The destinations we have been traveling to
In this article, we share our 3-day itinerary where we explore part of the lovely east coast of Taiwan by bike! We cover where we went, where we stopped, how we rented our bikes, how much we spent and everything we learn along the way!
In this article, we will cover one of them: the countryside town of Houbi and share the itinerary we took as it is really worth visiting if you have the opportunity to visit Taiwan.
What does life looks like ‘stuck’ in Taiwan during the pandemic? Strange but wonderful and we are very grateful for being currently in Taiwan during these unprecedented times.
In this post we are doing a recap of what we’ve done in July 2020 while most of the world is still battling with the coronavirus.
As you will see Taipei have been keeping us busy, offering us many sights and activities to practice. Are you ready to discover what Taipei has to offer during the pandemic?
It’s been 2 years since we got married, got rid of all of our stuff and left San Francisco to become nomads and slow travel the world! Year 1 was amazing, we were living out our dream lifestyle to see the world and staying in some really cool cities. Plus, we were able to do all of that for half the cost of living at home in San Francisco. Coming into year 2, we were becoming seasoned nomads and getting into a rhythm of enjoying new places, eating delicious meals, exploring nature, settling into monthly apartments and even making new nomad friends. We learned a lot from year 1 and applied similar money saving techniques such as booking long-term Airbnbs and using airline reward points. We had exciting plans for 2020 but like the rest of the world, we had to quickly adjust when the pandemic hit in March. As a result, we became grounded nomads and had to decide where we wanted to wait things out for the last 4 months of year 2. This also involved canceling a lot of flights and Airbnb bookings.
After staying for a month in paradise on a Caribbean island for only $2,7000 in the Spring of 2019, we were overdue for another month in paradise because why not? Since we just wrapped up a month visiting Chiang Mai, we decided to go explore one of the many islands of Thailand and after some extensive research decided to give a try to Koh Lanta. So without further ado, let’s go explore Koh Lanta and unveil in this two part article what we did, ate, saw and what we recommend people to avoid!
After spending a lovely summer in Europe, we embarked on a 6 months journey in South East Asia (SEA). While Mrs. NN already visited SEA before we even met, I never set foot there so there was definitely some excitement in exploring a brand new region as part of our 2nd year of nomadic travel. For our first stop, we decided to stay an entire month in Chiang Mai Thailand and we were blown away by the culture, the food and the digital nomad community. So without further ado, let’s go explore Chiang Mai and unveil in this two part article what we did, ate and saw!
For the final stop of our 4 months journey in Europe, we stayed in Kotor Montenegro. We picked Montenegro over its more popular neighbor Croatia because it’s got beautiful scenery (check out the view from our apartment below) and is not as busy or pricey. While we stayed only 2 out of the 4 weeks we initially planned, we really enjoyed it and would really recommend it as a lesser known gem. Let’s go explore Kotor!
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After Porto, we spent the second half of our time in Portugal in Lisbon for almost a month. We decided to stay in this capital because we were curious to know more about this growing digital nomads hub that has become a trendy European destination over the past few years. The city actually reminded us a lot of San Francisco which we will talk more about in this blog post. Let’s go explore Lisbon!
One of our favorite things about our nomadic lifestyle is that we can design it however we’d like based on our priorities. We can slow it down or speed it up, go to a food destination or a cultural city, spend time sightseeing or working on projects, meet up with friends or set out on our own, save money in Central America or splurge (within reason of course!) in the Caribbean. One of the biggest advantages to us is the ability to spend long periods of time with family and friends that live in different parts of the world. Since my family lives in France, I didn’t get a chance to see them very much during my 10 years in the US. Now we plan on spending 1-2 months every year with them and focus on great quality time versus the quick holiday catch up I was used to do. This is what brought us to Europe this summer!
Today we are fast forwarding a bit to our first slow travel destination of our 2nd year of long term travel: Portugal. (June was spent in France with family and was all over the place. Early July was spent with friends in beautiful Costa Brava Spain and we well talk about both at a later time). Given how popular Portugal is among expats, digital nomads and retirees, we were looking forward to see what the hype was all about! We decided to spend about 2 months in Portugal, spending our time between Porto and Lisbon. Porto was our first stop and we ended up with pretty mixed feeling about this city. Let’s see why by exploring Porto!
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You have to visit the Douro Valley if you are in Porto, I can’t believe we even hesitated because it is an amazing place. Not only does this valley have the perfect weather conditions to produce Port wine, the beautiful and dramatic landscape make it seem unreal. No surprises that this site has UNESCO World Heritage status in 2001 as you will be able to attest through the pictures and video we are sharing in this post.
