Become a travel content creator with Kash Bhattacharya
Hello and welcome to the very first episode of The Remote Life! My name is Han Talbot, known online as Han Meets World, and I’m so incredibly excited to begin this podcast journey with you!
No matter what I’ve done in life, remote working always seems to be a common theme. From taking extra language classes sat outside a Spanish village bar as a teen, all the way through to working in various cafes, offices, gardens and basically every form of transport as an adult. It’s something that I know I’ve gravitated towards and enjoyed for a very long time.
The road to remote working is a windy one, and my hope for this podcast is to provide a little more insight into the life of a remote worker. The different lifestyles, the different jobs, the different ways you can access this flexible lifestyle for yourself - and maybe link up with incredible people along the way.
Kicking things off, I’ll be talking to the fantastic Kash Bhattacharya, also known as the Budget Traveller. Kash is a full time travel blogger and as he would say: has been travelling in style on a budget for ten years. And challenging people to think differently about budget travel
We’ll be chatting more about the ins and outs of full time travel blogging, what travel could look like next and more about how to meet likeminded people while on the road full time.
So grab a coffee, a tea, or something stronger and let’s get started!
So Kash straight in one words, describe your remote lifestyle.
Unpredictable.
Can you give us a bit more?
Yeah. When you are embracing absolute remote working, you are embracing a lifestyle of a lot of uncertainty. Because before the pandemic, being a freelancer, the reason, one of the reasons for going to this place and one of the reasons why I embraced remote working as a lifestyle was because it gave me flexibility to plan my life around my work and my nature of my work as a content writer.
So remote working really worked well for me because I can bolt in on trips, but those trips can be confirmed 24 hours in advance. So suddenly you're on a plane and you're in Italy, or in Bologna, where I am now. And it's even more unpredictable now because we're in the middle of a pandemic. So it's even more difficult remote working, but it's still possible.
Hmm. Well, why don't we talk a bit more about it? What a day to day looks like for you. I mean, the last year and a half, of course, as for everybody has been different, let's put it that way. But on a typical day, pandemic aside, what does a day in the life look like for you (be as detailed as you like).
So it's very simple. We like to have the power of drinking coffee and consuming media and especially what's happening in the world. Then we like to work out. That's been constant in the last 2 to 3 years. When you have a life of living on the road or wherever you are, it's important to have a kind of schedule of things.
And as many other remote workers will be able to tell you, having some form of physical activity is a really good way to start being behind me in that, for the benefit of the viewers, I'm in the student hotel in Bologna, which is kind of a hybrid hotel, student accommodation space, and they really take a wealth of nomads and they have a gym. Gym comes in very handy and free to use.
There is a swimming pool to my left here So you usually start off with a nice workout that gets the blood pumping, and then you have breakfast and we start working and we work generally till six or seven until our brains stop working.
Then the fun part of remote working is that in the evenings you are free to explore and and suddenly become a tourist. And you go and walk around the city for hours and on late summer evenings like they are now in Bologna we can be out until 12pm walking around and doing things. So it's good.
What does actually being a travel blogger look like? Because it's not just all Instagram Reels and tasting wine…
So it can be very glamorous from the outside groups. From the inside, it's running a business. And the road has a lot of challenges in terms of what people normally do in the stability of their home or from their home base. You're actually running a business and choosing to also kind of-, it's a balance between work and also having a life outside of work, which is important that you grow a ton.
What wellness tip do you have for being able to find that balance.
Best I would say is having some sort of a consistent routine. I have these things in place and trying to eat as well as possible. Diet was a big problem when I was initially embracing different lifestyle back in 2012, when I went full nomad and I started travelling, I really was not eating very well.
So you talked briefly about what you did pre-going digital nomad. Why did you then take the leap towards remote working.
I'm too independent and too stubborn and too inflexible. I like every day waking up and where am I going to work from today brings its challenges, like trying to find a place as good we find we can work from home. So that's why I love for example, some hostels and some place places like the Studio Hotel because it has a certain range of facilities that are consistent throughout all the properties throughout the whole of Europe.
