Shannon Coggins (57), Theo Simon (65), and their daughter Rosa (19) left their cozy wooden home in Somerset, UK,  back in August 2023. The trio’s destination was Wyoming, Australia, where Shannon’s sister Ellie Richmond planned to get married in December. The wedding venue in New South Wales was 15 thousand miles away from British Wales, a place so far that a simple Google Maps search spits the result “Can’t seem to find a way there”. Even the Travelmath trip calculator declares the distance as “complicated”, subtly suggesting: “You might even have to swim. May we suggest you fly instead?”

Slow travel pioneers

Indeed, to attend a wedding on the other side of the planet, most people would just take a bus to Bristol and hop on a plane to Sydney, a day’s journey away. But a family that, back in 2002, decided not to fly, knew there was only one acceptable answer – the slow travel adventure to Australia.

On her Buckle Up Dorothy blog, Shannon Coggins compared the slow trip to Australia with giving birth, a mixture of love and pain

The art student Rosa took a gap year, while her parents, the factory worker Theo and the school officer Shannon, both musicians in the folk band Seize the Day, known for their environmental campaigns, pulled brakes on their lives so they could minimize the carbon footprint on their four-months long trip Down Under.

But the Yellow Brick Road abruptly stopped in East Timor. To reach Oz, the no-fly family’s journey via buses, trains, and boats had to be polluted with a plane crossing to Australia after all. Was it a defeat?

On her Buckle Up Dorothy blog, Shannon compared the slow trip with giving birth, a mixture of love and pain. We got to talk about their delivery in Australia, just before the return trip to the UK, because, after all, there’s no place like home.

Unlike Dorothy, Shannon, Theo, and Rosa won’t be able to just click their ruby shoe heels, or wait for the next tornado. The slow-travel family will embark on another grand journey to make their one small step for man.

Shannon Coggins: I really like the fact that you call it ‘slow travel’. I’ve not heard that phrase before. It feels like I have heard it, but I don’t use it. And yet, it’s exactly what it is.

You’re the ambassadors of the slow travel movement!

Shannon: Let’s hope so. It used to be how everybody did it.

Another way of traveling around the world without planes is - by walking. Check out the incredible story of Tom Turcich!

Off-the-grid and on-the-road

Besides traveling off-the-beaten-path, you also live off-the-grid, don’t you?

S: Yes, we have built our own home. There was a long battle for planning permission over 20 years ago. Eventually, we won. The 4 acres of land are owned collectively by a group of 16 shareholders, of which Theo is one. We all have permission to build low-impact dwellings, with a limit in size.

Our home has three rooms, we’ve got a borehole for the water, and solar panels for the electricity. We are surrounded by trees and a garden that is full of birds. There’s a compost toilet outside. We have a shower which is in a shed. It’s a wonderful way of living. I love going outside to the toilet. I like collecting my water from the borehole. You have to interact with nature to do those things.

We’ve got a car park in common, at the bottom of the hill. Everybody parks there, and then walks to their houses with wheelbarrows, with all their stuff. It means it’s really safe place for children. They can run around, they’re going to see each other and have some agency about friendship and playing. It doesn’t all have to be organized by the parents. It’s been great.

It’s hard in winter when the power goes out. You have to be a lot more thoughtful about charging your computer. I used to take mine to work every day, charge it up, and bring it back home again. That’s how we live.

Theo Simon: It’s on the edge of the big village. Our collective bought the land, it’s been very low cost. But that was because we got permission on the basis that we would live very low-impact, and that we would reestablish the wildlife corridor between both sides of that field, by planting trees and bushes, which we have done. It’s become quite bio-diverse again. We have our own electricity, water, and sewage. And we have to recycle our waste as well.

S: All our rubbish is our responsibility. No one comes to collect our rubbish.

Leaving home sweet home

Is living off-grid the way to more easily save money for traveling?

S: Choosing to live a more modest lifestyle did have an impact. You can rent a big house and not have much money. You can buy a big house and have a big mortgage, and not have much money, but you’ll have security when you’re older. Or you can live in a simple, smaller way, which is what we managed to do. But it’s not an easy option. It’s not like leaping off-grid is easy. But it has meant that we can save up some money.

Theo: Now we have a housesitter. Because we also have a cat, which is really hard to leave behind.

S: Rosa’s cat.

T: Yeah, we have a house sitter looking after it, and knowing that we will be back in June.

You must be missing your cat, Rosa! But you’ve seen many on the road, right?

Rosa: Yeah, as many as I can. My cat’s name is Tequila.

S: At the rescue center, where we got her, her mom was named Sherry. Her sister was Whiskey. And it was only fair that she was given an alcohol name.

Your housesitter is a friend or someone you found on a house-sitting / swapping site?

S: It’s a friend of one of our neighbors. In Australia, we’ve signed up for housesitting. We did a housesit for a family with five dogs, a lizard, a goat, six chickens, and fourteen parrots. We did that for ten days.

From protest to purpose

Wow, a grand zoo! But let’s get back to how you even got there. You left the European summer of 2023 behind and will be back to the Old Continent when the summer of 2024 arrives. That’s quite a long trip for attending one wedding in Australia! Most people don’t decide to slow-travel around the world for a year. How did the concern for the climate change come into your life?

T: Me and Shannon actually got together through the road protest movement in Britain. We got very involved in defending the countryside against road building, which was a successful campaign, it ended in the 1990s. We also became musicians who often played in support of campaigns. We’ve been doing that for 7-8 years, when the band had already flown to Seattle, for a little tour, supported by the Farmers Union in America. We’ve gone and supported farmers in India and done a tour there against genetically modified crops. Shannon and I have also been a part of a non-violent citizen initiative in Palestine, we’ve flown there. We were very aware of the environment and of climate change even back then.

S: I asked a friend at the Center for Alternative Technology in Wales to calculate my carbon footprint. My footprint for that one flight to India and back was half the carbon that I used that year, and it was twice as much as what I should be using if the planet’s atmosphere was gonna stabilize. And I took it on! Okay, I should be using between 1 and 2.5 tons. So what am I gonna do?

I didn’t know anyone else who wasn’t flying. Everybody would look at me like I was an idiot. It was horribleShannon Coggins

I am a very practical person, Ivan! This is my responsibility, my life is my responsibility. I was a bit of an anarchist at university. I wasn’t trash-the-state kind of anarchist, I was more – it’s about me, what am I going to do? If I can see there’s a problem, I’ve got to act. And the only thing I could think of to do was to give up flying. It was easily the biggest and worst thing I was doing.

It was so horrible. I didn’t know anyone else who wasn’t flying. Everybody was flying and they would look at me like I was an idiot. Or the ones who had some kind of awareness would confess their guilty stories of their flights here and flights there, in the hope that I would absolve them of their guilt.

It took a long time before I could get through my feelings of jealousy that all these people were flying and having wonderful holidays, and I wasn’t. It took about 4 years. Because I loved flying. I loved going off on those holidays, they were so fun. I loved getting in the airplanes, and the little meals you get, the whole thing, I just loved it! It was tough to give it up. But I did.

I got to a point where I stopped being aggrieved by anyone else’s flying, or I could just understand it. I understand why people want their holidays, why they want to visit their family. But I can still carry on trying to make my difference. I think we all have to go through a bit of a process like that when we give up something that nobody else has given up. It can be lonely for a while, but I don’t feel that anymore.

R: I’ve kind of always been aware of the climate, because I was born into where we live, and my parents are both activists. I grew up surrounded by that. But then I’ve made friends who were environmentally aware as well. I’ve seen climate change and I believe it to be true. And I’d better believe it to be true, because I’m gonna have to deal with it in my adult life, I know that. I don’t want to make it worse. I want to try to do what I can. Honestly, I did find being in a plane a bit scary anyway.

Because that flight from East Timor to Australia was your first one ever, right?

R: Yeah, I don’t want to do it again.

If you want to travel around the world with the lowest carbon footprint, why don't you sail around it? Bert terHart did just that, alone, at the age of 62!

The social dynamics of slow travel advocates

Shannon mentioned: before one finds a community that embraces the slow travel trend, people could look at you like a weirdo or an idiot. In one blog post on the Buckle Up Dorothy website, Theo mentions the risk of becoming an “unapproachable self-righteous hermit”. It seems there is a considerable stigma that people who want to reduce their carbon footprint have to live with. Did choices you made due to your different lifestyle affect how you fit in your circles?

R: Actually, I’ve never experienced negativity from it. When I tell them where I live, a lot of people find it really cool. People my age seem to like the idea of living in a low-impact dwelling with no rent, out in the woods. It’s exciting for a lot of people. Obviously, all my friends fly. I don’t have any friends that haven’t been on a plane.

We can go from England to Europe easily because of the Eurostar and ferries, it’s very straightforward as it’s a very small stretch of sea. So we go on holiday to the south of France a lot. We get the Eurostar and then we go by car all the way down and camp. But the furthest I’ve ever been before we went on this trip was north of Sweden when I was 10. We took a week and went by train all the way up. We stayed there and saw the Northern Lights.

S: We spend all our money on experiences, Ivan. We have no savings! All we’ve done is save up money and then go somewhere amazing.

T: Thinking back to when we started saying that we wouldn’t fly, it wasn’t just us. There were other people that we knew in the climate movement, who were concerned about nature. Everyone was getting to the point where they knew that flying had a big emission. You couldn’t hide it. I was very uncomfortable that they still wanted to fly, or needed to fly.

People say: “I flew up to Edinburgh. Sorry, Theo.” I’m not your priest, you don’t have to apologize to me, but to the planet. It’s not me that you are hurtingTheo Simon

It was a big decision to take. But it was also partly because we were in a band that had a reasonable following. If we’re singing those things… Personally, for me, it wasn’t so hard, because I’m not such a great traveler as Shannon, I could happily stay in my shack all the time. Well, that’s not quite true. I love traveling, but it is not something I naturally want to do. Nonetheless, we thought it would be good for us to say: “We are not flying.” It felt like it was responsible in a leadership way, just to raise that. Firstly, to help people understand that our lifestyle was part of the problem, we could all look at that. And secondly, to get us thinking about how the world needs to change, what else do we need to do? It was a big step, but it was one we thought we should take.

Shannon mentioned the absolving, and I found that particularly interesting. My friends still apologize as if it’s me they are offending. In Britain, if people have to go to Scotland, they’d fly, because it’s actually quite cheap to go to Bristol and get on the plane. Whereas if you go on the train, it’s a lot of money, and it takes a long time. So people say: “I flew up to Edinburgh. Sorry, Theo.”

I get quite angry. I’m not your priest, you don’t have to apologize to me, but to the planet. It’s not me that you are hurting. I don’t usually say that. As Shannon really captured it in that song, it’s not about criticizing other people for flying, it’s just about raising the possibility that maybe you don’t have to.

Check out the 2007 music video for the song “Flying” by Seize the Day!

Investing in experience

You made a clear diagnosis about the slow travel 16 years ago, with the song “Flying”, when you recognized it as a climate crime, but also that finances and time are the biggest obstacles. As the song says, “living is hard, and flying is easy”. Not flying is sometimes a pricier choice. You have to save up for much longer to be able to afford the slow travel experience. You have to spend more time traveling somewhere, and it costs more.

S: When I was traveling before, you fly somewhere, stay there, and fly back. You tend to go for a shorter time. With our current choice of traveling, we’ve been able to afford more. As soon as you leave Europe, accommodation, food, the traveling itself is so much cheaper than living at home.

Effectively, it took us seven years to save up for this slow trip. There are a lot of things you could do with that kind of money, to deposit it, upscale solar panels… People normally redo the carpets in their houses or get a better telly. We could have gotten a really nice electric car.

But this trip is about coming to Australia and seeing my sister who emigrated 16 years ago, 4 years after I gave up flying. And the trip is about seeing the beauty of the world. When Rosa was 10, and she was just leaving the magic of childhood, I wanted her to see the Northern Lights, because that’s the magic that’s in the real world. She is just turning 20, and I wanted her to see the beauty of the real world, what is our world like.

And that’s true for me too. What is China like? What are the people in Russia like? What happens in Kazakhstan? Where is Laos? We’ve answered so many questions for ourselves. By traveling slowly through our world, we have seen so much, and so much has changed in our perception of the world. That’s worth much more to us in our lives than almost anything, it really is. My understanding of the world has changed. And I love it even more than I did before I left. It’s worth the money.

A Canadian family also took their children on a trip around the world to show them its beauty. But they had another urgent reason to do it - their kids were going blind. Read the interview with the inspiring Edith Lemay!

Voyaging against the current

You still live in a society, where you are surrounded by people who do their travels differently…

T: When we stopped flying when Rosa was born, we basically went to New Forest Camping. We did what any British family used to do all the time when I grew up, before the cheap flights came in, which was holidaying in Britain and taking a day to get there. And it was great. We discovered going to Tunisia as well, we did mad dashes on trains to Spain, to get the ferry over to Tunisia, stayed there in the off-season for a week, and then went back. So we did some quite long journeys. They took longer, and cost a little bit more probably. We could only do that because we get that 2-week holiday or whatever.

But some people pop off quite a lot, whenever they get a break, they fly off somewhere. I completely understand why they are just dying to get away. There is that thing that if I can go where there is sun, and I can drink without worrying about driving, and it’s a nice-ish hotel, and there are a few sights I can go and see, that will replenish me and then I can come back to work and carry on.

I know people have great experiences, I’m not dissing them. But quite often, they come back moaning about the food, or something about the hotel. I don’t feel that they had that much of a different experience. They’ve gone to places that are very far away, they’ve taken long flights to get there, and they sound exotic, but I feel that they didn’t necessarily need to do that. They probably could have gone to the Centre Parcs and had as good an experience without flying. So that’s how I feel about those holidays, I’m not interested in them, whereas the traveling, when Shannon first suggested it – the way we get to see the world and see people – that interested me, especially for Rosa.

Forgiveness for flying

Shannon, how do you look at the choices of others?

S: I have a different take on this. Someone I work with is a single parent, she hasn’t been away on holiday for five years, and she saved up a little money. She bought a week-long holiday in New York, to take her daughter away on a first holiday for all this time. I’ve given her some money towards it, I wanted her to go so much. I didn’t care that she was flying. I cared about the fact that she’s had a really tough life, her daughter’s had a tough life. This was something that they thought was going to be really special, and it was. It was fantastic.

As individuals, we are not going to change anything. Yeah, the flight was going to Australia anyway. But if there’s another 100 families we meet on the way, that’s one less plane 747. Slow travel is a real thing!Shannon Coggins

You know, if my sister ever needed me in Australia, I’d get on a plane like a shot. When my gran was dying in America, I rang her up, and said: “Well, do you want me to come over now, before you die, do you want me to come to the funeral, or shall I give your daughter, my aunt, the money for the airfare?” And she said: “Oh do that, love, don’t bother.” But I would’ve gone if she wanted me to.

As individuals, we are not going to change anything. This journey of three of us traveling overland to Australia – so what? It’s changed things for us. Flying is only 8% of global emissions anyway! There are an awful lot of other things to do. It’s just if we’re going to go to Australia, let’s try and do something different. Let’s open up the possibility, let’s not have a go at anyone else for what they do and how they live their lives. This is about the choices we are making. Is it possible? Can we start thinking about doing things a bit differently? That’s all I want, really.

Yeah, the flight was going anyway. Of course, it was. But if there’s another 100 families we meet on the way, that’s one less plane 747. We met three families! Slow travel is a real thing, Ivan!

No-fly tribe

T: Really interesting for us was finding different people who were doing part of the journey when they could go by plane. There was another no-flight family, doing the exact same thing, we met them in a cafe in a little town in Indonesia. We met a young dude from Prague, who was traveling around with a camera doing no-flight.

While we were away, there was this whole story of a climate scientist Gianluca Grimalda who was working in Papua New Guinea, and he was asked by his employer, the Kiel Institute for World Economy, to come back to Germany for a business meeting. And he said: “Okay, but it will take me two weeks, cause I can’t fly. I’m a climate scientist, and I know what this means, so I’m not gonna fly.” And they said: “You are sacked! You’ve gotta come back!” He said: “I’m not. I’m coming the slow way.” So he’s now back in Germany, but he did it the slow way.

Like us, all of them found that there was a point in their journey where they had to fly. We’re now trying to figure out if we can get back without doing that. But we will see. And Shannon said: “If we can’t, we will fly.” We will if we have to.

Navigating the emotional turbulence

Still, getting on that plane in East Timor must have crushed you!

S: Getting on the plane did break my heart, Ivan! Rosa’s attitude to it was the most sensible. When we got to Australia, she tried to get me to notice that we’d actually made it. I was all: “No, we failed, it’s so bad, I’m so depressed.”

R: It was hard even for me, I felt guilty about it. I also felt kind of defeated; we’d come all this way without flying at all, we got almost halfway across the world without getting on a single plane! Most people we’ve met up to that point had to fly at least once just to get to where we were. I was so proud of us actually.

In East Timor, we tried really hard to find a way to get over by boat. But it was the wrong time of the year, the wrong season, so we couldn’t. And we had to get on that little plane. But it was such a fraction of our journey. Even despite that little flight, our carbon emissions were significantly lower than if we had taken a plane all the way.

T: I felt a bit depressed about it. In one way, we didn’t travel slowly enough. We were on the move quite a lot. And when we were not on the move, we were trying to plan our next move. Because you can’t plan it all over the internet, not yet, maybe never. So we didn’t know if there was gonna be a bus from Almaty, and then we got Covid, and then we had to try and find the bus. Wherever we were, there was often some work to be done.

It can be quite tiring, just being away from home. We are older people too. It’s not like we are young travelers, forming relationships. It’s physically slightly challenging, it was very, very hot. We’ve been in Indonesia a long time, and we tried and tried, and it built up to this, but we couldn’t do it.

We had that close call at the end when we thought it looked like, by some mad miracle, we were gonna get a boat. And then we took that to the wire, the owner said ‘no’, and there we were.

I went through thinking that this invalidates everything we’ve done, and then thought we should have stayed, even if it meant staying for months until we got the boat because of the carbon. It was a very exaggerated emotional feeling, to be honest. Because once we’ve flown, I felt like, well, that wasn’t such a big deal. (laughter) Then I remembered that everyone else flies all the time.

Finding solace in carbon calculations

What did you do to get yourself back up, Shannon?

S: It messed with my brain, Ivan, as I was sitting there, getting completely depressed. I’ve arrived in Australia, our ultimate goal, we’ve made it. In four months, we got through Russia, we got through China, things we thought were impossible. Here we are, how amazing, we are still in one piece, we didn’t lose any limbs, we didn’t have any major illnesses other than Covid, and I am depressed.

I woke up very early, feeling like a criminal, and sat there on my phone, and did our carbon footprint. I found some really good websites, it was very thorough. And because we’re not using our car at home, and we’re not using gas in our cooker, we’ve actually used less emissions, even if we would have stayed at home, which is remarkable. Driving our cars to work, day to day, having to get to the supermarket, all of that’s gone out of the window because we were doing everything by public transport.

We nearly got on a cruise ship from Bali to Cairns. Obviously, it’s not flying, and then we could have felt like we’ve “done it”, we’ve actually made it, we didn’t fly. But the carbon footprint of that cruise ship was through the roof compared to our little flight from Dili to Darwin.

We were going to try and find a propeller plane. But we stayed with an honorary British consul in Dili, and she said: “Yes, but Qantas jet is going anyway, every single day. So you’d be adding a propeller plane. You would definitely be adding more carbon.” And she was right. I mean, if I got on a boat and the plane is going anyway, alright. But if I’m chartering a propeller plane to take me where I want to go, and there is a plane that is going there already, that’s not okay. I had to suck it up. Didn’t want it, but I did.

Social media backlash

The feeling that one’s action is somewhat insignificant is what sometimes stops people from acting at all. Planes are flying anyway, they could indeed think. Of course, you’re talking about the sum of our actions that makes a change. Is there a solution to that?

T: That’s really interesting. Some compensation for feelings of disappointment was that we suddenly got all this unexpected media interest for the story, from the British and Australian press. It also showed that the whole idea of low-carbon travel was something that people were now more interested in. It wasn’t so cranky.

But one of the things I noticed was, as soon as it came out on social media, there were a lot of people who just wanted to have a go. That’s what people do on social media. And so they were piling in, saying: “What numpties! The plane was going anyway, they could have just got on a plane, they’ve made no difference.”

Of course, you make a small difference if you don’t add the weight to the journey anyway. But that’s never been for any of us a key thing. It wasn’t a boycott to stop the plane from flying. But the fact is that the more people think ‘maybe I don’t need to fly’, then the less demand there is. The less likely it is that an airport’s gonna build another runway. The less likely it is that an air fleet is gonna get expanded. The more possibility there is that some enterprising person would develop a good sea route for passengers between Australia and Timor because there is a demand.

So it’s a small thing but, we’ve seen it with other green lifestyle ideas, that could suddenly change quite quickly, once people get into it. Flying to places is an idea that’s been sold to us, that this is just something we want to do and need to do.

One of the great and quite humbling things about traveling is speaking to a worker on our train in Romania or an oil worker on a Kazakhstan train. These people – they’re not gonna jump on a plane! Most of the world’s population is not in a position to think about jumping on a plane or not jumping on a plane, about what it is like to sacrifice a holiday in the Maldives. They never have that opportunity.

I don’t think it’s central that we fly as much as we think we need to do. We might change our society to make it good in other ways. Or we might develop slow travel, we might develop airships. We contribute towards that change by making that decision.

Beyond just being about carbon, slow travel is a much more interesting way to get around. If you’re gonna take a gap year, why fly somewhere if you can travel overland?Rosa

Slow travel, big impact

S: What do you think, Rosa, when people say you didn’t make a difference, what’s the point?

R: Well, it brings into conversations the idea that this is a possibility. And especially for young people, people my age, if they are gonna take a gap year, why fly somewhere if you can travel overland? That’s exciting, that’s an adventure, that’s more impactful than just flying somewhere. You get to see it all, you get to experience things you wouldn’t have experienced. You would just fly out of these countries, and you wouldn’t even think about them. But now you have to think about them because you are getting through them. And you might find a country that you really love by accident. So beyond just being about carbon, it’s a much more interesting way to travel. You see more of the world, and you get more of a sense of the world as a whole union. We’re all living on the same Earth, and that’s so apparent when you travel through it.

S: Slow travel is a wonderful way of travel. So maybe they are right. Maybe the plane is going anyway, maybe we are numpties, maybe we should have got on a plane. But having done the journey, I’m glad we did it. I saw and learned and changed more. I want to live in a world where people are trying to take care of the climate. And they may not get it right. I may not get it right. There may be something I could have done that was better, different, more. But this is me making an effort. I applaud myself and I applaud other people who are trying to make an effort. Collectively, we keep coming up with good ideas on how to do it.

T: The lifestyle hopefully has effects, but it’s for your own benefit as well. It’s about not being defeated by things. Like, we want to travel, but we don’t want to fly. Can we do that? Then, it’s challenging. But we’ve found out that it wasn’t as challenging as we thought it would be. It was actually easier in some ways. Then you get resilience, and it helps your optimism. If you make those choices yourself, you don’t feel so defeated by the situation, and it can make you feel more positive. It’s not impossible for me to go to China, I don’t have to fly, I can still go to China if I want to. And that’s been good for us.

Surprises beyond the Yellow Brick Road

To share the benefits of slow travel with the world, you launched the Buckle Up Dorothy blog. Besides an obvious connection to the “The Wizard of Oz”, as Oz was where you headed, the phrase you chose for your site’s name is a strong reference in pop culture, announcing big and unexpected events. What were those for you on this trip?

R: It was all big and unexpected in a way. Nowhere was as we expected it to be, not really. That’s the thing about travel, you get a sense of a country from a distance, but it’s impossible to know what it will be like until you are there. I’ve been surprised by so many places, positively and negatively. I was really pleasantly surprised by Turkey. They have loads of cats, they are all really well taken care of, and really friendly. They live out on the streets, but everyone respects them, vaccinates them, and feeds them. It’s really lovely, I haven’t seen that before.

S: It’s a whole culture, taking care of cats, amazing.

R: We were really excited about Kazakhstan because we had no idea what the country’s gonna be like. And it turned out the country is almost entirely a flat, featureless scrubland.

T: And an environmental disaster.

R: The people were nice. We stayed in Almaty, which was really nice, and near the mountains.

S: Tbilisi, in Georgia, we had thought it’s a cultural hotch-potch. It’s a very mixed experience, very European, but still has Russian influence. We were expecting a very open and interesting country. The hostel we stayed in was a melting pot of different cultures and ideas. But the people out on the streets didn’t look happy. The older generation looked like they were still part of Russia, and they were depressed. The younger generation all wanted to be a part of Europe, and they would get depressed. You know, how can you make such sweep judgments when you’re there for a week? But we didn’t get that feeling in almost any other country. Turkey had its own identity, Russia, China… Most of these countries we traveled through knew how to be themselves. And Georgia felt like it was almost subsumed by other cultures and other ideas. I can imagine there are quite a few countries that are like that, and how hard that is for those countries that have had that influence from so many different places.

