Charlie Larga’s Field Guide to Life in Cuenca: Why nomads skip Appalachia for the Andes

A digital nomad, for those still thumbing through the dictionary, is a person who can do their job and earn money from anywhere in the world as long as they have a computer and an internet connection. Countries across the globe now woo them with special visas

Click through the ads for Bali, Lisbon, or Medellín and you’ll see the same golden beaches, cobbled streets, and yoga mats under palm trees. The pitches could have been written by travel agents a century ago — the promise that if you only leave home, you’ll find life cheaper, freer, and more authentic.

It put me in mind of Kipling’s Mandalay, where the lure of faraway places beats the grey drabness of home: ‘Ship me somewhere east of Suez, where the best is like the worst, / Where there aren’t no Ten Commandments, an’ a man can raise a thirst.’”

But Charlie sometimes wonders: if the goal is simply to live cheaper, why not just swap San Francisco for West Virginia, or Brooklyn for Boise? After all, Windows or Linux run on a laptop the same in the hollers of Appalachia as it does in Bali, Chiang Mai, or Da Nang.

But here’s what you soon find out. West Virginia is often considered the cheapest of all fifty states. The statistics show it: groceries, utilities, healthcare, and transportation cost about the same everywhere, but the price of a roof over your head is where the real difference lies. Housing in West Virginia is dirt-cheap compared to San Francisco or Miami. That’s what keeps the state at the bottom of the cost-of-living charts.

So when digital nomads, bloggers, or consultants speak of “low costs” in America’s poorest state, they are usually talking about rent. Try buying your groceries at Piggly Wiggly in Charleston, WV and you’ll find the checkout is no more forgiving than in a branch of Jewel-Osco in Chicago, IL.

Gasoline might be a few pennies cheaper, but your internet, your health insurance premium, your cell phone bill are all set by national monopolies that don’t offer discounts for the Appalachian Mountains, (although possibly you might be able to forage for coal in the winter), and you are still going to need to run a car or truck.

That’s the catch. In Cuenca, Ecuador, where I write these lines, the arithmetic is different.

Rent is indeed lower than in Miami or Madrid, but so is an almuerzo, or even an almuerzo ejecutivo if you really want to live life high on the hog, a crosstown taxi, and the monthly internet bill. A massage, a podiatry appointment, a cardiologist visit, a haircut, or even a trip to the dentist for some drilling and filling all come at a fraction of U.S. prices. Costs fall together like dominoes. That’s why retirees and other nomads keep drifting here: they save on more than just the roof over their head.

So West Virginia may look cheap, but only from one angle. If you’re young and restless and want to stretch your dollars, you might last longer in the Andes than in the hollers. Unless, of course, your idea of adventure is coal country instead of cloud forest. In that case, load up the truck for Charleston, but don’t expect the groceries or the cardiology to be bargains.