Interview Questions

• 0:20 Can you give us an introduction into your website and background?
• 2:00 What kind of work were you doing before you started this lifestyle?
• 2:15 Did you enjoy your work? Were you feeling fulfilled?
• 3:01 What was your wake up call to make you start planning for your new life?
• 3:58 Are you doing the things you most want to in life now?
• 4:40 Was travel an essential part of living a more fulfilled life?
• 5:21 What exactly did you do in your 25 months of preparation?
• 7:35 Do you still have a homebase?
• 7:57 Do you have chances to go home often?
• 9:32 Tell us  about your travels. Where have you been and what have you done?
• 10:56 Do you have time to work with all of your travels?
• 12:15 What does travel entail for you? (Are you moving around all the time?)
• 13:20 How do you make money? What’s your business?
• 14:48 Why do you sell your ebooks on Kindle rather than your own site?
• 17:54 How much did you sell your first book for on your website?
• 20:39 Did you lower the price for Amazon?
• 21:11 So the volume makes up for the fact that you are making a third of the price?
• 21:53 Do you have any specific tactical advice for Kindle publishing?
• 26:15 Is Barnes & Noble a major platform for you?
• 26:49 Do your book sales decline, or do they sell consistently?
• 28:56 Do you have any advice for a new author?
• 32:18 Do you write what you want or do you write what people are buying?
• 34:34 Can you tell us about the bad parts of a travel lifestyle? What are some of the hardships? What do you miss?
• 38:26 Are you going to move into other business areas, or are you focused on being authors?
• 40:26 Would you go the traditional published book route with a publishing house?
• 42:52 Can you please give us a run down of your travel costs?
• 44:42 What house-sitting advice can you offer? How did you get started?
• 46:24 Can you give some advice for people looking to make a major career or life change?

Links
MarriedwithLuggage.com
RTWexpenses.com
Follow Warren Talbot on Twitter
Married with Luggage on Facebook

Are Digital Nomad Interviews What you Want?

JetSetCitizen.com is primarily focused on digital nomad interviews. Most people don’t seem to like reading or watching long interviews. Those posts continually get the least amount of shares and comments. My most popular posts have been on more personal topics highlighting my own journey and challenges.  Last year’s blog redesign have helped increase the number of daily subscribers, but compared to many of my peers, my message and content is still not resonating with most people.

Many people have told me that the name ‘jetsetcitizen’ doesn’t really represent my real focuses of anti-consumerism, doing good in the world and trying to create a substantial difference. I know I need a better story and should try to be more inspiring, but I’m stuck.

I personally love the interviews because they allow me to meet and develop connections with other like mined people. I’ve met dozens of  other long-term travellers all over the world. Also, this site was instrumental in my own journey to location independence. Without those early connections I made with people like Cody McKibben of ThrillingHeroics.com and my One Year Plan to A New Country and Career, I don’t think I would have ever left my safe lifestyle in Japan.

I certainly value the opportunities JetSetCitizen.com has given me, but I’m starting to feel that I need to move on to something bigger and better.

My Passion for Social Good in the Idea Economy

With my volunteer and social good projects like the Unconference for Social Good, I’m trying to focus my attention on creating more social impact in the world. So many people and businesses seemed pre-occupied with socially useless, or destructive activities. I would like to help encourage entrepreneurs to shift their attention to solving some of the pressing problems in the world. It costs $20 to provide a permanent clean water supply in the third world, yet still close to a billion people don’t have safe drinking water. That’s $20 billion dollars, what Canadians spend on alcohol every year.

I also feel that we are entering a new economic era of great abundance. I’ve been calling this the IdeaEconomy. I believe we are already witnessing mass economic and social change and this is only the beginning.  Seth Godin writes about it in the Icarus Deception. Chris Brogan and Julien Smith talk about it in The Impact Equation. Dan Pink also covers it in To Sell is Human. These are amazing times and I want to focus on the people discovering the high leverage activities to do big, good things in the world and how they are doing it.

The problem is whether or not all of these ideas fit under the JetSetCitizen brand? If they don’t, what should I do?

Should I start a new blog and try to run yet another site?

One option is to keep  JetSetCitizen for digital nomad interviews and travel related content, while create a new and separate site. However, starting a new blog will mean starting from near zero. I’m very reluctant to spread my resources on yet another project. I would like to have one big thing in my work life if possible. I’m tentatively playing with the theme or tagline “Dare Big, Do Good.”

The second option would be to keep JetSetCitizen, but change the tagline to “Dare Big, Do Good”, and start writing more about how to leverage creative ideas to make a meaningful difference in the world.

What do you think? Can you please take a few moments and let me know in the comments or feel free to email me directly. John@ (This site’s URL)

• Do you enjoy the digital nomad interviews?
• What do you think would make my site more compelling to readers?
• What do you think of a new “Dare Big, Do Good” focus? (The site would concentrate on how to maximize the impact you make on the world.)
• Is it a good idea to just redirect the focus of JetSetCitizen to Dare Big, Do Good?
• What else could make the site better?

I look forward to your feedback.

 Please tell us about yourself?

Born in the UK, moved city three times before I was even 18, so perhaps a little bit of the hobo in me from an early age. I left home at 17 and have been pretty much financially independent ever since. I studied Mathematics at university, however study is perhaps the wrong verb since I spent most of the 3 years with my face cello-taped to a bong, in band rehearsals and whilst (relatively) sober organising the Uni Amnesty International group.

Skipping on the graduation ceremony (or even collecting my degree cert) I dived straight into self employment hippie naturalist oblivion. This took the form of a disastrous attempt at running a music/video/anything creative studio smothered with adjectives like universe, community and chi that eventually lost me about 50K EUR. The massive debts quite neatly catapulted me into a more sober and financially viable career as a freelance web developer and I was pretty much back in the black a year later.

Still naive and rather unbusinesslike I quickly ended up with a series of non paying clients and a “surprise” tax bill which once again led my financial health gauge to hovering around the zero mark.

The inability to pay one’s rent always being a good focusing technique led me to conceive the business that is now ArtWeb.com. After only about 10 paying subscribers and a few years before the 4 Hour Work Week was even published, I was already plotting how I’d spend my days working from the beach in Goa whilst my bank account slowly filled up with wheelbarrows of cash.

Then quite randomly in late 2005 an old school friend suggested we all move to Japan. I thought that was an excellent idea, so I learnt Japanese booked a flight and almost eight years later am still waiting for my school friends to join me.

Now a days I’m running a couple of businesses (ArtWeb and Tokyo Cheapo) whilst simultaneously galavanting across the world and the internetz having assumed the identify of Hobo CEO.

Please tell us about your travels?

Before I arrived in Japan, I’d already seen some of Europe, a couple of trips to the states and a brief reconnaissance of working remotely in Goa.

