So eventually I decided to leave. 6-7 months of travel. That’s the maximum I’m a allowed not to break my continuous residency in the UK, permitted that in this period I would continue to work and produce invoices.
I spoke with an immigration lawyer before leaving and that should be fine.

To start I went for about 3 weeks to Italy. August is a month you can’t miss there, everyone is on holiday and parties are everywhere. Plus I needed to pay visit to my parents and friends, a bit longer than usual as I’m planning not to get back to Italy before Easter.

In those 3 weeks I kept working for The Nido Collection – From August 4th I’m no longer an employee, but I’m on a freelance contract. – That was a first test of working remotely and it worked pretty well, despite some issues with the horrible italian internet connection (it’s much better anywhere in Asia now).

Then on the 25th August I finally took my flight from Rome to Colombo, Sri Lanka.

In Sri Lanka the adventures started immediately, I soon met a lot of people – that’s very common when you travel in hostels – and sat for my journey around the country.

For the first two days of work I had some problems with the internet connection in the first hostels I stayed. That worried me quite a lot and at one point I even thought that my idea to work remotely was utopistic as I had miscalculated the internet infrastructure in Asia.
However, on the third day I found out that buying a local sim card and doing the hotspot with my phone was the solution.
Although, of course, since I bought the sim card I only found hostels with perfect wi-fi…

After that all went pretty smoothly, I gradually got used to work at weird times and I’m now trying to work whenever I have time. As there is no routine, but a lot of free time. It seems hard to believe, but I’ve actually had enough holiday by now and I don’t really need to relax on a beach. So while the people I travel with are doing that I prefer to be somewhere in the shade, possibly with a plug and a fresh fruit juice to get some work done.

Besides the work, I brought with me my Canon 5D and I started a few pictures to document my trip. I’m planning to share everything on social media (you can check my album here), in order to keep updated friends and family on what I’m up to. In this way I can skip explanatory calls and webchats, I have no time for that.

Furthermore, still to avoid explain always where I am, especially to my parents I downloaded the app Polarsteps, which tracks my movements, showing where I am at the moment. I could make it prettier uploading pictures, but I don’t have enough memory on my phone. Plus they make the app very slow.