So I know I can expect to get I know I can find a place to work from, I can know I can get said Internet connection. And that really is a big luxury and comfort when you have this slice of remote working. So those are the things that are important to me. And yeah, this is what happens when I can't quite get to know. So why you got into remote working was because yeah, I really like the lifestyle. Yeah, it challenges me. It's a creative burst of energy, you know, supplement.
On a plane, step on a train and remove yourself. Because the biggest challenge as creatives we have is becoming stuck in the same places. Sometimes you need that movement to see new places and similarly get senses and get new ideas flowing. And also these are great places to collaborate and meet people from other walks of life. And that's all you need to tell is really good for remote workers, for example.
So when you're searching for your wifi in cafes or your student hostels or any hostels or when you're planning a trip, I guess what-, so you kind of have as a priority in when you're planning, but what kind of aspects of that place?
So when we are planning trips, we usually looking at hostels are hotels that have been say to have a common area to work from. Sometimes we stay in Airbnbs and that is also a very, very nice option for us because sometimes we practise, we need to get a lot of work done and we don't want too many distractions.
We just want to get our work out, coffee, breakfast, run and then start working out with good table space workspace and Airbnb. So when you set you’re searching Airbnb, you can find that in the list of criteria good workspace, business friendly laptop space.
So we find that Airbnb’s are usually good, but sometimes we'll find something that is cheap and affordable, an apartment for a few weeks or a month, and we'll try to find a good co-working space or again nearby, it might be important for us. So I also do like co-working spaces. There are great places to work from to meet people.
Okay, so go on to meeting new people. Give us your best icebreaker.
When you describe when you say so, what do you do for a living? I just say I'm a professional travel blogger. It's just this reaction that I always get. It kind of fills me with dread and and also excitement, because it's always interesting to see how people react.
People always have some of these conceptions about my work and my life. As you said, it is very misrepresented sometimes in mainstream media. This horrible word influencer, for example, is so far from my work and what I do. Yeah. So I just say that and that's the icebreaker. And then I get 20,000 questions. I want all my secrets to like, how do you do it? How do you make a living?
So tell us more about your book. What was that like? Do you have any plans for another at all?
My book is called The Grand Hostels Luxury Hostel of the World. Yeah, it's now two years old. It's in four different languages English, German, French and sent to me in Korea. And the book is about how this new world of design, hostels and hostels and people say, oh, you mean like luxury, like luxury hotels. And I see no luxury in the sense of experiences. I think real luxury in life is experiences. It's meeting people, being in a space where you can work, you can go to a bar at the end of the day.
In terms of plans for another book, there is currently no plans for another book. It's just waiting to see how things kind of pan out from here.
I've just actually written an article on the blog, about the best hostels for nomads.
I don't know about you, but I feel like there is going to be a bigger boom in slow travel. And by slow travel I mean not just going somewhere for a weekend or a week. Actually taking time to see a place.
It just makes sense from a number of perspectives. It makes sense from a budgetary perspective. I'm putting more time in one place. It's easier to get a better rate. You are more productive because you're not moving around.
And initially when I started this lifestyle, I was moving around at a ridiculous pace and I quickly had burnout issues. So my biggest tip is whenever you want to embrace this space of not working, spend more time in one place. Not only is that good for your own health, but it's good for all too.
The local community is also more responsible because that's something that is more and more important in the world we live in. We're spending more time and embedding yourselves in the local community.
I never consciously realised that I was proud of my work and what I did, but I always found the positive, not reinvent themselves in a local community to get to meet people in the community. You're not insolated from the cities you live in because a lot of these spaces that cater for nomads, to remote workers are very artificial and very they're in their own bubble.
And that's how you can spend time in a city you get to meet locals, make an effort to really get to know the culture. And that's why slow travelling is important. That is basically going to be a huge trend that I know a lot of destinations.
But by tourism blogger, I know that lots of destinations are looking to change it towards more long term stays because they realise it's more sustainable and it's also for perspective teach them there's a whole raft of countries that are offering special visas now for no months and it's not like.
What do you mean by sustainability and sustainable travel?