T: It’s very personal. We’ve met somebody else who’s been to Georgia, and they’ve been to the mountains, and it was great. You can’t obviously rely on a traveler to tell you what the country is like. We had a really limited experience.

From tourist traps to true encounters

How did you feel being a traveler in the world of tourists?

T: When we went to Indonesia, we had some very ordinary experiences. On the ferry to Jakarta, Shannon met someone who invited us to her cousin’s wedding. A full-blown Muslim wedding! And we sang there, really fantastic. Then we went to Bali, which is where most of our friends would know in Indonesia, and actually went to Ubud, a beautiful little town there. But the town is now designed to find ways to extract as much money as possible from Western tourists. Which is completely understandable. But it means that it wasn’t a place where we felt we could be ourselves.

S: We’ve got friends who went there quite recently, and absolutely loved it. They recommended it to us. And the people that we met doing the selling, we really liked them. It just wasn’t what I wanted from my experience of being in Bali. What I did get was an open cremation, an incredible experience, and the community, because they all paid for the coffin and the ceremony, that was incredible. So they are running alongside each other in Bali. I think that’s what people notice from the place. Bali is still Bali, and they worked out how to make a lot of money from the people who come there.

I did not have much of that experience. The places we traveled through were much more where people live, and we got used to that. We haven’t spent much time on the normal tourist trail, so it was a culture shock ending up somewhere where our job was to pay for things and buy stuff, and we weren’t doing that. It was kind of difficult.

T: In Laos, which had a much lower tourist footprint going on, and it was off-season, we had a really pleasant experience of being in a tropical place, but not feeling that we were the target of everyone, that our job was to supply the money.

Then we had a few negative experiences like finding ourselves in a flood in Tbilisi before we knew where we were staying for the night. So we had to walk through a flood, and we didn’t know how bad it was gonna get. It was quite freaky. And we had the interrogation leaving Russia, not knowing where that would lead, but none of these things turned out to be that bad. We haven’t had a difficult time.

Pollution and progress in exotic locales

Having in mind your sensitivity toward the environment, were you surprised by the level of pollution that doesn’t usually end up on everyone’s Instagram feeds when they report from such exotic places?

S: In China, in places such as Chengdu and Guilin, the majority of the vehicles were electric.

R: In Guilin, surrounded by very typical Chinese mountains, most people get around on electric mopeds. I was struck by that because there is nothing quite like that anywhere in Europe.

S: And there was no litter on the streets. Because they have a policy where nearly everyone has a job, and people are paid to pick up litter from the streets. I got a good sense of what China is doing well.

In Indonesia, we saw piles and piles of rubbish. When I used to fly, when I went to India, I would see much more pollution, than I saw on this trip. It hasn’t been a big part of my experience. I didn’t think about what we are doing to this world. I’ve seen much more of the beauty, the kindness, and the ordinariness of people living their lives.

R: Most of the places have not been heavily polluted. The most heavily polluted was Jakarta, it was so obvious, wow. There’s smog in the air.

T: In Indonesia, a lot of the pollution comes from Western consumable stuff. It comes in and produces a lot of packaging and rubbish. And that has to be dealt with, same in Timor. Kazakhstan is an environmental disaster area. The first place we stayed in was an Airbnb in a grotty apartment block, and I turned on the tap and the water that came out was brown. The people in that city were living with toxic water.

So often, in places, it’s more been a measure of poverty, or a measure of infrastructure not having been developed. A few places have a problem with rubbish, they have no proper way of dealing with that, and maybe they have a problem with water.

But in most places we went, we found things which we could learn from. It isn’t the case that the Western world is way more advanced than the rest of the world. There’s an economic difference, but in different countries, things were done amazingly well and thoughtfully. And China was an eye-opener, after all the bad news we heard about it. After this, I have maximum respect for China.

Avatars of adventure – unleashing the Lion

Coming back to your blog, you playfully adopted Oz characters accompanying Dorothy on her adventure of finding her way home. Shannon took the avatar of Scarecrow, Theo embraced Tin Man’s armor, and Rosa jumped into Lion’s suit. Did you find brains, heart, and courage on the road, and in which moments?

R: For me, as the Lion, I definitely feel more courageous now than I was when I started. I found it hard and confronting to talk to people, especially strangers, to ask for help. And I still find it very awkward. In a lot of these countries, I can’t speak their language, and I’m just assuming that they can speak English, and that makes me feel uncomfortable. I feel like I should be trying to make an effort to learn their language. And I feel bad for making them stumble through English because I don’t know their language. I know a little bit of Mandarin, so in China, I was really struck, because I can struggle to ask a simple question in Mandarin. Suddenly I would be: back in England, why would I be afraid to ask that question? Because I can speak the language, there’s nothing stopping me! I think it helped me, now in Australia, to be more confident. Because I can communicate. So why don’t I communicate?

S: And you got a job!

R: Yeah, we’ve been here only for a week, and I got a working visa for Australia, so I could earn some money while I was here. And I walked into a Subway, gave my resume, and they offered me to come for a trial shift the next day.

S: Someone has to pay for our trip back, Ivan! (laughter)

Scarecrow’s path from doubt to dialogue

What about the Scarecrow?

S: Working-class families in Britain don’t have particularly high expectations for their children. That’s not true across the board, but there’s a certain truth in saying that my Dad told me I was stupid a lot when I was growing up. And somewhere I believed him. We didn’t sit around the dinner table, discussing art and culture and museums and books, we didn’t talk much at all. Anyway, I didn’t have that kind of upbringing.

When I was growing up, my Dad told me I was stupid a lot. And somewhere I believed him. This slow trip to Australia restored the belief that my voice countsShannon Coggins

Sometimes, when I want my mind to work and I want to be able to think and say what I think, I stumble over my words. I can’t find them. I don’t know how to think in a straight line if you like. And then, I wanted not so much to challenge myself, but to believe in myself a little bit more, that my voice counts, and that what I’m thinking and what I’ve got to say – matters.

So I built our website, from watching a video. It took a lot of effort, and Rosa helped me a bit. Oh my god, it was hard work building that bloody thing! It’s a drop in the ocean for most people, but I was determined to do it. And then I have written a lot of blog posts, and that’s been my effort, my voice, and challenge to my mind.

When we did a talk in China about our journey over the Silk Road, that was another opportunity, and the press interest in us, and this, with you, you are asking me what I think, and I am telling you what I think.

Tin Man’s journey of humility

What happened to the Tin Man?

T: I was used to thinking, talking, communicating, campaigning, blah-blah, having lots of opinions. When you’re going through so many countries in succession, there’s no way that you’re gonna know other languages, so you are subject to other people, you rely on their kindness to you. I just feel quite humbled by what people are like around the world. I feel humbled to realize that a lot of what I thought I knew, a lot of my book learning, and internet learning about what countries and people were like have been turned overhead by the experience of meeting some of them.

There have been lovely odd connections with people on the way, the guy in the train compartment in Kazakhstan, some people in East Timor, people you meet on the ferry, the ship’s musicians… Often a very brief encounter, but you can really sometimes feel that connection you get with someone. That person could have been my friend, a lifelong friend! But we will never see each other again. And of course, there’s a whole thing of trying to hang on to that, should we keep in touch… But that’s not the point, because the world is full of people like that.

One of the things that makes it possible for me when we’re traveling, when I feel a bit lost with the culture, things I don’t understand, or feeling homesick, is nature. And that’s true for all of us. If we can find a bit of nature where we are and connect with that, that’s different everywhere, but it is also the same everywhere. There’s something about nature for us which is fundamentally the same spirit. Of course, it’s one planet, and when you connect with that, it has its unique quality, but it’s also what touches my heart, and makes me feel at peace and safe wherever I am. I think the strength is that I am thinking a lot more about my connection with nature, and I am much less inclined to have opinions about everything, and much more inclined to listen to find out what other people think where they are. It’s been good for the Tin Man.

Thinking beyond flight

Now that you have traveled across the world, trying to do the slow traveling, you came up with this interesting proposal that someone could think about making a better sea connection between East Timor and Australia. What else could governments easily do to make our travel more sustainable?

S: Cheaper public transport. Stop subsidizing airplanes. If you make public transport affordable, then people will use it. Train travel is an amazing way to travel! You do see more, you have more time for yourself and for other people. You can look out the window and read the book. And you can sleep! That’s a simple thing.

R: Some of the parts of our travel were easy once we had found the way to get across. But finding how to get across was really hard. So if a country would make that a viable and clear option as a way to travel, then the people wouldn’t fly across. Buses have often been inexpensive.

T: If governments really want to think about it, there’s a lot of options for making deals and arrangements with other countries for making those through-journeys, a bit like the Interrail system, even if that one didn’t work that well. But here, in Australia, we have a pass that allows us to use Greyhound Buses for a certain period. Rather than paying by distance, it’s the period. We know that later we can travel up the coast because it’s easy.

Do we want millions of people going to the last beautiful places on the planet? It has a big impact, so I don’t know about thatTheo Simon

You can make all kinds of international arrangements to facilitate that ease of transport, and then it’s about encouraging it. Persuading governments and particularly tourism people to see the benefit. I think we’re at the beginning of that. We had some of that discussion in East Timor, which is a pretty much new country. If you develop this eco-tourism approach, which has to include travel, otherwise it’s a bit of a contradiction, then there’s a possibility you get something sustainable which has the advantage that it won’t be destroying what’s left of your environment. It will actually be enhancing the environment, because that becomes the thing that you are selling, so you want to make it clean, you want to protect it.

There’s been a contradiction in all of it, which is – do we want millions of people going to the last beautiful places on the planet? It has a big impact, so I don’t know about that.

I think someone needs to develop airships! Because they’d be slow, they could carry freight and they could carry people.

There is another aspect about the whole thing about the slow: we’re lucky, we create time for ourselves. Most people can’t. So the other aspect would be that we design our working world to give people the time to travel and that we allow that. But that would probably involve major changes in the way we run capitalism.

UN's climate summits are when the political heads gather to reflect on the ways to save us all. That doesn't always work. Read about the COP28 hypocrisy, a great gathering of private jets in Dubai!

Tips for successful slow travel

For families that are considering doing something similar, what are the best places and countries for long-term slow travel? What is your top advice – how to slow travel? Or how not to?

S: I’d say, Turkey is well-designed for slow travel. But you have to understand the Turkish railway system, which we didn’t. So either you have to turn up and be willing to wait, because it’s very popular, or you could get your head around the Turkish website in advance.

China is incredible, it has phenomenal train systems. Every single train that we got on left to the minute it was going to, and arrived at the minute it was going to. You can travel, you can afford it. But even in Thailand.

The only place where I wouldn’t travel by train is Java because it was incredibly expensive, it was crazy money to travel there, but we went third class, and that was alright.

R: I think the best advice for traveling the way we do is: you should always arrive at the station an hour before your bus or train is due to leave. That has saved us a few times. Because sometimes it’s earlier, or sometimes it’s really complicated to get onto the station, sometimes you have to put your luggage through a scanner, or things get lost in translation, and you can’t understand where you’re meant to go. And that extra hour becomes a life-saver.

S: We’ve given ourselves two or three hours on many occasions.

T: For this kind of journey, you plan as well as you can. The internet is your friend, except that now often the information is out of date. You then have to arrive and try and find out what is the real information based on the information you’ve already got, and you then need to act as if even that information possibly isn’t correct. So you are covered.

The visa hustle

T: The other thing you have to do, if you have a timescale for when you want the journey to end, you have to pin down the absolutely essential bits so that you make sure to get to that bit. We knew we had to be in Russia on a certain day, we had to leave it on a certain day because that’s what our visa said. So you’ve got to structure your trip around that.

Did you plan your visas in the UK?

S: The only two visas we had to get before we left were Russia and China. You cannot get them outside of your country of origin. All the other visas we either got as we were heading to a country, online, or at the border. But China and Russia were a lot of work, and cost a lot of money.

These are then the ones you had to plan out, you had to know where you would stay, when you would enter, and when you would exit the country. How did you prove your onward travel?

S: For China, we had to buy a plane ticket. And then we canceled it after we got our visa. It cost us 300 pounds to do that. You wouldn’t have to do that anymore. You can get a train into China right now, but none of the land borders were open when we set off. To get the visa, we had to prove we had a flight.

For Russia, we went through an incredibly complicated process to get the proof of travel within Russia. But someone said that when you book a hotel in Russia, you can ask them to book your bus tickets and then pay them because they have a direct way of receiving money you pay through Booking.com or whatever. You can’t pay for things in Russia with credit cards from outside of Russia because of all the sanctions. So there are little tiny details that you learn as you go.

Breaking through climate alibis

We spoke about how the feeling of the insignificance of an action demotivates individuals from doing their responsible part. In a world where everyone contributes to climate change, dispersing the responsibility, how to deal with these alibis for inaction calling out the hypocrisy of those who try to do their own little steps?

The guy from the Center for Alternative Technology told me that climate change is the thing that we need to almost not talk about. Live somewhere, and have a good quality of life. You’ve chosen to travel overland (because why wouldn’t you?), and that has an impact on your carbon footprint. But you’re doing it for economic reasons, and it’s a smart lifestyle choice, it’s an interesting choice, it’s a social choice. And the carbon footprint almost slides underneath.

That’s what happens with this story for us. We are a family from Somerset. We’ve traveled for a wedding, we’ve traveled overland, how interesting, we’ve gone all the way from Castle Cary to Sydney, isn’t that a long way, and how amazing, they made it. And, by the way, they are worried about the climate, cause aren’t we all? That’s what I wanted because it’s everybody’s planet.

What do you think about the art of slow travel? Are you a slow nomad yourself?
Share your thoughts in the comments, and pin this article for later!

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The post Buckle Up Dorothy: No-Fly Family on a Slow Travel Adventure to Australia appeared first on Pipeaway.

The prodigy child is not only breaking hiking records. Castillo’s voyage made her a sensation, with dozens of media appearances. Journey got an entire page in the People magazine, and even popped in Saturday Night Live, where they joked she accomplished her feat “in the talons of an eagle”.

As a hiker in a diaper, Journey Castillo set her eyes on the Grand Canyon when she was 2 weeks old

But who is Journey Castillo in real life? How did she become this intrepid explorer of national parks at the age of three?

Valerie and Eric Castillo, Journey’s Mom and Dad, operate a tree removal and preservation company. As soon as they welcomed Journey into the world on September 19, 2020, the proud parents took her on a road trip. When the hiker in a diaper turned 2 weeks old, her tiny eyes already met the Grand Canyon. It’s been full speed ahead ever since.

Whether it’s taking her first steps at Zion National Park or conquering city parks back home, the hiking wunderkind is always on the move, preparing for her next big adventure.  

To say I sat down for an interview with Journey Castillo would be an understatement. One doesn’t sit down for an interview with such a whirlwind. We chatted over Skype, and the petite multitasker managed to answer questions while simultaneously swinging, hanging upside down, or sprinting like her feet were on fire.

Her Dad, Eric Castillo (40), did his best to keep pace with her racing body and mind, stepping in as an interpreter when I couldn’t decipher toddlerish.

Conquering the world at any age is an impressive feat. Meet the TikTok Traveling Grannies who traveled around the world at the age of 80!

Candy-powered adventures of Journey Castillo

Good morning, Journey. I see you’re already at the playground! What’s your favorite thing there?

Journey Castillo: Erm, purple.

Eric Castillo / Interpreter (whispers): Hiking!

J: Hiking.

Is this park far from your home?

J: It’s not far away. (runs away to pick up a disassembled penguin toy)

E: She was up at 7 this morning. She’s an early riser, and she likes to get going. So she is always outside, on trails, and hiking in parks. That’s kind of all she was seeing growing up. It’s in her spirit, in her blood. (laughs)

Did you eat your breakfast today, Journey?

J (with a radiant face): Yeah.

What did you eat?

J: I ate at Starbucks.

What did you have?

E: They have these breakfast sandwiches with a vegan patty made of beans, an egg, and a little bit of cheese.

J: And the meat.

And the meat? (now I laugh, imagining a vegan sandwich with meat) And when you go to national parks, what do you eat there? Do you have a picnic? Do you bring a sandwich?

J: I bring my candy.

So candy is your favorite food?

J: It gives me energy! (starts chewing on the penguin)

Yes, I saw it. You can run really fast. Do you like to bring snacks on the trail?

J: No.

E: You like fruit, don’t you?

J: Yeah, I bring it to the pool.

E: Smoothies?

J: I make smoothies, and they look pretty, and then I bring them to the pool.

What do you make smoothies from?

J: We mix smoothies from the house. Banana, strawberries, ice, juice, and pineapple.

Future park ranger – Journey’s dreams in the making

Do you know what you’d like to be when you grow up?

J: I’d like to grow up in national parks. As park ranger.

Did you meet many park rangers?

J: Yes, I did.

And what did you like about them?

J: I like about them that they gave me books. (rubs penguin against the wall)

E: Every park that she goes to, they give her a junior ranger book. It comes with an itinerary and a map of the park. The book gives you activities to do, such as ‘find this animal’, ‘these flowers’, or ‘these trails’. And when you get back, you turn in the book, you put your hand up, you swear in, and they give you a little junior ranger badge. She gets an incentive for doing it. She knows the logistics of it, and how it works, so she looks forward to getting the book and getting the badge.

And how many badges did you collect, Journey? It must be a lot!

J: Sixty! (looks at her father)

E: 63.

J: Sixty-three!

Sixty-three? In every single park? Wow, that’s a lot! And how old are you again?

J: I’m… (starts with a thumb, then adds two more fingers) Three.

And how much is 63?

Journey shows all five fingers.

Yes, it’s a lot more, right?

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From parks to press

Do you know what is my job, Journey?

J: No.

I’m a journalist.

J: Right.

Do you know what journalists do?

Journey stays quiet.

Is their job – talking to Journey? Or what do they do?

J: Right. (raises a fist in the air, as if holding a mic)

Did you meet a lot of journalists? I saw that you were on many TV shows, and in magazines!

J: Yeah.

How do you feel about all that?

J: It feels good!

You like it?

J: Yeah. When I was a baby, I went to national parks!

But do you remember it? It was a long time ago, no?

J: Yeah. I’m getting big right now.

What do you remember when you were little?

J: When I was little, when I was in mommy’s tummy, I kicked it. And I said: “Get me out!”

E: And boom, you were in the park already! We did the Grand Canyon, that was the first one.

J: I need to go now!

Did you go to the Grand Canyon only once?

E: Three times.

So you are already a regular visitor there!

J: Yeah. But I go to school.

E: They have little classes for kids there, at the Visitor Center.

J: And I have teachers!

What do they teach you there?

J: They help me to do basketball. I have basketball day.

Do they teach you about nature?

J: I don’t have nature at my school.

E: Oh, she’s talking about her church school, here in San Antonio… But the one at the park, you remember! We went the other day, with the park ranger, she had a book, and she was teaching us about what… Look at those! (pointing at the trees)

J: I don’t have those trees. I don’t have them. But I don’t have marshmallows.

Journey’s wild encounters

What kind of animals did you see in national parks?

E: What are the brown ones?

J: A buff. Allo. I saw birds! (mimics the wings) I saw real bears.

Wow… But they are dangerous, Journey, no? How close were you?

J: I was close like that. And they bite me. (climbs over a wall and collects some stones)

E: That was in Katmai National Park, in Alaska. She was on the wooden boardwalk. And you look down on them. You are like 15 feet up, I guess. They were eating fresh salmon, right? They were eating the fish?

J: They were eating. (opens mouth widely, like a growling bear)

But buffalos are also big, and dangerous!

J: There are a lot of cars!

E: Cars would stop around the animals, to see them. She saw buffalo in many parks. Quite a few have them.

Journey, what do the park rangers say about touching wildlife, animals?

J (raises shoulders): I don’t know.

E: We cannot touch them, because they are dangerous. Remember?

J: I knooow.

E: What about the trash at the parks? What do you do when you see the trash?

J: I hide it, so I can later throw away.

E: You take it with you, right?

J: I know.

And people in the cars, do they behave well? Do they throw garbage?

J: They throw garbage in the trash can.

E: And sometimes on the floor.

Do they go too close to the animals?

J: They do. I was in national parks. And I need to go again, today.

E: Yeah. Next week?

J: No, today!

E: She’s gonna go again next week. She’ll go to Bryce Canyon, Zion, Death Valley, and the Grand Canyon again. (laughs)

Misbehaving in U.S. national parks is a widespread problem, and the National Park Service tackled it with a sense of humor. Here's why you should not pet the fluffy cows!

Journey’s national park favorites – sandy shores to snowy slopes

You were in many different national parks. What do you like the best: sand, snow, mud?

J: I like Grand Canyon. I like beaches.

E (whispers): Virgin Islands.

J: Virgin Lions. The white sand and the water.

Do you know how to swim?

J: Yeah. (shows swimming movement with her hands)

E: A little bit.

J: Yeah. A little bit. (gesturing “little” with a thumb and index finger)

Do you do anything else on the beach?

J: I build the sand.

The sandcastles? Nice! And what kind of weather do you love? Do you prefer when it’s raining, snowing, or when it’s summer and hot?

J: I like snowing.

It’s not too cold for you?

J: No. (runs away)

E: We’ve done a lot of the parks in the off-season. Sometimes we would have to put her out of the car when the conditions were heavy with snow, high winds, and heavy rain. If we were doing everything in the season, we wouldn’t have been able to do it how we did it. So a lot of them were done off-season. We got to experience different weather patterns. And I felt that these different weathers that she got to experience, didn’t just build her strength and character. It also gave her an opportunity to adapt and understand what it felt like to be cold. She really loves the cold. When she’s around cold water or cold air, snow, cold weather, she just loves it.

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Brave and bold

Journey, did you ever stay in a national park, for a sleepover?

J: Aha.

Where did you sleep, in a tent, or a cabin?

J: In a tent.

And how was that experience?

J: Good.

Did you hear anything during the night?

J: Yeah, the animals.

What kind of animals did you hear?

J: Birds.

And did you watch the sky? Did you see anything there?

J: I saw the stars. And the Moon.

Was it beautiful?

J: Yeah. (jumps off some park equipment, quickly showing thumb up to signal she’s okay)

Were you scared?

J: No.

I’m a big girl. I help mommy and daddy, and share snacks with themJourney Castillo

You were not even a little nervous?

J (unclear): No, not either.

Not what?

J: Not either.

E: None of them.

Is it because you were with mommy and daddy, or because you are a big girl?

J: I’m a big girl.

And who is organizing your trips, more mommy or daddy?

J: Mommy and daddy.

Do you help them?

J: Yes. I help them, like give them snacks, share them.

Do you carry anything with you, or do mommy and daddy bring everything?

J: I carry suitcase. I have toys inside. Toys, and clothes, and candy!

Yes, we can’t forget candy!

J: And water, and fruit, and and and fruit. And vegetable. We’re going camping tomorrow! We go camping when it gets dark, and we’re going camping today.

Journey’s adventures with berkonoculs

I see you’re very excited about your trip next week. Tomorrow. Today. What is your favorite toy you bring along?

J: My favorite is, I think it is national park toys.

Is it like animal toys?

J: These like little things that I can see animals, it looks like this… (shows putting fingers around her eyes)

E: The binoculars.

J: Berkonoculs.

And what kind of animals do you see through these binoculars?

J: Bears and fish. But the bears are in the water, and the fish are in the water. I see a lot of animals.

Do you see mommy and daddy bears, or also baby bears?

J: Big bears, and mommy bear, and daddy bear. And a brother and a sister bear. I love those animals! I see them very nice when I wake up, I see them very nice. And I see them at my house, right?

E: It’s pictures. We have pictures of her around the house from different parks. So she can grow up and kind of remember seeing those pictures.

Did you bring home anything from national parks?

E: What kind of stuffed animals did you get? The buffalo?

J: Alligator, snake…

But alligators are scary. Are you scared of them?

J: Yeah. But my brother didn’t… (wanders away, sucking on a pacifier)

E (trying to keep pace with her): What about the alligators? Do you remember when we saw them at the Everglades, in Florida?

Silence.

Trips with the troop

So, Journey, you have a brother?

J: I have all my brothers. I have four brothers. They are older and go to school. I don’t have to go to school.

But do they go on trips with you?

J: Yeah, they go to national parks.

E: They’ve been on a few trips with her, maybe three or four. Usually in the summer, because they are in school.

J: Like, when we are on the airplane, they come with me. But they sit on their own seat.

E: We made it her thing and her goal, you know, and focused on that. I and Valerie come from previous marriages with the other boys, Valerie has two, and I have two. Journey is our daughter together. Her brothers are older, they’re in high school. So a lot of the times, when they would be with the other side of the family, that’s when we would go with Journey.

Did you make any new friends at national parks, Journey?

J: Yes, I did. Rangers. And I play games.

What kind of games?

J: I play a girl game. We play robots!

E: No, which game did you play when we went to that park, to the Missions? Did you play hide and seek there?

J: No!

Journey Castillo – lifestyle behind the name

You have a special name! What do people tell you about it?

She runs away, laughing.

