Healthy Vegan Travel Tips

The internet is full of healthy travel tips but these tips are healthy vegan travel tips; because let’s face it, vegan travellers are a little bit different.

Our Vegan Food Quest to find, eat and write about the best vegan food in the world has meant that we travel a lot and it turns out that it can be hard to maintain a decent level of healthiness when you’re away from home.

As we’re travelling long term we’ve also discovered that the longer you travel, the harder it gets to stay healthy. We develop new routines (not always healthy), get exhausted (frequently, as travelling can be hard work) and end up eating out all the time, (especially if we’re staying somewhere without a kitchen).

Here are 4 simple & healthy vegan travel tips to help you stay healthy on the road:

1 – Pack a travel plate, cup, cutlery set, and a couple of small air tight containers

These have been some of the most valuable items in the Vegan Food Quest luggage and we’re so glad we squeezed them into our bags. It means we can set up a basic kitchen wherever we are and make ourselves a quick vegan meal or snack.

Freshly prepared papaya on our trusty travel plate whilst overlooking a volcano in Indonesia

Having a good airtight snack box means we can fill it with nuts, seeds and dried fruit to eat on the road when we get hungry.

We fill our other box with whatever food we want to keep ant-free and fresh (like crackers, nuts or any other food we’ve picked up along the way. Lots of travel tips will advise to pack these sorts of things but it’s even more important for the vegan traveller because it’s likely that you’ll find yourself in places where healthy vegan food is hard to come by.

If you are trying to pack light then prioritise these things as a vegan traveler, you wont believe how handy they are once you hit the road.

Dried fruit and nuts in our air tight ‘vegan snack box’

2 – Find your local health food shop and market

Although harder to find when travelling off the beaten track, we have always found health food shops in most of the countries we have visited in Europe, North America or South East Asia, mainly in bigger cities or towns but also in places you wouldn’t expect.

When you are researching where to go, have a look for these shops and put them on your list to visit. Happy Cow is great for this as not only to they have vegan restaurant listings but they also have great info about health food shops too.

It’s often proved to be a good adventure wandering around more local areas looking for a shop like this and we always get really excited when we find them. Stock up on things you might need to make a healthy snack or meal. Things like nut bars, seeds, dried fruit, whole grain crackers always seem to come in handy on the road.

We hunt down health food shops wherever we go…

3 – Learn some recipes that don’t involve cooking

This means you can make your own healthy breakfast, lunch or dinner even though you don’t have a kitchen. Try making your own chia and oat porridge with non-dairy milk and fresh fruit (all easy to make in your travel cup and with no fridge, just see our recipe here).

Healthy vegan breakfast of soya milk, chia seeds, fresh fruit and nuts.

4 – Don’t forget your B12

We normally like to buy most of our supplies on the road because the mission to find things is always half the fun. But we always pack a supply of vegan multi-vitamins so we can make sure we get our B12 from an animal-free source. We’ve found trying to decode labels on some foreign vitamin supplements to be a bit challenging and as it’s so important not to become deficient in this vital vitamin that we think it’s worth carrying the extra supplies around.

And of course, no vegan travel adventure is complete without a large supply of Marmite (it’s a British thing) – you either love it or you hate it, and at Vegan Food Quest we love it.

Marmite – you either love it or you hate it and we love it!

Remember the healthier you are, the better you feel so you can enjoy your vegan travels even more…

Have you got a healthy vegan travel tip to share? Leave a comment below and share the vegan love.