21 June 2023
Nathan James Thomas is originally from New Zealand but left to travel 20,000 kilometres on the Greyhound Bus network in Australia when he was 17 years old. Over the next decade he lived in China, Spain, Poland, and Hungary, visiting and experiencing dozens of other countries along the way.
In 2014, Nathan founded the digital travel magazine Intrepid Times as a vehicle for sharing stories from the road and as an excuse to meet and interview his favorite writers. It has since grown into a thriving global community of thousands of writers and travellers. Nathan’s own travel writing has been published in places like Roads and Kingdoms and Outpost Magazine.
His latest book, Untethered, which delves into his life as a digital nomad, has just been released and I tracked him down in Poland to answer five questions about his life on the road.
How did you become a digital nomad? Can you tell us about your journey?
I started the better part of 10 years ago. Back then, I’m not even sure the term ‘digital nomad’ existed, and it was never an explicit goal like “I’m going to be a digital nomad now.” I wanted to travel—needed to travel—and had to support myself doing so. I had worked online in the past and knew a little about how to make money on the web, and had a writing background. So I combined those three things—writing, travel, and online business—into the seeds of what became my digital nomad lifestyle.
The actual journey for me began in China. I’d graduated from Otago and spent a few months travelling around Europe before starting a semester of study in Chengdu in Sichuan and then relocating to Shanghai. While in Shanghai, I got some of my first paid writing gigs, which included blogging for a China travel company (I pitched myself to them out of the blue and was astonished they took me on), and also followed a rabbit hole of connections that lead me to doing copywriting and marketing work for a Belgian film production company — I kept working for the latter company for many years and met the owner about eight years after first creating a website for him.
Those first gigs gave me confidence and built my portfolio, making it easier to find more clients as I travelled. Travel fuelled the growth of the business because I’d meet interesting people on the road who needed the writing and communication skills I had, and this, in turn, fuelled more travel, so at its best it became a kind of symbiotic relationship, like a wheel gathering speed with each rotation. I share in Untethered how I met an early writing client in a bar in Poland—once I had confidence in what I did, it seems things like this just kept happening. Eventually, I got better at determining the kind of work where I could have the most impact and be best compensated and started getting a bit more strategic about the kind of work I was doing and for who. But at the start, like so many freelancers, I just took whatever gigs I could get.
How do you stay productive while on the road? Do you have a routine or schedule?
You have to be onto it because you’re juggling not just the demands of work/running a business (and that’s quite enough as it is!) but also the complexities of travel, visas, packing, and time zones. I’m pretty low-tech so I don’t use any particularly fancy planning software—I write to-do lists for each day of the week with Evernote. Every Sunday, I write out my schedule for the week ahead, and the manual nature of the process is helpful. By writing out an appointment or task or goal, I internally process it and prepare myself for what is ahead. Every week is different but a few commonalities create a sense of routine and control which is useful when every other aspect of life is so unpredictable. I’m constantly using timeanddate.com to convert time zones between myself and various clients and partners in different parts of the world, and often have to be the one to bite the bullet for a late-night or early-morning Zoom call. Coffee generally sees me through these situations with (most of) my sanity intact.
It has been a weird few years for travelling with COVID. How have you found it?
Weird is the right word! My partner and I were actually in Albania when the lockdowns hit, we’d moved there planning to work remotely for a month but found ourselves locked down there for four or five months before we could get into the EU. I was in touch with the New Zealand embassy in Rome—the closest diplomatic support—but road closures meant it was logistically impossible to get out. So we made the best of it. Saranda, our town, was warm and pleasant and there were good days amidst all of the madness. We never intended to travel ‘despite Covid’ and respected all the restrictions wherever we were, but not having a permanent apartment at the time meant we found ourselves moving around a lot during the windows of openness that came and went during those years. Aside from Albania, we spent time in Poland, Spain, and Georgia, and a lot of work went into triangulating Covid restrictions, relative freedom of movement, cost of living, and lifestyle in these various places.
What are the most important skills you’ve learned while working on the road?
Understanding the value you bring to others—the real value. For example, I’m a writer and a communications consultant and I work with a lot of businesses that want to stand out in the English-speaking world but they don’t have a lot of native speakers on the team. I know the edge I give them is not only better sales, but it’s also confidence, knowing that they can proudly put themselves out there to the world, expressing their story and why they matter. Knowing the real value you can provide helps you choose your clients and work a lot more selectively as you travel.
I’ve also discovered the art of getting work done anywhere, at any time. A recent experience that comes to mind is 4:00 AM at an airport in Buenos Aires. Our plane was a little late and I’m always outrageously early to airports anyway, so I sat in the coffeeshop of the small departure lounge at the domestic terminal and wrote a chapter I’d been commissioned to write for an upcoming Lonely Planet guide—actually, it was about the best places to eat in Tirana, the capital of Albania! Writing about Albania from an airport in Argentina to me captures much of the beauty and absurdity of the digital nomad life, and I hope I can have many more strange and interesting mornings like that.
What is your favourite place you’ve visited to date? And where would you go if you could go absolutely anywhere?
I’ve mentioned Albania a few times and am delighted to see that (thanks to TikTok I think) it’s having a bit of a trendy moment, it’s massively underrated, as is the country of Georgia. I’m always quick to sing the praises of Poland—I think most Kiwis may visit Krakow as part of the OE or the Eurotrip and Krakow is gorgeous but there’s so much more to Poland as well. As for where I would go if I could go anywhere? Well, sometimes I just wish New Zealand was a little bit closer to everything else, so I could nip home more often for a weekend and see my parents and sister more often… but then again whenever I’m back home, I’m strangely grateful for that splendid isolation which makes New Zealand feel all that more special.