But my hobo CEO adventure kicked off properly when I first ventured over to the Far East. I’ll save the Tokyo details for the question below, but after 5 years I decided to take off again and give Europe a go.

First stop was London, but after a few months my optimism and high hopes were dashed. Although I made a few friends, there were virtually no like minded traveling entrepreneur types – the London four hour work week meetup wasn’t exactly over subscribed. I quickly realised there was absolutely no need for me to stay in such an expensive, competitive and somewhat dangerous city, so I booked a flight to Berlin packed my single cabin luggage suitcase and was gone just like that.

Berlin is/was awesome. I’ve been visiting regularly for over 10 years in fact, so it’s almost a second home for me. Any day in Berlin typically includes, continental breakfast al fresco and random conversation with the people at the next table, shopping for organic sauerkraut at one of the ubiquitous organic supermarkets, kebab for lunch for less than 3 EURs, laptop session, meetup or meeting in one of Berlins many coworking spaces, Vietnamese Pho for dinner 5EUR, then rolling around on the floor with strangers at a contact improvisation ‘Jam’, and bonus points for getting an early night so you can get up at 6am and start clubbing (night clubs typically don’t get going till about 3am and stay open most of the weekend). Add to all this the still remarkably low rental prices, Berlin is a hopspot for hobo CEOs.

Apart from a few months in London and Berlin, I’ve been back and forth between Europe and Asia, other highlights include Cluj (Romania), Hawaii, Chiang Mai (Thailand), Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam), Penang (Malyasia), Hokkaido (North Japan) and recently Tokyo again.

Generally I’m not traveling because I’m on holiday, I’m more focused on work, so I tend to favour tech/hobo CEO hotspots and places with plenty of internet connected cafes.

How does Vietnam compare to Thailand or Chiang Mai specifically?

I’m pretty new to Ho Chi Minh City but so far I’d say it is the big city antidote to Chiang Mai. Both are great value in terms of standard of living, plenty to do and good to stay for a few months of focus. Definitely more foreigners in Chiang Mai, but there seems to be a higher density of entrepreneur types in HCMC, far fewer travelers and if you’re looking to hire people locally for business (like developers, PM, designers etc) HCMC has much more on offer.

If I were Knit picking I’d say Chiang Mai has more healthy eating options and outside the rice field burn season (March/April), the air quality is much better. The internet in HCMC was definitely a grade above most of my Thailand experience though we still had a couple of power outages (during which I carried on work via tethering my phone).

Please tell us about your time in Japan?

Tokyo was my first real expat experience and it proved to be an addictive one.

“Welcome to Japan – it’s like Disney Land crossed with Blade Runner”, I recall someone saying when I first arrived, and indeed it was as exciting and bizarre as being cast as the replicant character played by Rutger Hauer in Disney remake of Blade Runner.

It wasn’t all Disney animated roses though. Whilst Tokyo is perhaps the safest city in the world, as a foreigner (and perhaps also native resident) you’ll find high barriers to entry all over the place, high prices, langauge, cultural differences and incredibly complex social rules perhaps being the tallest. But on the flipside this filters out a lot of people so Tokyo has a high density of really smart, motivated and hard working people. Like some of my some super successful friends – Rob Laing and Matt Romaine founders of gengo.com or Mike Sheetal co-founder of UltraSuperNew.com. And of course my partner in crime for TokyoCheapo.com Greg Lane.

Whilst the first few Tokyo years were a ball, my luck changed with the financial crisis. With the income from ArtWeb almost entirely in GBP and sterling sinking against the yen like a unicorn strapped to a cannon, I soon found myself back to student level finances in what was now the world’s most expensive city.

And so the halving in value of my pounds slowly ushered me out of the country, and for the last two years I’ve pretty much been on the road, with just shorter spells in Tokyo.

How did you get your visa to stay in the country.

I arrived on a tourist visa. I extended it to 6 months whilst I figured out how to apply for a work visa. I hired an scrivener (kind of lawyer) who sorted everything out for me for about 400GBP.

Since I have a UK limited company it was possible for me to get a work visa for running a “representative office” in Tokyo, the main problem was that I had to actually rent an office space (which I’d never go to). I wrote all the full details in a blog post here: http://www.anglojapanese.net/2007/04/179/

The last two years I’ve just entered on a tourist visa since I’m only there a few months of the year.

How do you make money?

ArtWeb.com is my income source, we help artists market and sell their artwork through building and managing their web presence – basically a niche wordpress.com/shopify for artists. It’s a subscription business model and we have a few thousand happy users. It’s a great business, we’re providing real value in helping non techie types leverage the internet to promote and sell their artwork, plus it’s rewarding from a geeky perspective in that I get to play around with load balancing, cloud computing and all kinds of nerdy optimization

Recently I’ve launched TokyoCheapo.com which is a content site and to be the first of a series of living/travel guides for expensive cities round the world. It’s already generating 50K page views a month and some revenue, but I’m investing in it for now, so it’s not a source of income yet.

How long have you been doing Artweb?

I started Artweb on my own about 7 years ago and it wasn’t until about 5 years ago until I started hiring anyone. Now we’re a team of 6, everyone is essentially location independent and we’re seldom in the same timezone, let alone same city.

When you first started, how did you get your initial customers?

I started with some direct mail, emails and cold calls. My first direct mail blast (about 30 people) landed me my first customer, so straight out the gate I felt like I was on to something. Quite early on I offered a large artist organisation my tech skills in exchange for endorsement/sponsorship and that was great source of new customers in the beginning since it gave the service exposure to almost 1000 artists. Apart from that a little bit of “white hat” SEO plus our organic growth (word of mouth and other referrals) has always been a good draw of customers.

Please tell us about TokyoCheapo.com?

Tokyo Cheapo is a Cheapo’s guide to living in or visiting Tokyo. We cover everything from sumo to sushi, plus accommodation, romantic cheapo date ideas and we often photoshop dogs and kittens into the photos on the site. It seems like we’ve hit a winning formula with useful information, not taking ourselves too seriously and unashamed cheapness.

For me this is epitomized by the numerous likes and funny comments on a recent facebook status on our fan page:

“just botched an upgrade on our server, obviously being cheapos we’re doing it ourselves rather than hiring a professional.”

(We’d never get away with this on ArtWeb!)

Does that site make much money for you yet?

So far it makes a pittance ($100/month) from google adsense, but we’re not trying too hard to monitise at the moment, more focusing on building the audience.

Long term advertising will be the key revenue source, plus we’ll release some some mobile apps when we have a number of cities and can leverage our data onto mobile devices. I also envision a series of T shirts and merchandise with slogans such as “Cheapo and Proud… Cheapo Planet” etc.

What do you think a Cheapo living and traveling budget is for Tokyo per month?

