Travel and Career - can we really have both?

I recently read an article on the Lonely Planet newsletter entitled Travel vs. career: does it have to be all or nothing? This is a topic, which I have been thinking about a lot over the past few years and one that resonates strongly in my life.  I naively hadn’t thought that other people might be facing the same dilemma as me until I read this article. It just seemed that everyone else had it figured out, which now I find out is not true. Up until this point, I have always put travel first in my life. Sure, I have gone abroad to work, the typical English teaching and temping in countries where I could, but this never really leads to long-term job prospects.

Now I find though that I am being left behind, all my peers and friends have jobs, and careers at least 2 or 3 steps up the ladder. Some are now managers, have their own businesses, are earning lots of money and are able to buy their own houses. I, on the other hand having decided that I should probably become more qualified to get a job, have just finished my Masters and am now unemployed.

Of course people will say, “Just get a job that involves travel.” These I found out a very few and far between and in order to get these jobs in the first place you need lots of years experience. But, what about those of us that are still relatively young, can we ever really begin our careers in the first place if we keep on travelling? Job agencies won’t even look at you if you have gaps in your career history, “… and what were you doing these few months here or this half a year here?” You can’t very well tell them that all those times were holidays.  Or those jobs that do look at you wonder why you have changed jobs so often and haven’t been in one job more than 3 months.

Don’t get me wrong, I have loved every single second of my travels and wouldn’t change those years for sitting behind the desk of any company in the world, but I do feel that this has been in detriment to my career, or lack of it I should say.  What I have done though and what has stayed constant with me throughout is my writing. Everywhere I have been I have written travel articles, after hard work and persistence I have now had quite a few of them published in magazines, online and in newspapers. I even wrote a few chapters for a Time Out guidebook while I was travelling around Argentina. I guess I would have to conclude that travel and writing about it is my career, even though I am not sitting behind a desk and I do not know where my next pay cheque is coming from.

So, can we really have a career and travel? Does it have to be all or nothing? I think in a way, that at some point we all have to choose.