Manchester woman lived on £5 a day for years after suddenly quitting UK

A Manchester woman has revealed how she walked out on her life in the UK to travel the world despite having no plans and very little money - and how she managed to travel across 16 countries over 3 years on a budget of £5 per day.

Erica Pham, 27, felt like her life had hit a dead end after graduating from university and starting work in a nail salon. She explains that, on a whim in 2018, she and her boyfriend Terry, 29, decided to both quit their jobs, pack up their lives and start travelling the world with no plan, no budget, and no tickets booked.

“We had both talked about our dreams of travelling the world but never made any plans, " she says. "One night I just said ‘today’s the day’ and we packed everything we had into our little hatchback, quit our jobs and took what little savings we had down to Dover without even booking a ferry”.

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Erica, of Collyhurst, and Terry arrived in France at 4am the same night without having booked a hotel, and spent the next 2 months driving 5,500 miles before scrapping their car in Athens - all while limiting themselves to spending £5 per day.

Erica says: “We stayed in £3 hostels or made friends along the way who would pay for our meals or let us stay with them - one night we even slept on a train station floor in India surrounded by rats.

"It actually felt nice to only think about where we would stay that night and not worry about existential things like what I wanted my life to be. We were driving with no direction or plan, we’d just stop when we found something interesting so I could take pictures.

"When we scrapped our car we gave anything we couldn’t carry to a