How a man who moved to Taiwan to pay off his student loans turned traveling the world into a career

When Matt Gibson left his native British Columbia in 2004, he wasn't looking for adventure.

He was looking for a way to pay off his student loans.

Gibson, now 36, graduated with about $10,000 in student loan debt, and had been working planting trees to try and earn some extra cash when he met a man whose girlfriend was in Taiwan, teaching English to pay off about $70,000 of her own student loans. His new friend quickly joined her.

"At the end of the season I emailed him and he said, 'Come on over,'" Gibson remembers.

Over ten years later, Gibson is still on the move, working as an adventure travel writer and photographer.

You can follow his adventures on his website, XpatMatt.com, or through his Instagram @xpatmatt.

Here's how he's made a career of traveling the world:

SEE ALSO: A couple who have been working and traveling for 2 years explain how they afford it

Living in Taiwan and teaching English, Gibson was able to eliminate his loans soon after he arrived, working only 18 hours a week.

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Vase Rock, Xiao Liuchiu, Taiwan.

He soon turned his attention to another project: Creating a quarterly English-language magazine that allowed him to work in the field he'd always dreamed of — writing. "I had a degree in journalism and some ideas about how printing worked, but that's a far cry from running a magazine," he says. "As new problems came up, new problems got solved. I learned Chinese to have the basic advertising conversation and the first ones, I delivered myself. I didn't know how to find a printer — I found one. I didn't know how to prepare the magazine for print — I figured it out."

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 Taroko Gorge, Taiwan.

"By the end it was a pretty successful magazine," Gibson says. "I even made a bit of money on the last few issues, and then I sold it." After three years of living in Taiwan and running the magazine, he decided to focus on his freelance travel writing and blogging while traveling through Thailand, Cambodia, and the Philippines.

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 The Philippines.