Travel slowly, immerse yourself in the daily in-and-outs. Rent apartments, do housesitting. Stay at least a month in a big city, use it as a "home base," and make shorter excursions out from there.
At the same time, there's adventure to be had coding and traveling at the same time... had to mute myself in a Google Hangout daily standup once because the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lohri drums from the Delhi streets below were drowning me out. Brushed death on a Bangkok mototaxi in rush hour traffic en route to a give a meetup talk. Most exciting of all: found novel timezone bug in an app once by working in a zone (India Standard Time) with a 30-minute offset.
I'm a software engineer, so I work online too, irrelevant of the country I happen to be in.
If you seriously think about driving (you should!), you'll find http://wikioverland.org very helpful.