Travel hack I discovered from my last 9 month traveling in S-E Asia

Hey, today i wanted to share my experience living in S-E Asia for the past 9 months. Some of you might be living abroad for much longer and some of you might not have took the big plunge yet. Either way, this is my retrospective of this year living in Vietnam.

1. A homebase will help you be more effective. If you want to be productive, you need to have a place where you can work from. When I first arrive in Vietnam, I tried working from cafe and restaurant that had a wifi, it was working for a few hours at a time.

Hunch over a miniature table and sitting on a small chair just didn’t cut it for me. When I finally moved to a new place with kitchen, a big work table and a good wifi, my productivity quadruple. So its nice to work from cafe and mastermind with other people but you need a headquarter where you can bash work like a mad man.

2.Watch what you eat. When I arrived here, I tried to eat like Vietnamese. Rice on everymeal. My energy level was up and down all the time. With all the carbohydrates i was putting down my throat i was getting tired very easily. I was brewing 2 big pots of coffee PER DAY to stop me from falling asleep in the afternoon and do some work. That’s because there was no grocery close by and i was eating out of vietnamese restaurants around my house all the time.

Since I moved to my new place, I have now a grocery on the mainfloor. Everyday I can go shop for food. I cut out ALL the carbs from my diet and my energy level went up the roof! Now it is only meat and veggies on every meal, and I went from drinking 2 pots of coffee a day to 2 cups! So watch what you are eating, carbs are a killer.

3. Find time to exercise. One thing i found since moving here is that my training regiment has radically change. I used to train like Arnold Schwarzenegger back in Canada. Since im here, well priority shifted a little bit and A/C gym are just something my bootstrapped lifestyle doesn’t let me afford. Also, after training like a mad man for 1.5 hours, there is usually not much energy left to work on clients and grow my business.
So i started doing a gym hack I have seen Tim ferris and the bulletproof exec doing. Go heavy, big body part, just a few reps and keep the visit to the gym to under 30 minutes. So pretty much all isolation movement went out the door. I basically just do deadlift, squat, benchpress, bent-over row and some pull up at the machine or unassisted. I compliment that with some calf raises times to times and some bicep curls. I do this 2-3 times a week. I can even go once a week, as long as I hit deadlift, squat and bench press then i’m an happy camper.

4. take a lot of pictures. I have been here for 9 months I really don’t have much cool pictures at the moment to share with family etc… I started to take this as a duty to report to my family back home how it is here in S-E Asia. After all, im always happy to get picture from them and see how my newphew are growing so I assume they are just as happy when I send them selfies of me eating pho in a street restaurant.

Well thats about the 4 main things I found that made a dramatic effect on me since moving in Vietnam. I’m sure that I could come up with more but i think that those are the major one i found. If you have been travelling for a while and you have something to comment, let me know in the comment below. Cheers!