Yeah, this is the way to do it. Instead of quitting your job and traveling, travel while you have a job. Someone I work with routinely travels around the world and lives with friends for a few weeks. As long as there's the Internet, you can get plenty of work done, and have plenty of time to enjoy the world. Why sit at home and chat on IRC when you can just go live with other programmers for a while. (We work on a lot of open source stuff, so it's always good to hang out with the other contributers. If you don't have a lot of hacker friends, this approach might not work.)

Anyway, I liked what I saw :) so I'm going to Tokyo tomorrow for this purpose. It counts as work, and will be quite fun.