I'm a digital nomad

In September 2015, my wife and I hopped onto Finnair’s wings. The plane would take us from the autumn-stricken Helsinki to Singapore. A week long holiday in tropic after no summer holidays sounded good to me. Seven days of sweating and air-conditioned shopping malls later, we hopped over to Australia. There we would spend the next 6 months or so working as a ‘digital nomad.’ We are already 6 months in and it’s been great!

The idea for this trip came to me in 2009. At the time I was working as an IT Trainee at UPM, a global forest industry company. I enjoyed working with this Australian bloke and somehow we all started joking around about me moving to Australia to work on UPM’s IT. The “joke” stuck with me and I started saving money for the trip. Saving is easy, but saving to stay in Australia for several months is not easy. I left UPM in 2010 and didn’t feel like going back to work there. So my plan was to find a job at an Australian company, but in the end I happened to find something different: in 2013 I got a remote-friendly position at Flockler and could live anywhere with Internet.

We bought plane tickets for all the major flights at the start of May 2015, 4 months before leaving for the trip. HEL→SIN, SIN→DRW, BNE→NRT, and NRT→HEL¹. The next day we started selling our stuff and gave notice on our lease. Getting rid of all that stuff felt so good! Right now my belongings consist of my Macbook, a camera, miscellaneous computer stuff (like cables, a mouse & keyboard), and a suitcase full of clothes. And I feel good about owning so little even though I could do with less clothes, hehe.

So we flew to Singapore. Then we hopped to Darwin, the north-most big city of Australia and spent another week on holiday there. After Darwin we flew straight down the middle of Australia to Adelaide. Adelaide was a lovely place, we were there for 12 days and I worked at Cocolat café through most of that. From Adelaide it was a 1 hour flight to Melbourne where we spent 3 months. Melbourne is amazing, probably my favorite city in the world! Then I took another week of holidays to travel via Wagga Wagga & Canberra to Sydney where we stayed for 1 month. I met with an old university friend and worked from their office for a few days. We took an extended weekend trip to get to Brisbane through Byron Bay, and now we are in Brisbane. We will be here for 3 months.

I’m not sure how to put the experience in words, but I’ll say this: trying to work while moving from city to city every week or few days is not easy. I full-heartedly recommend staying in one place for at least a month, preferably several. Slow travel. Suits me perfectly.

Anyways. I just wanted to drop a quick memo/update on what’s been going on. Let me know if you’d like to know details about stuff, like living arrangements, expenses and so on!

P.S. If you’re fluent with Finnish, check out our travel blog.