From the outside, it's easy to look at people who take part in long term travel and think that it's all rosy and exciting. Exotic new places all the time, no 9-5 job and responsibilities back home....
People seem to think that as a traveller you have walked away from all worries and stresses in your lives.
But there are some major stresses and problems that you face while travelling. All those that Mell mentions above. You leave your family and friends and don't have the opportunity to see them for sometimes a year or more. You miss birthdays, weddings, the birth of children. Your family and friends continue their lives without you and you can feel left out. If you are on the other side of the world there is very little opportunity to pop back for a quick visit to catch up. You want to go to a close friend's wedding, but when you calculate how much the flights/ transport/ cost of living would be to fly home, your realise that it's just not possible. The best you get is to look at photos of everyone having a great time on Facebook.
If you get a minor illness - you are on your own with noone to bring you medicine, food and water. Noone to check you are ok and rub your back when you feel rubbish. If you get something more serious, you could end up in a foreign hospital where you don't really understand what's going on, and there is noone to visit you.
If you are travelling and not working, you always have the worry of how much money you are spending, whether you have enough to finish your trip, how to save money without missing out on the best experiences of a place.
There are stresses from home that can follow you. Renting your house out requires the worry of whether you will always be able to pay the mortgage, whether your tenants are reliable, mending things that break etc.
If you want to sell it or renew your mortgage - well that's not easy/sometimes impossible while you don't have a stable job.
Sometimes you have to do tax returns for your home country, not the easiest thing from the other side of the World.
After a couple of months of living out of a backpack, you get sick of wearing the same clothes and shoes all the time. You wish you had some nice toiletries, or some different make up and jewellery to wear (if you are a girl). You need a decent haircut but you are keeping your hair in a manageable style. This manageable style basically means that it sticks up constantly because of the humidity. You miss spending more than 3 nights in the same bed. You miss cooking your own food.
If you start working abroad, there are still problems you face - living in a strange country where you don't really speak the language or understand how everything works, day to day things like managing a bank account when you can't read the forms, visiting a doctor or dentist, visas and work permits, still working out if you have enough money to live, and deciding when to move on when you don't necessarily have the promise of another job.
Just like home, we work all day and have two days off a week. We get up, go to work, come home, cook dinner and go to bed.
And then you still miss your family and friends as above.
This isn't that we would change what we are doing. Not for anything. We love our lives and it was definitely the right decision. We have seen some amazing things, visited some great places, met some wonderful people - perhaps that's what you mean by 'at the end'.
But to those who look on and think that we have 'dropped out' and have a much easier life than people back home, to people who want to travel and can only see the positive side, it's not all temples, all night parties and lazing on the beach.
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