In Praise of Digital Nomad Retreats
Stella Guan takes us to Yunnan, China 🇨🇳
Digital nomad retreats are nothing new, but they might be for you.
(No, I didn’t mean to rhyme.)
I first heard about them roughly a year ago. I was at a conference after party. It was everything I loathe––forced networking in an overcrowded space where you have to scream to be heard. I can never follow a conversation in these settings, so I generally retreat to a familiar friend and look for an excuse to head out early.
Before I could get an excuse, I did meet someone promoting a new digital nomad retreat in Bulgaria. She quickly walked me through the concept, which is again, nothing new in the world of digital nomads.
Digital nomad retreats can vary wildly, just like hotels. You can find a bougie retreat or a glorified hostel and everything in between. This one happened to be in a large, otherwise disused building in the Bulgarian countryside.
The idea is, generally speaking, that you can travel someplace new and have a built-in community of fellow travelers. You can work remotely side by side, join for nights out on the town, plan weekend excursions, or keep to yourself and simply treat it was a temporary place to live.
My first hands-on experience with this was last May when Melanie and I (and Moses) spent the month based at Kalima in Caldes d’Estrac, Spain. While there, I met Stella Guan––a Chinese digital nomad who lived in the US, bought a house and immediately regretted. Her story made it to the Wall Street Journal.
After selling the house, she became a digital nomad and hasn’t looked back.
We kept in touch on social media, as you do these days, and I noticed she launched her own digital nomad retreat. Except hers wasn’t a short train ride away from one of the most popular destinations in the world, like Barcelona to Caldes. Hers is settled in a small Chinese town in the Yunnan province.
I was immediatley intrigued.
Digital nomads get a lot of flack these days. I feel like they’ve become the new easy target that hipsters, coffee aficionados, and craft beer obsessives once were. Like any other much-maligned, fledgling group, the ugly ones stick out the most. I’m talking about those who contribute directly to the skyrocketing rise in local housing and push people out without remorse.
Don’t get me wrong. They suck. Continue to mock them as you wish.
But at its best, digital nomad retreats connect like-minded people from around the world in an otherwise disused space with the ambition of benefiting the local community. That, after all, was Kalima’s goal in Caldes d’Estrac.
With Stella, I see an even more ambitious goal. That is, to welcome people from all over the world to a lesser-traveled corner of China and challenge unwarranted stereotypes about the country. So much of what Westerners know about China is fed to them through the chilling lens of mass media. Few countries look good through the filter of a CNN or, god forbid, Fox News broadcast.
Much of what I love about travel is the opportunity to go someplace I’m told I should fear or be weary of and cobble together my own opinion based on conversations and experiences on the ground. I find this is often much more doable in a smaller, more tight-knit community than in larger, international cities.
I’ve long dreamed of traveling to China. It’s not a place I’ve ever intrinsically feared despite the general narrative in Western media. In fact, it triggers the romantic in me when I imagine its ancient history, varied natural landscapes, and of course, the food––perhaps my closest contact with the culture since I’ve yet to visit.
I wanted to talk more about this and learn more about Stella’s project. So, I invited her to join me on Travel Tomorrow for a chat. You can listen to that conversation here on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
A brief break: Tomorrow afternoon, I start the journey to the Mustang region of Nepal to run in and write about the Mustang Trail Race. I most likely won’t be back here until my return to Berlin on April 12th. If you like, you can follow along the journey on Instagram at @BaurJoe.