You are quick!

E: She is, big time. And this will be all day. Her energy levels are so high! We were at the playground last night, the lights were off, and she was still playing. She did a 1.5-mile hike. Her days are very active.

A lot of people say she won’t remember going to the parks. That’s fine. But we did it for a bigger reason. You know, we got to see her grow up differently. She comes up to people and says, “Hey, I’ve been to 63 national parks” or “I love the hikes”.

It’s like starting the kids very young with sports or gymnastics. You know, like Michael Jordan, or Serena Williams. They’re starting very, very young. And that’s kind of what we want to do with Journey, but with the natural world, with something different and unique, something that’s not socially normal in our society, here in Texas.

The tradition here is in sports, football, volleyball, baseball, softball… Those things are socially normal. We did it with raising boys, but we just wanted to do something very different with her, because she was a female.

And we named her Journey. Giving her that name was about us being on this new journey together and having her. Without even thinking or knowing what we’re gonna do. We never started with “We’re gonna have Journey and do all these parks”. That was never intended. It just kind of happened.

We had our old lives, Valerie and me, and now we had new lives, merging them, and having a daughter together. We’ve both been through our journeys, and this is a new journey. So this is Journey, that’s who she is!

Journey by air

Do you prefer riding in a car or flying on a plane, Journey?

J: I fly with planes.

E: Do you remember, what kind of planes were in Alaska?

J: The little ones.

Were you scared?

J: No. But those scary planes, they open the door and fly out, I saw the video. And you look at the sky, and you fall. (She runs away to her imaginary sky, like a parachuter)

E: I don’t think she is scared of the big planes. Because she did it so young, growing up. With commercial airlines, once she got to a point where she knew what was going on, she was familiar with her body going through it at a very young age.

I think when we went to the Gates of the Arctic in Alaska, that was scary not for her, but for all of us. It was our first time experiencing those small single-engine airplanes. The heater wasn’t blowing, it was freezing, and you were flying above the mountains. You could feel the cold air. The airplane would drop and shake with turbulence.

We had some near-death-experience feelings when we were on those. It was an adventure. You hear about those things going down. We knew it was a risk.

If you watched Netflix's Oscar nominee, you can relate to the fear of flying in smaller planes over mountains. Learn how the Society of the Snow survivors lived to tell the tale!

And those parks that are accessible by land?

E: We would drive to anything near Texas. We just rented an RV, and from Texas, we did Big Ben, Guadalupe, and White Sands. But everything else was flying there, renting a car, and then driving from the airport to the parks. For some of them, we had to take boats, ferries, ships, and then small-engine planes.

Sequoia is not bigger than me. In national parks, I hike up the sky!Journey Castillo

Journey’s viewfinder

What is your favorite, Journey? Planes, boats, or cars?

J: I love brioche.

E: I know, but planes or boats, or cars?

J: Erm, boats. And the veo.

E: The video of the boat?

J: No, the veo.

E: Oh, she likes the view from the boat.

J: I love ocean.

Did you see fish in the ocean too?

J: Yes, I did.

And bears?

J: Yeah. I caught fish.

E: We went fishing. But she is thinking about something else.

Do you prefer looking through the windows when you travel, or hiking in national parks?

J: I like boats and veos.

E: But in national parks, do you like to hike? Where do you hike to?

J: Up the sky.

Do you like flowers?

J: I like flowers in the parks. I like trees too.

E (whispers): Sequoia.

J: Sequoia.

Sequoia is very big. Much bigger than you!

J: No.

How do you look at it? Does your neck not hurt?

J: I look at the sky. But I just want to know my mom is coming. I have a mom.

What is the favorite national park mommy took you to?

J: Virgin Islands.

Would you like to live there?

J: Yeah.

Not in Texas?

J: Not in Texas. But I like Texas. Like, a little bit.

Eric Castillo – a father’s perspective (or veo)

Flexible work, boundless adventures

Why do you think the Virgin Islands, or Virgin Lions as she calls it sometimes, are Journey’s favorite national park?

Eric Castillo: That park had a very slow vibe. The culture was very rich. It was on an island. The water was beautiful, the sand. I don’t know, just the energy. It was a great experience.

We had the local newspaper there, a journalist and a photographer, a park ranger… Everybody was there for her, and I think she knew that. She understood that, she was a little older at that time. It was perfect for her, it was a good park.

I feel that through other ones we rushed a lot. We could have experienced them more, and gotten deeper into the parks.

How did you manage coordinating visiting 63 national parks in three years, and your job?

E: I’m an arborist, so I work on trees. I have a tree business. We have been doing this for 7-8 years, so it gives me a lot of flexibility, to spend more time with Journey, like I’m doing right now, or how we are going to do next week. Trees are reproductive, they are always growing, so there’s always gonna be work.

Valerie does marketing, she does all the back-office stuff, with marketing. When the phone rings, we go and do our jobs. When we leave, we turn the ads off, and when we come back, we turn them on. That’s how we’ve been doing it. Just working when we are here, and when we leave, turning everything off.

She does marketing for one company as well, but she can work from a laptop anywhere. And then my job is very flexible. That’s how we are able to do that.

Parks, just do it

Do you work with marketing on this project? I see Journey is often wearing Nike. Is that a partnership?

E: Not yet, but that would be the goal. I would love to have that. The only sponsor she got so far was the toy company Melissa & Doug. The reason why we were trying to push it to finish all the parks by September is that she would secure the sponsorship. They are putting out a national park toy line and they wanted to use the story of how she accomplished that.

Nature Valley, General Mills, also reached out to her last week and wanted to use some content with their products.

I’ve never wanted it to be about capitalizing monetary from it. But if Nike came, I would love to get Nike! (laughter) I would take it in a heartbeat.

If Nike had a kids’ line, called the Journey, like they have the Jordans, that would be hugeEric Castillo

We put her in Nike because I was an athlete growing up. When I played college football, we were sponsored by Nike. And it’s like a uniform. I was in it for four years at university. When we had Journey, we just kept her in that.

We did think, that if Nike had a kids’ line, called the Journey, like they have the Jordans, they could have 63 shoes in that line. The Yosemite, the Zion, each shoe for the kid could be with art of each park, obviously with the Nike logo. If it’s Arches, it could have an arch. If it is Everglade, it could have an alligator with Nike. But the national park line? Man, they could capitalize on that, that would be huge.

I have ideas, but it’s so much work to find that person. If it happens, it happens.

Inspiring minds – Journey’s journey from Instagram to schools

Beyond just personal satisfaction, what is your ultimate goal with this national parks project?

E: We want to use all the momentum that she got, from the media perspective, to build off it. I really want to focus on using her platform here locally first, to go to elementary schools, little schools, colleges, and universities, and share her story, how she was the youngest to finish this, the 63 national parks.

Not only that but also give a little history on the parks, explain to people how many sites there are, how many big parks there are, what is the difference between a national park and a national monument…

Educate people that they can become park rangers and that these parks are really good for mental healing. That’s why they were built. Theodore Roosevelt was going through mental illness. All these parks have so much rich history, why they were established, and why they’re being protected.

I know when I was in school, I didn’t even know the difference between a national park and a state park. At that time, I was clueless. I knew there was a Grand Canyon, but I didn’t put everything together. When I started visiting the parks, I saw there were national parks, 420+ sites, city parks, state parks, national forests… It just educates you. We soaked the history of every park and why it was preserved, or considered a national park.

A voice for adventure

Can this experience and knowledge you gained be contagious?

E: With Journey’s platform, besides all the sponsorships, all the glam that can come with it, I want to hit it more in an educational way. I think Journey’s story would inspire, in any school. If you would go to little children or university level, she would touch somebody with this story, and maybe redirect somebody to visit the parks, maybe somebody who was going through a hardship and needed to heal.

When she’s able to have her own voice, when she is 6-7 years old, she can go on a stage at a school or university and say, “Hey, I’m Journey Castillo, I was the youngest to finish National Parks”. She can have her own microphone and be an advocate for these parks, and inspire people.

“Hey, this little girl did all this? We should go do it.”

Raising Journey Castillo, a park ambassador

Journey broke the record for being the youngest person to visit all 63 national parks. Are you now chasing any other records?

E: We don’t have a goal at this point. We did what we did. Now, it’s more about enjoying the parks as we go and using her platform to advocate and educate. We continue visiting them because I want her to grow up just refamiliarizing with everything. So she starts remembering it.

Tiger Woods has been playing golf since he was a little kid, that was all he knew. And when you put that around somebody, and you grow up like that, and that’s all you know, then you become great at what you do.

I want her to become a voice for national parks. That’s what we need. Everybody wants to be an athlete or a doctor. Which is not bad. Those are good things to aspire to be. But what we are doing for Journey, it’s very rare. So to kids of the next generation or her generation to hand somebody that responsibility. I think with what she’s accomplished, that gives her credibility to be that platform. That’s what I want her to be.

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In silence, far away from mainstream media, this Russian-born Cypriot started crafting Mad Max-style battle cars in 2018, taking his fearless comrades on yearly rides to the edges of society. Exploring the closest one could get to the post-apocalyptic dreamscape, they blasted their way to the wilderness of Mongolia and Russia, often to places where no human has stepped before.

“I love strange destinations”, Alexey tells me. “For instance, I liked your article on pink lakes, I bookmarked some things I have to visit myself! You have cool articles on Pipeaway.”

Describing himself as “the biggest fan of Mad Max worldwide”, Alexey Gubarev leads fellow businessmen on fury-road rides to the fringes of civilization

Alexey’s affinity toward the unusual and his expeditions to desolate landscapes are just a glimpse of discovery his distant uncle, Soviet cosmonaut Aleksei Aleksandrovič Gubarev, must have experienced on space missions in the 1970s.

A boy born in the icy clutches of 1980 Siberia dreamed of becoming an astronaut too, but life was hard, and poverty grounded his fantasies.

After relocating to the sunny shores of Cyprus in 2002, Alexey Gubarev started building his name in the IT sector. He launched a successful Servers.com hosting company, also invested in AI start-ups such as Prisma and Lensa apps, and eventually founded Palta, a technology company focused on health and well-being.

The accumulated fortune enabled expanding the horizons, and Alexey opted for exploring the yet unseen. Describing himself as “the biggest fan of Mad Max worldwide”, he built upon the ideas of his good acquaintants George Miller and Doug Mitchell, leading fellow businessmen on fury-road rides to the fringes of civilization.

In July, they returned from their latest pit stop in Kyrgyzstan, where armored cars brought joy to locals, and even caught the attention of the country’s President Sadyr Japarov.

“We realized that kids from small villages are the most thankful. Our passing by may be one of the biggest events in their life. They have these big eyes, really happy about seeing us”, the roadmaster Alexey warmly recalls.

How did mutant machines manage to stay beneath the radar all these years? In an exclusive grand interview about MadWay Rally, this Russian-Cypriot entrepreneur and philanthropist for the first time openly talks about his passion for post-apocalyptic cruisers, views on what makes life worth living, and the always-threatening end of days.

Before reading the interview, peek into MadWay Rally’s most recent adventure in Kyrgyzstan on Pipeaway’s Youtube channel!

From frozen Siberia to sunny Cyprus

You grew up in Irkutsk Oblast, in southeastern Siberia, where temperatures are below zero for half of the year. How would you describe your childhood, your growing up?

You have to understand that, when you don’t have anything to compare it with, you’re happy with what you have. When I was young, I was walking to school at minus 45 degrees Celsius. And it was normal. In the wintertime, we would have minus 50, minus 55. The minimum I experienced in my life was minus 63.

At the first school, when I was four, I would be walking on foot. There was maybe a one-kilometer walk. When I went to high school, it was maybe four kilometers. I would usually go by bus.

And you know why we would be walking to the school until minus 45? Because after minus 45, the diesel fuel in the pipes freezes, and you cannot go. That’s the reason. (laughter)

But in general, it was okay. We were happy kids. When it gets minus 47 and you don’t go to school, you just play outside. I was playing hockey when I was young.

It was cold, it was really cold. But if you are born there, you become used to it.

I moved to Cyprus 21 years ago, and I think I had enough cold. That part of my life is finished. When I left Russia, the cold part stayed there. In Cyprus, the weather is much better.

Indeed, Cyprus is a country with a radically warmer climate. But surely the reason for emigrating was not just the weather?

There were a few reasons. My first child was born in Russia. But when she was one year old, there was a really unsafe climate, it was criminal, it wasn’t easy. I’m speaking about the 2000s. I didn’t feel safe. I started making money at that time and saw it as an opportunity to move outside of Russia, to get a better life. This was what I needed.

In 2002, I moved with my family to Cyprus and eventually stayed here. I built big companies, and now I live here for a very long time. Two of my kids are already born in Cyprus, and for me, it became home. When you live in one place for over 20 years, it’s like a home country.

Accents and identities

Your three children lived their entire lives in Cyprus. Do they speak Russian?

My kids speak Russian because of the family. They also speak Greek, but the main language in Cyprus is English because it was an ex-British colony. And the kids speak better English than Russian.

My four-years-younger sister moved to Australia in 2003, where she lived and worked. Later she moved to Canada, and after nine years there, she returned home to Sydney. And now she speaks Russian with an English accent! A person that was born in Russia, after 20 years of living outside, starts speaking Russian with an accent! (laughter)

Soon you will be living in the Mediterranean longer than you lived in Siberia. Do you consider yourself more of a Russian or a Cypriot?

Because of all my business here, all my life, I consider myself a Cypriot. I didn’t even finish the university in Russia when I moved. I did a lot of stuff in Cyprus. With my friends, I created the biggest technology association. For me, Cyprus is like home. When we moved here, we didn’t even visit Russia for the first five years.

From code to cold – unplugging on the ice

In a way, your MadWay Rally project is your return to the wilderness of Eastern and Central Asia. You passed from Mongolia, via Lake Baikal and the Altai Mountains, to Kyrgyzstan. What inspired you to start this unusual journey in 2018?

You know, the first rally was actually in 2017.

The world has become too digital. My company is an IT business. What does that mean? I have this phone with me 18 hours a day. I have a computer another 16. In this world, you have so much information around you, and I was thinking I have to do something to relax my mind, just to change what I’m seeing.

In 2016, I saw some British guys doing The Ice Run, on old Russian motorbikes, Ural sidecar motorcycles. In wintertime, they did a rally on the frozen Lake Baikal, on motorbikes with sidecars. But they did it in a survival way. They gave you a motorbike, something to sleep on the ice, and you went by yourself and had to finish the race without any support. You only got support if you called on the radio, but it would be shameful to call because you kind of lost it then. They did this race for ex-military guys and everybody who wanted to train themselves.

I thought it was a good idea, but I just wanted to add some pragmatic stuff: you have to have hot food, warm clothes, somewhere to sleep that is not ice… And I decided I would do something like that.

In 2017, I did the first rally on ice, with motorbikes, in a similar style, but with a little bit more comfort. I brought yurts from Mongolia, with heating and a nice atmosphere inside. We did 700 kilometers on ice.

Battling blizzards and bikes

How many of you were there on this pre-rally?

We were nine, seven men and two women, one of which was my wife. From all nine, it was only me who drove a motorbike with a sidecar before and one guy who drove a motorbike. Seven people had no motorbike experience at all.

We trained them for three and a half hours on how to drive it, and the next day we started a rally on the frozen lake. This was a little bit dangerous, but we managed to do it. It was really difficult, one of the most difficult experiences of my life.

There was a snowstorm, at minus 35, the wind brought over 20 centimeters of snow, and that makes it very hard for the bike to move. You stop and start again, stop, and start again… It was unbelievable.

One day, we started at 9 o’clock in the morning, and we were supposed to finish this day at 5 o’clock in the evening. But because of the snowstorm, we finished at the destination at 2 o’clock at night. People were so tired. I was never tired as much as on this day.

You cannot stop it, because you have to go to this place. Otherwise, you would just freeze in the middle of the lake. It was really a nice experience to see your limits.

The birth of MadWay Rally – Mad Max meets Mongolia

How did the 2018 rally in Mongolia, with Mad Max-style modified cars, come about?

The people who helped us organize the motorbike event told us they also do expeditions in Mongolia. They showed me the photos, and it looked really cool.

On the way back home, on the plane, I was watching “Skiptrace”, a movie with Jackie Chan, in which he travels by train from Irkutsk through Mongolia to China. It looked amazing, and I thought maybe we could do Mongolia. But Mongolia is a very big country. You cannot go by motorbike, it would be really problematic.

I was also a big fan of “Mad Max”, the movie, the concept, and the idea. And I said, let’s try to do it in Mad Max style. And this is how the idea of the MadWay Rally in Mongolia was born. It started from the 2017 rally.

I gave the task to build the first car. We did it. It looked nice. We built another four. By September 2018, we had nine cars, two buggies, two bikes, and one truck in Mad Max style. And we did 1,200 kilometers in 10 days in Mongolia. Completely isolated, in the middle of nowhere.

How was it?

It was not so easy because it was the first such big expedition I organized, and a lot of crazy and unbelievable things happened. When you do something so big for the first time, there are always problems and unexpected things.

For example, we started with nine cars, two buggies, and two bikes. We finished the whole rally with five cars. The rest was broken, completely broken. We were lucky to finish even with five cars!

The cars were breaking every day, as you go to places where nobody drove before you. We were going to the middle of nowhere. And this was really, really not an easy task.

The nearest city and petrol station were 300-400 kilometers away. You had to have your own water, your own petrol, your own people, your own food. You had to be completely independent in every way. But we managed, we came back, knock on wood, nothing happened, which I was really worried about.

From that time, we tried to do it every year.

Kim Leunberger also travels the world with an unusual fleet of - vintage toy cars. Read the interview with this Swiss photographer!

The road less traveled

Still, you skipped a couple of years…

We missed the year 2020 because of Covid. I prepared the expedition in Bolivia, South America, the cars were already on the way there, and everything was organized. But when the pandemic started in February, I asked to return the cars, in the middle of the journey to Bolivia. They sent them back to a regional location, and we managed to stop the race because nobody could go anywhere.

Another year we lost was 2022, because of the war with Ukraine of course. I was super busy, I had no time to do anything. I had a big office in Dnipropetrovsk, with 250 people, and it was really problematic.

Basically, the idea is that every year we do a new country, and never a developed one. The style of the rally is about going somewhere really wild. This year, it was Kyrgyzstan.

We were thinking of making another rally in middle Asia next year, and then we plan to move to Africa. It is the best spot for Mad Max. The environment there, desert, number of people per square kilometer…

Another reason to move there is that “Mad Max: Fury Road” movie was filmed in Namibia in 2013. When George Miller and Doug Mitchell started shooting “Mad Max” in Australia, it was the first time in a long dry period that the rainy season came to the middle of the desert. The desert became green, and they couldn’t shoot the movie there. You cannot film “Mad Max” in a green environment. They decided to send all cars and crew to Namibia to shoot there.

People ask us why we cannot come to modern countries. But what can I do in Switzerland? They would not even allow me to drive on the road.  The cars are so modified that nobody would allow them on a normal road in Europe.

They wouldn’t pass the technical exam!

Not even one. (laughter)

It’s logical. When you are doing something extreme, you have to go to the countries that are more isolated.

Navigating from breakfast to breakdowns

Paint us a picture of a typical MadWay Rally… How long does it last? Do you sleep in the cars? Do you eat on the road? How do you ensure the safety of the participants? Are you truly a self-reliable convoy?

The rally usually takes 10 days.

We have our own chefs who cook for us. Half of the time, we skip lunch, because it’s a difficult place, but there’s always breakfast and dinner.

We always stay in villages where we find hotels, if possible. If it’s not possible, we build small camps for us, we bring tents and entire facilities. We never sleep in cars, because it’s not good, but also during the night, mechanics do maintenance on cars, because the race is difficult.

Regarding safety, we have three special technical teams, two are going with us, one is going in front of us. In case something happens, the problem can be fixed on the way. If it’s not possible, we move people out of the car, leave the car with the technical team, continue going, and they bring the car in the evening when they fix it.

Also, because we are in such remote locations, we have satellite phones, a radio, and we always have a doctor with us. It’s really organized in a safe way. Usually, we have an agreement with helicopters that, if something happens, they have to come within 45 minutes, wherever we are. We usually organize it with the hosting country that they have this facility to help us in case of emergency.

But in general, we try to depend on ourselves, because you never know what can happen.

Alexey Gubarev’s car affair, from sidecars to supercars

Were you always into cars?

I was. Do you know why am I passionate about cars? Till 1994, we only had a motorbike with a sidecar. If you don’t have money, you cannot afford to buy a car.

In 1994, my family bought their first car. In 1993, my family bought a computer for me. We got a computer earlier than a car. My mother still believes it was the smartest decision in their life.

But I was always a big fan of cars, especially when you start to have money to buy them. I have a really big collection of cars myself, a huge one. And the rally is a part of that.

How many cars do you own?

Over 200.

Wow, you have a car in every country of the world?

No, most of them are in Cyprus. My main collection is of classic cars from the 1920s and 1930s. It’s really a big collection, and I will open a museum one day for that. If you ever decide to come to Cyprus, I can show you some cars. It’s the biggest collection of cars in this region.

I like cars. I’m a big fan of them. I have a lot of sports cars as well. And a huge collection of MadWay stuff.

MadWay Rally’s vehicle conversion workshop

How did the conversions of vehicles happen, and who can even do it besides “Mad Max” movie designers?

We are doing it ourselves. I met Mad Max guys long after I started a car race. I had my people in Russia making them, and when the war started, I moved them to Kyrgyzstan. Since the war, I am not going to Russia myself. We moved everything from there, and do it in Kyrgyzstan now.

We are not trying to copy Mad Max. We did our own design which is completely differentAlexey Gubarev

Every year, I am building 3-4 new cars. For the team, their yearly job is doing maintenance of existing vehicles, and also building new cars. Some cars are retiring, and we’re updating the fleet every year.

How many of these Wasteland-style vehicles do you have now?

Eighteen cars, three buggies, two bikes, and two trucks.

And which is your favorite?

Well, we have some new ones now, which are Evacuators, I like them a lot, they are very cool. We have two special vehicles that are transporting our bikes on highways, I like those too.

Each car has a unique design. We are not trying to copy Mad Max. We did our own design which is completely different.

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Bridging fantasy and reality

How hard is it with coming up with a design that is not just Instagram-worthy, but also functional?

I’ll give you an example. In “Mad Max”, they have a Gigahorse, a double Cadillac with two 8 engines inside, so V16, which they created. But the problem is that it is too wide. If you’re going on an off-road rally, you cannot drive it because it’s too big.

We have a huge limitation to go wide. You cannot copy Mad Max cars and do it completely crazy because the places you are visiting, this car cannot go.

We are a little bit more practical. It is different building cars for the movie, and building cars for the real-life rally, where you have to do over 1,000 kilometers.

How do you transport these cars to the rally location?

Between countries, we ship them, or we send them by lorry. The first time we moved cars from Siberia to Kyrgyzstan, it took them 9 days by lorry. You need to organize special paperwork.

Basically, we moved them out of Russia, because we will never go back till the war finishes, and we needed to create special documents to export the cars out of the country. It was really problematic, but finally, we managed, we did it.

Now we are building another three cars. Each time they design it, I am consulted about two cars, while one car they design on their own, and I will see it only when I arrive. Basically, I give my workers freedom. They can do whatever they want. It’s a surprise for people that are going with me because they don’t know what they will build each year, but even I keep it as a surprise for myself.

Disconnecting to reconnect

Can you describe the feelings you experience while driving these cars?

Life has become too typical. Every day, you know what you are doing. And there, you come, you don’t know what to expect, you don’t know what you’ll see, what will happen. I like unpredictable things.

The problem of our generation is that we cannot enjoy the momentAlexey Gubarev

And another good thing is that telephones stop working. We usually start from really remote locations. The next day, at lunchtime, your telephone stops working. And it’s maybe not working for the next seven days. This really changes people.

I’m telling you my experience from Mongolia: the first day, people took their phones and tried to see if they were working, the second day they didn’t work, and the third day they forgot about it. They understood that they needed to enjoy the moment.

This is the problem of our generation – we cannot enjoy the moment. For instance, I am going to concerts, and people are not enjoying concerts, they are recording them. It is not the same. Maybe I am a little old-fashioned. But you have to feel the moment, I think.

For example, I really want to do the photos by myself as well. But what did I do? I got camera guys and video guys with us who do that job, and I don’t have to think about it, that I am missing something. It was a really smart decision because from the trip I bring maybe 20-30 photos I made, that’s it. But they make 10 thousand photos. They give me a picture, and I get a feeling I didn’t miss anything. I open the album after the rally and I can see it.

Some things are really easy to organize, but people never think about them. We have our daily photos ready the next day morning. You come to breakfast, and operators give you a memory stick, you connect your phone, and you get the photos from the previous day.

I really like to organize stuff. Because I had companies from 400 to 1,000 people, I know how to organize that properly. I do the same on expeditions, just to deliver a good product.

So MadWay Rally is like a digital detox, a mental getaway. Would you say you feel more alive during these rallies?

