Blogging Around the World….Literally

This post was guest blogged by Gary Arndt of Everything-Everywhere.com

In a recent post, John pointed out how part of the Dot Com Lifestyle is being able to blog from anywhere. The freedom which blogging offers, however, doesn’t just mean working in your pajamas or from Starbucks. It literally means you can work from almost any corner of the Earth.

In March 2007 I set out to travel around the world and see if I could make a career out of traveling. Since then, I’ve been to 45 countries and territories and have been able to blog from almost all of them. That includes some of the most remote corners of the world such as Easter Island, Palau and East Timor.

Blogging overseas isn’t as hard as most people think. One of the things which has surprised me has been how ubiquitous internet access is today. As I write this, I am in a cafe in Vietnam on a free wifi connection. All over SE Asia, even in poorer countries such as Cambodia, you can almost always find wifi or at least cheap internet cafes ($1/hour or less). In the Marshall Islands, I went to the national communications building where they have an internet connection via satellite and managed to update my site from there. I’ve even done it over packet data terrestrial radio from a village in Fiji!

During my travels I’ve had the pleasure to meet up with several bloggers who have decided to pack up and live overseas in places such as Bali, Fiji, Japan and Thailand. Not only can you earn money from anywhere, but your dollar will usually go much farther overseas (depending on where you live of course). In Vietnam I can easily get by on $30 a day, and could get by on half that if I really needed to. Having an apartment or some sort of permanent residence, as well as cooking your own food can drop that amount even more.

There are challenges you have to overcome. Getting payment can often times be slower than if you lived in North America. While you can get online, bandwidth may be less than what you are used to. (Depending on where you are, it can also be much faster. South Korea has 100mb connections to most houses.) Often, I work ahead and upload photos and video in batches.

I carry more electronics than most people who travel, but it isn’t that much. I have a MacBook Pro as my laptop. I recently purchased a new one in Saigon, but my previous one had lasted me for over a year and a half of heavy travel. A Nikon D200 for my still photography, and a Sanyo Xacti HD1000 as my high-def video camera. I also have 2 external USB hard drives for backing up my photos and video. The total for everything I carry, including clothes, is about 50 pounds.