If you’ve always loved the adventure of travel, there’s a good chance that your hometown just isn’t giving you the excitement you crave anymore. A lot of keen adventurers end up traveling upon leaving school, take a break from work to travel, or when contemplating the future they think about whether they’d be happier if they lived life out of their backpack for an extended period, or by moving to live in a foreign country.
While backpacking is a less permanent option than living abroad, there are pros and cons to each choice. Here, we’ll look at just some of the factors you’ll need to consider when planning your future.
Backpacking
If one of your biggest joys in life is simply packing up your travel essentials and heading off to somewhere new, then backpacking is probably the way of life that appeals most to your instincts. When you decide to backpack around the world, you open yourself up to a sense of freedom and exploration that you just can’t get in any other way.
While moving to a new destination offers plenty of opportunities for personal development and exploration, your focus will likely be on settling down in a new place and establishing your life in a different country. With backpacking, there’s no concrete end goal. You can move from one city, or country to another very quickly these days, changing your plans almost entirely on a whim.
Of course, this kind of lifestyle is rarely something that lasts forever, eventually, you might get tired of traveling and decide that you want to settle down, relax, and enjoy the comforts of family life.
Living abroad
Just like backpacking, living in a different country is a great opportunity to meet new people, absorb new cultures, and explore places that you might never have seen before. The difference here is that you’re choosing to actively live in a new place, rather than moving from one location to another.
Living abroad gives you the excitement of traveling, along with the comforts of home. While some people consider this option less liberating than backpacking, others prefer the stability of living somewhere new.
If you have a family, living and working abroad can be the perfect option, as it gives you a great way to introduce your children to experiences and opportunities they would never have back home. If you moved to Asia, you could enroll your kids in a Hong Kong International School, where they will receive an excellent education tailor-made to suit students from many different countries. Language is not a problem because English is the language used. The schools have examinations that result in pupils obtaining qualifications that are recognized internationally.
Which option should you pick?
Ultimately, your decision of whether to live abroad, or dedicate some time to backpacking around the world will be one that you have to make according to your unique circumstances and preferences. While families with small children might be better suited to life living in a different country, single adventurers and couples might be able to feed their adventurous spirit by backpacking around the world.
