Leaving It All Behind: Why We’re Off to Travel the World

We live an incredible life here in Perth, Western Australia. We both have amazing careers, which are a result of study and hard work over the last several years. We live in an amazing apartment on the river, with beautiful city views. Both of us enjoy various hobbies, classes and volunteering that we dedicate lots of time to each week. Then there’s our families, our friends, and the AMAZING weather that Perth has – so why on earth would we want to leave this all behind?

We first traveled as a couple in 2011 – not that you could really call it ‘travel’ per se – it was your typical, week long holiday in a 5 star resort on the beach in Phuket, where we didn’t stray any more than 30 minutes from the hotel. We had a fabulous time, but we decided to shake things up the next time we went away, feeling that this trip was a little too ‘cushy’…

A year later, we went on a seven week trip through South East Asia. We swapped our suitcases for backpacks, the 5 star resort for homestays in the middle of the jungle, and putting meals on our room tab to eating from street stalls. Instead of packing enough clothes to last the entire trip and throwing the dirty laundry back in the suitcase, we’d spend hours drying off our laundry in our room with a travel hairdryer…ok, so we were still rookies and had a lot to learn – but we loved every second of our travels!

It was 18 months before we were able to travel again, and this time we changed it up again – taking things at a slower pace and spending over four weeks in one single country. Rather than an organised tour this time around, we travelled independently – planning and booking everything from our flights to stays in hostels and guesthouses, taking overnight buses and navigating around new cities with nothing but a copy of the Lonely Planet, and snippets of information we’d saved to our phone the night before during the five minutes that the hostel wi-fi worked…

With only four weeks of annual leave a year that you can take off from your job to travel – how do you make the most of that time? Do you visit one place at a time, slowly ticking off the bucket list, or do you cram as much as you possibly can into that time away, flying from city to city and running from one landmark to another? You either get to only see the smallest fraction of the world, albeit having seen it well, or you can tick off plenty of destinations however never really having been able to immerse yourself in that countries culture as you spend the entirety of your trip feeling exhausted. Not only that, but coupled with the fact that Australia is SO FAR AWAY from the rest of the world – half of your precious time (and precious budget) is spent just getting from A to B – just what do you do?

We determined a year ago, that we wanted to see the world. Both of us have lots of non-travel related ‘bucket list’ items and goals, however this particular ambition is one that we wholeheartedly both want for ourselves and our lives together – it supersedes all the others. So, how do we make it happen?We’ll be sharing over the coming weeks leading up to our departure how we managed to figure out a plan to travel full-time, just exactly what’s been involved in leaving it all behind, where we’re going and what we’re taking – it’s been a lot of hard work, but we’ve had so much fun in the process. Hopefully we can help you in some way in your plans to travel for an indefinite period of time!