from Good and Lost, I run a site that has free Photoshop tutorials (and will, ideally, make me money from advertising) and a webcomic called Red Revolt, which has yet to generate enough traffic for any kind of real monetization.

Software Design

If you’re a programmer, you can probably make money online while traveling anyway. But why work, when you can play? Make a good enough software product, and provide intermittent maintenance, and you can generate passive income through sales. My own work is done mostly for the iPhone, and includes apps like Zombie Roadkill and Big Bad Flower. Look for Kung Fu Master, from Big Bad Brush, coming out soon. I’m also working on a travel budget app for the iPhone, which, never fear, will be advertised extensively on this blog. My latest project, Disoriented, just came out a few days ago, and it’s on sale now — so if you’d like to support a poor traveler, buy it for $1 and leave a nice rating!

I’m sure there are other ways out there to generate passive income. What are some you’ve tried or heard of?

There comes a time in every vacation when you reach contentment, when thoughts of normalcy begin to overpower thoughts of adventure. You board a plane back home, revitalized and ready to slip back into the structure of everyday existence. That’s one of the things that makes a vacation a “vacation” — it provides a break in structure that makes the structure more meaningful (or at least, more endurable) when you return to it.

Extended travel is not a vacation, and to live a lifestyle of travel you have to abandon the idea that it is. If you fail to establish a structure capable of handling the various uncertainties and last-minute changes travel entails, you’ll become exhausted, homesick, and ready to quit. Most travelers you’ll meet will eventually experience this, and many of them will give up and go home. To survive and thrive on the road, you’ll have to change your frame of mind to one more conducive to international homelessness.

To do this, you’ll need some understanding of how the human mind works. For the most part, we’re adapted to a lifestyle with some modicum of geographical, or at least communal, stability. We all have a conception of “home” that works in our unconscious minds, and being “away from home” is psychologically tiring.

Dealing with travel fatigue and homelessness, then, means defining home as something we carry with us. We have to pare down our psychological needs piece by piece, and replace them with elements flexible enough to survive the fluid nature of the nomad.

The most important need we have that defines “home” for us is other people. Sometimes, our responsibilities to those people override our desire to travel, and our travels have to end (or at least, to be put on hold). If you have a spouse or children, for instance, extended travel (without them along, at any rate) is irresponsible. If you’re single and relatively unattached, like I am, you have fewer responsibilities and fewer essential social connections, but they still exist. In this case, we’re lucky to live when we do–a hundred years ago, a year of travel meant only sporadic one-way communication in the form of letters that took months to arrive, if they arrived at all. These days, I could be in Siberia for Christmas and still talk with, and see, my family via Skype. Your first step, then, is to establish regular methods of communication with people back home that you care about. Email and IM are obvious choices. For phone, I’d recommend using either Skype or Google Voice (free through GMail). The former costs only a few cents per minute, and the latter is free for use when calling a US phone number. I personally bring a laptop with a bluetooth headset (for work), but there are internet cafes all over the world with headsets and Skype installed. Just sign up for a Skype account and prepay for minutes online; Google Voice over IP is browser-based, eliminating even the need for special software.

Once you’ve handled the issue of communication, move on to the subject of structure. Nearly all of us need a certain level of “normal” in our lives. Take that away, and we become tired, edgy, ready to quit. Over the short term, normalcy is exactly the opposite of what you’re going for; over the long term, it becomes a necessity.

I accomplish structure and normalcy on the road through ritual. We usually think of ritual in terms of its religious connotations. That’s not necessarily a bad way to look at it. Ritual is important in religion precisely because it provides the kind of structure I’m talking about; it’s a repeated activity that has some function or meaning, that reinforces a person’s sense of identity and community.

We can tap that psychological power by consciously establishing rituals of our own. For a traveler, these usually aren’t too complex. For me, they’re things like reading for an hour before sleep, packing in a certain way whenever I prepare to leave, unpacking in hotels and hostels according to a certain pattern (more on pack contents shortly). It also involves things like specific strategies for exploring a new city, or finding a place to sleep. If I’m camping in a more rural area, it’s the way I set up my shelter and camp.