Cheapo residents in Tokyo are going to struggle to get by on less than $2000 per month – I survived on about $2500 per month living in a fairly hip central neighbourhood, though if you’ll willing to live in a less central area you can rent places super cheap and could conceivably bring this down to $1500 or even less.

For travelers check out our 3 days in Tokyo on $120 article – if you don’t mind sleeping in a reclinable chair for a few nights this is totally doable. Apart from that, whilst you can see lots of sights for free and food can be quite cheap, accommodation is always going to be the big expense for budget travelers. Hostels start around $20 per night – see our accommodation section for our cheapo recommendations.

Please tell us about your membership in the Dynamite Circle.

I joined the DC almost by accident. A friend of a friend recommend I and my partner in crime Nico Appel attend the Bangkok conference. I’d never heard of the DC before but within 20 minutes we’d booked and paid for the conference and 3 months of membership – it didn’t seem like a lot of money and we’d been planning on a trip to SEA about that time anyway, so we thought worst case scenario it was just a reason to write down our flights as a business expense.

The conference itself blew us away. Up to that point my hobo existence had been quite a lonely and I had only have a handful of true location independent friends. Being in a room of 70 other hobos was without doubt the high point of last year for me. Having such affirmation of my hobo lifestyle (as opposed to the oh so common lack of understanding or plain simple resistance from most people) made something in me click into place and ever since I’ve plunged into any opportunity to reach out and connect with fellow hobo’s and DCers.

Aside from all the awesome business advice, the social effect alone makes DC membership worthwhile for me. Being able to turn up to a new city, have multiple friends on the ground ready to meet me with all the good cafe working spots already mapped out is gold.

What’s next for you?

Businesswise I’ve just started out on a new podcast for hobo CEO – we’ll be covering the more ‘meta’ side of location independence – mindset, minimalist lifestyle and futurist philosophical banter. To me location independent lifestyle is the current frontier of human existence and it seems inevitable that it’ll become more and more mainstream. However I think the main things holding it back are not logistical concerns (like how will I earn money) but more cultural inertia and mindset.

Location wise, I’m currently in Tokyo and off to Berlin in a few weeks for the summer.

Links

Personal sites:

• hoboceo.com – blog and podcast
• hbm.jp – headstand photos
• mrkirkland.com – my tech blog

Business sites:

• ArtWeb.com
• TokyoCheapo.com

Twitter: @mrkirkland

In this short, but content packed video, Yamile shares details in how she got started, how she gets clients and her life as a digital nomad. As a special bonus, the dogs of Chiang Mai have provided the soundtrack for this video.

Here are the Questions Yamile Yemoonyah Answers in the Interview

• 0:30 Please introduce yourself.
• 0:55 Where are you from originally and where have you lived?
• 1:29 Why is Berlin such a digital nomad hotspot now?
• 2:02 How inexpensive is it to live in Berlin?
• 2:13 What’s a good budget for living expenses in Chiang Mai, Thailand?
• 2:28 When did you start CreativeWebBiz.com?
• 2:51 What exact services do you sell?
• 3:22 What percentage is coaching and what percentage is WordPress development?
• 3:34 How did you gain the skills to become a WordPress developer?
• 4:45 What is your unique selling proposition?
• 5:09 How do you get clients?
• 5:40 Has the Dynamite Circle helped you get clients?
• 5:59 What made you niche down so well in the beginning?
• 6:50 Does your website generate a lot of leads?
• 7:00 Is there is selling process involved when people contact you?
• 7:26 Do you offer a free initial consultation?
• 7:52 What are your next travel plans?
• 8:34 Please tell us about the World Domination Summit?
• 9:09 Please explain why Chiang Mai is such a digital nomad hub.
• 10:03 What are your future business plans?
• 11:03 Are you able to connect with artists in other countries when you travel?

 More Links
CreativeWebBiz.com Yamile’s website
Yamile on Twitter
CreativeWebBiz on Facebook

What these photographs don’t reveal is the heat of Thailand. Temperatures can get higher than 40 degrees Celsius and that means the dogs do a whole lot of nothing during the day. Most are just sprawled out in the shade to try and keep cool.

Enjoy the photos.

Please tell us about yourself?

I was born in the Netherlands in 1980 a spent a large part of my youth flipping through travel guides in my local library. I graduated from armchair travel when I went backpacking through Australia in 1999. The Working Holiday Visa program allowed me to see the country while working odd jobs.

I remember watching the Leonardo Di Caprio movie, The Beach in a cinema Down Under and thinking I should check out Thailand. After returning to the Netherlands I decided to study International Tourism Management & Consultancy. The highlight of the course was an six-month internship in the Solomon Islands.

I met my Spanish girlfriend –Marta– when I hitchhiked through Europe in 2004. In 2006 we fell for a well-paid job at Shell’s IT Helpdesk in Manchester (UK). There I realized I wasn’t wired to work for a boss and started looking for a way out. Since I always loved writing, becoming a freelance copywriter seemed the most logical step.

Please tell us about your travels?

After one year in cloudy and rainy Manchester we moved to probably the world’s best climate: the Canary Islands. On Gran Canaria, Marta studied a Master’s degree and found work, while I started getting more clients for my freelance writing.

We have seen all 7 of the Canary Islands, visited Cape Verde and Morocco, drove around Jamaica and fell in love with Greece. In 2010, two things happened that made me see the light: I read The 4-Hour Workweek and we went on vacation to Malaysia. There I thought many times: If I can work from anywhere, why do we stay put on Gran Canaria?

Mind you, we both love the Canary Islands and will return there sooner or later. But now that we don’t have kids or a mortgage, it simply makes no sense not to take advantage of my location independence. After searching for other nomadic freelancers and entrepreneurs , Thailand seemed to be the place to be, with Chiang Mai at the epicenter.

How do you like Chiang Mai?

After a brief stint in Bangkok, we flew straight to Chiang Mai. It is a very good place to start an Asian adventure, I’d say. You’ve got all your Western necessities, housing is easy to find, English is widely spoken, the food is great and prices are among the lowest in the world, according to other travellers.

Back on the Canary Islands, I met maybe one truly location independent worker per year. Apart from some surfers, sailors and deckhands, the islands don’t really attract a lot of adventurers. Here in Chiang Mai you can find digital nomads from all around the world in your nearest coffee bar. Anyone who stays over two weeks will probably end up going to one of the meetups organised through the Facebook group CM Biz.

In the dry season, these meetings can attract up to 100 nomads. I’ve seen people with lists in their hands of the people they want to talk to. I prefer the spontaneous approach. After all, everyone has an interesting story and they can introduce you to others in their network.

I also like meeting one or two nomad workers at a time for a coffee or to have a beer. The big meetups are fun, but there’s a lot of noise and distractions. Just look in the Facebook groups for digital nomads in Chiang Mai, shoot someone a message on Facebook and set up a ‘date’.

