Leaving Dubai to Travel Around the World – and Blog!

Fifteen years in the desert… and now it’s time to leave Dubai, our home, and travel around the world – so time to start a blog I guess! I don’t know whether I’ve quite come to terms with the idea of not living here yet. Only time will tell I guess.

Dubai has been our home for well over a decade and the only home our children have known. But when you get that feeling like it’s time to go, you go with your gut right? Family feels so far away, and we find ourselves (The Mama and the Papa) regularly giving our kids a pop quiz on cousins names. So it certainly feels like we need to get them home to New Zealand at some point. However, for now we’ll just say goodbye to Dubai, and gradually make our way back.

This idea of long-term travel is not one that we have stumbled upon, or come to lightly. We have researched, read and discussed all scenarios, that we could possibly think of. Education, safety, health, finance, travel logistics, locations, personal well-being… and the list goes on!

But at the end of the day, the more we read the more convinced we are that our next chapter in life, our journey is the right decision for our free range family.

We hope that this will ground us after ‘This Dubai Life’ (more on that later), and will bring us even closer together. We want to learn in a new context, new languages, new cultures, perspectives (and certainly more on that later too). For now, let me tell you about the how! How we packed up our Dubai Life to hit the road…

The when?

Returning from a day dive trip in Koh Samui, The Papa and I began dreaming about what if? What if we said goodbye to the busy city life and what if we had to live on a tighter budget. Could we make it work? That was the day the seed was planted. And to be honest the day dreams and decisions forward developed from there. From this point onwards it was time to start saving and planning the HOW… how we would make it happen.

The how?

We printed giant stickers of two regions in the world that we wanted to explore. South East Asia and Central/South America. From there, we highlighted countries, places that took our interest, destinations that we knew we could live for long periods of time for less. But the plan constantly changed and evolved, before long we had narrowed in on Central and South America. The benefits included – the potential to learn a new language, less time and money spent on flying between countries, and the FOOD!

Researching websites and following the social media channels of other travellers who travel around the world and blog, has really helped. We initially took inspiration from the Bucket List Family, then delved deeper into others such as the World Travel Family. We found watching the journey of YouTubers extremely valuable. Some of our favourites include Eamon and Bec, Kombi Life and Sailing La Vagabonde. Overall, their experiences gave clarity to our developing plans… and so the HOW progressively continued to take shape.

Over time and through a lot of reading we have discovered many families who have made similar plans. Each have slightly different approaches to the way in which they travel. But it is certainly reassuring to know their is a community of people who are doing it and are ready to share their knowledge and resources.

So there we go! Now in the months leading up to our departure we will update with our plans, challenges and successes to our world family travel. In the meantime be sure to subscribe to our blog to follow our journey of world travel. Also connect with us on social media, and drop us a line if you see that we are nearby. We love to meet new people!