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My Story: 10 Years a Nomad
10+ years on the road. Lived on three continents. Worked in schools, retreat centers, restaurants, bars, and on my own online projects. Regularly volunteer in hostels and healing centers across South America. No sponsorships pretending every place is paradise. Just honest, practical help for people who want to travel for real.
How I Ended Up Living Out of a Backpack
I’m Daniel, great to see you here. I left Australia to travel full time in 2016, figuring it out as I went. Since then, I’ve lived in several countries around the world, from the Americas to Asia, doing all sorts of things. I see travel not just as an experience, but as a lifestyle. More importantly, as an avenue to personal growth and self-discovery. This is what I understand as soul-searching.
So, you’re probably wondering who I am, and how I got here in the first place. I don’t have some unfair advantage like my parents funding my travels or having great mentors to teach me the ropes. When I was younger, I was miserably shy, lacking confidence or self-esteem.
Once upon a time, I would have never even considered traveling the world by myself. Such an idea was so far out of my box at the time, that I never even considered it.
Long story short, I had what I would describe as a spiritual awakening after many years invested in my personal development, to become the version of myself necessary to have a good life.
After this experience, I could suddenly see clearly for the first time. Why, realistically, can’t I also create a beautiful life for myself, where I can thrive and have the sense of freedom and independence I had always dreamed of?
That’s when it started to make sense…
How My Journey Started
A picture of me before I started traveling, when I was still depressed, struggling, and lost in life. Victoria, Australia, 2012
In 2014 I was a student at RMIT, Melbourne, where I was studying Landscape Architecture at the time. I had spent years studying and practicing personal development, learning everything from conversational and dating skill to working on my mindsets, beliefs, confidence and competence…
But I was still shy, not in my power. Don’t get me wrong, my life had gotten better over the years due to the traits and characteristics I was slowly applying, but it was a slow process, and my life didn’t quite reflect all the work I had poured into myself.
Like most people, I didn’t grow up dreaming of travel. I never really thought about it to be honest. I just wanted to do what everyone else does. Get a good job, find a loving partner, and live a happy, stable life.
And there’s nothing wrong with people who follow that route! But I also felt that something was missing, there was a piece of the puzzle I needed to find, and that I couldn’t find it unless I pushed myself out of the bubble I had always known.
I applied for the exchange program at my university. After all, this sounds like a fun experience where I have the opportunity to live abroad, but at the same time, I still have some reletive safety net. I had spent the past 6 years working casually alongside school and living with my parents, so I had some savings behind me.
Although I was nervous about it, as it’s really like stepping into the unknown, the idea grew on me. For the next year, I would face rejection after rejection, until I was out of time and options. I didn’t get my first priority in the Netherlands, nor my second in the US, and the option I could get was in Newzealand. Sure, would be nice, but I wanted a true cultural experience, NZ just felt like an exrension of home.
One day I got a call from the Exchange coordinator, telling me that an option opened up in Brazil, but I only had a little over a month to be there. I immediately said yes, and fortunately was able to get my visa expidited, and set off abroad for the first time by myself in mid 2016.
My First Year Abroad
I’m not going to lie. I felt very out of my depth when I first arrived in Brazil. I had no idea what I was doing, now to navigate the little things like currency conversation, airports, navigating with the language barrier.
Those first weeks in Brazil were rough. There was no one to hold my hand, which turned out to be exactly what I needed.
But there was also a deep sense of excitement being in a completely foreign culture, and not knowing what awaits me.
In the coming days, I happened to meet some people in the hostel I was staying in who would be starting the same exchange program as me. That instantly gave me a social security web,and for the first time, I could relax a little bit.
While it took me a couple weeks to get into the flow of how things work, I began to develop deep friendships with the other exchange students.
Over the next 5 months, I would go on to have a lot of fun. Lots of partying, lots of dating, not much studying… For the first time in my life, I was living the life I once only dreamed about. The lifestyle was addictive (and maybe a little hedonistic), but the icing on the cake was the sense of acheivement, that I had finally arrived at a point where I could eat the fruit I had been so long growing.
After 6 months in Brazil, I flew to Colombia, and spent the next 6 months backpacking down to Argentina, where I would then fly back to Australia.
During this time, I explored plant medicine traditions, such as Ayahuasca in Ecuador and Peru, and volunteered in hostels in Lima and Montanita.
While my focus still was on partying, experiencing and doing some of the touristy stuff, another philosophy started to develop in me during this time.
“Travel is just as, if not more meaningful when you take it slow, develop community, and are in no rush to move to the next place.”
