Sharing Travel Experiences

Travel the World as a Nomadic Mom

by A Guest Writer

In case you didn’t get the hint last week when I spoke with Travel Savvy Kayt, it’s ok to travel with children.  Even if it’s a LOT.

This week’s interview is a long one, so I’ll keep it short….

Could you briefly introduce yourself?

I am a 29 year old single mother of a precocious, spirited, funny and energetic eight year old daughter called Katie. We left England in June 2008 after a traumatic twelve months that included a personal tragedy and nearly losing everything. It enabled me to take stock and bite the bullet and follow a dream of traveling the world. Before her father and I split up we planned a long trip but after the break up I thought there was no way I could go through it with it on my own.

I sunk into a depression and found my escape through reading travel websites and other peoples travel blogs. I realized that this was no way to live my life and neither was it sending out a positive message to Katie. I started showing Katie pictures of other countries and asking what she thought about visiting other countries and she was very open to it. If she hadn’t of been so open to it then we wouldn’t have done this trip. Katie was excited about doing it and we were playing lots of travel related games and books in preparation but I still had nagging doubts that I couldn’t do it on my own as a single mother.

But when it came to crunch time in 2007 I decided that there was no way I was going to put my life on hold because I was on my own and if there was a way of doing it then we would, and there was no better time to do it. When I knew there was a serious chance that we would be able to do a long round the world trip I spoke to Katie about it and she said she still wanted to do it. She couldn’t comprehend other countries and cultures so she left the planning of the route to me. Though Katie had been repeatedly asking to go to India since she was five years old. She also loves to travel and has been traveling since she was ten months old when her father and I took her backpacking around Western Europe and she celebrated her first birthday in Sicily at the foot of Mt. Etna.

Katie and I aren’t rich, we were fortunate to have enough money to set off with once I had sold my house and paid off my rather large mortgage but we have been traveling simply, and once airfare is paid for you don’t need a lot to walk around and visit the sights, see temples, unless you want to stay in hotels with a pool and a gym and eat in restaurants all the time.

Wow, incredible – just the two of you traveling the world. What do you have to say to those that think you’re crazy, or who themselves are scared of travelling?

There may be some who think we are crazy, not that it has been said to my face! As we have met people and told them what we are doing the response has been really positive, the two most common questions people ask are what about Katie’s education and whether it is hard to travel with a child. When we left England I packed a load of textbooks that we worked through whenever we were sitting down, whether it be on a bus, in a park or as we were waiting for our meals to be served. The internet has also been an invaluable tool but also there is a lot of reading and math in our day to day lives as well as the broad education that traveling by its very essence provides. When we reached our first English speaking country since leaving the UK, which was the US, I stocked up on lots more books and educational tools for the next school year.

The second question is harder, is it hard traveling with a child? Well yes, at times it is very hard, but so is being a single mother, and the challenges that single parenthood gives are much easier to swallow when trekking through the jungle or relaxing on a beach! Single parenthood and travel pose challenges, it is part of the nature of them; I just have a different set of challenges to other single parents or travelers.

There have been times after a stressful day when I would love for there to be another person to take the pressure off, or for one of us to sit with Katie in a cafe or park while the other tramps off to find accommodation, or just to look after Katie so I can have a day to myself. Luckily, Katie and I were very close even before this trip started, and though being together twenty-four hours a day for ninety-nine percent of the past fourteen months has been pretty intense at times it is nothing we haven’t been able to get through. Although, I am the kind of person that likes my own personal space and I have found it hard not having any. There was one occasion when I had no choice but to lock myself in the bathroom for an hour just to regain some sanity!

Some of the countries we have visited could be perceived as crazy choices though. We have been to a couple of countries some would describe as high risk. My family were very concerned when I told them Syria was on the list and it was one of the countries I was most excited about visiting. Other travelers we met in Turkey who were coming from Syria all had a good word to say about it. We really enjoyed Syria, in fact, it is too long a tale to recount in this interview but I shall be writing about it on my blog, is about an overwhelming act of kindness from a stranger in Aleppo when no ATMs would give me money, I couldn’t exchange any travelers checks because the banks there had stopped accepting them, and I didn’t even have enough to buy us breakfast or make a phonecall, because I had just had to use our emergency stash for something else. It was in the early days of our trip and I was in an absolute state of panic, but trying to remain calm on the surface for Katie’s sake. Yet the man who ran a tour agency out of the hotel we were staying in, who was to all intents a stranger to us and owed us no help, came to our aid and really helped us out and enabled our financial crisis to be solved.

