Ever take a holiday that you wished would never end? Imagine if you went on vacation and loved it so much you never came back, or decided to move there a few years down the road.

If it sounds like a hopeless pipe dream, it doesn’t have to be. For some, packing up their lives and moving to a dream destination has become a reality, either through starting a business or pursuing a working holiday that morphs into permanent residency.

Two years ago, Jonathan Keim did just that. While working in Santa Barbara, California, for an online school that trains people how to become life coaches, he realised that he spent all of his time encouraging others to follow their dreams but wasn’t out there following his own.

So he quit his job, flew to Asia to expand his horizons, became enchanted by the Indonesian island of Bali and never left.

“My family told me to check out Ubud (in the Balinese interior) because it had a great community of artists, and when I got here something magical happened,” Keim said. “I was amazed by the culture. I had never met a group of people like the ones who live here, and I knew I wanted to stay.”

The 26-year-old’s recipe for coconut-infused vegan ice cream impressed the local expat community in Ubud so much, he said, that many invested in the product right away, spurring Keim to get a business visa and start the ice-cream company Kokolato, which sells 20 flavours island wide. He has since partnered with local food company Bali Buddha and will open his first storefront in Ubud this month.

Testing the waters

Not every country will allow tourists who come to visit to simply decamp there forever. Certain countries have reciprocity programmes. Starting a business is one way to dive into a new culture overseas, but for those who prefer to test the waters before they jump in, a working holiday visa can be a great first step.

Australia offers a popular Working Holiday Maker scheme with two types of visas available to residents of 29 partner countries, according to figures from the Department of Immigration and Border Protection. The agency’s statistics show that the country had within its borders 173,108 "Working Holiday" visa holders and 5,874 "Work and Holiday" visa holders at the close of 2013, a year-on-year increase of 9.9% and 19.7% respectively. Australia doesn’t publicly release figures on how many of these workers find sponsorship and transfer to temporary work visas, but it’s the fastest growing OECD nation with a population growth of 1.8% annually, according to figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Chilean Patricio Sepulveda, 31, used one of these working holiday visas to transition a one-year trip to Sydney into a new career. A former analyst for a small computer-parts company in Santiago, Sepulveda came to Australia four years ago.

“The idea at the beginning was to stay in Sydney for six months, make enough money to travel to Southeast Asia, and then return to Chile like many other Chileans do after university,” he said. “But the landscape was awesome, Bondi Beach was just around the corner, and, to be honest, I got seduced by the money.”