Hello and welcome to Gotta Keep Movin’!

My name is Emma Higgins, and I’m 24 and from the UK. I started travel writing after a trip to India in 2010. It was such a culture shock for me that I felt like it had to be written down – I had to document the things I saw to try, preserving them and sharing them with everyone around me. To say that my trip to India changed my life is an understatement, the inspiration that place can give you to live life is outstanding.

Prior to that and since then I have been around more than 20 countries in Europe, worked on a dairy farm in Canada, road tripped down to the States, been cliff jumping in Bosnia, lived in Barcelona for 6 months teaching English, been to Morocco twice, once without food poisoning and once with. It seems I have plenty of stories to tell already, but as far as I’m concerned the journey has just begun. In September 2012 I set off on an open-ended trip to South America, which had always been a dream of mine and was one of my favourite trips to date. I was out there for 5 months and was blown away but the continent. I’m temporarily back at home, sorting out my next trip and trying to contain my itchy feet.

It took me a long time to achieve full-time vagabond status, but now that I have, this blog is an attempt to convince you to do exactly the same. My writing has travellers on a tight budget in mind. My budget has never been flexible – I am constantly planning trips that, if I travelled conventionally, I wouldn’t have the money for. But, with a range of work exchange, volunteering and jobs I pick up along the way, a life of never-ending travel is definitely on the cards. It’s not how you get the money to travel, it’s how you use the money you have to travel. You could disappear from home on the smallest of budgets if you really wanted to.

Many of my posts are things I’ve done myself, on my tiny bank balance. I rarely write about anything outside of my own spending habits. My travel expenses money food, shelter, transport and, admittedly, beer. But those are all necessities, right? Sometimes you can even tick food and shelter off that list with the volunteering I do. I never pay to go inside a monument or a museum. There are very rare exceptions, but I find a more authentic experience of a place to be lining the streets or in the words of the locals.

Sounds too good to be true? Wrong – this could be you with a little determination.

Huge thanks to anyone who reads, comments or browses. You are the ones who keep me writing, and it is you who keeps me inspired.

External contributions:

In 2012 I started as a social media intern for Green Global Travel, and slowly progressed into a regular writing contributor. Bret and Mary, the duo who run the website, work endlessly hard on providing up-to-date and interesting posts about eco-tourism, wildlife, travel, conversation, and so much more. Give it a read!