It worked out on a couple of occasions in Damascus, when Katie was being looked after, that I had to walk home on my own in the very early hours of the morning through deserted streets of downtown Damascus. This is not something I would do even in my home city of London and I didn’t like doing it, but I didn’t get so much as a whistle or a word from passing strangers, and on one particular road I saw a night worker keeping a watchful eye on me, and I mean watchful in a good way! Syria was a very positive experience for us and I was pleased I didn’t listen to those who said I was crazy for wanting to go there.

We were advised not to travel to Mexico as it was during the height of the Swine Flu outbreak but by the time we traveled the health and travel warnings had been lifted. I was also nervous about all the bad media Mexico has attracted about kidnappings in Mexico City and wasn’t intending to stay in the capital itself, however changing my mind and spending a month or two living in Mexico City has been one of the best things we have done.

I would say the thought of a long trip or traveling to a far off country for an extended period of time is much more scary than the actual deed. I still get a week of nerves before leaving for a new country but we have such a great time once we arrive that the anxiety quickly disappears. Talking and making connections with other traveling families through forums and blogs is a great way of getting highly useful information and allaying any pre-arrival jitters. Don’t do too much planning or preparation before you go, but get a good idea of what to expect once you leave to prevent unnecessary amounts of culture shock. The safest countries to start off with would be ones where, though the culture may be different, the language is the same. As a general rule we have found Thailand, Bali, Israel and Mexico very child friendly and safe. And of course the U.S. but it blew our budget!

What does Katie say about all this? Does she have input on where you roam, is it a joint effort, or is it what-mum-says-goes?

Andy’s Caption:  Katie, obviously the type to take full control of the travel guide at all times.

Katie is the kind of child where not having an input is just not an option! I tried to involve her in every step of planning the route we took but she wasn’t interested, instead she enjoys making a decision on a more micro scale, deciding what we do day by day once we have reached the destination. So in that way it is a joint effort. I had to put my foot down in a big way while we were in St. Louis in the U.S. when she saw a report on the news about Somali pirates and insisted we go straight to Somalia so she could meet real life pirates. I had to explain to her that Captain Jack Sparrow is not a genuine example of a real pirate and going to Somalia wouldn’t mean we could then jump on a boat and have a swashbuckling adventure on the high seas. When I told her about what pirates really are, and not the Disneyfied characters, she soon changed her mind and didn’t mention it again.

Saying that, if all pirates really were like Captain Jack Sparrow, I would have been on the internet booking tickets on the first plane to Somalia before she’d even popped the question!

I think I read recently that Katie is in a summer camp and you’re starting English language group. Are you making a concerted effort to mingle with the locals?

Yes you read right. I recently enrolled Katie in a local summer camp here in Mexico City so now I have five hours of free time every day during the week and for the first time she is getting regular socialization with other children. I organized an English conversational group during those hours with locals who want to improve their English, which will help me make some money, and it is also a great way for me to make new friends.

I always make an effort to mix with locals as it adds so much more to the trip than just passing through a country and I have learnt a lot through friends I have made. I can be quite a shy person until I get to know someone, I don’t open up easily, but traveling has changed that, as the pace of travel doesn’t allow for friendships to grow slowly over a period of time. Katie and I are both much more confidant and outgoing since starting this trip. I have struck up conversations in a way I never thought I would do in this lifetime!

I don’t feel intimidated once I get over the initial culture shock of being in a different country, I think it is because locals have a natural curiosity of tourists and want to hear all about your home country and having a child with me is a fantastic ice-breaker. We have had interactions with locals that I would never have had as a solo traveler without a child.

The one exception to this was Hama in Syria, which is a very conservative city where we felt highly intimidated and scared every time we left the guesthouse. Almost every man we passed on the street would make nasty comments or sounds at us even though I covered up in accordance with local custom and women wouldn’t even look at us. Even buying a packet of gum for Katie from a street-side stall was a nasty experience that I won’t forget. We didn’t like to leave the guesthouse, not even to eat.

