Raymond Hou (Raymond) has run the Raymond Thirty brand as a one-person business for many years. Because his work can be done entirely remotely, travel has become a recurring part of his life and creative work rather than an exception. He sees this “travel while working” mode as an extension of Remote Work and Work-Life Integration (Not Balance): a laptop and external monitor stay in his suitcase, and after landing he is both a tourist and at work. This entry surveys several places in his travels that had a clear influence on him, and how those places in turn shaped his views on work rhythms and identity.
India: The Starting Point and Prototype of an “Expanded Mind”
Raymond’s first trip abroad alone was a 35-day independent trip to India at age eighteen. He has repeatedly used it as a reference point in personal essays. For example, in “How to Use Hou Zhixun,” he listed it as one of the early experiences that shaped his “atypical, dynamic life.” Years later, when writing about New Zealand, he still described the trip’s impact as “a little like the novelty and open-minded feeling I had when I went to India at eighteen.” India is therefore more than a place name on Raymond’s map; it is a benchmark he uses to calibrate what it means to have one’s eyes truly opened.
Western Australia: The First Experiment in Travel-and-Work
In March 2023, Raymond took an eighteen-day road trip in Western Australia with digital companions. The journey unfolded amid “fierce flies, scorching sun, and a phone with only SOS signal.” It ended at Perth Kings Park on the final day, after which he continued to Sydney to return to a life with internet access.1 He classified this trip as a stage when he was “still experimenting with travel-and-work.” He brought his computer, hoping to work in spare moments between activities, but often ended up making both the experience and his work performance worse. A trip to Thailand, including Phuket, that November led him to revise his approach: on outdoor activity days, he packed light and handled messages only on his phone. The overall experience improved considerably. Western Australia was therefore his first failed answer to the question of how travel and work could coexist.
Osaka: The Feel of a City Full of Remote Workers
During a trip to Osaka in May 2024, Raymond recorded an observation about his accommodation in a social-media post. He noticed that its 24-hour workspace was crowded with well-equipped remote workers: some wrote novels, some taught programming, and some wrote blogs. He compared Osaka’s urban atmosphere with Bangkok’s, seeing an international feel and everyday convenience in both—“the whole world is around you”—while describing Osaka as more refined and restrained, with a good blend of modernity and historical culture. The city mattered to Raymond because it made concrete the idea that “individual workers around the world actually live through similar days.”
Chiang Mai: A Change of Scenery During a Low Period
In November 2025, Raymond went to Chiang Mai for a change of mood during an intense low period in his life. While there, he attended the city’s thousand-person Yi Peng Lantern Festival. The trip also brought a series of setbacks: for several consecutive weeks, different accommodations had outages or unstable internet, so he had to rely on his phone hotspot to deliver the weekly livestream class for Notion Online Courses and Boot Camp; a leaking thermos spilled water on his MacBook, leaving its screen black. For Raymond, the significance of Chiang Mai was not the attractions themselves but the way the trip tested the vulnerability of “a remote worker tying a livelihood to unstable infrastructure.” Afterward, he chose small tasks that gave him a sense of control—such as organizing the house and clearing out things he no longer used—to rebuild his state of mind.
New Zealand: A Place to Hand Over “Time Sensitivity”
From December 2025 to January 2026, Raymond spent an extended period on New Zealand’s South Island, traveling through Christchurch, Lake Tekapo, Wanaka, Mount Cook, and the area around the Remarkables near Queenstown. He wrote issue 169 of the Raymond Weekly Report at the foot of the Remarkables and began trying to post short daily travel journals and a “New Zealand facts” series on social media. The strongest impact New Zealand had on him was its sense of time: in summer, daylight lasted so long that the sun rose at six in the morning and did not set until nine at night. He described feeling as though “time wasn’t passing,” creating considerable psychological tension for someone who considers himself “time-sensitive.”
The trip also corresponded with a shift in his work rhythm. In previous years, he would stay up late at year’s end to rush out an annual review. This time, he chose to postpone some projects and wrote, “Some places are valuable because nothing needs to be done in a hurry,” which he treated as the issue’s theme.2 At the same time, he did not stop working: by the harbor, he used Cursor to develop AI agents continuously and handed his former “productivity diary” process to AI for reorganization. New Zealand therefore became a setting where “slowing down” and “continuing to build systems” happened at once. His accommodation was not always smooth, either; a newly opened hotel where he stayed in Auckland over New Year led him to conclude that “new over old” is not necessarily a sound rule.
Traveling the World with One Backpack: Lessons Distilled into a Method
Seven years of travel-and-work experience eventually led Raymond to compile a “Digital Nomad EDC List,” centered on the principles “buy good things rather than carrying many things; choose lightness over excess performance.”3 From the missteps in Western Australia, through the adjustments in Thailand, to the extended stay in New Zealand, these places collectively shaped his judgments about equipment, itinerary pacing, and switching between travel and work. For Raymond, digital nomadism is not an escape from work; it is compressing work into something portable and using the rhythms of different cities to repeatedly test how far he, as a Super Individual, can “live in a way that feels like my own.”
Sources
Footnotes
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Hou Zhixun, “Wrapping Up an 18-Day Western Australia Road Trip—Tourist-Like Worries About Robbery and Outsmarting Budget Airline Baggage Scales,” public Facebook post, 2023-03-18. View original ↩
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Hou Zhixun, “A Digital Nomad’s EDC List: Minimal Gear for Traveling the World with One Backpack,” WordPress article, 2026-04-05. View original ↩