What you’re going for here is familiarity. At its most basic level, after all, that’s what “home” really is–the surroundings we’re familiar with, comfortable with. As a nomad, your surroundings are constantly changing, and so you have to actively create that sense of familiarity. Rituals like those above calm you down and center you, relieving the stress of uncertainty new places otherwise often have.

Though you’re fairly limited in this regard, you can also achieve this sense of familiarity with the things you bring with you. As a nomad, your “home” is quite literally on your back, and it helps to think of it that way. Your pack will quickly become like a second skin, and after an initial period of adjustment, you’ll feel a sense of expectation and preparedness every time you feel its weight on your back. When you unpack in a new place, your pack’s contents become part of your surroundings, and thus are also important for making a home on the road. Having certain familiar items in plain sight can help: pictures of family, a charm you picked up in a temple somewhere, even a favorite tin coffee cup, can make whatever place you are in be the place your mind feels it should be in. For me, that usually ends up being my creative tools (my laptop and work equipment, my notebook, my sketchbook, my camera) as well as a few lightweight personal items, like a small carved box of trinkets (Turkey), a Bedouin scarf (Syria), or a book of Russian folklore (Georgia).

Finally, music can be a useful tool for establishing familiarity. Our lives are increasingly digital and information-based; make use of it. Having a familiar and enjoyable music library on your iPod can work wonders in establishing a sense of home in a strange hotel bed, or a sleeping bag in some Scottish field. Sometimes, after spending five hours in a bus blasting Arabic pop music, a little Aerosmith and Bad Company is exactly what you need.

Remaking your sense of home takes time and discipline and conscious effort. It’s not easy, but well worth it to the serious traveler. It also serves as a spark to wider, deeper changes; “home” is an essential part of a human’s identity. To change your concept of home is to change who you are.

What are your methods for coping with the stresses of long-term travel? Share in the comments.

The main barrier to maintaining a lifestyle of travel, as opposed to the limited-duration tour or vacation, is money. If done right, travel isn’t much more expensive than living at home would be, especially if you live in a high-cost area like New York City or London. The problem is that income is easier to generate in a stable location, especially considering the difficulty of finding employment outside of your own country.

One option is to exchange work for room and board at any number of volunteer organizations. Websites such as Help Exchange can help enormously, but even so, that doesn’t strictly count as employment, and doesn’t generate active income. We’ll discuss these kinds of volunteer opportunities in a future post on  what to do when your funds run dry.

Local Income

If you’re reasonably enterprising, you may be able to make it on the long term by working intermittently at local places along the way. It’s often very difficult to get any kind of real employment if you’re not in your country of residence, especially if you’re from the States. Besides, if you’re working for travel, long term, nine-to-five employment probably isn’t what you’re looking for.

Bartending is one good possibility. Because many bartenders around the world are paid in cash and make most of their income in tips, being a bartender is a good way of getting around the work visa problem. Look for bars frequented by expats or tourists, where fluency in English is a major advantage. Working Abroad Magazine has a good article on this approach.

Speaking of English, if you’re a native speaker, you might be able to get work as a language tutor. If you go this route, it’s not a bad idea to get certified. The TOEFL is the most widely-used certification for English speakers, and has test locations in 165 countries world wide. The cost is a flat fee of $150 to $225, which is a decent investment for work you can do almost anywhere in the world. You can also work as a private tutor and set your own rates, though if you take this route don’t forget your cost of living in your chosen area while you build a client base.

Though the pay isn’t great, many hostels employ travelers. Here again fluency in English is a major selling point, and fluency in any additional languages only adds to your resume. You won’t be making a huge income, but chances are you’ll get a free bed thrown in, and use of the hostel’s kitchen facilities, so you should be able to live fairly cheaply.

