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

After 3 months in Roatan, it was time for us to get back on the road again. We are headed up to Belize for a little vacation from our permanent vacation. So we’re closing the laptops for a bit, taking a break from checking emails, and working on our tans which are surprisingly weak after this long in the tropics!…

We packed up our things (including 50 lbs of new dive gear) and headed out the door to catch the 7am ferry from Roatan back to La Ceiba. An hour later we were in a taxi headed to Puerto Cortes, north of San Pedro Sula. We had to stay overnight in Puerto Cortes and booked one night at the Brisas Hotel on Coca Cola beach (named for it’s proximity to the bottling plant). Puerto Cortes was a little thin on entertainment, so we splashed in the pool, had a bite to eat, and retired early along with a new frog buddy who apparently lived in our sink.

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Costa Rica was definitely more expensive than a lot of the places we’ve been over the last year and a half. That being said it also offered the most convenience and more modern amenities than anywhere else… which I suppose could be a plus or a minus depending on what you’re looking for. For us it was just what we needed. After a year on the road, and a particularly busy three months we were quite happy to find a nice place to rent and stay put for six months.

Before I jump into the numbers part of this post I want to remind everyone that we’re not budget backpackers. Yes you can do Costa Rica a lot cheaper than we did, but since this isn’t just a vacation for us, it’s a lifestyle, we often make choices that aren’t inline with other travelers priorities.

A comfortable place and a decent internet connection are always first priority on our list of requirements, which often means we stick to more touristy places and don’t venture off the beaten track as much as other travelers. When we arrived in Costa Rica we both had a lot of work lined up and knew we’d be spending the majority of our days online, so it was even more important than usual. Read More…

After 6 months, our time in Costa Rica has come to a close. Last week we woke up early to take the 5am shuttle to Liberia from Tamarindo. Around 9am, we boarded a Ticabus headed to Managua, Nicaragua. A few hours later, we arrived at the Nicaraguan border to find a HUGE line. Spending the next 3 hours frying our brains in the sun while we waited to get our exit visas, then another hour waiting as the Costa Rican DEA randomly selected our bus for a screening, and then another hour getting our entry visas in Nicaragua. During all this, the Canadian men’s final hockey game was going on… something we had realized only a few days earlier. Oops, bad scheduling on our part and we had hoped to make it to our destination on time to catch it. But we did meet a few people on the bus and chatted the hours away.

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As a tourist in Costa Rica, you can stay for a maximum of 90 days before you have to exit the country for 72 hours before reentry. Shortly before Xmas, our first three months in Costa Rica were coming to a close. Nicaragua is considerably nearer to Tamarindo than Panama, so we opted to head to Nicaragua for a quick visa run. Being so close to Christmas, many dates for the buses to Nicaragua were already fully booked, but luckily we were able to book a couple seats on the Ticabus (around $40 each) to and from Nicaragua as opposed to the ‘chicken bus’ where you walk across the border and catch another local bus on the other side.

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Frequent moves are a part of life when you’re a nomadic freelancer and when we move from country to country we try to settle into a location for at least a month at a time, often staying for a few months in one spot. But sometimes we’ll move from place to place every couple weeks. Over time, I had hoped that we would turn into an elite team of baggage packing ninjas, but truth be told it still comes down to muscle and bullheadedness whenever we move our 70-80kg of gear. I’m still amazed that we have so much stuff, but there’s a fine balance between packing light, living comfortably, and being work efficient. I thought it would be interesting, or maybe even helpful for a few people to see what we haul along to live like we do.

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Continuing our series of travel budget posts, here’s the numbers from the last 3 months. We spent 2 months in Malaysia with 1 month spent in Penang and 1 month in Malaysian Borneo. Since this was the end of the Asian leg of our journey, we traveled around a lot more and took part in a few more costly activities like diving at Sipadan and a motorcycle tour near Kota Kinabalu. I also had to buy a new laptop in Kuala Lumpur to replace my busted computer. Then there’s the clothes budget. We had to prepare for upcoming Canadian weather and business meetings. Overall, it was a big hit to the wallet.

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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.

Back in 2007 I picked up an issue of Bike magazine with an idyllic inside cover shot of a motorcycle traveling up a pristine, empty road through lush jungle valleys shrouded in mist. “Like a trackday paradise” read the title, and I was pretty much sold. Reading the actual article did little to dissuade me. Government funded and maintained highways, little to no traffic, and you get to stay in a beautifully architected house overlooking a valley of rainforest below? This was undoubtedly motorcycle paradise. The article was ear marked, often re-read, and each time I swore that if I had a chance to visit Borneo, I’d be tearing through the S-curves on an Aprilia Pegaso, wind in my face, tires to tarmac. Who knew at the time that Borneo also housed a little diving gem called Sipadan? When planning our trip through southeast Asia, my sales pitch to Kelly lasted all of 30 seconds before we were arranging itineraries in Sabah.

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I’m a spoiled scuba diver. I started diving last October in the Philippines when I realized that my motorcycle habit wasn’t going to be fulfilled and was instantly fascinated with the underwater world. Over the last year, I’ve done around 80+ dives (not too shabby for a recreational diver!). While I’ve enjoyed almost every dive, the first 40 or so tend to be the most memorable since they took place in the Philippines.

The Philippines pretty much had it all as far as I was concerned. Great macro and muck diving in the Dauin area. Fantastic wall dives at Siquijor. Beautiful soft corals and schools of fish at Apo Island. Turtles at Moalboal and sharks at Malapascua. It’s a package that was hard to beat. Traveling through Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia, I never came across a place with the diversity that the Visayas offered. Sure, there were some amazing hi-lights along the way like the whale shark in Thailand and manta rays in Indonesia, but never matching the sheer range of corals, creatures, and dive opportunities. Until Sipadan…

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Friends and family often tell us they’re jealous of our adventures and how lucky we are to be able to afford our nomadic travel lifestyle. We agree. We’re in a very advantageous position, earning an income working online while we travel. But how much is this costing us exactly, and how does the cost of living abroad compare to what we were paying back home in Vancouver, Canada?

You’ll notice that we spent significantly less in the Philippines on a per month basis than anywhere else. I primarily attribute this to being settled in a beach house with a full kitchen for a 4 month stretch and being fairly remote which limited restaurant expenses to local options. This illustrates my previous post about how to keep costs down by traveling slowly and minimizing food expenses. There’s also no international flight costs included in the Philippines expenses. I’m not sure if something like that should be averaged over the whole trip, or attributed to the arrival country. In which case, Hong Kong cost us $3400. :) Read More…