Ten Years in Exile: Old Blog Post (Or Unreleased Book Chapter)

Ten Years in Exile

Last year, I passed the 10 year milestone away from my home country of Northern Ireland. People often wonder how I have coped being away for so long, what keeps me buzzing, where I’ve been and why I’ve felt the need to give up a “normal life” of living in the same place all the time. I hope to give the readers an insight to into my nomadic lifestyle, which has seen me visit over 80 countries across all 7 continents in the last 10 years.

My story began in the seaside town of Bangor in Northern Ireland. I grew up there in the 1980s. In my teens I enjoyed a few trips to parts of Europe but when I reached my early twenties, I decided to leave my hometown to see a bit of the world. I had a desire and passion to start a new life and I chose the party town of Bournemouth in England to kickstart my journey round the globe. In Bournemouth, I could get a job easily, meet a lot of people and enjoy a good life. It was the best place to start. After a few months into my time in Bournemouth, I knew I wasn’t moving back. I had met people from all over the world, including making new friends from places like Colombia, Spain, Australia, Botswana and Canada. I developed a passion for travel but knew I didn’t quite have the budget for any major trips just yet, plus I was studying a degree part time as well.

So I worked in multiple jobs at the same time to save up. I started with England and Wales as they were close and easy, then a few trips across Europe gave me a passion to go further. The people I travelled with in the early days seemed to want more luxury than me though and my budget didn’t agree with it. I’d end up travelling with people staying in decent hotels, getting trains with cabins and even using taxis. So I decided to cut that hat trick out. I was a budget traveller – I didn’t need the luxury. I started to travel on my own. I took cheap buses and night trains, hitched rides with friends. I stayed in hostels, with mates and in cheap guest houses. I avoided taxis. I didn’t eat out very often. It was after working in London for a year in a busy PR firm that gave me the real incentive to leave Europe behind. So I put Russia, China and New Zealand on my itinerary and headed off into the sunset.

While backpacking in Toronto in 2007, I met a few other travel bloggers and decided to start writing my own stories. So I started a travel blog. I now own the longest running one man travel guide to all seven continents. Just from that one moment of starting a blog in Toronto. Since 2007, I have been a lot more nomadic, signing only one long term rent contract during the last 7 years. The rest of the time, I’ve managed to work hard and live out my travel dreams.

I spent time working on farms, mostly as a broccoli farmer in Tasmania, living in my tent and camping in the wilderness. During the broccoli farming, every day my mind was set that I was booking a trip to Antarctica. I wanted to live my travel dreams for real and by the age of 30 I had visited every continent.

Things couldn’t stop there for me and my journeys continued. I relocated to Hong Kong in 2011 temporarily. I worked in a load of jobs in Hong Kong including bar work and teaching and used it as a base to visit almost half the provinces in China.

My website was gaining momentum, now into its fifth year I had my first advertiser, my first sponsored trip and things were changing. A load of new opportunities came my way in 2013 and I was able to travel for 8 months of the year – for the first time ever. I was working on the move. I was travel writing, planning itineraries, working with sponsors and advertisers and I hit backpacking hard in the Middle East.