The rise of the luxe nomad
Many of us secretly yearn for the romanticism of a life lived on the lam, writes Lee Tulloch.
THE MARVELLOUS American bohemian Isadora Duncan once threw a house party that started in Paris, continued in Venice and concluded weeks later on a houseboat on the Nile.
Duncan danced around the world in obscure halls and palaces frittering away a fortune. Often penniless, when she had $2000 in her hands she would spend it on lilies. Her friend, The New Yorker’s Paris correspondent Janet Flanner, called her a ‘‘nomad de luxe’’.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries are filled with stories of flamboyant women who ignored the conventions of the time and escaped to wilder shores.
These days, we can only marvel at their nomadic adventures from the comfort of our A380 seat. Now, every desert camp has a five-star spa and four-wheel-drive dune-bashing adventures, while Anthony Bourdain is on TV to tell us what sheep eyeballs taste like before we’ve even booked our airfares. No wonder, then, that many of us secretly yearn for the romanticism of a life lived on the lam, where nothing is familiar and everything is unpredictable.
That’s why the concept of being a ‘‘nomad’’ has acquired great cachet of late. There are proud grey nomads, who roam the coast in their recreational vehicles, and digital nomads, who operate businesses on the run with the aid of smartphones and laptops. And there are global nomads: growing numbers of well-heeled early retirees in their 50s and 60s who spend several months of each year living in a country of which they are not citizens.
Cashed up and unwilling to grow old, with cheap airfares and house-sharing opportunities such as Airbnb to back them up, the over-50s are in an unrivalled position to make a run for it.
I recently invited five guests for dinner. One lived part of the year in Hawaii. One couple had returned from running a hotel in Sri Lanka and were off to live in Barcelona; and another couple, who had spent many years in Hong Kong, were now living in Paris and house-swapping for a few months each year with friends in Sydney.
The talk was not about real estate, the kick-starter to so many 21st-century dinner-party conversations – but about visas.
Only a decade ago, everyone was busily cocooning, acquiring property and Smeg kitchens to make the home the focal point of
modern life. Now a critical mass has now decided that experiences, not possessions, matter.
My friends are modern ‘‘nomads de luxe’’. For them, a ‘‘luxe’’ lifestyle has nothing to do with price and everything to do with richness of experience.
If that means narrowly escaping being killed by a machetewielding thug in Sri Lanka or finding themselves in the deadly grip of the sadistic French bureaucracy, they consider that a fair price to pay.
Like Isadora Duncan, they are dancing on the edge. I’ve lived in Paris and New York and I know uprooting yourself doesn’t always satisfy restlessness. And if you sell your home to fund your travels, there’s a real risk that you may never get it back.
And yet, the prospect of running out of money and living a potential sad old age in welfare housing is merely a passing shadow across this landscape of unfettered adventure.
‘‘You can’t take it with you,’’ they argue, and Richard Dawkins and I would agree with the soundness of that philosophy.
The nomadic life takes some courage. It may not be the level of courage required to dress like a man and travel with the Berbers, but it’s the best anyone can do in the age of TripAdvisor and Google Maps.