You’re travelling with a cat, is that difficult?

If you think you’re used to jetlag, you should try a ‘catlag’. We travelled with Lima as hand luggage and placed the cat carrier between the seat rows. We tried one leg of the journey without sedating her, but that was a bad idea. Fortunately the plane engine made more noise than Lima’s meowing. It was a long trip for all of us but Lima recovered faster than we did. She loves spying on the pidgeons and squirrels in the big tree behind our apartment.

As for the paperwork, we found this blogpost on 8 Miles From Home really useful. Even though we thought we had everything prepared, the quarantine guy in Bangkok found a flaw: the Spanish health certificate wasn’t printed on the right sheet of paper and didn’t bear the correct stamps. “4,000 baht (US$130), khrap.”

We’ve heard horror stories of pets in the luggage holds, so we only pick airlines that will allow cats to travel as hand luggage. This really limits our travel choices. In Thailand, we can only fly Thai Airways. I wish Air Asia would welcome Lima, but they have a no-pets-anywhere-on-the-plane policy.

How do you make money?

A growing revenue stream for me are the ebooks I publish for the Amazon Kindle. Also, I get some commission from affiliate links on my digital nomad website (which is in Dutch). SEO copywriting still is my main income and has been for the past six years.

How do you find your SEO clients?

When I began looking for writing gigs in 2006 I used the freelancer marketplaces. Then when I had some experience and some references to show for it, I cold emailed internet marketing agencies, which got me more and better paid work.

The past few years I’ve written some guest posts, have been interviewed and landed a column in the entrepreneurs’ section of the biggest online newspaper for the Netherlands. I reluctantly agreed to be paid for that in backlinks, which wasn’t a bad deal after all: I am now number 1 in Google for “seo tekstschrijver” and top 10 for other related search terms in Dutch.

Can you please tell us exactly what you do for an SEO client?

In an ideal situation, I focus on what I enjoy the most, which is writing. A client will send me a list of search terms he wants to rank for and the URL to his website, after which I write 300-500 word texts that include a few mentions of the search term. The client will then place this content on so-called landing pages that are technically optimized for the relevant search terms.

More often than not, I will have to edit existing content to make sure it’s optimized for reading off a screen and for search engine findability.

Is SEO difficult work to get into?

Anyone can learn the skills, but it takes time to convince clients that you’re the guy/gal to do the job. There are tons of blogs and forums out there that will answer any SEO doubts you may have. When I started looking for work as a copywriter, I didn’t really know what SEO was.

Of course, there are different levels of SEO. Nowadays, all digital nomads have their own website and a basic to intermediate understanding of SEO. There are still many individuals and businesses out there who hardly have any idea about SEO and are willing to pay for your advice and help.

Can you please tell us about Kindle publishing?

The ebook market is exploding and the planet’s biggest bookseller allows us to publish on its platform. After hearing a podcast interview with a guy that went from $0 to $1000 in five months, I thought I’d give publishing for the Amazon Kindle a try.

As for how to be successful: the trick is to publish in categories that have high book sales. Since I’m not a native speaker and because outsourcing can be so cheap, I order my ebooks to be written by experts at The Content Authority. I used to pay around $200 for 7,000 word ebooks. At the moment I’m waiting for an Elance writer to complete a 17,500 word ebook for me for only $ 175. I have attractive ebook covers designed on Elance or Fiverr.

Uploading an ebook to Amazon does not guarantee any success, though. I’ve seen lots of quality books with a very low ranking, which means they don’t sell. Your book will need reviews to gain credibility and a higher ranking. If you don’t want to rely on friends and relatives for this, you can exchange reviews on publisher forums, which is what I do.

How do you research what will sell or not?

The very first step is going to the Kindle bestseller page. Then you can go into the categories to see what rankings the top books have. If the numbers one to, say, five have a high ranking (meaning they sell well) your next step is seeing if you can break the top 20. The first 20 books are displayed on a category page so once you’re on that page, you can start climbing to the top. A good-looking cover and a high star rating help you with this.

Is there good money in ebooks on Amazon?

Yes, I almost hit $ 1,000 in royalties in December with only three ebooks in the Kindle store. My goal for this year is to publish one ebook per month so I now have a total of five ebooks up.

I’ve only been publishing non-fiction, so I want to outsource some fiction writing and see how sales go. If you look at the bestselling Kindle books, most are romance novels. I’ve read some rags-to-riches stories of indie novel publishers.

In the end, it’s a numbers game. The more books you publish, the more income streams you create. The only catch is that Amazon won’t pay you until 60 days after the months in which it sold your ebooks.

Can you recommend some good resources for new publishers?

There are many self-proclaimed gurus out there and I’m naturally suspicious of them. When I heard a podcast in which Eric Allyn almost reluctantly told about his successes, I became curious and got his guide. I followed the steps and some of my ebooks are doing better than his.

The forum access that is included with the guide is really useful. I don’t know where I would have gotten my reviews without it. In terms of ROI, this is the most valuable internet marketing product I have ever bought.

You’re a member of the Digital Nomad Academy, can you please tell us about it?

I joined in 2011 when I knew I wanted to eventually work from Southeast Asia or South America. The mentorship calls in the archive got me up to speed, after which I listened in and asked questions on the new calls. It’s great to be able to get in the minds of successful internet entrepreneurs.

On the forums I met a people in all stages of their location independence. Some are struggling to leave their jobs, others are hustling on the side or have quit. Some are already on the road. There’s always someone who can offer you advice because they’ve been in your shoes.

If you want to reach a new milestone in your life, you should surround yourself with people who are doing the same or have reached the same goal. The community helped me change my mindset into one of a digital nomad.

What’s next for you?

I can’t sit still. In fact, I’m known to complain there are not enough hours in a day! I’m working on a course for SEO copywriters, I’m collecting video stories from Dutch digital nomads around the world and I’m working on a secret project for my flight hacking website Melookyoubook. I also have a neglected dream of building and running an eco resort and/or beach bar with Marta.

Links
Follow André on Twitter
Follow André on Facebook
Martamolinera.com

Please tell us about yourself?

I was born and raised in Vancouver, B.C., Canada. As a kid all I cared about was sports. All of them really but hockey in particular being that I am Canadian and all. That sport requires a lot of money and dedication on the part of the parents though. I didn’t really have that so my sports dreams slowly faded away by my late teens. I was 18, had just graduated high school, and was working 9-5 bagging groceries in a supermarket. I had never really cared much for school but I saw it as a way out of that meaningless job. I fell in love with history, philosophy and literature in particular. Anything that was abstract and challenged me. Anything that had no applicability to a real world job basically as I found out when I graduated several years later.