For more ideas for working locally while on the road, check out this article over at Matador Travel.

Geographical Independence: Working Online

This is my own approach. It takes quite a bit more preparation to set up, but the freedom and income possible from working online is well worth the effort. Making a living online takes either some information-based skill or a lot of creativity.

Information-based work includes fields like web design, programming, translation, writing, and commercial art. The first step on this path is to create an online presence and start building a stable client base that understands your time restrictions–on the road, you’ll probably have days where you don’t work at all, and you’ll likely be only working thirty or so hours a week at most.

Don’t expect to make as much with this method as you would in the same industry at home. My main field, for instance, is iPhone programming, and while I make a decent living, I could likely make three or four times as much were I to settle down and accept a position with a development company. The payoff — complete geographical freedom — is well worth it in my book.

For anyone considering the online work option, I’d offer the following tips:

• Learn how to be productive in coffee shops or while laying on a hotel bed. Noise canceling headphones are a good purchase, and learning to concentrate completely while surrounded by other people is a skill best learned by practice.
• Make your main method of communication email. As a traveler, you could very well be a good nine or ten time zones removed from your clients, and getting to used to instant communication (IM or phone) means having to break your habits when you set out.
• Schedule meetings, and use Skype or Google Talk instead of carrying an international cell phone. International plans are expensive, and cutting that bill entirely means all that much more free time to explore.
• Match your weekly spending with your weekly income. For the freelance worker and traveler, budgeting is crucial. Neither your income nor your expenses will be completely stable, so you need to keep close track of both. I’ll cover this in more detail in a future article on travel budgeting.
• Streamline your tools. Many travelers can get away with a pocket camera and an iPhone, but you’ll have to carry your office with you. Make it portable and easy to use. I carry a Macbook Air for development, an iPod Touch 4G for app testing, a compact external hard drive, a small notebook for scratch paper, and a Wacom Bamboo tablet for Photoshop work. You could probably get away without that last one, but I’m addicted, and it’s not that much of a hassle.
• Organize your tools. While most travelers spend six hours on the train dozing or reading, you can convert that time into money. The best way to do that is to keep all of your work tools in one location. Keep your cables neat and everything you need easily accessible (preferably not buried at the bottom your backpack). Every minute you save in setting up is extra money earned.
• Protect your tools. Your technology will be much more important to you than to most travelers; plan accordingly. I keep my laptop in a neoprene case when I’m not using it, and have a waterproof container to house my iPod Touch (essential to my work as an iPhone programmer). Unless I’m staying in a secure hotel or have a hostel safe to lock my things in, my laptop goes wherever I do. You may also want to either a) insure your equipment, b) have a backup fund for buying new equipment should the need arise, or c) know people from whom you can borrow money if you ever have to buy new equipment. Without your gear, you can’t work, and if you can’t work, you lose clients, which means less money in the future.
• Protect your data. Your laptop is only a tool; your product is the information you create with it. I keep my source code online with Dropbox (by far the best online storage solution I’ve found — and free up to 2GB), and back up things that won’t fit (like photographs) on to memory cards kept in a nearly invincible Pelican case. Laptops can be replaced, data can’t.
• Choose your lodging according to workability. I’m not really one for the night life unless I’m out with friends, so I’m often back at my hotel or hostel by around 8 or 9PM, where I usually work until midnight. If your hotel room has wifi, you can work; if it has a desk, you can work comfortably. A private room may well be preferable to a hostel dorm bed, simply because you can make up the extra $20-$30 with the extra time you’ll have to work.
• Scope out cafes. When I’m on the road, coffee shops are my office. This adds a fun new dimension to travel, too, as local cafes are often interesting places in their own right. It’s not a bad idea to learn the words for “WiFi,” “internet,” and “power socket” in the local language. Work that doesn’t require a constant internet connection can be an advantage, as it significantly widens your range of possibilities.
• Register for online work sites, especially when starting out. I found most of my initial clients through a service called oDesk, which is free to use (for workers) and has online job listings for everything from web designers to translators.
• Make it clear to friends you meet along the way that you are in fact working while traveling. Most of your fellow travelers will be on vacation from “real life” back home, and will be thinking accordingly. Don’t get too distracted–you’ve still got a living to make. That said, make sure to schedule some off time, and prepare accordingly. If you’ve got a slow day sitting on a train or ship, or a few rainy days in a new city, take advantage of them. Work enough in the first few days of a week and the rest of the week opens up for exploration.
• Be responsible. The key to independent work of this sort is building a solid client base. Don’t screw them over, or it will come back to bite you. Work hard, work well, work honestly, and your business will prosper.