Of course, I do believe you feel more alive. Because you are enjoying the moment. You are not thinking about how it looks on a cellphone camera, or how people are watching you…

Those things happen at completely isolated location sites, basically, you don’t have anyone around you. The only people there are your friends and the crew who is doing this job in the back seat.

When the rally is passing some cities, of course, it gets huge attention, and people stop and look. But most of the time we are going to places where there’s nobody. This gives you the freedom to concentrate on yourself.

You know, some days, I like to drive by myself, without anyone else in the car. I take time to think about myself. When you are at your job, in the office, or you have ten meetings in a day, you cannot concentrate on yourself. You have to do the duties which you are obliged to do.

Crash course in adventure

Were you ever involved in a car accident during the rally?

I had an accident in 2003, I flipped over with my car. But during the rally, I never had an accident myself, knock on wood.

We have big accidents, but the strangest one for me happened in Mongolia. We arrived at a remote location where we just received the cars. My wife decided to drive a buggy. I put on her seatbelt, I put on her helmet, I put it on the friend of hers too, and told her “Now, you can go”. Three minutes after we started the rally, they flipped over and did a triple somersault.

With a buggy, you have to be really careful. Because buggy is light. If you catch something with back wheels, it’s very easy to turn it upside down. People without experience don’t know that.

But slowly, the team is becoming more organized. I also take my wife to many training sessions. We went to Sweden and Iceland lakes to train how to drive on ice. I took her to Dubai to train her how to drive on dunes. And she became a good driver.

I did the same for our team members, to bring the level of driving at expeditions higher, to make sure we are safer. Because we really go to difficult locations.

As a matter of fact, none of you are professional rally drivers. Most participants are entrepreneurs such as yourself, coming from the IT & tech industry?

Most of the people are from IT, yes.

Check out how MadWay Rally crew spent their days on frozen Lake Baikal!

MadWay Rally balancing price and principles

If someone wants to participate in MadWay Rally, how much money do they need to cash out?

We don’t have open admissions, you cannot even apply. But the cost is approximately 150,000 dollars for two people for one rally, without travel expenses to the country.

I haven’t decided yet if MadWay Rally should become a commercial projectAlexey Gubarev

So if people don’t apply, do they come from your inner circle?

Yes, they are mostly my friends. We don’t open to submissions because on such expeditions it is hard to manage a big group. Over 30 participants are unbelievably hard to manage. The problem becomes with safety, quality, and service.

The biggest problem for me now is that I have a big queue of people who want to come and I cannot accept them because I just don’t have space. Also, we go to locations where the largest hotel has maybe 25 rooms. So I cannot do more than that.

There’s a huge limitation on the number of people I can accept. We were thinking about doing two rallies, but it is not a commercial project, this is a non-profit. I never thought if I want to change this or not.

Every rally, we do a lot of charity. During the rally in Kyrgyzstan, we renovated 41 kilometers of a road that was not used for 20 years. We renovated it and opened it.

Then we did a huge charity concert there too. We paid for all the expenses, performers, and stage, and all ticket income was paid to the Kyrgyzstan charity fund which will spend it on the local needs of the place where we did the rally.

We have a different philosophy. I’m not sure if we should go commercial. And it’s not my business. It’s more of a hobby, it’s about the moment. If I attach the moment to the business side… I haven’t decided yet.

Racing against time

It’s true, business is something else. Your Cyprus career is focused on launching advanced tech solutions.  As a business angel, you invest in projects that conduct research in longevity and anti-aging drugs and technology. Are you personally scared of death?

Eh… (long silence) You know, I have a really good joke about that. And it’s actually connected to the Mad Max idea. My problem is that in long-term planning, I believe too much in an apocalypse. (laughter) I always have to consider something can happen. Okay, I am not a young boy, and of course, you don’t know what can happen.

The last four years were crazy. Covid, Ukraine, now Africa. Where are we going? Doesn’t it look like a path of the apocalypse?Alexey Gubarev

A crazy story: one and a half months ago, my friend died. He was six months younger than me. And he died while doing a medical test. He died in the hospital where he went just for a check-up.

Scared? I am not really scared. Careful? Maybe. Logically careful. But to concentrate on that? No. But…

You know what I think… I discussed this morning with my wife about this, as I was watching Euronews, and there was no good news. Everything they were saying was bad news. Instead of seeing some good things about what is happening in the world, we are completely concentrated on bad things. I think the general approach is a little bit wrong about that.

And of course, the last four years were crazy. We started with Covid, then the war in Ukraine, and now we have another war coming in Africa. Where are we going? Doesn’t it look as if we are heading to the path of the apocalypse?

Chasing longevity

True, the future is not predictable. But how long would you like to live?

Yesterday, the oldest lady in Cyprus died, she was 111 years old. Cyprus is a good place to live long.

But it’s not about how long you live. It’s about how long you live in good conditions. You can be 100 years old, not be able to do anything, and stay in a hospital. Is this life?

For me, I wish I can live to 100, in good medical conditions. But what will happen with that, we will know soon. Technology is moving very fast. A lot of things are happening, and I believe there will be a big revolution in longevity in the next 20 years. What you have to do is not die in the next two decades, and be in good health condition. Just survive these 20 years! (laughter)

There are tech entrepreneurs of your generation, such as Bryan Johnson who went to extreme lengths to reverse his aging and find a solution to staying young forever. What do you personally do in that regard for yourself? Do you have special routines?

I train ten times a week, I exercise every morning. The one thing that you can work on is to have a good physical condition because it is super important. You know, when you are 20, you can do anything. When you are 30, you can still do anything. When you are 40, you really have to work to be in the same shape, or to at least look the same.

When I was 30, I had a simple operation where you remove an appendix. I came out of anesthesia, and asked: “Doctor Andreas, how am I?”

He said: “Alex, you are 30. You cannot be better anymore. Every day is worse.” (laughter) This is what you have to remember. Now you have to work to be in the same shape.

I go to the gym, I am riding a bicycle, I swim. In October, I’m going to try to do the Olympic triathlon, 1.5-kilometer swim, 40 kilometers bicycle, 10 kilometers run.

Do you take any supplements to advance your health?

Only vitamins. I am not doing biohacking. If you want to take some serious supplements for health extension, I believe they have to be tested properly. Because they may give more damage than benefits.

A road to retirement

Can you imagine yourself being in a retirement home one day, playing chess?

I wish. (laughter) I remember when I was 25-26, and started Servers.com, I was thinking: by 30, I would make a big company and retire. Then I made some other big companies, and said to myself, when I sell this company, I’ll retire.

Being active keeps you alive longerAlexey Gubarev

I sold Servers.com three months ago, and I was a little bit upset about myself. I sold the company, I got the money, and it was the biggest sale of my life; I should be really happy. And you start to think about what you have to do now, what you have to achieve, do you have to buy a present for yourself. (laughter)

I was thinking about it for two days, and I understood that nothing changed. There were no presents, and I just continued doing what I want. And I said, okay, maybe it’s not yet the time.

You know, Warren Buffet is over 80, and he is still active and works. I do believe that it is the most important to continue being active because if your brain is busy with thinking, this keeps you alive.

I see so many people who go to retirement houses, and they start to become older much faster. There is nothing to do, they are not motivated, they don’t have fire and ice, and they don’t know what to do tomorrow. I believe being active keeps you alive much longer.

MadWay Rally’s escape to dystopian fantasy

This idea that grown-up men and women dress up in movie-style costumes and drive pimped-up cars through real-life movie sets could sound like an escape from real life. Sort of like a next-level Burning Man, finding a community that embraces the idea of a dystopian fantasy. It could be seen as childish by someone. Do you feel that you and your friends are giving yourselves a permit to live a new youth through this project, away from family obligations, business life stress, money chase, rat race, and so on?

A lot of my friends went to Burning Man, but then told me that it was not so interesting. (laughter) Because MadWay Rally is much more active.

Burning Man is nice. I was there myself, and it’s really strange. I didn’t take any drugs, I never took drugs in my life, it’s not for me. But I went there because there’s a great artist world, and this is what I really liked about Burning Man.

But if we are speaking about why we are doing this, I think it is about the idea and about the possibility. Because what are the chances of people like me and my friends ever going to Kyrgyzstan, without this story? They are close to zero.

My friends and I are visiting places we never expected to visit. To see the world how it looked before people. We went to places where a human foot never stepped on. There are not so many people in the world who can do this.

If you are living in Europe, maybe you can see such places in the Alps, you can actually go to places that never saw visitors. But we are going to places and countries that are really beautiful. I’m telling you, Kyrgyzstan is super beautiful. It is like Switzerland, but with much higher mountains. In Switzerland, the average height is from 2.5 to 4 kilometers. In Kyrgyzstan, the average height is between 5.5 and 7 thousand meters. It’s unbelievably nice. People are different, we meet another culture.

What we are actually looking for is to get experience, the one that we cannot get somewhere else. It’s about that.

Alexey Gubarev’s response to the modern apocalypse

It’s very interesting what you are saying. It feels as if you are going to places where the future hasn’t arrived yet, it’s preserved. But also, from Mad Max fantasy, it could resemble the future that is in front of us, the closest one can get to a post-apocalyptic Wasteland. Of course, things are changing fast, from climate change to war conflicts. There is a true apocalypse going on in Ukraine at this very moment. With the background of your origin, how do you respond to someone’s possible perception that MadWay Rally is an inappropriate playground for a rich Russian tycoon? How do you position yourself in terms of this ongoing apocalypse happening between your home country and its first neighbor?

I would not like to connect these. I started this rally many years ago, much before anything happened. Personally, everyone can decide what they are taking themselves. I made my decision, it’s public information, I stopped my Russian citizenship, and I gave my passport back. Each person can decide what they want to do, and I did it like that. I stopped my Russian passport, I don’t go to Russia anymore. And I don’t believe what is going on is over. There should always be a solution.

When the war started, we were moving our people from Ukraine (from other countries), and it was really a terrible situation. One and a half year has passed, and we don’t know where is the end. I know they are fighting for territory or something, but in my personal opinion, with a hundred thousand people killed, is territory really worth so many lost lives, from both sides?

The biggest crime of this story is that people are dying today. And they are not doing anything to stop that on both sides. I believe it’s better to have a bad peace than a good war. All they have to do is to stop people from dying.

Roadmap to positive change

As we know, with great power comes great responsibility. I don’t know what is Alexey Gubarev’s net worth, but you are obviously a wealthy man. You revealed you have 200 cars, I know you own a yacht, and generally seem to be investing smartly. Once people succeed and gain fortune, such as Elon Musk, let’s say, they have an opportunity to change the world, not just a logo of a leading social media network. Of course, Musk’s venture into space is much more revolutionary than renaming Twitter. While you share the name with Aleksei Gubarev, a Russian cosmonaut who flew on Soyuz to space in 1975 and 1978, your extravagancy didn’t go that direction. You seem more grounded. How do you see yourself as a person who made good investments and got the opportunity to change the world for the better?

I am doing a lot of charity, really big. My wife actually created the biggest charity company in Cyprus – the City Friends Club. We started it after Covid. We were walking around the city and saw how dirty it was. And we created this company that is cleaning the city because the municipality doesn’t have enough power to clean it properly. We are trying to help them do the job they are not able to do. This is a really big and prospective project that is going on.

We also created the association of IT companies – TechIsland. Its vision is to create a tech hub in Cyprus, and we are doing a really good job with that. It’s the biggest association in the country. We have 270 members already, with over 27 thousand people working in Cyprus. We had really good progress since we created the association. In 2020, the IT sector in Cyprus was 8.5 percent of GDP, and in 2022, it was already 13. In two years, we almost doubled the contribution of the ICT sector to the GDP of Cyprus, which is an unbelievable result.

My vision about what I can contribute is to try to change Cyprus in a good way because for me it has become a home. I feel responsible for where I live. One of the changes is Cyprus’s economic affairs, also to bring more highly-skilled professionals, I really want Cyprus to grow as an IT hub.

We see a huge improvement in this region in the last few years, and I think this is only the beginning. Cyprus really has a good opportunity to become a local big IT hub like Israel, and we think in 2-3 years, Cyprus will also be on the map.

Leaving trace instead of trash

The City Friends Club charity is focusing on reducing waste through a more efficient system for a cleaner environment. Can you tell me more about your attitude toward responsible waste management during the MadWay rallies? That throwing a truck in flames down the mountain could raise some concern, so I wanted you to be clear about this…

No, we are actually pretty efficient in that. Our idea is to leave the place in the same condition we found it in. We never leave garbage. You cannot create the biggest cleaning charity company in Cyprus and be irresponsible somewhere else. For us, this is super important, also for our image. We don’t want to have a bad image.

The way we do the rally is super efficient in terms of how we handle everything. Nobody had bad comments that we are not handling the environment properly during the race. Of course, we burn fuel, we cannot change that much. (laughter)  We cannot go with electric cars because where we go, we cannot charge them.

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. You are a big collector, collecting from vintage audio equipment to old cars. Eventually, these collections call for more eyes, and then you come up with ideas for museums…

Our focus on building the museum of retro cars will be next year, and one day we will build something related to Mad Max. I really like the idea of post-apocalypse, people like it too.

Not many movies create their world. “Harry Potter”, “Star Wars”, “Star Trek”… These are the movies that create new universes. And “Mad Max” is one of them. Before “Mad Max”, nobody thought about post-apocalypse in such a way.

Four decades after “Mad Max” premiere, the quantity of nuclear weapons in the world only got bigger. People love post-apocalypse because many believe it’s possibleAlexey Gubarev

George Miller created a universe, how post-apocalypse, a life after a nuclear war, could look like. The first movie was released in 1979, and I believe it was very actual. People were really worried about it, what could happen to the world.

It hasn’t become irrelevant, because 40 years passed since these times, but the quantity of nuclear weapons in the world has become even bigger. Each time, we just hope that it doesn’t get to a situation where it becomes a really big problem for everybody. I do believe that nuclear weapons have to be destroyed in the world and that we don’t have to discuss it. But we are not there yet. We are really not there.

People love post-apocalypse because many believe it’s possible. We can go in this bad direction as a civilization, as humans, because a lot of decisions that are made by politicians are not smart. I hope we will never go there, but everything can happen.

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The authors of the photographs in this article are Andrejs Zavadskis and Evgenii Konasov.

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After covering 45 thousand kilometers on foot, the adventurer Tom Turcich became the tenth person to circumnavigate the globe this way, setting foot on six continents, and wearing out 45 pairs of shoes in the process. Savannah became the first dog to conquer 38 countries on paws alone.    

Tom Turcich’s legs took a well-deserved break, but challenges didn’t end when the walk around the world did

Tom left his parents’ home in New Jersey a day before his 26th birthday and returned as a grown man that matured beyond just accomplishing a remarkable feat. The epic journey enabled him to explore his own and other people’s heritage and learn valuable lessons about life.

He already knew how fragile life was. When he was 17, his childhood friend Anne Marie Lynch died in a jetski accident, unleashing a whirlpool of emotions. Even the best ones among us can disappear tomorrow, Tom saw, and this essentially became a first push towards the World Walk.

A year has passed since Tom’s legs took a well-deserved break, but his mind continues racing. I caught up with him in Cincinnati, where he just settled with his girlfriend Bonnie. Between working on writing his memoir (hitting shelves in spring 2024), self-publishing his children’s book “Savannah’s World of Adventure”, juggling speaking engagements, and unpacking the boxes from moving, he revealed that challenges didn’t end when the walk around the world did.

Transitioning back to a non-walking life has meant relearning what he knew about living among people, rewaking obsessive thoughts on mortality, and embarking on an ongoing quest for identity and purpose.  

Tracing the Turcich roots

Becoming the tenth person to walk the world made you an instant media sensation. Through watching your public appearances, I noticed numerous journalists struggling with the pronunciation of your last name as [Toor-seech], [Toor-kitch], or [Toor-chik], never hitting the Croatian version [Toor-cheech]… I wonder how you pronounce the name of your Croatian ancestors, and did it change after visiting their homeland?

Here, it’s [Toor-seech]. It was awesome to go to the island of Krk and see the little village of Turčić. I have one of my ancestors in Ireland too, but in Croatia, it just felt it was on another level, being able to go and see the town, to see the headstone with my last name on it, and meet my cousins there. And you’re like, ‘No wonder my great grandfather left Krk because it’s all just rock. This would be insane to live in the 1800s, that’s crazy.’

A lot of my aunts stayed in contact with cousins and family everywhere. There’s a good Turcich network! They would just tell me: “This is your cousin, Milijana, go stay with her! And then she’ll introduce you to more cousins, and you’ll meet these cousins, and they’ll show you these cousins!” It was just getting contacts of a few of them, and then me bouncing around.

Who is Tom Turcich after the World Walk?

It’s been a year now since you finished your seven-year-long quest for meaning by walking around the world. After being constantly on the move for so long, and now exploring the side of you that doesn’t have that always-present mission in the spotlight, what have you learned about yourself? Can you now answer better: Who is Tom Turcich?

Man, it’s difficult to answer that question now! Before it would have been very easy, I think. My whole purpose was wrapped up in the World Walk.

Like you said, every day I’d wake up and have that purpose of getting up and walking, it was very simple. Just by doing that one simple thing, I saw the world, I had new experiences, I met new people, I tried new food, and I didn’t have to really do anything. I just had to get up and walk, and then find the place to sleep, and get some water and food for me and Savannah.

And now, it’s definitely challenging. I don’t know, it’s a tough question to answer honestly. I wake up now and the days are just very open, in a way they didn’t use to be. I go: I could do this, I could do this, I could do this… I think I’m still figuring out who I am after the walk. And I think that’s hopefully to be expected; after having such a clear purpose for so long, I’m in search of a new purpose, of something new that would drive me. But yeah, it’s tough to say, I’m in a gray zone.

Boredom and crisis beyond the finish line

After you finished that journey that lasted 1861 days and walked through the finish line in Haddon Township, things seem to have changed. As a photographer, you barely posted five posts on Instagram in the past year. Did you feel as if your life became boring, did you enter an existential crisis, or were you just bothered by some new questions?

I would say all of them. Definitely boring, definitely an existential crisis…

Life on the road is really fulfilling, and there’s just so much stimulation and challenge to it. I’m glad it’s over, as it’s difficult. But with that difficulty comes a lot of richness.

The World Walk was my answer to my mortality, and now that it’s over, I find myself thinking about death a lotTom Turcich

Now that life is a little easier, I can shower every day, I can lie in bed, I can make a coffee whenever I want to make a coffee, there’s this sort of boredom in a certain way. Because I don’t have that sense of discovery that I used to have.

And then there’s definitely an existential crisis because the World Walk was my answer to my mortality. And now that I don’t have that anymore, and I am not waking up outside, in the tent, or in a new place, I really find myself thinking about death a lot. And what I need to do to make my life meaningful to me, and worthwhile.

So there’s a lot of questioning. In a certain way, there is a lot of boredom. Yes, I don’t have that strong sense of purpose. At the same time, I am very grateful to not go through all of that.

When I was in Croatia, it was during the heat wave, and it was so insanely hot when I was out walking. I don’t miss that. But I also do miss walking through that heat in the morning and just dying, and then I’d get to these little beaches all along the water there, and take a 3-hour break, and I’d just swim for an hour. That was amazing.

But yeah, it’s been a challenging transition for sure.

From wanderer to wonderer

Maybe everyone expects you’d mature through this journey, and I’m sure your parents would say you’re not a boy anymore. But do you also feel as if you went back somehow, to feeling lost like a teenager? You passed the finish line, but you are again at the beginning in a way…

Yeah, definitely. I am such an entirely different person than I was when I started. The growth happens so slowly, you don’t even notice it’s happening after a while. Just like my understanding of the world, my understanding of myself is so far beyond what it was when I began.

But as you said, in a certain way, I do feel that I’m behind strangely. I was living such a different life, and I come and see people having their careers, they go to kickboxing or other classes, and they have all these friends or the wardrobe… They just know what they are doing in this one place, and I didn’t have any of that.

I’m feeling more and more settled by the day and figuring it out again. But I remember when I stopped and moved to Seattle, I just had so much time on my hands. The world wasn’t coming at me as it did when I was walking. And I realized, ‘Oh, I have to go out and sign up for classes, or go to the tennis court and play tennis.’ Like, I had to do these things. Whereas when I was walking, I would just walk and everything would come at me.

It’s difficult, it’s a change. But you know, after a year, it’s getting easier and easier, I would say.

Tom Turcich’s journey through loneliness

For seven years of your World Walk, you were living a repeating, but slow-tempo life. As you said, after you returned, you saw your social circles had moved on rather quickly. And maybe they even live rather quickly, rushed by their job duties, families, activities, things to do… Did you feel alone?

A little bit, yeah. When it ended, I was at my parents’ house in New Jersey for three months. I was really in the afterglow of having finished. I was seeing all my friends and family. I could just do nothing and be totally satisfied.

When I was walking, I never felt alone. But as soon as I would stop in a city, I would feel lonelyTom Turcich

Then I moved to Seattle, to be with my girlfriend Bonnie. It was great being there and I moved there for a reason, but also I only knew two people out there, and she was off to medical school. There was definitely little more isolation.

And again, a part of it was that I just didn’t know what to do with my time. How do I fill my days?

A similar thing was happening when I was walking. On the days I was walking, I would never feel alone. But when I would stop in the city and didn’t know anyone, that’s when I would feel lonely. Because you see all these people walking and doing stuff, and you think ‘I’ll just gonna sit here and do people-watching’. You really feel you don’t have any of these connections.

It felt the same way in Seattle for a little while. But eventually, I got my group, got into a little more rhythm, found ways to spend my day, and felt a little more assured.

Also, I loved being outside, and I was in an apartment. You had to go to some public space to be outside, and I just wanted to sit out. Now, I’m in a house and I can sit out on the front porch. I just need to be able to sit outside somewhere, on my own.

There are environment-friendly ways to travel to the other side of the world without necessarily involving walking. Meet the British family that decided to travel slowly to Australia!

Transient connections

You speak about loneliness in the crowd. Even for the social connections you did make on the road, you had to take into account that you would be saying ‘goodbye’ the next day. It’s a social life that’s always ending, right?

I got really sick with a bacterial infection after South America. I came back, and I was walking in Europe, and it was difficult because I had been in a lot of pain over the seven months before from the infection.

When I got to Valencia in Spain, I stopped for a month and a half to get a Spanish visa. And I met this girl there, and I just wanted some connection, some permanence, and had to leave it.

Then, when I was walking Morrocco and Algeria, I was meeting these great people, and again I wanted to stay in some of these places, and I wanted to have this deep connection.

I really just had to accept this was the deal I made, this is a part of the World Walk. You can’t stay in one place. Definitely in that section of the world, probably from Spain to Algeria, it was really me trying to come to terms that it’s not the time yet to have these connections.

I would obsessively think about what my house was gonna be like in the future, I was really nesting, I couldn’t wait to have my place and have people around. But at the same time, just over and over again, I’m just leaving and go ‘You just can have this’.

In Azerbaijan, I stayed for six months because of Covid. I lived with a Swiss girl, I pretended normalcy. Even if the world was very not normal, for me it felt normal, I was in an apartment, buying groceries, and so on.

Then in Turkey, I walked around and stopped in Kaş, on the south coast. It was one of the few places where I could keep walking. I stayed for three months, I had friends, and everyone was in the same situation, it was a pandemic hide-out. And I had those connections. Having those made me really appreciate and long for being in one place and having connections.

When I left again in Uzbekistan and Kyrgistan, and then I walked across the US, I was also really exhausted from leaving people over and over and over again. I’ve just done it for so long, and I was really looking forward to not doing that after six years.

A man from Canada also didn't let the pandemic stop him from his trip around the world. Bert terHart became the ninth person to sail around the globe alone, using only celestial navigation!

Love on the road

So you broke two hearts while on the road?

Yeah, well, I think in Valencia it was more of a fling and I was in a bad state emotionally and just wanted the connection. But in Azerbaijan, it was a girlfriend.

Did you break these connections because of the walk, or were you considering maybe breaking the walk to continue the relationships?

No, that was never gonna stop the World Walk. That was always in the back of my head, and I was always upfront about it: “This is what I’m doing.” And to myself as well. That’s what also made it difficult, that I knew nothing was permanent or could be lasting.

So it’s like a one-night stand, but it could last for a month maybe, but not longer…

Yeah, exactly.

How did Bonnie and you meet?

We met on the road, in Washington State, I was halfway across Washington, and she was doing a rotation in a little town called Omak. Got on Tinder, she was on Tinder, and we kind of hit it off. I stayed with her for a couple of days, on Labor Day weekend, and she followed me. She saw me in Washington, then in Idaho, in Wyoming. She visited me in Colorado on Christmas, and Pittsburgh as well.

Did she walk with you, or just followed where you are?

She walked a little bit, here and there, not like a full day and night.

Do you know about Christian Lewis who started a solo quest of walking Britain’s coastline, and ended up not only with a dog, but also now a partner, and a baby, all doing the walk? I’m not pushing this scenario, but do you have family plans?