I went through some trying times in my personal life right around that time as well and quickly lost focus. I couldn’t really see myself going down the standard liberal arts degree career path anyways; teacher, lawyer or government. I had always wanted something more. I wanted to do something exceptional or different at least from everybody else. And I really wanted to work for myself above all. Around a year after I graduated, and after drifting through a couple more meaningless jobs, a friend introduced us to this new game called “Texas Hold’em” at a party in late 2004. We each put in $5. I had no clue what I was doing but I got lucky and won. Easy money right? I found online poker the next day. I will talk about my poker career some more in a bit.

Please tell us about your travels?

Right now I am in Cha-Am, Thailand which is a quiet beach town on the Gulf of Thailand two hours south of Bangkok. I would like to say that I am some worldly traveler but really I am not. I finally made the decision to hop on a plane a little less than a year ago (one way ticket to Bangkok) and have totally fallen in love with this country. I have traveled through and lived in many parts of it and I guess I haven’t found a real reason to leave it yet. I definitely have aspirations of traveling to many other places in Asia and around the world though.

How do you like Chiang Mai?

Chiang Mai is where I have stayed the longest in Thailand. In my limited worldly experience I would have to say that I have never seen a more perfectly liveable place. A decent sized city at around one million and a great mix of the new and old. From the weather, the food, the people, the low cost of living and the culture it is simply an amazing place to be. I think you summed it up very well in a recent article here on Jetsetcitizen. There is a vibe and an energy in Chiang Mai that is just unmatched anywhere. And it is the digital nomad capital of the world so there are tons of internet professionals who call it home and love it there.

Please tell us about your website?

My website started out as basically a personal blog. In fact I wrote it for several years with hardly any readers at all just as a way to track my poker progress and keep myself motivated with goals and such. It was only when my name became popular in the online poker world and I revealed who I was that it started gaining some traffic. I have since turned it into more of an educational site where I post articles to help beginners struggling to find their way in the game. It is also the hub for everything that I do now on the teaching side of the game from the ebook (in English, Spanish and Russian), my coaching, my forum and more.

Playing 9 Games of Poker

How do you make money?

I will start with my poker career. I started out playing online poker with fake chips (offered by nearly every card room on the internet and far more popular than real money games). The thing with these virtual chips is that the card room gives you a certain amount each day no matter how many times you lose them all. Therefore, there is literally nothing on the line at all and people play like complete lunatics. I quickly learned that if I just played tight (play better hands than everyone else) that I would win. And I did. I just played for fun for quite awhile and amassed millions of these worthless chips on multiple card rooms.
Then I found out that they weren’t so worthless after all. I guess anything in life has a value right? If you had a big enough quantity of these fake chips, which I did, then there were people willing to give you real money for them. I remember trading about 5 million of them for $60. I soon dived into the lowest stakes real money games playing for 2 or 5 dollars at a time. I felt like I was playing with the house’s chips because I had essentially just been given this money for free. To this day I have never deposited money into any online card room. I have made everything off of that original $60.
I quickly progressed through the stakes, again just employing my “play tight” strategy which was good enough to crush the incredibly soft games of 2005-2008, and before long I was playing the $100 and $200 buyin games and making far more per hour than in my day job. It was another worthless job and I figured that I had nothing to lose so I quit in early 2007 to essentially become a professional poker player. I loved the idea of working for myself and setting my own schedule but I quickly learned that I didn’t have anywhere near the discipline at the time to manage it properly. The money was just too easy in those days in online poker and I thought it would be that way forever. I was wrong.

The games started getting more difficult for a variety of reasons and my bankroll dwindled primarily due to lack of play. I spent the next several years 24 tabling the lowest stakes again (the max number of tables allowed at the card room that I played at) but still earning enough to make a living, albeit a very meager one. As bizarre as it may sound, I am not really a gambler at heart at all. Part of me didn’t want to play those higher stakes games anymore because I would have to endure some losing days or even weeks whereas I would basically never lose in the lower stakes games because the competition was so bad. I was ridiculed thoroughly for it especially when a website began publishing the results of online poker players around 2009. I had the highest winrates and overall winnings in history at the lowest stakes of online poker and now everybody knew about it. I became somewhat of a freak show for some and a hero to others.

It was around this time that I slowly got into teaching the game. I never thought that anybody would want to hear what I had to say. I didn’t think that I was anything special at all. All I did was beat up on some of the worst players in the world for very small amounts of money. These games were so ridiculously easy to me that I thought that anybody should be able to print money playing them. But I was wrong again. I sent out a bunch of emails inquiring about becoming a paid instructor to all of the biggest membership based poker training sites on the internet and to my dismay I received interest from all of them. I started blogging a lot more, I started offering private coaching and then finally in late 2011 I decided to write an ebook as well. The book is essentially a strategy guide for success at the lowest stakes of No Limit Hold’em cash games based off of my own experience and success playing over 6 million hands.

Why do you think your ebook is so successful?

Well firstly, I had no idea if it was going to be successful or not. It actually only took me about a month to write it even though it is a full length book. The words just poured out like it was nothing because I had spent so many years doing what I was talking about almost in my sleep. The editing was very painful but I am a perfectionist and had to do it all myself. Still, I had invested a lot of time into this thing and I only had the vague promise from about a dozen regular commenters on my blog that they would buy it. Sales quickly took off however and surpassed what I had hoped to make on it lifetime within a couple of months.
I think that there is no question that a big part of the success of my ebook has been because of my results in the games (the fact that I can put ‘biggest winner ever’ as the subtitle). And also my name recognition within the online poker world as well. I also had, and continue to have, a small but consistent amount of traffic coming to my website. And a good chunk of it is organic with people searching my name in Google or through longtail results due to articles that I have written.
So I definitely had a big head start over your random ebook author. However, what primarily continues to drive the sales of my book to this day are forum and word of mouth recommendations. I have received countless emails and pm’s from people thanking me for having turned their results around and remarking about the simplicity of the language, advice and the flow of the book. I am a big believer in quality over quantity and I think that this has also played a large role in the success of it. No matter what product or service you create if it exudes real quality and solves problems for people then they will help spread the word for you. And that kind of marketing is by far the most effective in my opinion. Best of all, it costs you nothing.

How do you market your ebook?

I did the vast majority of the marketing for my ebook in the first couple months after it’s release. This mostly involved emailing every influential poker blogger that I could think of and offering them a free copy in exchange for a review. I also contacted all the major poker news sites with the same offer and received some huge temporary traffic spikes from a couple of stories that were done (see here andhere for example). And I also offered to send it to several influential posters on poker forums as I knew that they would be the main driver of long term sales.
I am not much of a social media expert but I set up the requisite Facebook and Twitter pages. And I also made a few videos trying to promote it on Youtube as well. I briefly set up an affiliate program but it did not prove to be too successful so I scrapped it. I may look into that again in the future though. I do not sell my ebook on Amazon. I only sell it on my website.

