Adventure Update

Before you read our next story about Varanasi, we have to tell you why we are so late in publishing our articles! So here are some fresh news from Dubai.

First, what about our mission to understand and find happiness at work? Since the beginning of our trip, we’ve met a lot of people from everywhere in the world. Sometimes we had insightful conversations. Sometimes we didn’t because of language barrier. Not everyone speaks good English and unfortunately we don’t speak the language of everyone we meet (even if one day we may be able to thanks to technology!). This often didn’t allow us to share deep ideas with some people.

In the last countries we’ve crossed, Pakistan, India, Oman, we’ve met people having several jobs at the same time: a little business, a tourist business, and some other ways to get money. But not a 9-5 job. Even if not earning a lot of money, people were happy and moreover, they looked quite free to divide their time for each activity and for leisure. The most visible consequence of this is that almost all the people hosting us in their homes never told us “OK now I have to go to work”. They had a lot of time, and their work was always super flexible. This is something you won’t see a lot in Western countries! To a certain extend, multiplying sources of earning money is the fundamental principle (to another scale) of the Four hours Week by Timothy Ferris. We realized we had already started to go towards this lifestyle. Today, Alex still gets earnings from his book published in 2013 about web development using a special framework, Symfony. He has to regularly work to update his book and online course and has been re-published last October with Erolles. This was a good beginning.

But moreover, during our stay in Lucknow, when coughing in our bed, we had a super great idea for a website. And since we left Lucknow we haven’t stopped thinking, brainstorming, working hard on it. What is it? We cannot tell you the details now, but it’s an innovative collaborative website about travelling and helping travellers find useful content to prepare their trip! This idea we’re working on has opened our eyes on two things.

First, we cannot travel on the long term like we do now without having some added-value activity. Preparing this trip has been our project for a few years, and now we’re doing it, we feel the need to start making new plans for the future. We need to keep our minds working, creating new concepts, finding new solutions. Before starting our big adventure, we remember meeting a couple back from a world tour. They told us they were happy to go back to work after a year and that they had looked forward to it even when their trip wasn’t finished. It surprised us, but now we realized what they could have felt. Since the beginning of our trip, Alex has been happy to regularly do web development for VillaFinder, the client he had in Singapore, but we needed to create something together. A project that would made us challenge each other. And now this idea is becoming a tangible website. We want to enjoy working on this website, make it a quality website thanks to Alex’s skills in web development and my great interest in web design. Better than earning money with it, we want to prove ourselves that we can push this project to the step when travellers will go to our website and realize it’s so helpful for them to prepare their trip. That’s what will make us happy that day.

What about the second thing we realized? The pace of our trip doesn’t fit our personality. We like to settle and immerse ourselves in places. Three days, one week, two weeks in the same place is not enough for us to feel totally good. So we think that the best way for us to travel and discover the world would be to stay a few months in the same place and work remotely on our projects while creating a true routine until we move to the next place. We’ve spent a lot of time in Dubai (quite against our will! Long story… we’ll tell you about later!), but during this time, in our lively Pakistani neighborhood, we started to create relationships with the people, eating regularly at the same cheap restaurants, going to the same Pakistani supermarket… It was a good feeling to see the same friendly faces, happier and happier to see us as long as we were there.
Still, we need to experience a slower lifestyle, thanks to house sitting opportunities maybe, to see if it really fits us. But on another side, the human dimension is also important to us when we visit a place. Today we meet a lot of people but no longer enough for creating the deep friendships that we need. We also feel that even a few months is not enough to create new friendships with people. Today most of our friends are in France or planning to go back there. Our families live in Europe as well. So what’s the solution? Six months abroad and six months in France?

The reflexion is not finished yet! And we hope to tell you more about this in the next few months. But as you see we have a good program on going! As you guess, we need to divide our time between meeting new people, discovering new places, eating amazing new food, telling you everything on our blog and through our videos, and working on our big project! Sometimes we don’t manage to balance all of this. Especially when we have a new idea and spend the day working on it. But we’re happy like this and we have time to discover the world at our pace.

Tomorrow we should be taking the ferry to Iran… Stay tuned!