Maybe. You know, I’m still trying to fill up my wardrobe and sign up for classes. Maybe in a couple of years, we’ll see. The dogs are enough responsibility for now.

Canine culture

What country loves dogs the most?

Oh, probably America. Americans are crazy about their dogs. They are like our kids. I don’t think there’s anywhere else as extreme as in the US.

I would say Turkey is pretty good about their dogs too, in a very different way. Dogs are not generally brought inside, but people are very respectful of the dogs. They are fed, and spayed/neutered, they are just left to roam, which is really nice in a certain way.

There were a lot of places that were very receptive to Savannah. They really loved her in Uzbekistan. Because it was kind of an anomaly. Maybe every once in a while, someone would have a dog, and it was so strange for them that I would be walking around with this dog on a leash. Whenever they met Savannah, they would love her. Uzbekistan was really friendly, more out of curiosity.

And which country do dogs love the most, according to Savannah?

Kyrgistan, for sure. We were just up in the mountains, with the horse and the guide. So she was off leash basically all the time, and just running around the mountains, on the grass, chasing yaks, goats, and sheep. She was in paradise.

Savannah’s journey from trauma to trust

As it was the only life she knew of, do you feel she grew into a different type of dog? When she was meeting other dogs, used to their leashes, courtyards, and neighborhoods – what were their encounters like?

Yeah, very different life. During the first two years in Central and Southern America, she was attacked by other dogs a lot. There are a lot of dogs that are beaten or just not treated with any love, but just there to protect someone’s property, and they are given some scraps. So the first two years, she had a lot of trauma. She didn’t trust other dogs.

When we got to the US, and I was getting her paperwork to get into Europe, we would go to this dog park, and she would just stand on the side, and watch the other dogs, and not really know how to play. It wasn’t until a month in or so, when we would get to park and she would be so excited. Because she was like ‘Oh, I know I can trust these dogs, and they are not going to attack me’. And now she is so friendly.

She still has some weird little quirks. When I was camped out somewhere, and I walked away, maybe to go to the bathroom, or just go explore somewhere not too far away, I’d leave the tent set up. And as soon as I would turn around, she would race back to the tent to go see if anyone was there, to protect it. She still has that, when we walk. As soon as we turn around, she’s pulling as hard as she can, to get back to the house. And if I’d let her off leash, she would just run home to protect it. So she has a few little quirks from the road, but she is on the sofa right now, sleeping, so I think she is pretty happy about that too.

Bedtime choices

On the road, did she prefer sleeping on the grass outside or in the tent?

For the first two years, it was always outside. She never came into the tent. Even if I wanted her to come inside. Even if it would rain, she would sleep in the vestibule, the little outside area.

But then we spent a month in Montevideo, Uruguay, and then two months at home, to get her paperwork to get her into Europe. I think after that she was like ‘I’m just gonna be in the tent, that’s nice too, to be inside’. Then it was quite often in the tent.

After sleeping on hard surfaces for so long yourself, how do you prefer to sleep today?

Sleeping outside is definitely nice. I sleep really well outside.

I spoke at this camp to a graduating class of seniors, and I was sleeping in the cabin. Just having sounds of nature and a little breeze coming in, I slept so well. Even if the mattress was terrible, I didn’t even have a pillow, I was in a sleeping bag, but I slept great.

And then when we drove across the country, Bonnie’s Dad drove a tractor-trailer, and Bonnie and I would sleep on the air mattress in the trailer, with a little door opened, and I slept so well.

Sleeping outside works really well for me.

Blister-free feet

How did you deal with the physical challenges of walking for so long? What advice would you give to individuals who aspire to undertake an extraordinary challenge such as circumnavigating the world on foot, how to do it safely and without risking health?

Definitely, wool socks! And then, you have to find shoes that figure feet well. If you find the right shoes, you shouldn’t get blisters. I tried a lot of shoes, until finding a pair that fit right – Brooks Cascadia. I would have those sent ahead, and do whatever I could to get those, because I knew I wouldn’t lose toenails, and I wouldn’t get blisters, because they just fit my feet right.

And I would say – stretch! I’d stretch every day, and if I didn’t stretch, I would feel it, for sure. You can just stretch for 5-10 minutes, that’s enough to keep you from cramping up, just to keep you moving.

Another American replaced the permanent house with constantly moving landscapes. Jessica Rambo is a single mom traveling around on a school bus!

Lessons from loss

Seven years ago, I left for a long-term journey too, and one of the motivators behind it was also reflections on life and death. I myself had some medical issues that could have been serious, luckily it didn’t turn out like that, but I was delaying the check-ups, drowning myself in the everyday grind of work. And it wasn’t until someone else in my proximity, a colleague with leukemia, experienced a life-threatening situation, that I reacted to protect myself. It made me think that I should step out of this working grind, and just remove myself from the everyday rituals to reconnect with myself. Why do you think it is that we need this type of social mirror to be able to basically act in our best interest, and take care of ourselves?

Intellectually, I think about death a lot, probably almost every night before I go to bed. And I wish I didn’t, but it’s just how it is.

A couple of months ago, my grandmother died, and I was there, just an hour before she passed. And for the week after she died, I saw the world with such clarity, and I was so much more appreciative of everything.

In a certain way, we are just dumb, and we are wired dumbly, and we just don’t see everything at once. We will fall into whatever pattern, which is good because it’s a good use of energy. You fall into some sort of rhythm and routine that works, and you are getting by, and you are surviving.

It’s not until there is a little inertia that hits you and makes you able to see and reconsider the path that you are on. And then you fall into another rut, and you are down that path, and then need another bump to help you reconsider again.

I think it’s just our wiring. If we get into a good rhythm, and if we can do something that has us surviving, then that’s probably what we will do, until something knocks us off it.

Can you tell me more about your friend Anne Marie, the person that managed to alarm your deepest questions at that crucial moment?

She was a very close friend. There were four girls and four of us guys, and we were a good close group. I grew up with her, I’ve known her since I was five years old.

She was the nicest person I knew. She was nice to the point that, when I was younger, it drove me crazy, it would just annoy me so much! “Would you just say something not nice?”, I’d ask. I could never get her to do it!

When she died, it was going from that intellectual understanding of death, to really understanding death, to seeing and feeling it. And that gave me the motivation, the alacrity, the necessity, and the feeling to do something.

The empty hollow of bucket lists

People who love to travel are often obsessed with bucket lists. They even call them “things to see before you die”. When you were faced with this idea of your mortality, I assume you mainly wanted to see the world, while you can. But do you now feel as if you have seen much more important “things to see before you die” than just crossing Machu Picchu from the list?

For me, it was never a bucket list thing. I think bucket lists are stupid, and I don’t think they get you anywhere. They could be useful in a way to motivate you and give you some direction. But the place that you go to is very rarely the thing that matters, and the thing that provides meaning to you.

Generally, you are meeting people along the way, you’re having some bad meal that has you in a bathroom for three hours, and you tell that story forever. Or you have an amazing meal at some small restaurant. Those are the places I remember.

I was at Machu Picchu, it is amazing. But I tell a thousand other stories before I would ever talk about Machu Picchu.  And my memories are of a thousand other places before they’re of Machu Picchu.

When Anne Marie died, I was considering what I wanted out of life, and what I don’t. It was much more about what I wanted to experience and feel before I die, much more than where I wanted to be or what I wanted to do. It was more about the process, I wanted to understand the world and I wanted the adventure. I didn’t really care in what form that came in. These were the values I wanted to live by, and then the World Walk was just a means to achieve those values.

I think when you have a checklist or a bucket list, it’s sort of hollow. Like, ‘I wanna be a Youtuber, and I wanna go to these countries, and I’m gonna get a hundred thousand followers.’ But then you get to a hundred thousand followers and see that it doesn’t mean anything, it’s pointless.

So I think it’s much more valuable to figure out what you value. Because that will instill meaning. You can go in any direction in life. You can create any bucket list. It can be to have a big mansion, or to visit Machu Pichu, Singapore, or wherever else. But unless you know why are you doing these things, the hours you spend reaching them are just pointless.

A Canadian family decided to travel the world in order to show it to their children progressively losing sight. Meet the family of Edith Lemay and Sebastien Pelletier that follows the bucket list of things to see before going blind!

Stepping out of the rat race

Recently I talked to those TikTok Traveling Grannies that made a trip around the world in 80 days at the age of 80, which is an impressive goal for people their age. But then, on the other side of the spectrum, there is Jamie McDonald who broke a Guinness World Record by seeing the seven world wonders in less than a week. This new-age Olympics of “Faster, Higher, Stronger” is not just showing an urge for instant gratification, but also leaves an enormous carbon footprint. I know your choice of traveling on foot was formed by the financial aspect of the journey too, but can you talk a bit more about the intentional slow traveling that is a direct opposite of how people live today, travel today, and post a requested number of stories and reels on their feeds per day, so they could be “seen”?

I think it’s probably a product of a greater system in place again. You feel the need to do something voyeuristic or extreme to stand out, maybe because you have a job to get back to, or you feel like you need to make the most of this.

It’s good to step out of the system for a little bit, and realize that you will be okay. You don’t have to continue chasing down this wheel of cheese foreverTom Turcich

But I think the most valuable traveling is what the Europeans do well, getting a month off, like August, and you just go sit on the beach, or you go and wander around, and you do it slowly.

I think strangely a lot of that is more because of not having the time or not making time to travel slowly, or being afraid ‘If I quit a job, and I just go for a year, will I have a job when I get back?’ It’s a scary prospect.

But I think it’s good to, like you were saying, step out of the system for a little bit, and realize that you will be okay. You don’t have to continue chasing down this wheel of cheese forever. You can step out of it and travel slowly for a while.

I traveled in such a different way for so long that I find the quick, even a week-long trip, not very satisfying. In a certain way, it feels cheap. To get to know a place, you’ve got to be off the beaten path and talk to people that are just there.

The priceless journey

How much did this adventure around the world cost you?

I probably spent 120,000 dollars over seven years, maybe a little more than that. First two years, it was 13-14 thousand a year, I rarely went to hotels, just camped. And then there was probably 25-30 grand a year for the years after that. You can do it really cheaply if you just camp.

I had this sponsor, Philadelphia Sign, from the very beginning for the whole seven years. They gave me a baseline to rely on, and then I had my savings and started Patreon when I got to Europe, which helped a lot.

There are known corners of the world beaming with beauty, but there are also undiscovered sites, not necessarily geotagged. What was the most beautiful or awe-inspiring place you woke up to, that the rest of the world might have never seen?

Where I crossed the Andes, that’s what the children’s book is about in part, it’s called Parque Los Flamencos, it’s a very remote altiplano with some salt lakes up there and flamingos. It’s insanely beautiful, especially the Argentinian side. And then there are salt flats a little further down. That’s a really beautiful place.

There are a couple of port towns on the Peruvian coast that I wish I could remember their name. But there are a lot of little towns that I passed that are very idyllic and seem untouched. There are no tourists. When I would find these places, it was really incredible.

I’d recommend anyone to go to Kyrgistan. Very few people go to Central Asia. And even Uzbekistan which has been closed forever, is just opening up to the world. If you go to Samarkand or Bukhara, those cities are as beautiful as any cities I’ve ever been to.

Not every moment of the World Walk was all flowers and smiles. In Turkey, Tom Turcich was even held at gunpoint!

The currency of happiness

I feel you’re a true example of people doing something overwhelmingly big mainly to realize how small they are. On the other side, the smaller the bubble we live in, makes us more full of ourselves. How do you deal with your own importance today?

The primary lesson I learned is how small people are. It’s just driven on over and over again of meeting kind and intelligent people around the world who work really hard, who are in situations worse off than I am or better off than I am. I was the one walking around the world and visiting them because I had an American passport.

We’re just this minuscule little speck floating around on another minuscule little speckTom Turcich

I fell into a good job when I was younger, I was able to save money. And you just realize life isn’t all up to you, almost all of it is up to the situation that you are born into. It’s something that I struggle with.

You are so tiny. In a certain way, it’s such a relief because, you know, none of it matters. You’re just this minuscule little speck floating around on another minuscule little speck.

But on the other side, it matters a lot. Because the only currency there is – is happiness. People make money to be happy, or you want a good city design so people are happy, and you want good health care so people are happy. That’s what it all comes down to.

I see the world much more now in the way of systems than I did before. Before, I thought it was much more about world power, and personal strength. And now I get much more frustrated or inspired by good or bad systems that are helping or hurting lots of people. I don’t know if there is any emotional cost to that or the difference to it, but that’s just the change that happened over the years.

Boundaries and privilege

The US passport is the fourth on the list of the strongest passports in the world. But even you had to arrange your travels in a way that would minimize visa bureaucracy that would slow down or detour your journey. What are your final thoughts on the borders and privileges that we all come into this world with?

It’s such a complicated issue. I definitely feel very fortunate, that’s for sure. It’s country-by-country basis, it depends on the relationships with the neighbors and history.

You would think that a good, human immigration system would enable people who are intelligent and hard workers to move wherever for work and in better systems. But the system is tough.

I have a friend in Iran who has walked around Iran a dozen times, and his dream is to walk around the world, and it’s just never gonna happen. It’s just the way it is, it sucks sometimes.

Savannah's World of Adventure: Crossing the Andes - the book

As the back cover copy says, "Savannah's favorite things are smelling new places, rolling in snow, and tasty crunchy chicken wings."

The children's book written by Thomas W. Turcich and illustrated by Catherine E. Turcich, follows the adventures of the first dog to walk around the world.

"Savannah's World of Adventure" transports little readers to the Andes Mountains, where Savannah and her best friend Tom discover the harsh altiplano, daring llama relatives - vicuñas, and the wonderful people of Argentina.

Order the paperback book based on a true dog story here.

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A video on their TikTok account exploded with more than 5 million views, propelling traveling grannies to viral sensations

Sandy and Ellie’s trip around the world started in Argentina where they battled rough waters on a two-day journey to Antarctica. The two best friends then continued to Chile and Easter Island, went hunting for Aurora Borealis in Finland, and explored world wonders, from Colosseum in Rome via the Great Pyramids of Giza in Egypt to the Taj Mahal in India. In the Asian part of the journey they stopped in Nepal, Bali, and Japan, and even hopped over to Australia before returning home.

People don’t just wake up in their ninth decade of life, and decide to relive Jules Verne’s famous novel. Surely you wonder, who are these Texas ladies traveling around the world in 80 days?

Sandy works as a doctor of medicine, and Ellie is a documentary photographer. They met 23 years ago, on the Zambia Medical Mission that Ellie directed. After both of their husbands passed away, the bond between the two girlfriends grew even stronger. 

While executing the grand adventure of their golden years, which included a stopover in the country that connected them (and seeing Zambia’s mighty Victoria Falls), these brave smiling women achieved something they were not initially planning for – social media fame. 

A video on their TikTok account exploded with more than 5 million views, propelling them to viral sensations that now have to not only handle social media presence but also schedule their mainstream public spotlight. 

Wednesday is a dedicated media day, and they managed to squeeze me into their tight schedule, between an interview for a TV program in Japan, and another media appearance in the USA. Sporting matching T-shirts promoting their octogenarian project, Sandy Hazelip and Ellie Hamby were finishing each other’s sentences like some deeply connected twins. 

In Pipeaway’s interview, they revealed how traveling helped them deal with loss, shared the most heart-stopping moments of their journey, and offered sage advice for the younger generation. Meet the TikTok Traveling Grannies!  

@aroundtheworldat80 Sandy & Ellie 81 and Still On The Run! #bffgoals #bucketlist2023 #sandyandellie #grandmasoftiktok #aroundtheworldat80 ♬ Live Like You Were Dying – Tim McGraw

Second-class adventures with criminals and chickens

Your around-the-world trip was not a one-time adventure. You’ve been avid travelers even before you became TikTok stars. Tell me a bit about your earlier trips together!

Sandy: Our first travel was on a Trans-Siberian train, after both of our husbands had died. Ellie and her husband had traveled a lot. So I just mentioned one day: “Ellie, I’ve always wanted to take a trip on the Trans-Siberian.” We started making our plans, and…

Ellie: … We did it. And we travel second-class! We are true budget travelers. We do not go on tours, we plan everything ourselves, and we always book everything by ourselves. Trans-Siberian was a second class, it was great. 

We had a wild experience when we were in Mongolia, at Ulaanbaatar, and like in that book “Murder on the Trans-Siberian Express”, there was a crime that happened in our car. We were apparently the only witnesses, and we don’t know what we witnessed. But the KGB came on and searched our compartment.

S: They searched our luggage. We said: “What’s wrong?”. “Well, you are the witnesses to the crime!” “What crime?” “We found something, I don’t know the English word, but we found something that goes inside the gun.” I said: “A bullet?” “Daa, a big one!”

E: But there was more crime to that. They arrested the guy. As we were the only witnesses, they took all of our information, to call us back to testify. But they haven’t done that yet. 

Our next trip was to Southeast Asia. And we took second-class trains from Singapore, Malaysia, to Thailand, and then we flew down to Cambodia.

S: And then we took a public bus from Cambodia to Vietnam, with several chickens on board with us. (laughter)

A young American took on an adventure that only nine persons finished before him - he circumnavigated the globe on foot. Meet Tim Turcich who walked around the world!

A close call in Syria

E: The third trip we took was to the Middle East. We were actually based mostly in Syria. That was in March 2011, and we left Damascus on Friday morning, at about 10 am, and unbeknownst to us, two hours later the actual war started there. We were heading to Palmyra in the Syrian desert, where we were going to stay for a few days. 

S: We rode camels out, to get there. (laughter) Three hours in the Syrian desert!

E: We then spent the night in a Bedouin tent, with a family that didn’t speak English. But the next morning, in the old city of Palmyra, we got an internet connection, and then we realized, in New York Times, that all of this happened in Damascus. 

We stayed a couple of days, as nothing was happening where we were. We thought this was going to blow over. But it didn’t blow over. 

Because this was very remote, we had a little problem: we were out of cash. We wanted to use an ATM, but they said there’s none in Palmyra and no credit cards… We’re all winging cash for our bill, as we needed to get out of Syria. 

Mohammed, with whom we were staying out of town, said: “I’ve got a plan. I’m gonna get up at about 4 am. We’re gonna drive to Damascus. And there is an ATM in the Old City, at the square. You can get your money, pay me, and then there’s gonna be a white, unmarked car on the side of the road, and he’ll take you out of Syria, to Jordan.” And we did it. 

When we arrived, soldiers were guarding the square with AK-47s. Our driver went there and talked to them. They put their guns down, let us go through to get money, and we jumped in that white unmarked car… We were actually going past Daraa as it was burning to the ground, as one of the first cities that were blown up badly.

That age is just a number, proves another American, a three-year-old who hiked to all 63 U.S. national parks. Meet Journey Castillo!

Jailed in Russia

E: So we had quite some experiences traveling, but the trip around the world in 80 days was wonderful.

S: Everything worked just like it was supposed to. No missed flights, no lost luggage.

E: No police encounters.

Speaking of police encounters, Sandy, you ended up in a Russian jail once, right?

S: Oh, we don’t tell that story too often. Well, at that time, every time you change from one city to the next in Russia, you were supposed to register in that city. I’ve flown into Moscow, and I registered. Then I took a train to Saint Petersburg, and I tried to register. The landlord of the apartment complex where I stayed was out of the country. All of my missionary contacts said: “Don’t worry about it, you are going back to Moscow. You are already registered!” 

So I was in St. Petersburg for almost a month, then went back to Moscow, and was just gonna spend one night in a hotel and fly out. On check-in, the lady was looking through my paperwork: “Where have you been for the last month? You registered in Moscow a month ago!” “Well, I’ve been to St. Petersburg!” “Where is your registration?” “I didn’t get to register in St. Petersburg.” “You can’t check in the hotel until you have St. Petersburg registration!” “How do I do that?” “You have to go to jail!”

They escorted me to a little local jail by the hotel. I left my 15-year-old grandson in the hotel lobby, with the luggage. And I went to jail. The Russian jailer looked like he is playing a role in the movie, a big guy. “You broke our law!” (mimics a deep voice) “I didn’t mean to! That’s why I’m here, to correct.” So he writes out a confession, in Russian. He translates it to me in English and says: “Sign here! Do you understand what you are signing?” “I understand what you’re telling me I’m signing.” “Do you understand what you’re signing?” “Yes, sir.” “Sign here.” So I signed it, paid my fine, and got out of jail. (laughter)

It's never too late to do extraordinary things. Meet Bert terHart, the 62-year-old who sailed the world alone, using only celestial navigation! 

Two widows on a journey – healing through travel

You mentioned your travels together started after the experience of loss. Many widows handle the grieving process differently as if they feel they are not allowed to continue “normal life”. Can you tell me a bit more about your experiences in handling the loss of your partners? I know there is this concept of griefcations, but does traveling help?

S: My husband Don had actually suggested before he got sick, that we start taking our grandchildren on mission trips in the summer. I’m a busy doctor, but he planted that seed. And shortly after he died, I went to a medical mission workshop, learned about the Zambian Medical Mission, and started to take a grandchild every summer on a mission trip. It was a great healing process for me, to do something to get farther on my path.

Losing a spouse as your best friend is very hard. Friendship with Sandy helped me carry on with my lifeEllie Hamby

E: My husband Kelly had a tennis accident, a hemorrhage. And within 24 hours of the accident, he passed away. It was all of a sudden. And it was very difficult because I was not prepared at all for that.

At first, I was really feeling sorry for myself. For about the first six weeks, I kind of stayed in bed and thought “Why me?”, and then I had a phone call from someone who was coming to see me. They left a voice message that I wouldn’t answer the phone.

And I said to myself: “If you don’t answer that phone, your life is gonna be like this for the rest of your life, and Kelly would not have wanted that. Get out of the bed, and answer the phone!”

At that time, Sandy had moved her practice to Abilene, but she still lived sixty miles away. And she wanted to stay in Abilene a couple of nights a week.

So she called me about the same time that I have finally gotten out of bed and was maybe going to get back to normal. And she said: “I got a deal for you. You give me a bed two nights a week, I’ll take you out to eat.” 

That was 18 years ago, okay? She was here last night! So, we are still doing that. And on those two nights a week, which we’ve been doing for 18 years, we planned all these trips and realized how we like to travel together, and the friendship. 

It’s very hard when you lose a spouse as your best friend. And we are blessed that we found each other as best friends after we lost our husbands. That has really helped us in just carrying on, going on about life. Of course, everything we do, we dedicate to the memory of Kelly and Don.

No retirement from adventure

The other interesting perception you are challenging is by going on these long-term travels. Usually, it’s youngsters who take on sabbaticals, but you didn’t let the perception of age stop you from becoming known as TikTok Traveling Grannies. What are some of the tips or advice you would give to other senior travelers who want to follow in your footsteps, but might be hesitant?

S: My advice is: “Get up out of your easy chair! Step out of your comfort zone! Make some plans, and live!” Because…

E: … Age is just a number!

In Jules Verne’s novel, the eccentric Phileas Fogg and his valet Jean Passepartout took on a challenge to prove that a trip around the world can indeed be done in 80 days. What inspired your duo to embark on the same adventure at the age of 81?

S: Years ago, we’ve seen the movie “Around the World in Eighty Days”. So in anticipation of turning 80, I mentioned to Ellie one day: “Wouldn’t it be fun to go around the world in 80 days at age 80?”

Ellie said: “Oh my goodness, yes!” 

We made all those plans, had all those tickets bought, and Covid shut it down when we were 80. But Covid didn’t shut us down. And our theme was – around the world in 80 days…

Together: … At 81, and still on the run. 

Traveling can indeed heal the trauma, as another American, Jessica Rambo, found out on her skoolie adventures. 

Budget choices, priceless experiences

How much does it cost to travel around the world in 80 days?

E: We are really budget travelers. Most people don’t travel this way. But it cost us less than it would cost to buy a new economy car in the United States. That gives you kind of a clue. We say it’s not a game-changer if you’re willing to go budget. Otherwise, it’s very expensive.

How does it work on the road? Do you split the bills? Is each paying for her expenses or how?

E: We just split halfway, everything.

For adventures like yours, we can all prepare only to an extent. Did you buy your flight tickets, arranged visas, and everything beforehand, or were you swinging it on the go?

S: Oh, we planned everything to the nth degree.

E: We did all of our flights with One World Alliance which offers around-the-world trip tickets, with airlines such as British Airways, American Airlines, Qatar Airways… It’s one set price, you can take 16 flight segments, you can go to six continents, and you have to circumnavigate the world in one direction. So that was the basic thing that we did first.

S: Then, knowing what our basic itinerary was, when we knew we would land in a country or a continent that we wanted to see more things there, then we used our airline miles to get tickets to go to other places. Or sometimes, occasionally, we had to purchase a ticket to fly to other places.

E: Of course, we used trains.

S: Oh, trains, buses! (laughter)

E: We did a second-class train in India, where curtains make a compartment. There was no door. We were on the bottom bunks in two sets of bunks in a compartment. And of course, we had two Indian guys sleeping above us. They were kind of shocked when they came in and saw these two old women. It was quite an experience, but no problem. 