How did you learn to be a good poker player?

When I first started out there really were no decent learning materials out there. Today you have tons of forums, video training sites, personal coaching, books and more. So I basically just learned on my own. I think perhaps I had some natural inclination for the game. It requires a lot of patience, discipline, emotional control and logical reasoning. I am pretty good in all of these areas.

Can you provide some basic advice or strategies for beginners?

I would say that anyone can learn the game to some extent but the vast majority of people will not have success. I have heard statistics stating that as little as 10% or 15% of people actually win in the long term after the rake. And probably as little as 5% are able to turn it into a solid income. Common mistakes that beginners make are playing too many hands especially when out of position, playing too passively overall, tilting too much when things don’t go their way and playing stakes too high for their skill level and/or bankroll.

It would be difficult for me to say anything of any real substance here in the limited space but I believe that the foundation of success in poker will always lie in a TAG (tight and aggressive) style of play. That is, be fairly selective in what hands you decide to play but also understand the importance of position and aggression.

Is it possible to earn a good living as a professional poker player?

It is possible to earn a good living as a professional poker player even in the fairly tough online games in 2013. With that said, as I stated before, this game is only going to be really profitable for a very small percentage of people. I don’t want to discourage anyone who has dreams in this game but I want to be realistic as well. Keep your day job or get your degree and play the game on the side. If you find that you have been consistently having success for a long period of time, then and only then should you consider changing it from a hobby and into a job.

I hear Chiang Mai is a big hub for online poker players, why is that?

Chiang Mai is indeed very popular with online poker players. There is a large community there and in many other places in Thailand as well. Regarding Chiang Mai’s popularity in particular it is probably for many of the same reasons that so many other internet professionals flock there. Beautiful weather, low cost of living, easy going lifestyle and on and on. As regards to poker players specifically though there has also been somewhat of an exodus to many places all over the world among American professional players since their government decided to make it almost impossible for them to play online even though the game is not illegal there.

What’s next for you?

I don’t like to plan too far ahead into the future but what is next for me right now is living the quiet life here in Cha-Am for awhile and completing my second book (also poker related). After that I am not really sure. I certainly plan to travel a lot more. Business wise I want to move into areas outside of the online poker world more but definitely still on the internet.

Links

BlackRain79.com Nathan’s website
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Unconference for Social Good Chiang Mai

I’ll Wait Till Someday

It’s easy to make excuses and procrastinate until some better perfect time in the future. “I’ll travel after university.” “I’ll start a business when I pay off my new car.” “I’ll join a gym after I get a promotion.” “I’ll start saving money after I get married.”

Substitute all the things you wish you could do, but aren’t and you’ll see that it’s pretty easy to put off everything important until it’s too late.

Waiting is not the answer. I want to accomplish big things, not make excuses.

Life’s Good, but it could be Better

My life is pretty good. I’ve been living abroad since 1997. I’ve started and sold businesses. I’ve been blogging for many years on various sites. I’m doing a lot of things I want to do with my life, but I still have fears and I’m not accomplishing as much as I’m capable of.

I’ve always thought that I need to become famous and popular online in order to do bigger and more exciting things. An example of this thinking is, “if only I can get 20,000 blog subscribers then I can publish a best selling book. Recently, my thinking has started to change. I believe that:

 You don’t have to be exceptional to do exceptional things. It is the doing of exceptional things that makes a person exceptional.

There is no need to wait for permission to create what you want out of life. You can start doing what you most want, now.

I’m giving myself the go ahead to pursue bigger, more challenging and audacious goals. It’s time to level up my life.

Amazing Times

We live in a time of amazing opportunities. The tools to make movies, record music, publish books, start businesses or anything else you can imagine, are essentially free. There are no barriers to entry, other than our own unwillingness to put in the hard work to create.

I don’t have a big audience. I don’t have lots of money. I’m not even particularly talented or smart. Yet, I still want to do big things in this world. Maybe you feel the same way? I’m sure that I’m not the only crazy one in the world.

I’m afraid of failure, ridicule and poverty but, life is short and I don’t want to play it safe all the time. I’d much rather try and fail, than end up on my death bed with countless regrets because I was too afraid to try.

It’s easy to make excuses. I can wait until I have more money, more time, more skills, more subscribers, or more something. Or, I can work towards my biggest most audacious goals now and see what happens. It’s foolish to wait for permission or acceptance from others, because it’s never going to come.

What does it Mean to do Big Things?

Many people equate success and achievement with acquiring possessions, having a big house and fancy cars. Others, might value climbing mountains, adventure sports, or getting stamps in their passports. I don’t consider those ‘big’ things. They are all just some form of consumption. I do or have done all of that stuff in the past to feed my ego and try to impress others, but that is not the ‘big’ I’m talking about here.

“Big” means doing things to make the world a better place. It’s about living on purpose. It’s about doing the right things, not doing things right. It’s about being creative and expressing myself. I don’t want to get good at doing destructive, socially useless businesses just to make money. I want to dedicate my life to striving to be a better human.

My wife and I don’t need much money anymore, our current income and savings are relatively sustainable. That means I have some freedom to focus on projects most important to me. I’m declaring to the world that I’m going big. I’m going to strive for crazy, difficult projects that can potentially make the world a better place.

How do you do BIG things?

And now the hard part. This is not some meaningless marketing hype. I need to follow through with what I’m saying. The purpose of this post, is to hold myself accountable and scream to the world that I’m choosing an unconventional path. I don’t know how it’s all going to work out, but I’m going to work my ass off to make it happen. Here’s how:

Choose the Right Things

A great idea, project or cause spreads. It has to, that’s the nature of an idea. If it’s good, everyone wants to talk about it. If it’s boring, stupid or self-serving, good luck. You need a lot of money to promote a lousy idea.

Design Counts

We live in a visual world. Good graphics and video are essential to communicating any message. In fact, this manifesto probably needs to be a well designed ebook, but I don’t want to procrastinate.

Quantity Trumps Quality

Most of what we create is going to fail or be largely ignored. This blog post here might be a great example of that. No one knows in advance what is going to be well received or not. You all might think I’m a total idiot, or maybe you’ll support me because I’m attempting something a little out of the ordinary. I have no idea.

The only certainty is that the more times you try, the harder you work and the more value you deliver, the more likely you’re going to gain attention and support.

Deliver

Uncompleted projects are useless. Only finished and shipped projects count. That means focus and action. Choose one or two things at a time and deliver, before moving on to the next. One completed project is infinitely better than a hundred partial attempts.