For me, sustainable travel is human travel. It's travel with the human face is travelling with care, it's empathy, it's travelling with a sense of respect to the place you're in. And that can take many forms, say people out of crisis of conscious about where they could be as a sustainable traveller as I promote a budget struggle like most sometimes airlines like is debt and remember to spend it to the environment. But if I take that out of the equation and I've been doing a lot of train travel recently, it's very affordable and easy when you live in Central Europe, but then when you live in Britain.
What is one thing you wish you would've known when you started out.
Going remote? I was just scared. My biggest fear was financial. I was under a lot of financial stress. I come from a full time income to embracing a life of uncertainty, where I wasn't sure where my next job would come from and worked out a couple of small projects lined up.
So my main concern was trying to finance myself on the ground and keep developing this idea. I had this blog. I was under a lot of financial stress. And unfortunately when you are short money and you are travelling and travelling can be very, very stressful or unsure of what you're doing the next month and what when your next paycheque comes through.
How did you find that you overcame that?
I overcame it because I managed to make something stick. And creative kind of breakthrough project in my first year, which was my book, my first e-book and was a great success, was featured in The Guardian, The Times.
And if that hadn't happened, if I hadn't had that breakthrough project and I don't think I would be here now, it might have taken longer to make it, but yeah, that's just me. And that's what it’s like blogging and content. And when you are remote working and think it's important to to have kind of a plan of where you are coming from and then just go for it. I think it's tough for anyone is is that if you really want to get into market and see what's out there and just thought what would be the biggest help? Then I met lots of really interesting people on the road and some of those who'd like to work for the corporation.
So what is one story or memory that sums up your experience of remote living and working? Don't hold back.
I would say that after six months of travelling remotely, I left Edinburgh in July 2012 and I committed to six months on the road to write a book just called The Luxury Hostels of Europe. I went to hostels as myself, and then I took a pause in Berlin, and that was the point where my money was really running low and I wasn't sure how I was going to survive. And I was already looking at flights back to Edinburgh.
But I managed to find a very affordable flat in Berlin for the summer, and I remember spending six weeks there. I loved it because it opened my eyes to what is great when you travel slowly and embed yourself in a place you never would have thought of experiencing.
So I was in Berlin in the summer, if anybody has been in Berlin this summer, it's an amazing place. And Berlin was already become a very popular place for creative people. And I met so many interesting people that summer and ended up in co-working spaces. You just have to buy a cup of coffee to sit in the café of the co-working space. Good old days at Betahaus.
I met a bunch of people and based on my life I networked, getting lots of confidence, got lots of ideas from that. And that was the kind of springboard that summer in Berlin to many other successful things. But just choosing to stop, pause and spend time six weeks.
You talk quite a bit about networking and the importance and benefits of network. Name a couple of places that you think are the best places to go network, specifically for travel, but if any others come to mind?
Co-working is a great. They're like a long way from a home office. Which hostel? Retail spaces has everything. You'll find a kitchen there where you can cook. You'll find a café and you can have goof coffee. You have instant access to plug in, to all the events spaces and to meet and listen to local entrepreneurs from different backgrounds. And that's super exciting and inspiring.
That's where you also network and meet people, and that's when the magic happens. So that's my biggest tip is co-working spaces.
Final question. Do you have any thoughts or predictions on what the next step for travel, travel content could be?
I would like to think that in terms of the future of travel and content, we are entering into era of more conscious travel. Where we are more clued up about the impact of our lifestyle, of the choices we make, that we accordingly invest financially and emotionally into places we go to.
In terms of content, my hope is that content will start reflecting more about people, places and not be just about the most instagrammable places to go. For example, this still seems to be a thing. I just wish for travel to be more human and for content to be more about humans and more about stories and faces.
Rather than just about lame trends that come and go. I just think one thing this pandemic has taught us that travel is, at its basic essence, is all about connection and about people and about being mindful.
And I think our way of travel, the way you write photos to reflect that… that's my goal going forward, I need to be reminded of constantly.
To listen to the full podcast, check out the YouTube link below, or on your favourite listening platform.
