Living The Dream: When You Can Have Cake & Eat It Too

Josh met Jon and Kach recently in Istanbul. They admit they aren’t Living The Dream, but they are on their way, at least they hope. First step marriage in December 2016.

Jon and Kach

What was the first country you visited? Who with and why did you choose it?

We both lived abroad before we met, but I'll start with the first country we travelled to together - India. After meeting in Laos and living together in Vietnam for 9 months, we both decided that we wanted to take our yoga practice more seriously, so India seemed the best place to do that!

When did you start a travel lifestyle? What inspired that change?

We both decided to start a travel lifestyle before we had even met each other, both for very similar reasons. Regular job changing and bouncing from one goal to another, with no real outcomes or satisfaction made us reconsider what we really wanted. Apparently neither one of us could figure that out, so we decided to quit, sell, and start travelling, in the hope the the answer to the meaning of life would jump out and slap us in the face. It didn't and it still hasn't, but piece by piece we're discovering what we want and how to get it!

Do you have a base you travel from? Or is it continuous travel? And why do you choose that style?

We have had several temporary bases since we started travelling - Hanoi, Peru, Costa Rica, Bogota - but we're now back on the road again and will be the next year pretty much non-stop until we get married in December 2016. I have always needed to slow down and put down shallow roots here and there to get the most out of travel, which probably comes from having been an expat kid, but now our business - Two Monkeys Travel Group - needs it as much as we do. It's simply not possible to do everything and travel constantly too.

How do you fund your travel lifestyle? Is it something you do when travelling or are you a saver?

We started out with savings from our old jobs when we first set off, but with only around $5000 USD each, this vanished pretty fast. We then saved about $10,000 USD between us, in about 6 months of teaching English in Vietnam, most of which we spent throughout India and getting qualified in Yoga and Ayurveda Massage. These skills became our income when we arrived flat broke in Peru, where I found an old massage table and pushed it around hotels in a rusty old wheelbarrow. We quickly grew this into a massage business, converting our spare bedroom into a treatment room in Arequipa, Peru! Since then, we started our website, which has become a community travel blog and is now our full time business and only source of income.

If you could tell yourself one tip before you started your travel lifestyle, what would it be?

In hindsight, it would have been a hell of a lot easier to just know what we wanted and how to get it from the start, but it was never going to happen like that. Everything that has happened is the result of a process we went through, with a lot of trial and error, and if we had had firm plans and ideas then we probably would be where we are right now.

What does "Living The Dream" mean to you?

In my mind, we're still not quite 'living the travel dream' yet, but we're getting there. Truly living the travel dream will be when we have our cake and eat it too, choosing what to do and when, without doing anything which I still consider to be any kind of work. So not asking much then! Right now though, we have a pretty good compromise, for the most part able to work when and where we want to and earning a decent living out of it at the same time.

You can find Jon Howe here -

Website: Two Monkeys Travel Group

Twitter:  @2monkeystravel  

Working towards a dream life of travel and complete freedom!