I went to Africa after burning out at my first startup (which spectacularly imploded 9 months later). I recommend travel, but taking time off is not necessarily a panacea. In particular, be realistic about how much money you have and will spend. Otherwise, when you come back you have to scramble to find a job, which isn't an optimal position. In retrospect, the time could have been better spent figuring out a startup of my own.
Agreed. This is pretty much the greatest article ever. The funny thing was I've been thinking about going to Thailand this summer anyway, so this article pretty much clinches it. I get my diploma in a couple weeks (I failed twice at dropping out) so this is the time to do it.
Wow, thanks! It's amazing to compare the reception of this article here versus Reddit. Over there, 700 people voted it DOWN, whereas here I'm being offered free beer.
Check out the coast of Honduras and the islands nearby. It's still plenty cheap and there are un-touristed beaches to be found. The little slice of Guatemala that touches the Caribbean is good too.
I read "C With Assembly Language" by Steven Holzner as a kid... he wrote that he works 6 months and travels for the other 6. It has been my dream since. It should work out this year.
If you are planning, reading "The Four Hour Work Week" might help.
Oh yeah, highly recommend the book, a lot of his ideas seem controversial, but there are a few points worth taking away from the book. There's also a nice podcast on his website.
i'm actually going to be doing just that. my employer (10-20 employees) was nice enough to grant my request to let me telecommute from brazil for a few months.
how's that for relaxed management?
i could not agree with this article more. people need to loosen up and go see the world much more than they currently do. farecast is a great place to buy plane tickets and couchsurfing is a great place to find a roof.
Yeah, this is the way to do it. Instead of quitting your job and traveling, travel while you have a job. Someone I work with routinely travels around the world and lives with friends for a few weeks. As long as there's the Internet, you can get plenty of work done, and have plenty of time to enjoy the world. Why sit at home and chat on IRC when you can just go live with other programmers for a while. (We work on a lot of open source stuff, so it's always good to hang out with the other contributers. If you don't have a lot of hacker friends, this approach might not work.)
Anyway, I liked what I saw :) so I'm going to Tokyo tomorrow for this purpose. It counts as work, and will be quite fun.
Did you give them prior warning? What was your negotiation like (cordial or walkout?) Or did it just come out of the blue? I came back from a trip from Guatemala and was spouting off about quitting and going there the week I came back so the element of surprise is not there (and not in my non-secretive personality).
I've been putting off buying a house or making any big commitments like that for precisely this reason. Doin' the startup thing right now, but there's no reason why that can't happen from wherever I happen to be too. Working on a plan to free myself geographically sometime in '09!
This is my plan precisely. It'll be Ghana for me. A surprising amount of the third world has a decent internet connection these days. If you can get that plus a decent hotel room for a few hundred bucks a month, why not give it a shot?
This is why I hope to be earmarking half a million for a trip around the world in a few years. I may only end up using a tenth of that, but I don't want to limit myself in terms of activities: scuba diving, mountain climbing, safaris, maybe a few expensive hotels, foreign clubbing, etc.
I went to Thailand when I was 23 (I'm 27 now). Stayed at the Khao San Road, traveled a lot. It's a great place to get away from it all. Cheap too, and I earn Mexico wages.
I leave Canada for Australia in a few weeks. Though not the 3rd world it's a new base of operations which will allow us to easily travel around Asia. Though I plan to work the odd consulting gig to help pay for it mostly we'll be living as cheap as possible and moving as often as possible for the next year or 2.
This is a great article and timely because my friend just asked me yesterday if I'd like to go to Thailand with her this Christmas! But I'm going to Nigeria so I guess this article is spot on.
The point is that you are free to stay as long as you want and not have to rush it. A few weeks in a new place is rarely enough to get a real feel for it and experience everything that place offers.
Besides you'll probably be spending less traveling in 3rd world countries than you will living in a tech centre in North America or Europe.
It's funny, but internet access is a lot easier to find in the developing world than it is in the US or Europe. In the States, it's all private and corporate DSL with the occasional unsecured wireless router to be found.
In rural Cambodia, it's a little building in the village with public terminals. These get used by the locals since they can't afford a machine or connectivity of their own, and by tourists who are happy to pay the equivilant of a dollar an hour to check their email.
Generally, they don't mind if you push the keyboard out of the way and plug the ethernet cable into the back of your laptop.
All in all, it's about 1000x easier than trying to find a pub in England with functioning Wifi.
