The other day Tania emailed me with some questions about what inspires me to roam the planet, and how I finance my wandering.
Tania is a beautiful person I got to know at Confest earlier this year, via our mutual friend, Asi. Tania has been reading Raw Safari and chatting with me in the comments regularly since then.

 

Tania:
Good gorgeous evening, Emmanuel.  How are you flowing on your travels?
I have some questions to ask if you care to answer.
Do you travel always?  As in, do you have a base where you call ‘home’?
How do you financially sustain your travels?
What is your inspiration for travel?
 

Emmanuel: 
Hi Tania!  A Beautiful day to you!
Your questions are a really nice set and the third one is really thought provoking.  

Q: “Do you travel always as in do you have a base where you call ‘home’?”
A: I have not always traveled, but even when I was a kid I was obsessed with Gypsies, and quests. I always used to make camper vans with my Lego, and the little plastic people would go on epic journeys across the wilderness of the living room floor.
I only started to really travel a few years ago. It began as something I did for a while every couple of years, and now it is what I do eighty percent of the time.
Right now, there is no one place I call home.  Sometimes I refer to Australia as “home”, but that is not truly the case any more.  I joke with people someimes and say;
“well, this is my front yard” (gesturing in front of me) “and this is my back yard” (jerking my thumb over my shoulder).
I have some clothes and stuff in my dad’s shed.  I visit my parents place near Jervis Bay for a week or two at a time when I’m in Australia.  Mum and Dad will always feel like home I guess.  My sister and brother live close to them too, and my uncle, and aunt.  It’s family.
These days, I feel very comfortable with the idea that my home is where I am right now… wherever that is.

Q: “How do you financially sustain your travels?”
A: One part of being able to roam freely is being stingy with dollars. I have found ways to move around, sleep, and eat with minimum expenditure. (See my pages on free transport, free accommodation and free food.) I do spend an average of about US$12.00 a day though, so sooner or later I have to make some money. As of now, I work at whatever I can to make a few dollars now and then.  Painting houses in Australia is a very good earner for me.  Not many tools required.  Safe work.  Self employed.  I will do some massage professionally when I go back to Oz next time, too.  Been learning lots of new skills lately.   Busking in Australia is something I want to try, too.
I am already offering photographic print products for sale in the Raw Safari Print Shop.  In addition I plan to publish an ebook soon.  At some point in the near future, I hope I will be able to sustain myself through this blog.  That is not a reality yet, though. 
[ Share Raw Safari on Facebook.  Tell your friends!  I would like to dedicate more time and energy to the Raw Safari community, and start doing podcasts, and videos, but the resources aren’t there yet.  The more people read the site, the more financially sustainable the project will become. 
There are already so many of you reading the blog every week, and that is exciting. 
:-) Thank you all, friends, for supporting Raw Safari.  Just keep clicking “share“! ]

(Below: one sure way to save money when you travel is to hitchhike. This is the little car I hitchhiked to the Sahara Desert with Bill in.)

Q: “What is your inspiration for travel?”
A: Interesting question. 
Adventure?
Romance?
Music, increasingly.
People!  Emphatically.  It’s all about meeting amazing people.  Humans are endlessly interesting to me.  I especially love talking to other nomads.  People who roam, people who move through culture and time like avid readers through a library.  People like that are so interesting to talk to.
As I travel I experience stories.  I love writing the short stories for the blog.  The situations and characters I experience on the road, in alien cultures, are so vivid.  They inspire me to write like nothing else.
Now, also, I travel so I can learn to be a more expert traveler.  One of the big motivations behind Raw Safari is sharing travel knowledge.  Every day I learn new lessons about living sustainably as a nomad, and passing that information on to other travelers is really inspirational.

I hope those answers are illuminating, Tania. Thanks for traveling with me via the blog, and for your comments, questions and encouragement. See you soon I hope!

  
What do you know? If you have more info to add to this Q and A, please share your thoughts in the comments, below.

 
>> You can find more questions and answers on the Q and A page.
>> Learn how to hitchhike around the world.
>> Read some of my stories from the road and get an idea of what my nomad life is really like.
>> Who writes this blog, anyway?