So, that’s exactly what I did. Took it slow and based myself in different places for a while.
The Move to Vietnam
At the airport in 2018, about to head to Vietnam.
Back in Australia, life was good. I moved in with some friends, I worked jobs in restaurants, bars and in sales for a short time, but I couldn’t get rid of that sense of freedom, the adventure, the sense of not knowing what’s next.
So, I started planning my next trip, but I wasn’t quite sure what I could do or how I could sustain a living abroad.
I decided to look into teaching English, and decided to book in a month-long TEFL course in Vietnam.
About a year after returning to Australia, I was off again. This time I had no plans to return to Australia, and although I didn’t know it yet, it would be 5 years until I returned.
I arrived in HCMC a couple weeks before starting my course, and the culture shock this time was much worse than in South America. The heat, the noise, and chaos… I didn’t really know what to expect, but I don’t think it was this.
When the course begun, things were quite smooth. I quickly made good friends with some of the other training teachers, and stayed in a share-house with a few people during the course.
When it ended, I spent a couple months traveling, and then secured a job in Ha Long. Interestingly enough, two of my closest friends from the TEFL course also happened to be in that city. I didn’t know this at the time, but I bumped into them at a meetup. Turns out they were both part of the same friend ground with some of the teachers from the school I was working at.
After 4 months, I moved to Hanoi, where I would teach for another year and a half. I met my girlfriend at the time there, and we moved to Da Nang, a beautiful coastal city in central Vietnam.
Each chapter in Vietnam had a different feel, but each place was a new experience with different friend groups, and a different lifestyle. A few months into teaching in Da Nang, the pandemic hit. Schools closed down, the working visa was becoming an issue to renew, and I felt called to do more work with plant medicines in South America.
Not being able to go back to Australia at the time due to the heavy lockdown, or Ecuador where I was trying to line up a volunteering position at a shamanic healing center, I decided to book a flight to Mexico for the next step of this journey.
My Central American Stint
I arrived in Mexico city and stayed put in a hostel for a month. Same thing, different country. Constantly meeting a new stream of faces, and becoming good friends with some of them. Utilizing dating apps and living my best bachelor life. Drinking, partying, and doing the occasional Ayahuasca ceremony that fell on my lap.
When you’re traveling, you tend to pretty quickly pick up the main backpacker routes through conversations with other travelers. Oaxaca seemed to be the go to, so I jumped on a bus and a day later I was in Oaxaca city.
I spent some time there and found a volunteering position in a hostel in Puerto Escondido, where I stayed for a couple months. That’s where I met a beautiful, charming Mexican lady who I traveled with for a couple months, until we parted ways in Chiapas and I made my way to Lake Atitlan in Guatemala.
I then found another volunteering position in a hostel where I stayed for a month, and kept moving, spending most of my time in Antigua, probably my favorite city in the world.
Another year flew past and it was now the start of 2021. Money was running low, and I didn’t have a whole lot of options. Finding work at a school posed a challenge because of the Pandemic, and I still couldn’t get back into Australia. Luckily, I had a trick up my sleeve.
Moving to the US
I didn’t say it was a good trick, but a trick none-the-less. Luckily, I’m a duel citizen, so I also have a US passport, and it was only about a month from expiring.
I had no friends or family in the US, a shoestring budget, and I didn’t really want to go there anyway. But, I decided it was the most practical option. Fly in, find work as soon as possible, stay for a year and head out.
I wanted the best possible chances of finding work. Some of the states like California and Colorado, which were most appealing to me, still had some pretty heavy restrictions. Not a time to take gambles, so I decided to fly into Texas with the hopes of finding work in Austin, which I heard was a nice city.
The first couple weeks were tough going. Seemed like nobody was hiring, the place felt a bit like a ghost town, and I was sleeping on the couch of a stranger who I happened to find through couch surfing.
To be fair, he was an amazing guy. Very hospitible and friendly, and he let me stay there for a couple of weeks until I found a sharehouse through a Facebook group. Shortly after moving in, I found a job in a restaurant.
And I’m not going to lie, my life was a grind, with having no vehicle making it so much more complicated. Commuting almost 2 hours a day, to the city and back by bus, working a job that I didn’t quite enjoy, and I was barely breaking even too.
Sure, I had good memories. but mostly, the grind was exhausting. A year later when the world was open again and I finally lined up this volunteering position, I had $3k in my bank account. Not much, but I decided it was enough to move to Ecuador to begin volunteering at a retreat center near Cuenca in February 2022.