Getting Paid for Being Awesome

If you manage to come up with a great enough idea and can implement it right, you can make a living just by doing what you enjoy and writing about it. To be clear, this is still work — sometimes more work than normal — but it tends to be work that fits well with the travel lifestyle. Coming up with a successful enough travel blog is one option, as Nomadic Matt points out on his blog.

That’s not going to be easy. Competition is tough, and it takes a long time to build a loyal readership. It helps to have something unique to say, or something unique to do; the same writer who might get only a few hits on a blog about a three week vacation in Ibiza could get thousands by going on pilgrimage to see the Dalai Lama in person.

If you really make it, you might even get a book deal and free gear out of your trip. If you make it that far, let me know, and tell me how you did it!

What about you? Do you have any good ways of making money on the road?

It is now 2011, The Year of Departure. With a little less than four months before I start out, the reality of what I’m planning to do is finally beginning to sink in. As such, I’ll be writing a post every week or two on some aspect of designing a fully mobile lifestyle. I’ll covering everything from income to gear to building a “home on the road.” Here are a few article topics to look forward to:

• Attaining online employment, or active income on the road
• Building resources to generate passive income: blogging, photography, and intellectual property
• How to keep up with your reading while traveling
• The perfect backpack load-out for permanentish travel
• Lodging for the longtripper–optimizing price for staying periods longer than the few days of the average vacationer, but shorter than a resident
• Security: redundancy, protecting key possessions and making a foolproof bugout plan
• Meals: eating on the road, maintaining a steady budget, and protecting your wallet
• Budgeting for long-term travel, including a travel iPhone app that’s currently in the works
• Tricky diplomacy: attaining visas overseas
• Living cheap: what to do when your funds start running out but you’re not quite ready to come home
• Coping with homelessness: how to make sure your “home” is always around you
• The art of slow travel: or, how to avoid the TSA

Keep checking back, and keep traveling.

Peace.

Thanks for stopping by. This demonstration is now hosted over at Badass Tutorials. Be sure to browse the rest of the site too–there is (or will be) a lot of good content there.

While I use a Moleskine wallet for my day-to-day notes, reminders, and idea, I like to have a more substantial journal to record more complete thoughts in. I used to buy leather journals at local bookstores for the task, but for the last one I bought some scrap leather, paper, and tools, and built one for myself. I used it for more than a year, and it served me very well. I’ve recently built another one, and this time I took a few photos along the way so I could show other people how to do it as well. So, without further ado:

Tools

Leatherworking and Sewing Awl. You’ll use this to actually sew the leather. Chances are, leather heavy enough for use as a book cover will be to heavy to sew with a normal needle. You can probably find one of these at a local hardware store.

Scalpel. A heavy duty scissors would likely work as well, but I prefer the control a scalpel offers. You can also use a scalpel to carve designs into the leather.

Needle nose pliers, to help with the sewing.

Leather shaping tools. If you intend to tool the leather yourself, you’ll need something appropriate to the task. I used a standard leather awl and a spoon-tipped modeling tool for mine, but with a little searching you’ll find that there is every imaginable tool out there for the shaping and carving of leather.