TikTok Traveling Grannies conquering the order and the chaos

You seem to take everything lightly, but what was the most challenging part of the trip for you? What were some of the difficulties you faced along the way?

E: Japanese trains! Because they are the most efficient in the world! Everything runs like clockwork. We’re not used to that in West Texas, okay? 

We walk in there, the second-largest train station in the world, and everybody is moving like they exactly know where they’re going. Trains are zipping by every two seconds, every which way. And we are out there, trying to buy a ticket to Mount Fuji. We had no clue!

We are standing there, with our shirts on, and this young man walks up to us and says: “I know you! I’m from Slovenia, and I’ve just read in the London Daily Mail an article about you and your travels. Here we are, together in Japan, and it looks like you are having a little problem.” 

S: We told him we are trying to find out how to get to Mount Fuji. He said: “Well, I know how to do that. I’ll just forget what I’m doing right now, and help you two ladies.”

E: So Ziga from Slovenia was our hero. Such a nice young man, with great English, and we just really loved it. We were able to finally figure out the trains in Japan.

The only other problem that we really had that was kind of scary was when we went to Abu Simbel in Egypt, close to Sudan. But we did not know that the day we picked to go there was the one day of the year when they make the Sun Festival pilgrimage there because the dawn sunlight is coming up to the holiest room.

There were 6.000 people trying to go through a little two-meter gate to get in to see it at one time. It just looked like people were gonna get trampled any minute. So getting in a mass crowd with all that hysteria was really scary because you see those photos all the time. Everyone trying to get to one place at the same time, and you are caught up in the crowd, you can’t go anywhere, you’re just stuck in the middle of it. But we were okay and made it through.

Discovering the true wonders of the world

Did you ever end up in a travel crisis? I would imagine that turbulent passing through the Drake Passage on the way to Antarctica would be a wake-up moment for many. Did you ever come to think: “Oh, what did we get ourselves into? Let’s go back!”?

S: Oh, no! We’ve got to keep going!

E: We never had any major issues, except for our Peru flight that we had to cancel last minute because we couldn’t go to Machu Picchu due to political unrest.

But we actually did not have real rough flights, it was just amazing! No lost luggage. Only three delays in flights, and they were not delayed enough to cause any problems. Most travelers are not that fortunate. I don’t know, gods were watching down on us, or whatever it was. But we were just very, very fortunate that we did have those good experiences.

You might have not managed to reach Machu Picchu, but you’ve discovered some other of the Seven Wonders of the World, such as the Great Pyramids, Taj Mahal, and Colosseum. After seeing so much of the world, has your definition of what a wonder is – changed?

S: Well, the real wonder of the world is the people of the world!

E: The goodness of people – that really quite impressed us, more than anything else. When you travel, and you just open your heart to people, there is goodness all over this world.

It doesn’t matter who you are, what country you are from, or what political belief you have, people are basically good. And want to be good. 

Even when one knows what tomorrow will bring, learning from an adventure is beneficial. Edith Lemay and Sebastien Pelletier took their children going blind on a trip around the world!

The active life of TikTok Traveling Grannies – adventure over bingo

You left for your trip around the world in January 2023, postponing it because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Traveling definitely changed in the past years, making people of your age especially vulnerable. How did you cope with all of that on a physically demanding journey, balancing your travel needs with staying healthy?  

S: When Ellie is at home in West Texas, almost every day she walks four miles a day. So, she stays in pretty good shape, okay? And I occasionally work out on a treadmill.

E: More than occasionally. She does! We are both trying to be very active. We both still work full-time. 

Yes, that’s not typical for a retiree age, let’s say. It seems you are persons who could never settle down in a retirement home, playing bingo or watching TV. 

E: Oh, no! We don’t have time for that! There’s too much adventure out there. We love what we are doing, we both love our jobs, and we hit every day ready to go. 

Becoming TikTok Traveling Grannies must have strengthened your friendship. But it also meant being away from other people you care about. Did you experience homesickness or loneliness while traveling? How did you deal with it?

S: No. Truthfully, because of modern technology, I was in touch with my children several times a day, sending them text messages, and pictures, showing them where we were, and keeping them involved in the travel. And we were not on vacation. We were on an adventure! And the adventure just keeps revving you up to have another adventure.

The art of packing light

Still, traveling through so many time zones and climates must’ve been stressful. Jet lag is a challenge in itself, but how does one pack for a trip that includes both the coldest Antarctica and tropical Bali?

E: One packs as light as one can! And we did. We had to pack for very cold weather, and we layered. Layers are essential. In the end, we didn’t quite pack enough cool things, so we maybe bought a shirt here or there for the really hot climates. But no, we were able to keep that one suitcase and it was never even close to the limit that the airline lets you check-in. We just had a good warm jacket and wore lots of layers when it was very cold.  

Even when packing minimal, the definition of the essential belongings is quite different for everybody. What are some of the items or gadgets that you can’t travel without?

E: I can’t travel without my battery pack for my phone. (laughter) Because, you know, we were always taking so many photos. But you have to remember never to put the battery pack in your checked luggage because they will remove it and take it. It’s illegal to put those in checked luggage. But keeping a good phone in charge was vital to travel.

S: And my necessary thing to travel internationally is: you take two tablespoons of Pepto-Bismol every morning on an empty stomach, to prevent getting that traveler stomach problem. That takes up some space in the suitcase, but we did it.

So there was no Bali Belly…

E: No, we were okay. And we ate local!

S: Everything was good. We ate at local places, and local foods, and stayed in tiny local hotels. (laughter)

There are no excuses for not grasping one's traveling dreams. Slaven Škrobot travels the world despite being immobile. 

The rise of the TikTok Traveling Grannies

There are a few famous grandma characters on social media. On TikTok, we’ve seen dancing grannies, Eurovision grannies, fashion grannies, flower grannies, and even a gangster granny. But you managed to steal the title of TikTok Traveling Grannies. How did you come up with the idea of documenting your trip on TikTok?

E: Actually, we first started a travel blog, years ago. The first thing to have was a blog and a Facebook. And then, when we started the trip, we extended to Instagram. But we realized that we would not have enough time to do all these social media on the trip. 

So we asked a friend Brandi Sue, if we sent her all the photos, and wrote things, could she do it for us. And it was actually her idea, about halfway through the trip, to do TikTok. I had a TikTok account. I never used it, but I always try to keep up with what’s the latest thing. So she started putting those short videos on TikTok. She did a really good job, it was her first venture into that. We had one that had more than 5 million views! It’s been quite interesting to be so famous on TikTok. 

When we arrived in Los Angeles at the airport, at the end of our trip, we got off the plane, walked out with our shirts on, and the lady came running up to us, and she said: “You are the TikTok Traveling Grannies!”. Five minutes later, another person came saying the same. That was a shock to us. We had no idea that was going to be happening. We didn’t even realize how far our TikTok was reaching.

From inspiration to influence

Sometimes I feel too old for TikTok, so congratulations on embracing new media formats! Now, with the experience of going viral, can you give some advice? How do you grow your TikTok account? It must take a lot of work!

E: She spends quite a bit of time, doing the videos. She can only do the information we give her. So as long as I’m sending her… We send lots of videos and stories that haven’t even been told. But she’s dealing with it. 

When he went traveling around the world in 80 days, Phileas Fogg was motivated by a bet that would bring him 20 thousand pounds. You didn’t have such a financial incentive, but did you consider monetizing your TikTok presence? Are you being approached by brands that want to include TikTok Traveling Grannies in their influencer campaigns?

E: We consider ourselves influencers, but nobody has offered us any money yet. (laughter)

S: If you have any ideas, feel free to let us know! (laughter)

E: There is no question about it… The comments we get on Instagram and Facebook say “You are an inspiration to us, you’ve influenced us, you’ve encouraged us, you’ve given us the courage to try to step out, and do something”. We never thought this would happen, but we are making a difference in some people’s lives. And that makes us feel that maybe we are contributing to people having a happier, healthier, and more meaningful life. 

BFF’s lesson: Don’t make social media your best friend!

Since becoming famous as TikTok Traveling Grannies, did you ever face any criticism or negativity on the network or any unusual requests from fans?

E: Of course, we haven’t looked at all the requests. For the most part, on TikTok, there is almost no negativity in any comment. 

At least 95% of all comments are on friendship. Every single person says: “This can be us. I want a friend like that.” On the other social media, friendship is not as important. But on TikTok, what we have brought to the younger generation that does TikTok is the need to have a good friend. And they see that that’s actually what they are wanting. Even though we are 81 years old, they say “This can be us, I want this kind of friend”. It’s all about friendship. 

It’s just amazing that our friendship through the TikTok Traveling Grannies is what encouraged so many young people to want to have a friend. 

Social media cannot replace human relationships. Get out and make a real friend!Sandy Hazelip

Young people are concerned with the fear that TikTok is gonna get banned. What is your opinion on social media in general, and do you have a message for them? 

S: My message is, while all of those social media things have benefits, nothing takes the place of a real, human…

Together: Relationship.

S: Get out, and make a real friend.

E: Don’t make social media your best friend. Make a real friend your best friend.

The TikTok Traveling Grannies’ next adventure

What’s next for TikTok Traveling Grannies? What are some of the places or activities that are still on your bucket list? A trip to space maybe?

S: Next year, in 2024, we’re going to be 82. Our new theme will be…

Together: … We are 82, and travel we can do.

S: So we are going to South America, see the world wonders it has to offer us, and whatever else we can see in South America.

E: We’re gonna do now one continent at a time. Just look forward to it, we’ll keep you posted. 

And I’ll follow.

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It’s a scenario we have seen many times before, from the Javan tiger to the Mauritius dodo. Due to hunting and loss of natural habitat, animal species cannot survive on a planet ruled by humans. The most intelligent animal on Earth is causing the most irrational history of extinction.   

Photographer Matjaž Krivic captured the emotional essence of the bond between the second-to-last northern white rhino and her devoted caretaker

There are only two northern white rhinos left in the world. And both of them are females, Najin and her daughter Fatu. Sadly, the last male, Sudan, died in 2018. Today, the northern white rhino is a functionally extinct species.

Matjaž Krivic traveled to Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Nanyuki, Kenya, where constantly monitored by her guard Zachary Mutai, the 33-year-old Najin resists the faith of her ancestors.

In “The Last Two” photo series, this talented photographer captured the emotional essence of the bond between the devoted caretaker and the second-to-last representative of the oldest land mammal species in the world. The photographs of this companionship serve as a powerful reminder of the urgency to stop humanity’s reckless destruction of the planet’s wildlife.

Pushed to the brink of extinction by poaching, the population of two northern white rhinos could only be saved by a miracle. That includes the BioRescue breeding program that uses the sperm of dead males to artificially inseminate female eggs, and transfer the embryos to surrogate mothers of another rhino sub-species. If successful, the conservation program could bring the northern white rhino back from extinction. And if that happens, you can bet Matjaž Krivic will be there with his camera to capture the magic of a new northern white rhino baby.

Matjaž Krivic on passion and pleasure of photography

For more than two decades, you’ve been receiving numerous awards and recognition for photographing extraordinary places, people, and events. The most recent award comes with the title of the travel photographer of the year, but that work doesn‘t expose any typical content tourists associate with traveling. From the Canary Islands, instead of casual beach life you portray the untamable power of the eruption, and from Kenya, instead of the beauty of the world we’re living in, you’re depicting a beauty of the world that’s dying. There is a silent mindfulness behind your motives. Is that a vision of your photography work?   

I search for moments that portray some beauty and emotion, often filled with silence and grandeur. Whether it is a face, a motion, a mountain, a bridge, or a temple.

I have never looked at photography as an industry, but purely as my passion and pleasure. As a professional, it is vital to me to keep the enthusiasm of an amateur. I photograph genuine, pristine moments, never posed or fixed.

Total respect for any individual or group is of the essence. My work is about capturing true and natural beauty.

As a self-taught photographer, how did you end up falling in love with this art form in the first place?

It was not until the first travel that I discovered my love for photography. I was 16 and wanted to see the world. I have discovered that I am surrounded by so much beauty on my travels that I wanted to capture those moments to show them to my friends and family. Soon I realized that my photos are good and I loved taking them, so photography became my passion.

War is threatening another endangered species - the Mongolian wild horses in Askania-Nova, the world's oldest steppe reserve, sometimes referred to as Ukrainian Serengeti. Read what else is in jeopardy in this war-torn country!

The last remaining northern white rhino

Explain a little about how your “The Last Two” project came about!

The story was actually brought to light by my journalist friend Maja Prijatelj Videmšek. As a journalist for the Slovenian newspaper Delo, she started doing research about close-to-extinct species and wrote an article about the northern white rhinos. Soon we decided along with journalist Boštjan Videmšek that this is the story that needs more attention.

Wars, geography, shrinking of the natural habitat, climate change, the unsustainability of the economic model, (post)colonialism, and wild hunting are woven into the fate of this already functionally extinct species. At the same time, Najin’s story offers a hand of salvation.

What do you mean by that?

The northern white rhinos’ destiny is in the hands of their Kenyan caretakers and a team of scientists at the BioRescue international consortium, which is developing and using several different techniques to resurrect the species, including assisted reproduction and stem cell research.

The plan is to insert northern white rhino embryos into southern white rhino surrogate mothers as soon as possible. There is a real chance the first “new” northern white rhino baby will be born in 2024.

The world's last northern white rhinos were raised by the Czech Dvur Kralove Zoo. Institutions often regarded as controversial animal prisons are becoming crucial actors in conserving the threatened species. Basel Zoo in Switzerland, for instance, is involved in more than 40 breeding programs, including the one for the Indian rhinoceros.

Perceiving danger and respect

A typical impression of a rhinoceros is the one of a gigantic animal with thick skin and dangerous horns, yet none of that seemed to protect it. Despite having the largest horns in the rhino world, or actually, because of that very fact, the species of the northern white rhinoceros is functionally extinct, with only two females left. How do you perceive danger when standing so close to this vulnerable giant?

You don’t feel danger. You feel respect. Enormous respect. And you feel humble.

Even with their horns sawn off for their own good, Najin and Fatu still have 24-hour armed protection. Is there a risk that they could still die from human hands?

Currently, there is no fear of that. They’re being protected at all times.

Did you yourself, in all your years of traveling as a photographer, ever end up in a seriously dangerous situation?

Never really. I was arrested once in Rwanda in 1996, as a police officer said I was not allowed to take photos of the market. He requested money so I gave him what he was asking for. But shortly after, other police officers came by, apologized, and gave my money back.

In Africa, I met face-to-face with a rather dangerous predator. Learn how I maged to pet a hyena!

Rhino whisperer

What is your approach to the authenticity of documentary photography? According to you, can there be a certain degree of staging behind it?

In my opinion, staging has no place in documentary photography.

Can you tell more about this in the context of photographing Najin? How much time did you spend there? How hard was it to achieve these fantastic photograph motives?

I was in Ol Pejeta Conservancy twice, for a week. Each day, I was waking up early in the morning, along with Najin & Fatu and their caretaker Zachary Mutai, to follow them on their daily routine.

Their movement is slow, and so is the day watching them. You can only hear the light breeze, birds, and the sound of them grazing. And Zachary’s whispers, when he’s talking to them.

When you’re spending time in this serene atmosphere, surrounded by these magnificent creatures, it’s not hard to capture their beauty on camera.

What can you tell us about Najin’s relationship with her keeper? Obviously, you portray this connection with a very touching, almost intimate exposure of their togetherness. Do they operate like pets and pet owners?

Their relationship is really beautiful. There’s a certain intimacy between them that is hard to explain. He talks to her and it seems she understands him, she listens to him. I wouldn’t say that it’s like a pet relationship, they’re friends.

A man in Croatia cares for one of the largest animals on European continent - boškarin. Check out the photographs of this gentle giant!

Environmental photographer on the road

Are you an optimist? Do you think that we can indeed have a greener future?

No. We have the technology and know-how, but we’re too greedy.

What was the crucial moment in your career that ignited your interest in themes of environmental protection?

There was no crucial moment, I think. It was more gradual. The more I traveled, the more I witnessed the effects of climate change. I thought the issue needed to be spoken of more.

How does the life of such a travel photographer function in real life? Are there sources that can fund trips that document the ways we damage our home planet?

There are some grants that can help you but have limited capacities. It’s not so easy to get in. Mostly I fund the stories myself and get reimbursed later on by publishing them.

With continuous road trips and world travels, do you reflect on the impact and sustainability of your own traveling? Do you actively work on neutralizing your carbon footprint?

I’m sorry to say that I don’t.

What is the essential equipment you can’t see yourself traveling without?

I use a Canon R5 camera, with lenses RF15-35mm, RF50mm, RF100mm/macro, and RF100-500mm. The essential part of my traveling equipment is also DJI MavicPro 2 drone.

This Swiss photographer travels the world to take pictures of toy cars. Meet Kim Leuenberger, and her miniature vintage models!

Climate crisis – balancing pessimism and hope

From the poverty of the gold diggers, the wilderness of urban environments, and similar contradiction-fueled and sometimes saddening concepts, you did arrive at the project that paints more hope in our common future. What do you want to convey with “Plan B”?

That’s a collection of the most promising projects in the fight against the climate crisis.

So, we missed our first shot. Decades of warning signs didn’t cause us to avoid man-made global warming. But all around the globe, there are communities, countries, and companies refusing to resign to the dismal future of an overheated planet.

We have the means to revert climate change, but I’m a pessimistMatjaž Krivic

This is a story of what the transformation to a zero-emission world looks like; the people, the machines, and the landscapes that play a part in the shaping of our common future.

From a Swiss-based company capturing carbon dioxide from thin air, to sea-power developments in the Orkney Islands. From the electric-mobility revolution in Norway to the ITER project in France, where 35 nations are building a miniature Sun on Earth.

This is a monument to those delivering hope and damage control, the ones collecting and creating the knowledge, experience, and technology paving our way out – our plan B.

You did say you lack optimism for a greener future because humans are greedy. On the other hand, you explain “Plan B” through hope. Does that mean that you are not a complete pessimist after all, or do you just want to give your own contribution to the “better side of history”?

There is know-how. We have at our disposal the means to revert the change. But I’m a pessimist, estimating that there will be a lack of political will or that the corporations’ influence will be too powerful to actually implement the changes. Hopefully, I’m wrong though.

If you want to stay close to some of the most amazing African animals, check out these lodges in Ethiopia that bring wildlife to your doorstep!

Matjaž Krivic’s home and away

Originating from Slovenia, a tiny European country whose wildlife predators get no more dangerous than human fish, is that the reason you feel the urge to explore what you sometimes call “the distant Earth”?

I can’t really say if me being Slovenian has contributed to my travels (laughter). But since I was young, I was drawn to the outside world and wanted to explore it.

What place do you consider your home, and are there special corners of the world where you love to come back in particular?

Well, my home is my home. But the place I always come back to is Tibet. Being at a high altitude means bad headaches, you’re super cold, and the food is awful, but somehow I feel the best.

What is the secret of Tibet then?

Hard to explain. There is something sacred, and magical there. The harsh environment is accompanied by the warmth, kindness, and humility of its people. Being there, you just become at ease with everything, yourself and the surroundings, it’s like you find yourself in a different state of mind.

What’s next on your roadmap?

I’m continuing with the conservation and environmental stories in South Africa, Namibia, Georgia, and Romania.

The Last Two - the book

Besides being the name of the photo project, "The Last Two" is also the title of the book you can order here.

The authors, Slovenian journalists Boštjan Videmšek and Maja Prijatelj Videmšek, take you on a journey through the history of the northern white rhinos, whose numbers were brought to the brink of extinction due to wars, climate change, poaching, and the black market.

They also introduce the people fighting for the future of the species: the rangers, conservationists, and scientists.

Will science prevail, or is it too late?

From the reviews 

The story of the ravages of humankind's toll on innocent creatures who have fallen prey to poachers, conflict, and climate change, The Last Two is also an inspiring tale of the best of which our species is capable. From the conservationists in Kenya who care for the mother and daughter rhinos, Najin and Fatu, to the scientists in Italy, Germany, and Japan who are racing against time and daunting odds to snatch the rhinos from extinction's terrible grasp. Written with urgency and empathy and illustrated with stirring photos by Matjaž Krivic, The Last Two is at once a chronicle of disaster and hope. -- Kelly Horan, The Boston Globe

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Edith Lemay and Sebastien Pelletier took their family on a voyage of a lifetime. Faced with the diagnosis that will make three of their four children blind when they reach adulthood, these fierce Canadian parents decided not to go into despair, but instead live life to the fullest on an around-the-world trip they would all remember.

But while the older kids, already familiar with many doctor visits, knew what it meant to lose vision, Edith Lemay suddenly realized that the youngest passenger of this unique journey didn’t fully understand it.

“It’s like keeping your eyes closed all the time, Laurent”, Edith said.

Miles away from his hometown of Montreal, the curious five-year-old had a billion questions troubling his little head. “How will I cross the street? How will I drive a car? Will my wife be blind, mommy?”

The river of question marks poured over Edith Lemay while she tried to gather both herself and facts in portraying the situation as non-problematic.

“I tried to answer as matter-of-factly as possible. ‘There is a solution’, I said. ‘It’s normal, it’s not a problem…’ But inside, I was crushed. It was a really hard moment for me”, Edith recalls.

Edith Lemay and Sebastien Pelletier – love at first sight?

Exactly eight decades before this conversation in the Mongolian outback, in the middle of the Second World War, another curious Quebecoise boy was asking a billion questions. The listening adult engaged in this 1942 conversation was Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

If the French writer had not visited Montreal and met the inquisitive Canadian boy, maybe he would have never written the story about the little prince traveling the universe and addressing the topics of love and loss in a world where grown-ups fail to see the important things.

The fox was the one sharing the wisdom with the boy: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

Edith Lemay (44) and Sebastien Pelletier (45) have been together for 14 years, even if their pathways crossed 24 years ago. They saw each other back at the university but remained invisible.

“We went to the same school, we knew the same people, but we didn’t really talk to each other. We were probably not at the same place in life, and pretty different”, Edith describes the times when she caught first glimpses of a man who would become her future husband.

It took an improbable online meeting ten years after college, to say the truly profound “I see you”, in a way that the Na’vi tribe greets each other on Avatar’s Pandora. “When we finally met, we were like soul mates.”

This was not just an unusual encounter between two souls who almost missed each other. After they started building their family, Edith and Sebastien would find out they were the source of a genetically-transferred disease that could activate only if both parents carried the gene.

“I have never heard of retinitis pigmentosa. Nobody had it in our families”, Edith Lemay says. “Both mum and dad need to have defective genes, so it is pretty rare. You really need to be unlucky to get it. Even if both of us have a gene, we statistically only have a 1-in-4 chance to transmit it. Well, it ended up being 3 out of 4.”

Due to retinitis pigmentosa, this rare genetic disorder that makes cells in the eye retina break down over time, Mia (11), Colin (7) and Laurent (5) will be slowly losing their vision as they become adults. Only Leo (9) was lucky enough to escape the genetic destiny.

Tom Turcich embarked on his world journey after losing a friend and being faced with questions of his own mortality. He decided to become the tenth person to walk around the world!

Filling the children’s visual memory

“When I have a problem and bad things happen in life, my way of coping is to spring into action. And the thing with this diagnosis is that there is nothing you can do. The doctor tells you ‘Well, your kids are going to be blind, but we can’t do anything about it, so see you in a year’. That was really hard for me”, Edith Lemay explains.

For a professional working in logistics, mainly in healthcare but also for the fantasy factory Cirque du Soleil, solving problems was an everyday challenge. Suddenly, she faced a process she was not able to improve.

“Before the pandemic, my job was to make things run smoother in Cirque du Soleil, a really great job. I would take a process that is not working well, and try to make it better. But the pandemic hit, and it almost closed down, so everybody lost their jobs”, Edith explains.

Luckily, her other half was in a better position at the time. Sebastien worked in finances, in management of a small company that got bought by a larger one, so he cashed in his shares. That amount of money was enough to pay for the trip around the world, in which they would follow the professional’s advice to “fill the visual memory” of their kids losing eyesight.

“For us, this money was a sign, just a nice big gift from life, telling us ‘you can go and live your dream’”, Edith says.

They rented out their Montreal house for 9 months, and in March 2022, off they went. Namibia, Zambia, Tanzania, Turkey, Mongolia, Bali…

Even the pandemic couldn't stop another resilient Canadian in his quest to conquer the world by - sailing alone around it! Meet Bert terHart!

Bucket list of things to do during the voyage

When traveling the world, many of us are chasing sights recommended by tour guides, those neverending lists of “things to see” here and there.

Lemay-Pelletier family initially also started with a well-planned itinerary. They had to leave in July 2020, cross Russia with the Trans-Siberian train, go to Mongolia, China… But then the pandemic happened, and they were redoing their plans countless times.

In the end, when the countries started opening up, they left without an itinerary. Africa seemed pretty open, and that’s where they started. Nowadays, they only plan a month ahead.

More than with things to see, this sight-losing family filled their itinerary with things to do, the activities they would like to experience during their trip.