Take Risks

Exceptional results don’t come from doing what everyone else is doing. If you want to be noticed, you have to do something worth noticing. That means risking ridicule, criticism and humiliation. It is inevitable that online trolls that will try to sap your enthusiasm with negativity and personal attacks. That is all life. The more you start to achieve the more people will find reasons to dislike you. That’s part of the process. We all need to expect that going in. I can’t wait to see all the criticisms in the comments below.

Mr. Pareto

By now, we’ve all heard of the variations on Alfredo Pareto’s ideas of the 80/20 rule. That is, 20% of our efforts, generate 80% of our returns. Basically, that means if we can identify that 20% and put a little more effort into those activities, we can achieve massive productivity gains. Can you identify your 20%? Can you cut back on the 80%?

Outsourcing

Creating systematized processes to outsource repetitive tasks can help you achieve a lot more. Outsourcing doesn’t always have to be to low cost overseas workers either. Sometimes just spending the money to hire a talented professional generates much better results and gives you more time to focus on what your best at.

I’ve been outsourcing all over the world for close to a decade. It’s definitely not easy to find and manage virtual contractors, but I consider it essential for anyone trying to build a business.

Leveraging your network

It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. A large network of connected and influential people can skyrocket any business or idea. What would you rather have; $100,000 or friendships with a couple of high profile venture capitalists?

Your social capital is infinitely more valuable than a little bit of money now. Every single day should be spent genuinely reaching out and helping someone.

On sites like Kickstarter.com, there are countless examples of people who are raising $100,000 or more to fund a business that hasn’t even started making anything yet. How would you like to completely fund your business idea, in a month or so, on the strength of your network?

Creativity

Everyone talks about creativity but it’s usually in very generic terms. There are short cuts to disproportionate results, if you are creative enough, but what does creativity mean?

Often creativity, is a product of everything mentioned above. Taking risks, completing more projects, outsourcing, focusing on high leverage activities, networking all lead to more creativity. Ultimately creativity comes from an open, inquisitive mind and lots of output. When you see a problem, do you spend time thinking about how it can be fixed? Do you read information from diverse sources for inspiration? Most importantly, do you bring lots of new projects into the world?

Dare Big, Act Bold

Here it comes.

My very first public declaration that I was going to change countries and careers within one year, gave me the courage to actually make it happen. That was four years ago now.

I’m going to do it again here. This is the stuff I’m working on now. Are you interested in coming along?

ActionMBA

I’ve been organizing a private group of people that want to do bigger things in the world. This means challenging ourselves to learn more and taking action on high leverage projects.

I want to scale this up. I would like to have teams of people that work together on causes, projects or businesses that bring more value to the world. Some of these will be not-for-profit, some might be real businesses. The focus is action over planning. We learn and improve by creating new things, not by studying.

I’m looking for the right group of people to expand the idea. Email me and tell me why you are interested if you want to be part of this.

What you will get out of it is:

• A chance to work with talented and motivated people. I want to recreate the excitement and energy of university for the rest of my life. Work shouldn’t be a solitary or boring activity.
• Opportunities to gain new skills and knowledge.
• Recognition for doing creative projects
• A chance to really make a difference in the world.
• A network to turn to for advice and inspiration.
• Internship, work and business opportunities, with a focus on social good.
• A chance to work on projects that inspire, bring out your creativity and focus on what it means to be human.

The first project to come out of the ActionMBA is the:

Unconference for Social Good

I just put on my second Unconference for Social Good, last week in Thailand. The first was in Calgary.

I believe that connecting people to discuss how to make the world a better place and making concrete plans to take action, is one of the best uses of our time. I want this idea to spread.

We’re working on a platform so that Unconferences for Social Good can be held in other cities all around the world. I will personally do more Unconferences, but I also want others to host their own events. This is an idea that will make the world a better place.

English Language Training for Children

For underprivileged children around the world, strong English skills are the best opportunity for higher paid work and will connect them to the global economy. I’ve invested a lot of money into developing teaching materials, online games, animations and a learning platform to teach children English, but have let the business stagnate in recent years just because of the time and investment required to improve it. I want to revitalize the sites and offer free English lessons and resources for teachers in the developing world. Please let me know if any of you are interested in helping out. I need game developers and English teachers for content and materials development.

The Future is Unlimited

I have a couple more ideas in the works, and I hope to have some announcements soon. I have been spreading myself thin over too many projects for a long time, now I’m starting to bring together a team to push everything forward. I hope that this new excitement will be reflected in my writing on this site.

Please let me know what you think in the comments.

This was an important interview for me because I also suffer from various social anxieties. Talking on video, meeting large groups of people and public speaking can be very stressful and difficult for me. Sebastiaan took me through a two-hour coaching session and I think it helped a lot. I’ll make some more comments on his coaching below.

Sebastiaan Tells Us

• Where he has travelled over the last decade.
• Why he didn’t like living in Bali.
• How he initially funded his permanent travel lifestyle.
• How he built a successful online business even though he made a lot of mistakes along the way.
• How he learned the skills to become a social anxiety coach.
• How much passive income he earns every month, even though he doesn’t know much about online marketing. 
• The problems and benefits of outsourcing.

Interview Questions and Timeline

0:41 Please introduce yourself.

1:00 Can you tell us how you started your travel lifestyle? When did you first leave your home country of the Netherlands?

2:30 You’ve lived in Bali, The Philippines, Thailand, South Africa?

3:11 In Bali, there are not many long-term travellers?

4:14 Where in the Philippines were you?

4:45 Can you give us a run down of your living costs in those four places? What is Cape Town like?

5:50 My immediate idea of Johannesburg is danger and crime, what was it like there?

7:33 Can you give a comparison of the Philippines versus Chiang Mai, Thailand?

9:00 How much more expensive is the Philippines than Thailand?

9:17 How much did you spend a month in Chiang Mai?

9:41 Tell us about your business Social-Anxiety-Solutions.com. What do you do? How did you get started?

11:11 What is the product you sell? Is it an ebook? Video course?

12:10 What were your own social anxieties exactly? Please explain how this all started.

13:35 You don’t seem to have social anxiety any longer, have you completely transformed your life with this?

16:39 How did you become an expert on this stuff?

19:11 Do you have a full-time income from your coaching now?

19:24 What do customers buy from you?

20:04 Is this passive income for you? Does selling products automatically from your website work?

21:36 Once a customer buys from you, do they become a lifetime customer? Are they always coming back to you? Or do you fix their problem and it’s done?

22:30 Do you see other niches where your business model could work? What can other digital nomads do?

24:30 I love your business model. It’s so niche and targeted.

25:16 If you were starting today, what would you do differently?

26:20 You don’t hire professional web developers or other professionals to help you?

28:19 What are the ups and downs of a digital nomad lifestyle?

My Opinion of Social Anxiety Coaching

I’m pretty skeptical of most things, especially touchy-feeling types of subjects like psychological counselling and spirituality. I’m definitely a much more analytical and scientifically focused person. I want measurable results, not subjective evaluations.