Materials

Scrap leather. You can get leather for quite low prices by searching online (I get quite a lot of mine off of eBay) or asking owners of local leather working shops to give or sell you their scrap. For book covers, I like heavy, stiff leather. If you want to tool the leather yourself, make sure you buy veg (vegetable) tan leather, which is pale in color. If you buy this, you’ll probably want to buy stain also (see below).

Thread. This should come with the sewing awl. It just needs to be heavy enough to work with and hold up over the years–presumably your journal will be built to last.

Leather Dye. If you want a different shade than the leather you already have, you can use a dye. You can also use dye to make permanent patterns on your leather cover. If you use veg tan leather, you will have to use the dye (or stain) to “set” the leather once you’ve worked it.

Paper. There are plenty of places to get reams of good, high-quality paper online. You can also check a local craft store. Make sure you get something sturdy which you won’t mind looking at for a while. Also make sure the paper is “acid-free, archival quality,” which will ensure the journal remains in good condition for decades to come.

Making the Journal

1. Start by making the pages of the journal. For the method I use, I fold sections of seven 8.5″ by 11″ sheets of paper directly in half, and pile the sections to make the inside of the journal. You can use any size you like, and any number of pages –the important part is the fold itself. Make sure the folds are well creased and even for each section of paper.

2. Now, stack the folded sections together to determine the width of the journal’s spine. From here there are two ways to go–you can either create a wraparound cover of the sort common to many leather journals, or you can actually create a separate spine and cover. For this journal, I chose the second option–we will follow that path for the rest of this post.

3. Cut the spine and covers to size. Make sure to make the spine half an inch wider on each side than the thickness of your stacked pages, as you will use this extra material to sew on the covers.

4. Tool and stain the pieces. Now’s the time to create your cover design and implement it. Veg tan leather offers by far the most opportunity for decoration. You start by the tooling process, where you soak the leather surface (I just apply water liberally with a brush) and then make impressions in it with your leather tools. Once the leather dries, you can make more sharp designs by actually carving patterns into it with your scalpel. In these photos, the Ouroubouros (circled snake) and symbol on the front are carved with a scalpel, while the circled A on the back is tooled using the wet leather method. Then, stain the leather in a shallow vat or with a brush. You can make further designs when the stain is almost dry by scraping it clean with a knife–this is how the runes were created on the front of mine and the stripe pattern on the back. Notice how scraping off the stain also highlights tooled sections where the stain isn’t scraped off.

5. Sew the pages to the spine. This will take some time, and be careful–it’s easy to end up with some very crooked sewing lines if you’re not careful. I start by using a piece of scrap paper to mark out a guide for spine sewing. You should only need six holes or so, but they should be even, for appearance’ sake. You will sew by making your awl puncture directly into the crease of one of your paper stacks (I use seven sheets per stack instead of ten or more because it makes sewing easier) and through the leather of the spine, in a straight line running down the crease and the length of the spine. Sew the rest of the stacks in line with the first, making them as tight as possible–I’ve created journals in the past that felt poorly-made because the paper sections were sewn too far apart, making the leather feel “loose.” When you’re finished you should have your “book” of pages in the center of the spine and about half an inch of loose leather front and back.

6. Use that loose leather to attach the cover and back. Sewing the covers “inside,” that is, between the flap and the paper itself, will make for a tighter binding, but will also require a longer period of pressing (see step X). Sew tightly, using perhaps a third to half an inch per stitch, making your knot on the inside of the cover when finished.

7. Do any touch up staining with a small brush, if it’s needed, such as along the edges or over knots here and there.

8. Once all the stain is dry, place the journal under heavy weight, evenly distributed across the surface. I use a stack of old clothbound national geographic collections, probably weighing around fifty or sixty pounds. This is to crease the pages and lock the cover into the “book” shape–if you don’t this, the journal will constantly be falling open from the stiffness of the paper and the spine. Leave it under the press for a few days.

9. Pull it out of the press and put your name on the front cover. You’ve put a lot of work into this journal–you don’t want to lose it now!

And there you have it. If any of you try this, take a picture and send it my way–I’d love to see what you come up with!