Work abroad to extend your trip indefinitely

Travelers Search for Traveling Jobs

Each month about 8,100 travelers search Google for “traveling jobs.” They are searching for a way to balance their wanderlust with work abroad that will finance their globetrotting. Each month, 8,100 travelers look for work abroad, dreaming of getting paid to travel.

Imagine not just getting paid to travel, but getting paid to travel and learn the local language. Imagine this work abroad immerses you in the local culture in a deeply compelling way that few travelers experience. Finally, imagine that this work abroad is something that anyone with two hands and resolve can pull off.

How Antony The Gringo Bracelet Maker Found Work Abroad

Meet Antony. Despite an undemanding smile and a humble demeanor, wherever he goes he causes both locals and gringos to turn their heads and wonder, WTF?

WTF, was what I wondered when I saw him for the first time selling bracelets in Antigua Guatemala’s Parque Central. WTF is this gringo doing selling bracelets, I wondered, noting that he looked neither local, nor Argentinian, nor Chilean (the usual bracelet selling suspects). No he looked puro gringo, and I had never seen a puro gringo, working abroad selling handmade bracelets. I decided that I needed to meet this guy, and I soon did.

Work Abroad: How To Travel Around The World On Bracelets

Antony’s accent is hard to place. It’s not quite English, not quite Australian, and not quite African. He was born in Zimbabwe to an English father and Zimbabwean mother. Escaping oppression of the country’s dictator, his family relocated to Carnarvon, Australia—a small, insular fishing and mining town 900 kilometers away from the nearest city, Perth.

Growing up in Carnarvon, Antony never felt completely grounded. Being from Zimbabwe, he was somewhat of an outsider in Australia and related as much to the Portuguese and Vietnamese immigrants as he did the locals.

His first big trip was to England. After high school, he apprenticed in refrigeration and then took a trip to England. “I realized I was screwed right away,” he recalls, after he a 20-minute bus ride from Oxford to Heathrow cost him $60. Realizing England was bent on breaking his budget, he started hitchhiking across Europe. Her larned an important travel lesson early on—take matters into your own hands.

The Art of Traveling Smart

Antony is one of the most street-smart travelers I’ve ever met. His ravenous intellect is as informed on world affairs as a UN delegation. A natural jack of all trade, he says “I’m obsessed with the things I’m interested in.” This has led him to work in a variety of professional capacities from apprenticing in refrigeration, advertising, animation and a $70/hr gig doing Facebook development out of Melbourne, Australia.

These days, he’s found work abroad that follows him to wherever he chooses to travel—making and selling bracelets.  When I caught up with him, it had been six months since he’d touched his savings account.

Argentinian and Chileans on tight budgets have learned the art of paying for travel through macramé, a style of bracelet/craft making. When Antony linked up with a group of Chilean artesanos, he was looking for ways to make travel cheaper, easier and more interesting. So he befriended these Chileans and in the course of that friendship learned the art of both bracelet making and bracelet vending to pay for his trips.

“You don’t need Lonely planet to find cheap accommodations,” He’ll tell you, “just find artesanos and they’ll tell you where to find cheap accommodations.”

Traveling On a Bracelet Budget

Selling bracelets, Antony has successfully paid for six months of travel. More than that, he’s made unique connections with people everywhere he goes and he has an occupation which keeps his overactive mind and hands busy.

This is important. Travel, especially long-term nomadic travel, can go from being an ideal to a ghost of an ideal if it lacks purpose. That purpose can be learning a language, volunteering, writing, photography, making personal connections, or whatever. But travel without purpose is simply aimless wandering.

Antony is an interesting case study in finding work abroad laced with meaning. He teaches local artisans what he knows and learn from them what they know. He’s befriended all the bracelet venders in Antigua, Guatemala. He’s happy to swap English for Spanish and instead of learning in a classroom has learned his Spanish from talking to locals. They are helpful and warn him when the police might be coming to shut his operation down. While the local’s clients are mostly foreigners, Antony’s clients are locals.

A Way With The World

When I sat with him in the park one day, he was worried that he might have to go to the bank for the first time in six months. He’d been out selling in the park all morning without sales. Then, just as it seemed he would need to break his bank-less streak, three Guatemalan high school girls approached him. They were shy at first—who was this gringo and why was he selling bracelets. But Antony has the gift with knowing how to speak to anyone. He asked them about their studies and which team they were rooting for in the World Cup. By the end of the conversation, two of the three girls bought bracelets in colors of their favorite football team. Antony lived to travel another day.

Work Abroad: The Lesson Is That Anyone Can Do It

“If I died now, I’d be happy” Antony says. He’s found contentment in his wanderings. People who understand what Antony means are a special breed. The lesson of Antony’s bracelet enterprise is not that your work abroad should be bracelet selling—only that it could be. If finances are keeping you back from doing and being where you want to be, they need not. Antony’s story is one of many who have found out how to pay for travel through creativity, dedication and being unafraid to go against the grain.

If you really want to embrace the nomadic life for a time, things will fall in place so long as you believe they will and work until they do.