Edith Lemay agreed to share her family’s voyage bucket list with Pipeaway’s readers.

Edith Lemay's family voyage bucket list
1. To go on a safari

2. See the Great Wall of China

3. Sleep on a train

4. See Pokemon

5. Swim with dolphins and/or whales

6. Do a multi-day trek

7. See a sunrise over a mountain

8. Learn to surf

9. See an Aurora Borealis

10. Bathe in a hot spring

11. Take the Trans-Siberian train

12. Eat with chopsticks

13. Ride a horse in Mongolia

14. Collect sunset photos

15. Make friends in other countries

16. Learn new languages

17. Sleep on a boat

18. Drink juice on a camel

19. Eat unknown fruits

20. Snorkel with tropical fish

21. Visit colorful markets

22. Visit a castle

23. Visit a boat museum

24. Go ziplining

25. Take a cruise on a river

26. See hot-air balloons in Cappadocia

27. Take a plane

28. Eat ice-cream

Already in the planning phase, the Canadian family obviously cherished the experience of being together, finding beauty in the most simple things.

They were just in southern Lombok, Indonesia, when we started our interview, with dog barks, catfights, and imam’s call for prayer in the background.

Do you want explore Lombok yourself? Consider Hotel Tugu Lombok as your base, one of the most romantic places to stay on the island!

Beauty is everywhere

Are you happy with where your trip took you so far?

We soon realized that it doesn’t matter where we go, everywhere is beautiful. Every country has nice landscapes and beautiful places to see. We just want to travel and let the adventure surprise us.

One thing our kids will lose is that wide field of vision, so we are trying to stay in nature, in these big, nice, wide open spaces.

But also, what we realized, kids being kids, they really live in the moment. They don’t do this trip with their urgency to keep memories. They are just enjoying the moment. And often they show us beautiful things.

Like, we could take them to see some magnificent temple, and we want them to look at it, but they will see a cute stray cat, and for them, that’s going to be the most beautiful thing of their day.

And it’s okay. Because they also teach us, the beauty from their eyes, what they find beautiful, is just as important as what we think is beautiful.

Yes, puppies can be a real distraction when seeing the wonders of the world!

Exactly, puppies, or even beetles! When we were in Namibia, we visited these amazing sand dunes in Sossusvlei. Laurent was so fascinated with their little black beetles they call toktokkie. He played with these black bugs that walk on sand, and he thought it was the most interesting thing in the world.

At the end of the day, we asked him what he liked, and he said – toktokkie. Oh my god, we take you to these amazing places, we climb one of the highest sand dunes in the world, and what do you do? You care about toktokkie!

But you know, they show us the beauty of the world. Beauty can be anywhere. So we need to be open to how they see the world and learn from it.

The curse of the bright light

At the sand dunes, it must have been nice to enjoy the sunrise!

No, they didn’t enjoy it. We had to wake them up really early, actually before sunrise. A desert at night gets pretty cold. And climbing a sand dune is really hard. It was windy like crazy, you actually get sandblasted.

We got to the top of it, and I sat down thinking I would take these beautiful pictures of them looking at the sunrise, but actually, it was so windy they were covering and hiding. They didn’t even watch the sunrise, it was so uncomfortable due to the sand, but also light, as they are sensitive to bright light.

It was a bit stupid for me to think they would watch the sunrise, it wasn’t the best idea. But it made for funny pictures.

And they had lots of fun going down. They actually ran and rolled down in the sands, and loved it. But after the sunrise.

How much can your children see at this moment?

Their daytime vision is super good. Their field of vision is good. But at night, right now, they don’t have night vision. So whenever the light goes down, they can’t see, way before us. They get totally blind. So if at night you go out, and there is little light, they won’t be able to see anything.

Also, my daughter is really sensitive to bright light. So when she is in the sun, she always needs to wear a hat and cover her eyes. Whenever she goes from outside to inside, if it is really bright outside, it takes a long time for her eyes to adjust.

Can your children see the stars?

No. Just a few bright ones.

Disability didn't stop Slaven Škrobot from traveling either. Check out what traveling in a wheelchair looks like!

The future crumbled in the blink of an eye

Mia was the first one to get the diagnosis. How did you find out about it?

It all started when she was about three years old. We realized something was wrong with her vision. During the night, she would get up and start bumping into furniture or walls.

Because it was our first kid, we didn’t really know it was a problem. But after a while, I realized something wasn’t adding up. I would hand her something in dim light, and she wasn’t able to see it while I was able to see it really well.

I took her to the optometrist and ophthalmologist for a check-up, but it’s not something we can see in the eyes in the early stage of the disease.

So they sent us to do some genetic testing. After the first panel of genetics, it came back and it was all negative. They didn’t know what she had.

But there was a research protocol at the time, so they did the whole genome for Mia, me, and Sebastien. It took almost two years before we received the results. Mia was seven when we got the diagnosis.

Finding out it’s not curable, did it push you to despair at first?

Our first reaction was disbelief and shock. When you have kids, you just have an idea of how their future’s going to look like, what our lives are going to look like. And all of a sudden, in a blink of an eye, you need to rethink all that. It is a grieving process.

So at first, you don’t believe it’s true, you think it’s a mistake. And then you get angry, you are looking for answers everywhere, get sad… But after a while, you just have to accept it. And it’s only when you accept it, you can move forward.

Elephant in the room

How did you move forward?

I started thinking about what could I do, and one thing I thought would be good for my daughter is to provide her with some tools to help her in the future. And I thought she could actually learn Braille at school, so she would already be able to read once she loses her vision.

But at school, the specialist told me that they didn’t have all the resources, that she was not blind enough, and her vision was too good to learn Braille properly so that the best thing for me to do would be to actually fill her visual memory.

And she said: “You know, put as much image in her head as you can. For example, you can look at elephants or giraffes in the books, so once she is blind, she’ll have an image to refer to.”

That’s when it clicked to me. Let’s go and show her elephants and giraffes in real life, that way she will really remember it!

And from that, Seb and I just decided that we might as well do it all in, just go to see the world and show them how beautiful the world is. We wanted to fill their visual memory with as many beautiful things as we could.

This American veteran is also traveling the world with her family, in a converted school bus. Meet Jessica Rambo!

Telling your daughter she is going to get blind

Parents often have to support fairytales of the global world we live in, from Santa Claus to the Tooth Fairy. How does it look when you have to present a truth that is not so bright to your children, as you obviously want them to be prepared for what would come?

The really hard thing about the diagnosis was not knowing whether I should tell her or not. I would ask people around me for advice. Some would say: “No, don’t tell her, she doesn’t have important symptoms, let her be a kid, and not worry about it”. Others said: “It’s better that she knows now, it’s easier”. It was really, really hard for me to make a decision on whether or not I would tell her.

But after a while, knowing my daughter, I decided it is best for her to know right away. I didn’t want to hide anything from her, and she resented me afterward. I knew she was strong enough to get that information.

I didn’t plan it, but at one lunchtime I was sitting with her and it came to the subject of disabilities. And I told her just like that, matter-of-factly: “You know the problem with your eyes, you know you will probably get blind once you are an adult”.

She thought about it for a moment, and then she said: “Oh, well, that’s not fun.” And that was the extent of her reaction.

Coping with the fact that our future might be more or less sightless would be hard for anyone, not only a 7-year-old!

At first, I thought that maybe she didn’t really understand what I was saying, but after a few days she got back to me and said: “Mommy, you know what, I think I have to keep my room clean because once I lose my vision, I need to be able to find my things, so they need to always be at the same place.” I realized that she was already thinking about the solution.

After that, I saw her a couple of times trying to get from one room in the house to the other, keeping her eyes closed. I was reassured that she did understand what was happening and she was just finding some solution on her own.

When people ask her how she feels today, she will say: “Well, today is today. My vision is good, so I will make the most out of it, and I’ll rise to the challenges when they’re there, but right now I’m just enjoying my life.” And I think it’s a good way to see it.

Disabled passengers encounter numerous challenges when flying. Canada's major airline seems to struggle a lot with issues of accessibility. Check out how Air Canada deals with disability!

Things to see before your eyes die

There are numerous lists of “things to see before you die”. Obviously, your family’s bucket list testifies that even when facing the toughest challenges, we can find greatness in small things.

More than things to see, we made a bucket list of activities we wanted to do during the trip because we didn’t know what we would see besides nice, beautiful places.

Mia really wanted to go horseback riding on the wide steppe of Mongolia. She was so happy and excited when it finally happened. When she got down from her horse, she was all teary-eyed because it was so emotional. It was such a great moment for her.

Colin’s best moment was in Tazara, the Tanzania-Zambia Railway, as he really wanted to sleep on the train. It’s a 24-hour ride that we took through Tanzania, and it’s a really old slow train so it was amazing. It would stop at all these different train stations, people would come up to the window and sell us bananas. And just sleeping on the train while it was rocking us, was really a cool moment of the trip.

Leo wanted to see Pokemons, but that might not happen. He thought Pokemons would be living in the wilderness of Japan. He also wanted to go to see the Great Wall of China, but that’s not going to happen either. His favorite moment so far was on a little hike we did on the foot of Kilimanjaro. The vegetation was so amazing, it was a really nice hike in the misty jungle.

My daughter got to see a dolphin. Seeing giraffes and elephants, we did that. The whole family enjoyed the safari. Kids were so excited to see wild animals in real life. They were very impressed with how tall the giraffe was from close up, and the same for the elephants. Safari is definitely the highlight of our trip.

As for Laurent, he wanted to drink juice on a camel. He was 4 at the time when he made the request, but he was really specific. It was not about seeing a camel, he wanted to drink juice on a camel.

Wait, just any type of juice?!

Yeah, any. It became a kind of an inside joke, we would talk about it all the time because it was really funny. And he actually got to ride a camel, and of course, he made sure he had his juice. So these were funny moments for us.

And tomorrow we are going surfing! That was on the list too, and they will try it. They love playing with waves. Let’s see how surfing goes.

They are not afraid, they can all swim. They got washed out on the beach, even the little one, I was really surprised.

When we started the trip, Laurent wasn’t 5 yet, he had to wear little floaters, but after a few weeks he just wanted to try swimming without those, and he has been swimming since then. He can cross the pool underwater, and he is like a little fish right now.

But in a lot of the best moments, Laurent’s best moment was when we went on a hot-air balloon ride in Cappadocia. We got up before sunrise, and we walked in that dark field. We couldn’t see much, but all of a sudden these huge hot-air balloons started filling up and getting lit from the fire, there were these big giant lanterns rising all around us.

We told the kids that we would see them take off, but that we couldn’t afford to get in them, so they were okay with it. But when we told them we were actually going in, they were so excited. So we got in the hot-air balloon, and it rose slowly as the sun was rising in the valley, with all those hundreds of hot-air balloons, and the color was pinkish, it was just amazing. Even Leo said: “Mommy, it looks like a dream!” And that’s really how it felt, it was so magical.

An American family hit the road with a two-week-old daughter who would, before the age of three, become the youngest person to visit all 63 U.S. national parks. Read the interview with the hiking prodigy - Journey Castillo!

Lemay family voyage to authentic Africa

Kids often have the most sincere but fascinating insights. Are there some specific anecdotes you could tell, quoting your children’s reactions to meeting different cultures?

When we were in Zambia, we were in a village where they didn’t have running water, they had a well. My kids were wowed, they were amazed these people had a well. They thought it was a great thing.

“So okay”, I said. “You think it’s great, here’s this huge bucket, and you need to walk over there, fill it and bring it back.” Just for them to realize it’s really fun to play with a pump for five minutes, but if you need to do it every day, it’s actually a lot of work. So they realized it is not that easy.

But then afterward, my little one was really cute. I asked him what did he think of the village, and he said: “Oh, mum, they are so lucky to have baby goats. I want to live here!”

They don’t see the world the same way. When we met the Masai, he wanted to be a Masai because they told us that men, when reaching a certain age, drink a mix of cow blood and milk just to be strong. So he said: “I want to be a Masai, I want to drink milk and blood, to be strong.” For a long time, he wanted to be a Masai.

Journey through sweet and sour

Laurent’s interest in unusual diets is extraordinary! I would imagine that the world tour with children would be complicated food-wise!

Mongolia was really challenging, for everybody. Especially because they had no vegetables, no fruits, for six weeks… We were able to find pasta and rice, with a few carrots and onions here and there, but we craved some good food.

Indonesia is amazingly good. Turkey was good. Africa was not so bad, it was actually easier than I expected. It was pretty much always the same thing, a lot of chicken and rice, and nshima/ugali, the paste made of maize. I was really worried that our kids would not like it, because it’s all gooey, and you eat it with your hands and dip it in some green sauce or whatever they serve it with. But actually, they loved it. So I was really glad about that.

Throughout the trip, they were pretty good with food.

When I traveled through Ethiopia, I always missed desserts. Traveling through countries without sweets must be a nightmare for Western kids?

Yes, that’s true. Even us as adults, in Africa we were missing sweets. They don’t eat sweet at all there. When we got to Turkey afterward, it was like Christmas! We went crazy for baklavas there. We had enough sweets for a lifetime.

Lessons on privilege and resilience

Of course, traveling through so radically different cultures is a valuable life lesson…

Definitely, we want them to realize on this trip how lucky they are. We have traveled to places where people don’t have electricity or running water, their children cannot go to school, they sometimes don’t have clothes or have really little clothes to put on, no toys.

So I wanted them to realize how precious it is to be able to get up in the morning and have good fresh water out of the faucet, that when you look at the planet, they are actually really, really privileged. Their life is quite easy.

Even if their condition is going to make their life a little harder than other people’s, in the big picture they still have a lot. They still have a lot to be grateful for. Also, they have a really nice loving family, and that’s precious.

I want them to see that and appreciate that. Not to focus on the things that are not good in their life, but really on what they could be grateful for.

Do you think this trip can make them stronger?

We want this trip to make them more resilient. With retinitis pigmentosa, what happens is that they will lose their vision, but slowly. So they are going to need to adapt all the time. They will need to adjust all their life.

For example, they might be able to drive their car, but after a while, they will have to let that go, because they won’t see well enough. And after a while, they might have to use a cane or a guide dog, because their vision won’t be good enough, and it won’t be safe for them anymore. So it will be constant readjustment, constant adaptation.

They are going to fall down, and they’ll need to get back up and find a solution. So I hope the trip will help them achieve that a little bit.

We are not staying at a 5-star hotel or traveling by a first-class plane. We are visiting little places, and sometimes when you travel, it can really get uncomfortable. There’s frustration, it can be hot, we can be hungry, we can be tired. So they need to adapt all the time. And I hope they get that from the trip. It’s going to help them become a little bit more resilient in life.

And I hope they will learn that when a situation is uncomfortable or unpleasant, if you focus on what’s not good, it doesn’t make it any better, it just makes it worse. While, if you focus on what is good in this situation, even in a bad situation, if you focus on a solution, then it makes things easier, in also that any bad situation will eventually end. And it will get better. It’s just a matter of time. So you need to keep your faith that it will get better at some point.

So where do you stay when traveling?

We usually try to sleep in a homestay or a guesthouse. It’s typically family-owned, so we feel the money is going back to the community that way, and it is also a better contact with people.

Sometimes, when you rent on Airbnb, you don’t get to meet the owner, there is nobody there, so I prefer guesthouses.

We find bookings online, but we also get a lot of references in the Family Travel Facebook group. There we get advice “try this family” for anything that is not on the web usually, it’s through a reference in traveling groups.

Childhood on the road

What about the school and other obligations that keep families usually anchored at a particular place?

We homeschool the children, but we really just do the minimum. They are going to be out of school only for a year. We do math and French, just to be sure they will be able to keep up once they get back home. We have the books, and we just follow the program.

Do they like to read school-unrelated books?

The oldest ones have their reader, so they read e-books. And they actually go through so many books! It is just crazy, because they read all the time, on the bus, at night… They read all the time!

For the youngest ones, we have audiobooks. That’s easier to carry than to have books. We play audio stories, they listen to hours and hours of stories.

They all love fantasy, they love stories with dragons. Harry Potter was a big hit, they read Percy Jackson, all fantasy series, that’s what they really like.

Do they miss their Canadian friends?

The boys, not at all. I think they are too young for that. But my daughter definitely. Because she is a little older, she misses her friend.

But recently she said: “I miss my friend, but I want to keep traveling forever.” So she is happy. She does FaceTime with her friends once in a while, to keep in touch.

Sometimes, we meet with other families that have kids, so that’s great also, to be able to bond with kids their age.

How about you? Do you miss the social life in Canada?

(Big sigh) I don’t have time to miss it.

Last week, we met some Canadian friends, a family traveling with kids, and we spent a few days together. It was really great to be able to talk. Then I realized I do miss chatting with adults.

My parents also came over, and that was great too. Especially as before the trip we didn’t get to see them that much because of COVID, so I miss my family a bit.

Burden of stuff

Do you travel with a lot of stuff?

Way too much. Not a lot compared to other families traveling, but we have two backpacks and a carry-on. And kids have little backpacks with their school stuff, little games, and stuffed animals.

It is still too much. I wish we could travel extra light. But with kids, you always want to be safe and comfortable so we carry medication, extra this and that, just to make sure everything is okay.

Do you feel traveling teaches us about minimalism, and that we do not need all these materialistic things left behind?

Yeah, we’ve all been living with three T-shirts each for six months. Like, why do we have so many clothes at home? Why do we change clothes so often? While on the road we say: “Yeah, it kind of looks clean, it doesn’t smell too bad so you can wear it again.”

I can imagine it gets more complicated when changing climate zones, from Mongolia to Southeast Asia. Do you get rid of clothes, or get new ones?

When our parents came, we had our coats sent back to Canada. When things get broken, we change them. But we really don’t need to buy new clothes. My kids are skinny, and it’s even hard to find clothes for them.

Now we are shopping for a bathing suit for my daughter, and we are in a Muslim country, so it’s pretty hard. We’ve been to a shopping center, and there is no bathing suit whatsoever. I don’t know where I’m going to find it. Hopefully, at some surf shop around here, I can find something.

Besides photographs, do you take any souvenirs from the places you visit?

We can’t carry anything in our backpacks, we are already full. When we know my parents are coming for a visit, we take little souvenirs we could send by them.

For example, our driver in Mongolia was like family to us, because we spent six weeks with him. He gave us some gifts when we left. We couldn’t just say we don’t want it, and we are going to get rid of it. We kept it and sent it home.

But otherwise, we can’t take physical souvenirs. That’s why I take so many pictures. That’s what will be left of the trip.

Connecting with the world through Instagram and media

Your children are not the only visually impaired kids exploring the world with you. There is a group of students “traveling” with you in a way, through following your social media stories on Facebook and Instagram Plein Leurs Yeux accounts. How does it work?

That school is really close to our home. The teacher knew about my trip, so she started to follow me on Facebook and share it with her students. She has this huge board where she can project the pictures because some of them still have some vision left.

What they do is they read the post which gives them description and information on where we are, and then the other kids or her describe all the pictures. And they actually often comment on my posts. So that’s pretty cool. Afterward, she shows them the map of the country where we are at.

I think it’s a really fun adventure, and of course, I relate to that, I’m just glad to be able to share with them.

Your story connected with many people. It became a great platform for speaking out. But is media attention overwhelming? How do you cope with it?

I did CNN, Sunday Times, People magazine, Global Mail in Canada, I did some news channels all over the world, I’ve been live in Dubai for the news. Honestly, every day I receive dozens of requests. So it’s been totally crazy. I didn’t see that coming at all.

But I am glad to share this story, because of the feedback I get from it. And it’s really surprising that on social media today I receive only good things.

Cures of care

What kind of reactions do you get?

People are reaching out to thank me for sharing the story, or they share their own stories because they are going through similar things. So they are sending me good vibes.

I get a lot of prayers and a lot of recommendations for natural medicine that I should try. That’s a lot sometimes, this whole list of things that could “cure” you from all diseases.

I have people sending something every day. But it all comes from a good place. Even if it’s really weird, people are simply caring. I’m just glad it’s so positive. So that’s why I am happy to share my story because I feel people are getting good from it.

What type of cures do they recommend?

Currently, Ayurvedic medicine apparently does miracles. There is a guy in every country curing you with these. Also, a lot of Bible studies that are supposed to clear everything you have (laughter). Organic barley from Australia that should be able to cure the disease. Oh, sweet potato in lye!

Sometimes, the craziest things I hear, it’s just really weird.

Some people say it comes from the past, that we need to heal the past and consult with this and this to heal their disease.

It’s really actually amazingly interesting what people believe in such a wide range of places. It’s a fun experiment in some ways.

Do you mind if I ask if you are religious?

I don’t mind. But I am not. They are contacting me from many different religions. From Christians to Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus. It’s really sweet and caring, it is good.

The path to a solution

You do see life beyond “vision or no vision”, you accept it and move forward. I assume people who get confronted with an incurable disease, do get into despair and are rather willing to invest resources into finding any kind of cure that would eradicate the problem. That’s why they support this whole industry of alternative medicines.

Yeah, and for some people it does work. Sometimes, when you believe in something, it does work, just because you believe in it so much. But I trust science too much. So I need to see studies. I’m really a logical person.

Also, studies don’t tell you if and when the children would completely lose their vision.

Yeah, but the thing is that they are already losing it. So for sure, they’ll lose a good part of it. They might see a little bit. But with central vision, you still need a cane because you’ll bump into people or walls. It’s really hard to go around with just a central vision.

But yeah, we don’t know how long they have, so we’re just going to make the best of it right now.

You know, for them it’s just normal. I never try to approach it as something bad, as something sad in their life. It’s just their path. They have different paths and they’ll be able to rise to the challenge when challenges come.

So they don’t feel sorry for themselves. And I don’t want them to, I’m working really hard for them not to feel sorry for themselves. You know, you just find solutions.

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The series of turbulent events went beyond just losing a job. A sexual assault, a divorce, addiction, and mental health issues would push many over the edge. As this single mom of two reveals in this interview, taking her own life seemed to be a viable choice back then. But instead, she joined an art school, purchased a school bus, and drove it through that dark tunnel.

Jessica Rambo didn’t just convert the school bus into a house on wheels. She created a nomadic art studio that saves the lives of war veterans

Jessica Rambo founded the Painted Buffalo Traveling Studio. On the wave of the tiny house movement, she didn’t just convert the skoolie into a house on wheels. She created a nomadic art studio that saves the lives of other veterans too. In August 2019, the Painted Buffalo started traveling through the United States, bringing art supplies and hope to retired soldiers trying to adapt to civilian life.

Jessica is not hitting the road alone. In the house on wheels, there is a vivid herd following the therapeutic mission of this full-time mom/bus driver/marine/artist: Skyler (daughter, artist, 13-year-old), Liam (son, adventurer, 10-year-old), Bella (black lab mix dog, 10-year-old), Atlas (blue heeler dog, 4-year-old), Sushi (cat), Smokey (cat), and Lemon (leopard gecko).

Read on and find out how it is to live in a tiny house on wheels, how traveling looks like during the pandemic, and how art, nomad community, and Bella, the service dog, saved Jessica Rambo’s life. To paraphrase Roberto Benigni, La vita è Bella.

If you want to learn more about a three-year-old who visited all 63 U.S. national parks, don't miss out on our exclusive interview with the toddler - Journey Castillo! 

Woman outside the box

An old Croatian proverb says that the woman holds up three corners of the house, and the man one. While it is definitely grounded in the traditional image of a woman caring for a household, at the same time it also advocates for giving better credit to the important role housewives have. I feel that, in the 21^st century, a single mom who takes care of the household while also taking care of a big vehicle that makes that household, breaks the norm of what is a male or female domain in a very plastic way. Are you ever confronted with prejudices, and how do you deal with them?

I have faced prejudices for as long as I can remember. Because of my background in the military, I have learned to deal with the narrow-mindedness of people who think women are only meant for making babies and cooking a man a meal.

Women have so much to offer, much more than things provided in a traditional home. I am here to set an example for other women, mothers, and daughters to see that they too can step outside the box of what they think women are and can be.

We have certainly come a long way since women’s achievements were celebrated mainly on International Women’s Day, or probably even worse, Valentine’s Day. As someone who is living an independent life 365 days a year, how would you describe your biggest achievements?

One of my biggest life achievements has been driving my self-converted school bus around the country with my children. I think it’s important for children to see their parents as human beings and not superheroes. I make mistakes, I do things wrong, and I also learn and move forward from them. Teaching my children that they can do hard things and, when it’s hard, not to give in, is the most important attribute I can instill in them.

Do you have any role models among women? Who inspires you?

Women in general inspire me daily. Of course, it’s inspiring to see women doing things that are not traditional to what some perceive as women’s role. But what inspires me the most in the day-to-day achievements is what women have done throughout history. Being able to be in the military, be a woman, and be a mother all at the same time is hard work, but so many women do it on the regular basis. We don’t want to be celebrated per se but want to be respected.

Traveling in a house on wheels might be strange to some. What would you say about Slaven Škrobot, a young Croatian who travels the world in a wheelchair?