However, when it comes to fears, emotions and spiritual matters, humans have a tendency to behave very irrationally. I know that how I react to certain social situations is completely irrational and unfounded, yet I still can get stressed at times.

My one session with Sebastiaan has helped a lot. I’ve gained an inner confidence very quickly. A large part of his coaching was just repetitively guiding me through my fears and their likely origins so that I could move beyond them. I guess this would be a lot like what a psychologist would do, although I have no experience other than what I’ve seen on TV.

Another part is the Emotional Freedom Technique, which involves tapping on different parts of your body’s energy meridians. Although, I feel that I’ve had a major improvement in my confidence levels, I’m still a little skeptical of the benefits of tapping on the surface of my body. However, whatever Sebastiaan has done has generated results. Even if it’s just a placebo effect, I’m getting results, so I’ll continue the tapping and personal mantra that he helped me write.

Does his coaching work? It did for me.

Links
Social-Anxiety-Solutions.com

How Not to Hike Up Doi Suthep

Apparently, Thais are not so interested in hiking. The very first time we tried the hike, I asked directions from several locals and all said that it was impossible to hike up. All recommended turning around, going to the other side of Chiang Mai University, and taking a taxi truck or song tao up to the top. None of them seemed to believe that we actually wanted to walk up. One guy even told us it was dangerous because it was a jungle full of snakes and wild animals.

After been turned around several times, I finally decided to ignore all the advice and go in the direction I felt the trail must be.  Here are directions on how to climb to the top.

Where to Start

Start by going East on Suthep road past Chiang Mai University. There are many good, inexpensive cafes and restaurants on the way so this is a good place to get something to eat before your hike.

Walking up Suthep Road, you will eventually hit a greener area, it’s possible to get to the trail by going straight, but it’s easier to turn right down the narrow road in the picture below. There are some billboards there, but you should also see a sign that says “Nature Trail.”

The TV tower is right near the entrance to the hiking trail, so you can use that as a visual marker about which direction to go. From where you leave Suthep Road, there is only one way that a vehicle can go, so just follow that to the start of the trail.

To summarize, turn right off of Suthep Road, go straight for about 100 meters, then take the first and only left. After that, follow the road right up to the hiking trail.

The picture below shows what the TV Tower complex looks like. The hiking trail entrance is right before this gate.

TV Tower at the Base of Doi Suthep

The picture below is what the entrance to the trail looks like. There is a map on one of the green boards, but it is almost completely useless.

Most of the hike has a pretty well worn trail. The picture below is a good idea of what to expect. It’s not exactly jungle trekking, but I wouldn’t recommend doing it in flip flops. Some insect repellent is also a good investment.

 Wat Phalad Temple on Doi Suthep

The first set of temples is only about a 25 minute hike at a slow pace. The temple is beautiful, and it offers a decent view of Chiang Mai when it’s not cloudy.

This is your only chance for toilets until you get to the top, so it’s a good pit stop. The toilets closest to the trail are often locked, particularly early in the morning, but there are more inside the complex, near the main temple.

Wat-Pha-Lad Temple

There are monks working in the area here through the day. We often surprise young monks on the trail listening to iPods or talking amongst themselves.

Wat-Phalad

Take some time to walk around the complex. It’s a great place to catch your breath.

The trail before and after Wat Phalad is marked by orange colored cloth from monks robes so it is very easy to navigate.

The trail markers end quickly after the first temple, so some good general advice is to stay to the right and go up when faced with a fork in the road. The path gets very steep right after Wat Phalad. This is one of the worst parts of the trail but it only lasts for about 5 minutes.

Be careful on the way down at this point. There is a lot of loose dirt and rocks on the path. This is where you’re most likely to slip and fall. Trust me I know from experience.

Soon you will reach the road. Cross over and walk up about 20 meters and you will see the trail start again on the opposite side.

The picture below shows what the entrance to the next section of the trail looks like.

Hiking this section is steep but there are cut out steps which give you stable footing. It’s less than an hour to go from this point.

Cross over the river and the trail continues up.

Recent rain can make the trail very slick, so be careful.

After about 45 minutes, you’ll reach the road again. There is a sharp u-turn here where all the taxi trucks and vans struggle to get up the mountain. You can walk on the main road to the main entrance of the temple, or you can go through the not-so-secret back way.

The entrance to the back way has a white gate that is always closed. Going through the back, means going through some of the shacks where people live on the mountain, passing monks residents and entering the temple without paying the 30 baht fee (US$1). There are also some trickier parts to navigate, so if you are travelling with a larger group of people, I would suggest going up the main road. There are sometimes dozens of people on the trails and if all are going through the back way, it would probably be disrespectful. However, we often take this route, so I’m being somewhat hypocritical.

At the end of the first steep path, there is a large empty house. You’ll need to turn left up the stairs before you reach the house.

The path has a stair case with a blue plastic pipe as a handle.

It gets a little steep around here and the trail is not so travelled here. As you go up, take your left. That is the easiest way to get to the next road.

There are several shacks were workers live on the mountain. The cook and live right off the main road, so it’s probably a good idea to get through here as fast as possible.

Once you go up the road, you’ll see another very old and tattered stair case. This is the last part of the hike. These stairs not likely to last much longer so watch where you step.

You’ll have to walk through the monks residences. The monks are generally busy in the middle of the day, but you will see some walking through here.

Soon you’ll get to the last path way. Turn left and follow the path. There is a new set of rails and a trolley built to move building supplies up the mountain. This will probably only be here temporarily but if you see it, cross over the stairs where the rails are and go straight to the next set of stairs. Then it’s an easy walk right to the top of the temple.

Going this way, means you avoid the entrance fee for foreigners, however there are many donation boxes at the top. Please consider making a small donation for the upkeep of the temple and mountain.

This is the view at the top. If you’re lucky, can see all of Chiang Mai. Most times it will be pretty hazy and cloudy.

The Reward

Here is a photo of the golden temple Wat Phrathat. This is your reward at the top.

Wat Phrathat, Doi Suthep

There is a cafe at the top that serves okay espresso drinks and some tasty hot waffles. We always make a stop there to fuel up before heading back down.

The main entrance has a large set of stairs that is definitely worth seeing. There are also many shops and food stalls if you’d like to buy something.

Doi Suthep hill tribe kids

If your too tired to hike down, you can catch a red taxi truck for 40 baht (US$1.35), I believe. There is always a long line of trucks waiting to take people down.

If you decide to skip the trail and walk down the main road, it will take about 2 hours to get back to Wat Phalad, but there is a lookout platform that might make it worth your while.

Hiking Doi Suthep is good exercise and the temple, view and coffee at the top are a fantastic reward for your efforts. See you on the trail.