I told a man to keep it loose.
Chiang Mai, a plastic table outside a laundry that also sold coffee and did neither of them well. He was about 50. Grey polo shirt, the sort with a small company logo on the chest. He had been out here 3 weeks and he asked me the question everybody asks, which is where to go and how long he could stay there.
I gave him the answer I would have wanted. Do not sign anything. 30 days here, run down to Penang, come back in, try Da Nang for a month, see which one sticks. Keep the bag light. You can always leave.
I was pleased with that answer. I felt like I had earned it.
It is the worst advice I have ever given anybody out here.
I saw him again about 4 months later, in a different town, in a coffee place I did not like.
He looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. 5 towns by then. He told me, and I remember it because of how small it was, that he had bought soy sauce, cooking oil and a sponge in 4 different kitchens and walked away from all of it every time.
He still had the lanyard from his office on his room key. Blue, company name printed down the strap. He had not been inside that office for over a year.
He was not a traveller. He never had been. He had a full time job with a manager and a payroll department and 25 days of holiday, and what he wanted was his normal life moved somewhere with sun in it, for less money than it cost at home. A flat. A gym he would go to often enough to get bored of. A doctor. A shelf.
I heard the words digital nomad and I answered the words instead of the man.
There are 2 completely different lives out here and they are sharing one word.
One of them came to move. The country is the thing being used. The room is where the bag goes at night and it does not have to be good, because he is barely in it, and in 6 weeks it will be another room in another country and that is the whole point.
The other one came to live somewhere else. The country is just the place where his life is going to happen. The room is where he will open his eyes every morning for the next 2 years, so the room matters more than almost anything, and travel is a thing he does twice a year when there is a reason for it.
Both of them call themselves digital nomads. They sit at the same table. They give each other advice.
You can watch this go wrong in any conversation about rent.
One man says the town has got expensive and a place now costs 2,000 a month. Another says he pays 250 and the first man is being robbed. They will go at each other for an hour and neither will move, because they are not actually disagreeing about anything.
250 is right if you are gone by March. That room is not a home, it is somewhere to leave a bag between airports, and spending more on it would be stupid.
2,000 is also right, if that is the kitchen where somebody is going to cook 500 dinners. Cheap means nothing until you say how long you are staying, and nobody ever says.
The paperwork splits the same way, and this one costs real money.
If you are moving, you want short and easy. A stamp nobody thinks about, no forms, no relationship with anybody official, and the freedom to be gone on Thursday.
If you are staying, you want the opposite. You want length. A visa that renews. Something a landlord will accept for a 12 month lease, and something a bank will look at without asking you 4 more questions.
A country can be excellent for one of those and useless for the other. The article you read called it nomad friendly and stopped there.
There is a test for this and it takes about 10 seconds.
Picture signing a 12 month lease on a flat, tomorrow, in the town you are sitting in now. If your chest gets tight, you came to move. If you feel relieved, you came to live somewhere, and you have probably been living out of a bag on purpose because somebody told you that staying flexible was the whole point.
Then the second one. Free Saturday, new town, nothing booked. Do you go and see the thing everybody comes to see, or do you go and find the good supermarket. Both answers are fine. Only one of them survives a year of 30 day visas.
I know which one I am now. That took a while and it is not worth writing down.
Almost nobody gets asked, is the thing. You get asked where you are from, and what you do, and where you are going next. Nobody asks what you came out here for. Half the people I know have never said it out loud, including to themselves.
There is one thing I look at now, before I ask anybody anything.
Whether there is something in the room that will not go in a bag.
A rice cooker. Shoes that are only for the gym. A plant on the windowsill, which is the loudest one of all, because you do not buy a plant for 5 weeks.
It does not tell me whether somebody is happy out here. It tells me what they came for, which is a different thing, and a better question.
I never found out what happened to the man with the lanyard. Somebody said Da Nang, and a year on a lease. I hope that is right.
Andrew - No Refunds •••