I hope that in my previous post I did not make it seem like you had to have a large stash of cash available in order to hit the road for an extended travel tour. The fact is, while savings are helpful, plenty of people travel and find work along the way. I was astounded by the number of long term, working travelers that I met along the way and I thought I’d share the strategies they used to keep going week after week. These won’t make you rich, but they should keep you clothed, housed, and fed for as long as you want to travel. Please feel free to comment if you know of any other tips.
Get a visa.
If I was in my mid-twenties and recently jobless, make no doubt about it I would be heading to New Zealand to take advantage of their Working Holiday visa program (Australia offers one as well). In short, as a member of the British Commonwealth, Kiwis and Aussies are entitled to spend two years in Great Britain without a work permit. What ends up happening is that upon graduating, all the young people leave in droves to explore Europe (after all, they’ve been stuck on an island for their whole life). This not only explains why so many Aussies travel, but also why the two nations always have huge shortages of people to fill cheap paying jobs.
In response, the government of these two countries created a program to allow some of their tourists to fill the job needs. If you are between the ages of 18-30, you can apply for a one year work visa allowing you to legally work. What I’ve found is in Australia, the work tends to fit in the migrant/farm/manual labor category, but in NZ however, it tends to be more in the service category. In Queenstown alone there are signs all over the place looking for bar tenders and wait staff. As NZ is the college break location for most of Eurasia, you get a steady stream of young, beautiful, and blonde thrill seekers bussing through town, looking for the next party. That’s really not a bad place to find yourself as a bar tender –you get the best hiking in the world in the summer, great skiing in the winter, and beautiful people year round.
A list of working holiday programs can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_holiday_visa. As far as I know, the only countries offering the program to Americans are New Zealand, Australia, and Singapore.
Use the Internet for more than writing home.
Perhaps you are older than 30? In that case, grab a laptop and make your way to either Southeast Asia or a cheaper eastern European nation, such as Riga, Budapest, or Prague. There are a bevy of “jobs” available on the net that pay you no matter where you do the work. On the cheap, low pay end would be something like Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk. The theory behind Mechanical Turk is that there are many mundane tasks that Humans can process much better, faster, and cheaper than software would (for example, looking at a photograph and identifying if the subject is a boy or a girl). Software developers sign up with Turk and offer bounties for each process – so in our example, a developer has 4,000 photos and is willing to pay .02 cents each. Each task takes only a few seconds…so say you put 6 hours a day into this, giving yourself an average of 10 seconds to respond, means you can pull in almost $45. It’s not a huge amount of money and the work is mundane, but in a place like Thailand $45 is pretty good change to get through the day. Keep in mind that some jobs in Turk require a certain level of hours already put in.
On the higher paying, higher risk side of it are job sites such as www.bountyjobs.com, where employers post the job they are looking to fill and as a member recruiter, you can fill this position. So if you have some recruiting experience, skype, a computer, and a decent internet connection, you can recruit on positions that can pay between $5,000 - $20,000 (and more) for a fill. This process takes much longer to do and odds are stacked against you, but it’s doable. There are similar sites looking for programmers, tech writers, etc.
Ebay. Ebay. Ebay.
Become an import/exporter. Certain tourist destinations also attract clothing manufacturers for ample supply and cheap labor, making it a haven for high quality knock-offs (which essentially are clothes made in the same factory). I met a Polish guy living in Bangkok who for years has made his living purchasing high-quality knock offs and selling them on Ebay. In recent years, he told me that new regulations have cut down on his profits, but he’s still there, still churning away.
Use your tongue.
A lot of American’s don’t realize that they all are in possession of one of the most desirable skill sets in the world: superior knowledge of the English language. It’s well known you can teach English, I’m not going there. What I am saying is that if you speak English and are a certified Scuba instructor, you can find a job in almost any coastal tourist destination in the world. In my travels through Thailand and Australia, they were even offering to teach you how to scuba and certify you in return for a few months service. This is how a friend of mine took a year to travel and ended up living in St. Croix.
Play the odds.
It is illegal in the United States to use a credit card or bank account registered in the US for purposes of on-line gambling. However, it is not nearly anywhere else. If someone wanted to, they could play your way around the world. I’ve even heard that there are plenty of programs on the internet with a fairly successful win rate (many online casino rooms are filled with bots, making money for their owners while they are at work).
Start your own tourism agency.
It’s not that hard. You print out a few business cards detailing your special knowledge of a country you’ve been to a few places and make yourself available as a personal travel guide – one guy had been to Peru 8 times doing this. In the winter, he stayed here in Seattle and worked in restaurants, passing out his cards to more affluent couples. In the winter time, he would book 3-4 trips with no more than 6 people per group, and be their personal tour guide to these mysterious, backwards, and scary locales for a couple weeks – really, it’d be like having 3 couples paying me to take them on a week-long trip to New York.
Hang out where the travelers (not the tourists) are hanging out.
There’s an American right now in Thailand whose been serving bar at a beach shack for 5 years now. There’s a Brit in Laos who got his job chatting up an NGO (i.e. foreign-based charity) employee in a popular expat bar. I myself was offered a few jobs – one as a bartender, another leading outrigger kayaking groups in Australia (open sea kayaking is insane, btw), and more than a few offers to work in a hostel. The point is, if you travel for long enough, you are going to run into offers to stay behind. And if the employer wants you to stay, they will find ways to make it worth your time.
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