My Travels Truly Begin – CELTA

Published by Johnny on February 25, 2010

From my courageous stint in medical research I could finally afford to fly the coup once more. This is how my life as a serial backpacker actually began….

Came out of the hospital, but didn’t want to face the real world and I wanted to travel but I still wasn’t exactly rolling in it with $2000 in my current account and $5000 in savings from working through uni, an awesome mother etc. I went online and started googling – “how can i travel with very little money”, “travelling on a genuine shoestring”, “working and travelling” yadda yadda yadda. Aside from being inundated with pleas to pay 5 grand for the privilege of volunteering for 2 weeks in some far flung country I wasn’t making much progress. Then I stumbled across CELTA.

I’ll explain the mechanics, logistics, tips and tricks etc behind a CELTA diploma in my ‘Travel Tips’ subsection but I’ll give a brief run down here for the sake of my story. It’s basically a diploma from Cambridge Uni (the REAL Cambridge Uni believe it or not) that you study intense, i mean intensely intense, for one month and combined with your degree you can then teach pretty much anywhere in the world

CELTA’s can be taught anywhere so I signed up for my course which was being run in Chiang Mai, Thailand – i had never even heard of Chiang Mai by this point :S, and bought a one way ticket to Thailand. Wham, bam, thank you mam and I was outta there. From looking on the net aimlessly on how to travel and earn to applying for my course probably spanned across about 24 hours but i figured the more i think about how crazy it is the more likely i am to pull out, so i booked the course and my flight and all my money was gone again, but spent very wisely.

*IMPORTANT MESSAGE/DISCLAIMER: I feel as if i should add that at this point my plan was honestly to fly to Thailand to study my CELTA, take a one year contract teaching English in China, then fly back to the UK to pursue my career in finance aided by my new found ability in Chinese. So, 3 and a half years, 40 countries, 3 broken cameras, 2 lost ipods and and a host of amazing experiences later I’m still on the move with no plans to stop. What I mean to say is, if you are planning to do something similar a CELTA abroad be prepared to never be able to return to the same life, same mentality and same banality ever again :S