We wanted to leave as soon as possible but couldn’t as I got very ill with suspected giardiasis and couldn’t leave the hotel room save for five minutes to get food for Katie. We left Hama as soon as we could, we should have stayed longer so I could fully recuperate and I wasn’t really well enough to travel but we got out of there as soon as I had improved enough for Immodium to have some effect!

But the rest of Syria was astoundingly beautiful and friendly, and was overall a fantastic and positive experience for us.

The easiest way we have found of mixing with locals is through Couchsurfing.org. It is so much more than a way of finding free accommodation. It is like a cultural exchange where you stay with a local, see how they live and if you are lucky you get to meet their friends and family. We were invited to a large meal at the parents of our host in Kuching, Borneo, who was of Chinese descent to round off the Chinese New Year. And we always travel on public transport, the type that locals use, there were only two occasions when we had to use transport designed for tourists, both times was in Thailand, and both were equally dismal.

What’s been the most inspirational place you’ve been?

My first eureka moment was when had just left England and I was sitting by the pool of our hotel in Turkey in the sunshine on the first day of our trip. Our last few days in England had been so hectic and stressful that nothing had really sunk in until that moment. My chest tightened with excitement and anticipation of all that lay ahead. Before we left England it still felt like the trip was a dream, that it wasn’t quite real. When it struck me that the trip had started, that it was happening at that very moment, everything preceding it felt quite detached and dreamlike.

The real knock me down kind of eureka event happened much later on in the trip when we went to Bali.

I think it is rather a cliché to say that going to Ubud in Bali is a near spiritual event, spirituality flows and ripples through it. The Balinese practice a unique form of Hinduism and place gifts for their Gods several times a day. You see them everywhere and the smell of incense is pervasive. Even when we put clothes in the laundry they would be returned permeated with the most sensuous uplifting scents so that we found we were sending clothes to the laundry on a daily basis just for the beautiful smell they were returned with. When the clothes came back the entire hotel room was filled with the most beautiful smell.

Balinese Hinduism is a very gentle beautiful form of worship and it makes you feel particularly connected to the world, both physically and spiritually. You can’t help but be caught up in it and it makes you feel very alive and in touch with everything around you. But there was something else as well.

I had arranged childcare for Katie in the afternoons through the local library there, it was the first time since leaving England, and the only time until we arrived in Mexico City, when Katie joined a local summer camp, when I was to have any time to myself. I read in a local English newspaper about an upcoming art course, where through meditation and movement to music you would later on express yourself through producing artwork. It seemed rather far out and I am not creative at all, that is Katie’s forte, but I decided to do it anyway just because I wanted to do something for myself. It started the following day so I quickly put my name down on the list and arranged extra childcare for Katie as the course was over the period of two full days.

It turned out to be absolutely amazing, it wasn’t hippyish, or far out, things that I really don’t have patience for. The group was made up of ex-pats and everyone already knew each other but I was made to feel welcome from the get go. A couple of people got emotional and a lot of things surfaced for me from the traumatic times I had experienced in the years before the trip that I mentioned earlier. I really broke down and I found some of the things that quiet meditation made me aware of quite overwhelming. But since that day I haven’t had any flashbacks or periodic moments of extreme sadness, so for me, that was the biggest eureka moment of the trip, because through that course I received a lot of healing and insight and a lot of things that haunted me before no longer have any power over me.

So what’s upcoming on the agenda? Are you on the road forever or just until something better comes along?

I don’t think things can get better than this. Katie and I are learning so much about ourselves and the world around us. Her confidence has come on leaps and bounds since leaving England, she is no longer the shy girl who would stand quietly until she had everyone sussed out. She can hold her own in any company and is learning a wide range of skills that will set her well in the future. Forever is a long time, we don’t know what the future holds. Of course if either of us ever felt the strong desire to return home to England or settle in one place for an extended amount of time then we would, but we are both so happy right now and are excited about continuing.

We have changed our style of travel though. Katie was getting very tired of moving around from place to place every few days so now we are renting a room in an apartment and intend on staying in each place at least a month or two before moving on and it is working well.

We planned for a year and had a route and a plan we wanted to achieve, we’ve done that now and we are in our fourteenth month. We didn’t plan for this, but we want to keep going, so everything from here on out is without an agenda and I think that is the biggest adventure of all!

If little Katie can see the world, why can't you?

What are you waiting for? Travel More with our Special Offers

Get hands-on travel help from Donna, our travel concierge.