Have Internet Will Travel A blog about travel freelancing in the Philippines

One of the hardest parts of long term travel is being so far away from friends and family. Gone are the long lunches with girl-friends, and Sunday barbecues at the beach. No more long weekend ball tournaments, and no more late night dinners with good wine and good friends.

When you’re constantly moving around, making new friends can be hard. Sure, it’s easy to meet people… traveling has a way of breaking down normal social barriers, making it easy to approach new people and start up a conversation. The problem is, that conversation is often exactly the same:

THEM: “Where are you from?”
US: “Vancouver, Canada”
THEM: “How long are you traveling for?”
US: “We’ve been on the road for almost two years.”
THEM: “Wow, must be nice… how do you afford it?”
US: “We work online…..blah, blah, blah…”

From there, the conversation will progress to where we’ve been, where they’ve been, we’ll compare favorite places and add new ones to the list. We’ll swap travel stories, the good and the bad… and at the end of the day, or evening, or dive trip, we’ll say goodbye. Encounters like this are great, we’ve met so many interesting people. All of whom have helped to make the ferry ride, or the boarder crossing or the night out, all the more memorable. But, at the end of the day you know that most of these people you’ll never see again.

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We arrived in Roatan in early March just as the last of the seasonal storms were coming through. Scouting out a place to stay for a few months we found a large range of options and locations but we quickly focused on 3 areas on the west side of the island due to their proximity to grocery shopping, beaches, entertainment, and dive shops. The island is quite hilly, so a car or scooter would be a necessity in many areas if you don’t want to be taking a taxi 10 times a day.

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Kelly was interviewed by Nora Dunn from theprofessionalhobo.com not too long ago as part of her ‘A Week-In-The-Life of’ series. People sometimes assume that because we’re living in a tropical destination, we must be semi-retired, or that we’re always hanging out on the beach or diving… Truth be told, it’s been a very busy few months work-wise since we arrived in Costa Rica. For a closer look at what went on in an average week when we arrived in Costa Rica, have a look at Nora’s latest post here: A Week-In-The-Life of Kelly & Mike: Have Internet Will Travel

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2009 was an amazing year for us. It was a year full of travel, new experiences, fantastic memories, and thankfully a lot more ups than downs. It was our first full year without a permanent home and our first full year freelancing from the road. We visited 7 countries in 12 months, took 18 flights, and made a million new memories.

Below are just a few of those memories, as we look back and reminisce over an amazing 2009.

We rang in the New Year with some friends at a beach resort in the Philippines. We had some great dives in January, made some new friends, rented a motorbike, and celebrated my 30th birthday. Read More…

Merry Christmas from Costa Rica!

Last week, I was reading Shannon’s RTW (Round the World) trip blog and came across a post about the moment she committed to a RTW trip. She mentions that she was going through “what can only be described as my quarter-life crisis.” And I had to consider how much of what I’ve done this last year has been due to a similar circumstance?
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So a while back, John from JetSetCitizen.com asked us if we’d like to do an interview with him about our nomadic travel lifestyle. We took him up on it and the resulting interview was just posted.

Have a look here: Interview with Nomadic Couple, Kelly Hale and Mike Schimanowsky

Thanks John! It really made us think about our lifestyle, traveling as a couple and how that impacts our journey and relationship.

After almost a month with an over heating video card stuck in 640×480 and $600 later, I’m back online. For most travelers it probably would have been a non issue till they got home using internet cafes in the meantime, but I have a number of client projects on the go and I’m usually not more than an arms length from my PC unless I’m underwater. Luckily I bought an iPod Touch before leaving Canada! I’ve often pooh-poohed how the iPhone and Touch are bulky MP3 players with not quite enough built in features to be true PDAs, but man was I thankful for the WiFi, browser, and email applications these past few weeks, not to mention the countless hours spent playing solitaire when the power was out. I was able to stay on top of client issues and steal Kelly’s Mac for emergencies. It took UPS almost 2 weeks to ship a new video card from New Jersey to Koh Tao in Thailand via expedited shipping. At least I didn’t have to install it with my Swiss Army knife screwdriver… I ended up finding a repair shop locally that had the proper tools, something of a rarity on some of the smaller islands.

So what does a nerd do offline in a tropical country? He stays hydrated…
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It’s been six months since we started this crazy adventure of ours and arrived in the Philippines. We weren’t quite sure what we were getting ourselves into when we landed in Cebu on Sept, 2, but if there is one thing I’ve learned since we started this trip is that you can do all the research in the world, but you will never know what a place is truly like until you arrive.

It’s been an amazing six months. There have been some ups and some downs, and it hasn’t always been exactly what we hoped it would be, but I wouldn’t trade it for a minute. Mike and I are both very excited about the next phase, and are looking forward to arriving in Thailand after a brief week in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Before we do, we wanted to give you a little recap of our time in the Philippines.

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1. Everyone needs a rice cooker. Making rice using a pot is barbaric.
2. Having many possessions doesn’t equal happiness. Having none can give you a kind of freedom. Having some makes life more comfortable. Having too many, you become a keeper of things and they in turn eventually keep you.
3. The basic necessities of human life have been replaced by the four “Good F”‘s of nomadic life. Good food, good friends, good family, and good fun. Remove any of those from the equation and you might as well go home and get a day job.
4. A problem will never fix itself. Us Canadians are a non-confrontational lot for the most part, but in Asia… you better speak up and throw some elbows to get to the head of the line. And once you’ve maimed the rest of the crowd, remember to wear a smile while you complain.
5. There is no such thing as ‘excessive use of horn’. In a country where there is little driver training, no drunk driving enforcement, and driving at night with no lights is common, its a valuable life saving warning system.

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