Slow Travelers – An Xperience Interview

Slow Travelers – An Xperience Interview – by Liam Sweeny.

Have you ever taken a trip to a faraway land? You walked the streets, sampled the local fare, and maybe you stayed for a week, or maybe just a few days. But what if you never went home?

Warren and Julie Knox are slow travelers. Their bags get a workout as they travel the world a few months at a time, never back home in the States, not for long anyway. They are American citizens of the world.

RRX: So, I was gonna write some questions, but this is so interesting, I don’t think I need to. I think there’s enough to talk about. Now you guys are expats, right? Can you tell us what that means?

WK: We’re more or less slow travelers, but yeah, expats. What that is, is a person that is still tied to their home country, and they’re going to eventually go back, and they still have their tax allegiance to their home country. When you look at the difference between an immigrant and an expat …  the difference is one’s paying taxes to one country and the one’s paying taxes to their own country primarily.

RRX: So it’s a person who’s paying taxes to their old country. It’s really like you’re on vacation, except you might be on kind of a permanent vacation.

WK:  Typically, you’re keeping your home, and you may eventually go back to your old country, or you intend to eventually, at some point. You still consider yourself primarily an American. If you have French residency but you’re not a citizen there, you’re not really an immigrant. When you start paying taxes there, then you can consider yourself an immigrant, and when you get right down to it, if you have Mexicans in America that intend to go back to Mexico someday, they could be expats also.

RRX: All right. So that’s a general term that covers that situation. One of the first books I ever really enjoyed as a kid was Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises,” which is the whole story about expats during World War One. Very romanticized; I wanted to do that after reading that book. I don’t know if you’ve ever read that book, but there is a glamour to it all.

WK: We’ve been doing this for almost five years and it was a dream of ours for a long time. We’re slow travelers more than just expats, so we typically go spend one to three months in the country, but our home base is in Montenegro in Europe, so this is where we come back to kind of recharge, change out our wardrobe. So we’ll spend three or four months a year in Montenegro while we travel to different places. We’re living our dream of what we wanted to do; see what it’s like to actually live somewhere instead of coming in as a vacation, spending 48 hours and thinking you’ve seen the country. Or getting off a cruise ship for eight hours and saying, OK, I’ve checked that country off my box. I spend a month somewhere and, you know, learn how to shop, cook at home, go to restaurants, and see what life is actually like to live in a place. Every day is an education as we travel, learning something new, learning, going somewhere different. We’ve done a lot of stuff on our YouTube channel, which also keeps us occupied. Sometimes it feels like a job when it was supposed to be a hobby, but I think it’s met a lot of our expectations. What do you think, honey?

JK: Definitely. I mean, we do it with our dogs also, so we drive across Europe currently. We’ll be hopping continents for a couple of years to South America here shortly, but it’s just been a fantastic experience of living life on our own terms. And you know, we’ve met so many great people. We actually met so many expats or slow travelers and nomads that it feels like the whole world is travelling to us because we blur those lines a bit much. Our bubble is full of travelers, and if we meet people that don’t have a passport, it just kind of blows our minds.

RRX: Is there any core thing to understand, because I know the one thing that would stop me from doing what you’re doing is that I’d be so afraid of being horribly out-languaged. Like, being in a place where the language is so off that I would just basically freak out because I couldn’t talk to anybody. Is that something that you got into? Did you have to learn new languages before you started, or is this something where you kind of grew to know it?

WK: It can be challenging, and we do not know another language, but English is well spoken in most of these countries, at least in some of the more tourist spots. I mean, it’s tougher if you go too much into the farmland. And it’s problematic, but generally Google Translate works for us, and I know a little tiny bit of French. I know a little bit of Spanish, and I’ve picked up a few keywords for Bosnian Croatian, which helps us over here. We know probably like about 30 or 40 words in a whole lot of languages, because we’ve learned that as we’ve gone along. But with Google Translate, you can use a camera app and you aim it at something that’s spelled out, and it translates it to your language. And you can have conversations with Google Translate. It’s actually a game changer. However, English is the most spoken language in the world. It’s got more speakers than, when you count second language speakers, than Chinese, and most of the Chinese speakers are in China, where people all over the world are speaking English. So if you’re gonna know one language, English is the best.

So when you go to expat communities in a lot of countries, they’re very international. You’ll have your Germans, your Japanese, your Philippines, your people from the Middle East, you’ll have your people from Spain, Italy, and English is used as the bridge language. Almost all the expat groups, English is the language that they all communicate in because it’s the most common language. If you only spoke German, you’d be in trouble. If you only spoke Italian, you’d be in trouble. You’d have to use your Google Translate. We have French friends like that. They speak some broken English, but they could not possibly interact as well as we do with so many people in the expat world because their English is much more limited. But English is the language that, if you’re gonna travel and you’re from any other nation, it’s the language you’re gonna learn. Because if you go somewhere and you have a multi-language menu, it’s oftentimes you’re gonna have English and the native language that they have there. I wanna say it’s probably about eight or nine times more dominant in the world as far as the amount of speakers than Spanish. Spanish only has Central America, part of South America, and Spain.

RRX: I imagine with people that are slow-traveling expat nomads, there is a world to that, like a network of like-minded people that do it. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

WK: I don’t know if you’ve seen our Facebook group or not, but basically it’s the Expat Slow Travel Nomad Network by Warren and Julie. It’s the offshoot from our YouTube channel. But there’s a lot of people that are trying to learn how to become nomads or expats, and there’s a lot of people there that are expats and nomads. We’ve developed so many friendships, and a lot of times we’re connecting through these different Facebook expat or nomad groups because when you go somewhere new, you find out where the get-togethers are, where the foreigners are. And it’s not that we just want to hang out with the foreigners, but … let’s say we go to Serbia. If we go to Serbia, these people have their friends that they’ve had their whole lives, they have their jobs. And if you go there and you expect, “I’m gonna just learn Serbian and meet Serbians,” it’s not gonna happen. But if you go to the expat groups, you’ll find the Serbians that want to meet the other expats, and you have the expats that can show you around, teach you the ropes, and help you get acclimated to the country. I will tell you, we just had a viewer of ours that was in Albania. He showed up, planned for a couple of years to go to Albania, didn’t do any research about where the expats are, the foreigners. He showed up in Albania, planning to be there for one year, was there for three weeks, got lonely, couldn’t handle it, and went back to the States. You have to do your homework and know where to find people, and if you’re gonna travel alone, you definitely need to know how to find other people to show you around and try to lay the groundwork before you arrive.

More from Liam Sweeny…