Is a world trip work or a holiday?
Travel the world with €12
January 25, 2018
Discover the best hike in El Chalten
February 6, 2018
Work or holiday
What is the difference?
"World traveller and travel blogger" that's how Olivier names his current job title. This insinuates it's a job while most of the people associate a world trip with a holiday. When do we talk about a job, when do we say it's a holiday? Working often means something serious, meaningful, where you earn the money. Holiday is fun, relaxing and spending the money. This is why work sometimes has a negative connotation, something we have to do. Everybody is looking forward to vacations, the weekend or a day off. The majority isn't looking forward to the first work day after two weeks of holiday. But what if work and holiday are combined?
Every day we are cycling from ten to five. After this we pitch the tent, make ourself comfortable in a small hostel or in front of the stove of a local farmer. After cooking, we continue our daily tasks. Writing the blog, editing photos and updating the website. At 10pm we can't keep our eyes open anymore and get to bed, satisfied after another nice day. On a day off we make a long to-do list to use our day in the most effective way. Resting is for the legs, not for the mind. This way it looks that we have less 'off-time', but there isn't a single day that we feel mentally tired or that days are a rut. We are never looking forward to holidays or do not feel like working the next day. We do what we like to do. Travelling, meeting people, pushing physical boundaries, living in the nature and write about it.
You don't earn money
A counter-argument we often hear is that we don't earn money and we only spent it. We are paid in encounters with people, beautiful nature and a healthy body. Sometimes we get a free meal or a place to sleep, but a we don't have a steady income. Although we write for other travel blogs and earn a little bit with this. But isn't this the way that many entrepreneurs start a business. Investing with a goal, a dream. It takes weeks, sometimes months or years before all the efforts are paid back.
We started in september 2016 with our dream. We invested in a web page by purshasing a professional theme and decent web hosting.
At the start only friends and family followed our adventure. Our travel blog contained only the first travel stories and there was no commercial value. Every day we work on the content on our website are try to enlarge our social media accounts. One year long the growth is steady but we still are far away from a profession travel blog. The time we invest isn't related to the result. But suddenly there is that moment that your travel blog is discovered. Our Instagram account triples in two months time and you become interesting for certain companies.
Finally a dream inspires other people and value arises. We still don't earn money with our trip, which never was the goal, but we work hard to make our travel blog a succes. A world trip might not be the same thing a putting a new product in the market. But also WeLeaf is a company where we put all our effort in.
Voluntary work
Besides enlarging our website and social media accounts, we do work where we don't earn money, on purpose. Voluntary work is an important theme in our trip and we always try to combine it with the way we travel, using our own strength. During the three months of sailing from Spain to Brazil we collected information about the sea life every day. In collaboration with Sail&Whale we tracked the ocean looking for whales, dolphins and turtles. We learned more about the life under the boat, had an interesting task on the long sailing trips and were contributing to scientific research.
While cycling we also collect different types of data. Together with Adventure Scientists we work on the 'Roadkill observation project'. We take pictures of dead animals which we see on the side of the road. We write down all the information about the location, the road type and the animal. Adventure Scientists uses this information to know more about the influence of traffic on the wildlife. It is helpful information that they use to convince governments to take measures for the protection of animal species threatened with extinction. In the south of Brazil for example, we saw a lot of dead owls and armadillos.
Is it work of holiday? We work every day with a perfect holiday feeling. This is our life! As long as we have this feeling, we keep on doing what we like to day, until the day that we start looking forward to vacations. And you? How do you look at your job? Do you live to work, or work to live?