Staying social during the pandemic

COVID-19 pandemic, with its omnipresent maxim #stayathome, made us all reflect on the freedom of movement we once took for granted. On the other hand, you were able to follow the epidemiologists’ advice of staying at home while still traveling around. Can you tell us to which places did the journey during the pandemic take you?

During our 2020 tour around America, we spent the majority of our travel time in Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, California, Utah, Montana, Wyoming, Oregon, and Washington. We drove our bus through 31 states and traveled to all four corners of the United States.

For more itinerary ideas, check out our list of the best destinations for electric car road trips!

Traveling during the pandemic had its pros and cons. There were places like national parks, state parks, and the ocean, that were not crowded and you could enjoy them all by yourself. Just because we traveled, it did not mean we were putting ourselves or others at risk though. Living this lifestyle, we already live a socially distant existence, so that helps.

One could think that hopping into a house on wheels equals fleeing from society. Even if misfits oppose the conventional way of living, is there a social life on the road?

There is an amazing social life on the road. The people who I’ve met on the road mean so much to me. Without this lifestyle, I would have never been able to meet them and make them friends.

How does it function? Do you travel together? Agree to meet somewhere on the road?

Social life is as much or as little as you make it. For us, we travel with people sometimes and have small community meet-ups. It’s good to hang out with others and not be alone all the time.

For me, I need to be alone sometimes and need to hang out with people sometimes too. It’s an equal balance.

We meet up with people on the road in all different ways. Sometimes I plan ahead and meet up with our friends, but there have been times that we have been driving and randomly ran into groups. It’s always fun to meet new people!

If you're a fan of car conversions, you will love MadWay Rally - the place where all vehicles look as if they have come straight out of the Mad Max universe!

Family with 26 legs

What does a typical day in the house on wheels look like?

My family and I wake up in the morning and have coffee and breakfast together. Then we start school work. Once schoolwork is finished, we try to adventure and explore as much as possible. We travel full time so there is always something new and exciting to see.

Your skoolie is, I assume, a great place for kids to learn about the world. The retired school bus still serves its basic function of bringing children to education. Are you homeschooling them? 

Although my kids have been going to regular school online, they get a good amount of homeschooling on the road too. Currently, my son is doing online school and is not homeschooled. Our goal is to get there and be able to spend more time learning about the places we are visiting.

Your traveling group or, as you call it, a herd, includes five four-legged passengers. Will you grow your pet list even further?

Truthfully, I didn’t plan on growing our animals from two dogs we had when we started the bus. My son really missed his cat that passed away, so we went to the animal shelter while we were in Georgia, and adopted Sushi. While we were traveling through Texas, my daughter found Smokey. We didn’t want to leave her, so she moved on the bus. We recently got Lemon, the gecko, because someone was rehoming her. So she moved in too. I think we are full for animals right now.

How do animals perceive a moving house? Do they ever wander off, just when you want to move on?

The only one that wanders off sometimes is Sushi, the cat. I’ve accidentally left him a few times in places. I’ve turned around and got him each time. He’s slowly learning that when I start the bus, it’s time to go.

A Canadian family with 12 legs decided to travel around the world for a very concrete reason. Their children are losing their vision due to genetic condition, and this is their parents' way to show them the beauty of the planet while they still can. Meet Edith Lemay!

Joining the Tiny House Nation

The popularity of shows such as “Tiny House Nation” with Zack Giffin and John Weisbarth on Netflix is definitely telling us that the tiny house movement is growing. Living a location-independent life has become a new way to exercise freedom. What was your inspiration for the decision to live in a house on wheels?

My inspiration for living tiny was based on the fact that being away from my children in the military really made us suffer sometimes. I wanted to relearn and grow with my children, and for them to get to know me as a mom and not so much as a Marine.

The biggest benefit to tiny living is realizing materialistic things aren’t as important as you might thinkJessica Rambo

Despite the plentiful resources around, going tiny is still an idea that can scare off those who want to make the transition. First of all, the idea of doing one’s own conversion can be terrifying. How did you deal with transforming a school bus into a livable home? Plus, you practically did it by yourself!

Although building the bus myself was hard and frustrating at times, the community that you are a part of is so helpful. I used people in the community I respected to answer questions and learned a lot from watching YouTube videos.

Living in a tiny house might not be for everyone. But there are even tinier vehicles hitting the road - vintage toy cars!

The minimalism of the house on wheels

Then there are obvious changes in the lifestyle. It is often promoted as “living big in a tiny house”, but there are certainly many sacrifices. What would be the biggest benefits and the hardest disadvantages of little homes?

One of the biggest benefits to living tiny is realizing materialistic things aren’t as important as you might think, and the people you gain as friends and family are worth the sacrifice. One of the hardest disadvantages of a little home is that I don’t have a lot of room for art supplies and animals.

I assume many of those going tiny confront with the idea of keeping only truly functional things. How does one embrace minimalism in a wheels house? And how important it is to bring along objects that have sentimental value?

Although you have to get rid of a lot of stuff, you just have to prioritize what is important and if it actually brings joy and importance to your life. Although I love to create, there wasn’t an infinite amount of space for all of my art supplies. I got rid of a lot of stuff I was going to do in the future and only kept things that were important right now. I still have stuff that is sentimental, I just build a safe place for them.

For instance, I held onto my military uniforms and awards because they mean a lot to me. I worked hard to be a Marine and I want to keep them for my children and their children too. I also have all of my children’s baby photos and blankets. Some of my military items and my children’s artwork are on display.

Take a tour of Jessica Rambo’s bus home with Tiny House Giant Journey:

Economy and ecology of tiny living

Can you brief us on the small house budget? What should someone consider before diving into the adventure?

I don’t think people realize how much it costs upfront to build. You don’t need to go into debt to get into this lifestyle, take it one project at a time. You will get there!

Everything is easier if there are funds. In the modern era of digital nomads, it is possible to work remotely. How do you manage to grasp the challenges financially?

My story is a little different when it comes to finances. Because I am retired from the military, I always have an income even if I’m not working. There are plenty of jobs on the road to make money and live free!

Modern tiny living hopes for small luxuries, but also has to be sustainable. Was eco tiny house your deliberate choice?

The Painted Buffalo has some pretty cool environmentally friendly attributes. We have 640 watts of solar and currently have a 100 Ah battery bank. Our battery reserve will be increased soon. We also have Nature’s Head toilet. This helps us compost our poop and be able to dump it almost everywhere because we use organic coco coir as compost.

Painted Buffalo Traveling Studio – a place for art therapy

Painted Buffalo Traveling Studio is not just a house on wheels, but also a non-profit art classroom for veterans. How do your projects look like?

Painted Buffalo Traveling Studio is a 501c3 non-profit. Our biggest initiative is the Paint Can Project. I fill retired ammo cans with different veteran-friendly products and art supplies. Out on the road, I hand them out to veterans we meet to be able to tell their own stories through art.

We also have the ability to meet up with veterans on the road and create art on the bus. Because I love to create and learn new skills, I have a lot of different art supplies on the bus. Just about any type of art-making a veteran could be interested in, we can do it on the bus.

Besides bringing art education to veteran communities, your project also highlights other veteran artists, military personnel who have transitioned to the life of photography, painting, sculpturing, tattoo, or multimedia art. Is it a common thing in the US to use art as a therapeutic tool for mental health?

Using art as therapy is nothing new but, in the last decade, it has become a more common practice to help through mental health recovery, especially with veterans.

Why did you call your bus a buffalo?

I’m not sure when I began to love buffalos, but I have always loved them. I relate their resilience and hardiness to veterans. They can survive strong heat and heavy snow just like veterans have survived so much.

Art against PTSD

In Marine Corps and Pentagon, you worked as a Sergeant with people such as President Barrack Obama or the members of Congress. Can you tell us more about that period of your life and how did you make the transition to the arts?

I grew up being creative and came from a creative family. I also came from a strong military family. My mom and her brothers served in the military.

My job in the Marine Corps was to tell the story of Marines as a combat cameraman. I was able to meet many amazing political figures while doing my job and meet incredible people around the world.

After Marine Corps, I went to art school in North Carolina. That is where I started building the bus and started my non-profit. It was a hard transition. The students and professors really helped me. Because transitioning from the military is really hard mentally, art-making and school really helped in the transition.

A terrible car accident shattered your military career. It’s maybe silly to point out bravery to someone who has chosen such a profession, but many would be deterred from the idea of life on the road after a car crash annulled efforts invested in professional development. How did the accident happen and how did you overcome its effects by fully embracing navigating a school bus, your entire home, on the road?

I was medically separated from the Marine Corps after a major car accident in 2010. While driving to work, my car was struck by an 18 wheeler. I rolled my car across the highway.

I didn’t have any symptoms of major injuries then, and I continued to be a Marine. Over time, my injuries got progressively worse. After a few surgeries, it was determined I could no longer serve.

Along with physical issues, I also suffered from a traumatic brain injury and PTSD. Both have really affected my relationships with friends and my children.

I’m slowly working through mental health recovery and I’m thankful to be on the other side. Although 18wheeers still scare me while driving, I try to not let that hinder my goals and my life.

Traveling can play a strong role in healing, as two Texas widows also found out. Meet TikTok Traveling Grannies, circumnavigating the globe in their 80s!

War on suicide

You openly talked about drug addiction, alcohol abuse, and mental issues in that period of transition. From being depressed and suicidal, you became someone who saves veteran lives, by providing a creative “outlet that does not include self-harm”…

Every veteran has their own struggle with anxiety, depression, self-harm, and sexual assault, especially female veterans. Although it’s well known these problems exist, they aren’t always helped in the military. I talk openly online about the struggles I have gone through, hopefully to help others.

Without art school, the nomad community and my service dog, I would have committed suicideJessica Rambo

One of your dogs is a service dog. How did animals change your life?

With the help of Semper K9 (a charity that provides custom-trained service dogs to wounded veterans, Ed.), I was able to train my dog to be a service dog. Without the help of them and my dog Bella, I wouldn’t be where I am today.

Where do you think you would be?

Without art school, the nomad community and my service dog, I know for a fact I would have committed suicide. That is a scary thing to think about, but it is my truth. I struggled with a lot of guilt, doubt and mental health problems and I know that without my friends and family I wouldn’t be here to see how amazing my life is now.

It’s fantastic you found a safe space. And that pets can help us get there too. How does a service dog differ from a regular dog?

Although service dogs and regular dogs are similar, they are very different. In my case, Bella helps with memory loss, anxiety, meeting new people, and dealing with stressful situations with a positive outcome.

We have two dogs. One has been trained for service dog work and the other hasn’t. Bella, my service dog can join me anywhere I go, like the store or school, but Atlas cannot.

Finding community in Nomadland

The van life is the main topic of the award-winning movie “Nomadland” directed by Chloe Zhao. The character Fern lost her husband, a job, and everything that made her life stable. The movie follows people who feel lost, and try to find the missing part on the road. Do you see this resonating with your story too? 

The story from “Nomadland” resonated with me deeply. I bought the bus and started traveling after a long bout of pain management, depression, and being lost in life. I felt lost after the military, and I had to find my way again. This is common in tiny living but what is so amazing is who people become during this life. “Nomadland” talks about the individual struggle and finding your community. I have found it here with other nomads.

You’ve traveled the world, both with Marine Corps and your Family Corps. What are the places you would always remember, memories you would always cherish, and learned lessons you would like to pass on to others?

I have been to Asia, Australia and Europe on my travels. One of my favorite countries has been Thailand. I went there with the Marine Corps. I love the food, the people and the nightlife. It was amazing and beautiful.

I think some of the best life lessons of traveling around the world is being humble and learning about other people. Learning languages, cultures and learning about how other people live is amazing.

Survival as a process

What does the message “Nothing is over”, written on the top of your bus, mean?

My last name is Rambo. There is a famous movie series called “Rambo” where you learn about war and mental health problems veterans face, called Post-traumatic stress disorder. It has a special meaning to me. Surviving mental-health and in-bus life, the projects are never over.

One of the famous lines from the movie is “Nothing is over! Nothing! You just don’t turn it off! It wasn’t my war! You asked me, I didn’t ask you! And I did what I had to do to win, but somebody wouldn’t let us win! And I come back to the world, and I see all those maggots at the airport, protestin’ me, spittin’, callin’ me ‘Baby Killer!’, and all kinds of vile crap! Who are they to protest me, huh?! Who are they, unless they’ve been me and been there, and know what the Hell they’re yellin’ about?!”

Is your house on wheels on a neverending road too?

We have been on the road for two years. I hope to travel full time for two more years, and then settle down somewhere. I’m not sure where that will be yet. I hope to start an artist retreat and be able to help more veterans in a long term.

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Bert terHart is the ninth person who managed to circumnavigate the world in a solo non-stop trip, using only traditional navigational tools

While the COVID-19 pandemic shut down world economies and quarantined entire countries, this man was writing history, experiencing a quite different form of self-isolation. Rocked by the rough ocean waves, with no continent in sight, it was a definition of social distancing. During the majority of his trip, the closest humans were the astronauts on the International Space Station!

On October 26^th, 2019, Bert terHart left Victoria on Vancouver Island, and rounded the five great southern capes (Cape Horn in Chile, Cape Agulhas in South Africa, Cape Leeuwin in Western Australia, South East Cape in Tasmania, and South Cape in New Zealand), before returning home on July 18^th, 2020. For 267 days, he did not step on firm ground.   

His solitary home was Seaburban, a family sailboat built in 1987. With the navigational help of a sextant, pen-and-paper, and log tables, the dangerous journey of sailing around the world luckily finished as an epic adventure story. Ber terHart is here to tell it!

For more lessons on the dangers of traveling, read about the riskiest situations from my journeys!

The journey worth the risk

There are many ways to go around the world, and a bunch of them don’t require nine months like yours did. The same as when they see a person risking life to climb the highest mountains only to step on the top, many will see your extraordinary journey and ask: why?

The first question I’m usually asked is ‘why’. It’s also the most difficult to answer as there are a hundred of different whys each with its own rich context. For me, there were physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual whys I had in mind. There were interpersonal whys focused on motivating others. There were whys associated with doing something that would outlive me. Any of the ones I’ve mentioned could fill a book. And they probably will if I can’t pair down what I’ve been writing so far.

I think that one of the most interesting whys, is why did the trip resonate with so many people? What is it about someone pitting themselves against such a task that is so compelling for so many? That’s an interesting, nuanced question. It also, or at least I think it offers some insight into why that question is asked so often.

For the other sailors and mountaineers that I’ve spoken to, it’s not “only to step on the top”. Indeed, the top has very little to do with why they take the risks. The journey, the process is worth the risk. The top is simply a measure of where one journey starts and another begins. Similarly, for the adventurers I know, the top is not a bucket-list item to be checked off. It’s another way of saying ‘next’.

The most succinct why I can give you is this: Why not? To fill in the blanks, ask yourself why not choose to do something extraordinary? Or adventurous? Exploratory? Or transformative?

One Canadian family had very clear reasons for taking a trip around the world. They wanted to fill visual memories of their children losing their eyesight. Read our interview with Edith Lemay!

Bert terHart grew up with adventure

Tell us a bit about how you grew up! Did you develop an interest in early-world explorers in childhood?

I grew up on the Canadian prairies. My father taught me to sail on a small dam that was created to provide cooling water for a coal-fired power plant. Estevan and Boundary Dam are about as far removed from a solo, non-stop circumnavigation via the 5 great capes as one might imagine. Nonetheless, I learned to love sailing, science, and adventure in equal measure there.

I also gained an appreciation of the early explorers and surveyors that trekked sea to sea to sea across the great plains, mountain ranges, and vast wilderness that much of Canada is today. That appreciation blossomed when I came to live on the west coast of Canada where the wake and footsteps of Cook, Bligh, Vancouver, MacKenzie, LaPerouse, Thompson, and Bodega y Quadra, just to name a few, can be seen and found to this day. They are, in fact, right outside my front door. Their experiences, shared or otherwise, have fascinated me for decades.

Itinerary at the mercy of the weather

What were your itinerary goals and navigational plans when you left Victoria, Canada, your home, and replaced it with a sailboat?

An attempt to sail around the world leaving from the north-west coast of the Americas is bounded by the tropical storms and hurricanes spawned off the west coast of Mexico in the summer and fall months in the Northern Hemisphere and the weather you can expect to face in the Southern Ocean. More specifically, it would be suicidal to try and sail a small boat through a hurricane in the tropical eastern Pacific or around Cape Horn in the dead of a Southern Hemisphere winter. That translates into leaving the northwest coast of America no earlier than September and no later than November.

Once you set a date between September and November and leave on that date, the rest of the trip is pretty much cast in stone. The boat will only go so fast and the weather, outside of what is known by climatological means, will be what it will be. I had hoped to:

1. Leave by the 1st of October 2019
2. Clear Cape Horn at the beginning of December
3. Clear Cape Agulhas at the beginning of January
4. Clear Cape Leeuwin mid to late February
5. Clear South East Cape at the beginning of March
6. Clear South Cape mid-March
7. Return mid-May 2020

Sailing around the world – a true solitude

In reality, I assume there is no such thing as a “solo journey around the world”. Who were the people supporting you and how?

I would disagree with this. It is hard to articulate, let alone imagine just how alien and remote most of the world’s oceans are. This is especially true in the Southern Ocean. It’s one thing to say ‘thousands of miles from the land’, or ‘the nearest person to me was on the International Space Station’, or perhaps ‘it’ll take me 6 weeks to get to shore’ and something completely and utterly different to live it entirely and utterly alone.

There is no one and no thing that can help, do, decide, or make you do anything no matter how big or small, no matter how trivial or life-threatening, other than you. It is impossible for anyone, save a minuscule few who have done a very similar thing, to have an understanding of how alone you are.

Of course, there are people genuinely concerned for your safety and well-being. And people supportive of your efforts. But that support can never be conflated with them being there and somewhere rendering the trip something other than solo.

Solitude is a challenge that Tom Turcich also faced on his adventure around the world - he circumnavigated it on foot, becoming the tenth person ever to do so!

Navigating between tradition and technology

We could count people who managed to encircle the globe via the five great southern capes, without stopping and without GPS, on two hands. Did you say goodbye to all technology?

I am the ninth person to circumnavigate, solo, non-stop around the world using only traditional navigational tools. The first two did it as part of the original Golden Globe Race (1969). The third was Chay Blyth (1971) who incidentally sailed against the prevailing winds and therefore the ‘wrong way’ around. The next 5 did it as part of the reincarnation of the Golden Globe Race (2018). I am the ninth, the first North or South American, and the first to do so leaving from the West Coast.

Traditional navigational tools imply a sextant, tables, pencil, paper, and a watch. I used no electronic navigational tools or aids. No calculators, no GPS, no SatNav, Loran, or anything of the kind.

I used non-traditional technology for communications including single side-band (SSB) and VHF radio, Automatic Identification System (AIS) to warn other vessels of my presence, and an Iridium GO! satellite link for email and limited voice communications. I used a laptop connected to either the SSB or the Iridium GO! to receive weather forecasts.

50 shades of rough

How did the weather serve you? It must have been rough at times?

I served at the mercy of the weather always. Calm or storm, I was enslaved to the weather as any sailboat would be. Rough is relative. Rough in the Strait of Georgia or the North Pacific doesn’t begin to compare to rough in the Southern Ocean.

The only way to sleep for the majority of the trip was to strap myself down to my bunk. Even during calms, the motion of the boat is chaotic as the swell and waves persist long after the wind has evaporated. To work at the chart table required strapping myself down onto the seat at the navigation station. At sea on a small boat, it’s rough ALL the time.

Did you ever question your decision on making this expedition?

No. Once you’ve committed to going, there is precious little room if any at all for second-guessing that decision. While at sea, there’s no room whatsoever for second-guesses. It is literally do or die. You would always be right, but to second-guess as opposed to acting is tantamount to disaster or worse.

You knew that the boat would possibly not survive. Was there ever a plan B?

I had a life raft and an Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon (EPIRB). Realistically, if the boat were to sink and I had to take to the raft and hope, the probability of surviving such an event is extremely low.

The most violent environment on Earth

Sailing around the world is dangerous. Have you ever thought you might not make it?

My life was truly endangered the moment I entered the Southern Ocean and remained so until I left some four and one-half months later. It is the most extreme, most violent, most hostile environment on the planet. And that’s not including the most remote. Remote as in no reasonable chance of help or rescue.

The severe storms in the Southern Oceans are vast swaths of hurricane-force winds encompassing thousands of square miles of ocean with waves the size of 4 or 5-story apartment buildings. To say that my life was in danger is not hyperbole.

I never thought I wouldn’t make it. I did, however, worry constantly about keeping the boat in one piece. Like any machine, constant harsh use in extreme conditions takes a severe toll on everything. You have a very small window to get in and get out. Pushing that window means risking mechanical failures and breakdowns that can quickly cascade out of control.

The day of the injury

Injuring oneself on the boat, with nobody nearby to help, could be already nerve-racking as an idea. You had such a moment, but how did you overcome it and found the courage to continue?

Any injury, no matter how minor, is a recipe for disaster. A small cut, constantly exposed to salt water, can easily become infected, turn septic and result in an excruciating, lonely, ignoble end. I did everything I could to avoid injury. It was the biggest concern.

I turned around and let go. Crumpled, I laid in agony and unable to move. I had hurt my back but just how badly, I didn’t knowBert terHart

Avoiding injury requires constant vigilance and attention. Standing in the cockpit and hanging on with both hands to the safety bar that forms part of the main companionway dodger, I turned to look behind me and for some reason, let go. I was immediately tossed some 5 feet (1,5 m, Ed.) across the cockpit and folded in half backward over the stainless steel bars that protect the compass. Crumpled on the cockpit sole, I laid in agony and unable to move. I had hurt my back but just how badly, I didn’t know.

Fortunately, the weather was relatively mild and forecast to be that way for at least two days. I spent those days strapped to my bunk, barely able to deal with the minimum required to sail the boat even in those conditions. Anything not absolutely necessary was out of the question.

I don’t believe it was the courage to overcome. It was rather the simple necessity of continuing. Other than quitting and resigning one’s self to whatever the fates may hold, there’s nothing else to do but continue. I rested for those two days as best as I could and then set about sailing home.

Bert terHart, the luckiest man alive

You are 62 now. Some people of your age have trouble going up the staircase, not even imagining how it is having waves tossing you around the boat like a puppet while you are just trying to use the loo. I wanted to ask you about the secret of your fitness, but then I’ve also read that you broke your ribs three weeks before this odyssey! You really have guts!

I ended up leaving at the end of October as opposed to the beginning as I had fallen off the mast in mid-September. That fall resulted in 4 fractured ribs and a collapsed lung. No one expects to survive a 55’ fall (almost 17-meter height, Ed.), let alone walk away from it. I don’t know how I survived. I was air-lifted by helicopter to the nearest trauma center equipped to deal with someone who has massive internal injuries. The doctor that saw me into the helicopter was not convinced I would survive the flight.

The head of the surgical team that admitted me said on my release that the smartest thing I could do at that moment was buying a lottery ticket. He figured I was the luckiest guy alive and certainly one of the luckiest patients he had ever seen. I limped out of the emergency room using my father’s cane 40 minutes after arriving.

I don’t have any fitness secrets. Other than rugby and Tae Kwon Do (I’m a third-degree black belt), I don’t do anything too different than I’ve always done.

Age is just a number, claim two Texas ladies that traveled around the world in 80 days at age 81. Meet TikTok Traveling Grannies!

Dangers of sleep deprivation

Traveling without a companion is not only about social distancing. It’s also about not being able to share responsibilities with anyone. How did you decide that it was safe for you to sleep, for instance?

Everything you do is done so as to optimize something. Whether it’s the direction you’re going, the weather you’re trying to avoid or catch up, how fast you could or should be going, when it’s OK to eat, to navigate, or to sleep. When it’s not safe to do it, you don’t. You simply don’t have a choice.

If it is safe to do something, or you think it will be safe sometime in the future, then that’s what you do. In some ways, you live a very regimented life. It just so happens that you’re not the one regimenting.

Being alone at sea for a long time can bring a person to a state where reality and fantasy mix. As suggested in the “Life of Pi”, one can even start talking to tigers and discovering phantasmagorical islands… Have you traveled to any of those hallucinatory places?

The only sailors I know of who have hallucinated as you describe are those that have been injured, were sick, or were seriously sleep-deprived. Hallucinations are not at all uncommon to survivors of extreme events and there are numerous stories of sailors (Joshua Slocum after a bout of food poisoning) and mountaineers (Jeff Beck surviving on Everest after having been given up for dead at least twice) coming to mind.

Being alone at sea I believe is neither necessary nor sufficient. A serious injury or ailment would be sufficient. I was never in that state so, happily, I was able to keep my wits!

The ocean as a spiritual desert

I hope you do not mind me asking, but are you yourself religious? People go to the solitude of monasteries, to deserts and mountains, to talk directly to God. Piscine Patel from Yann Martel’s novel went through a peculiar spiritual journey too. Did your view of religion change in any way after this trip?

I am religious in that I would argue that there is something far greater than me in this universe. What that is, I am unsure. I am sure, however, that it is everywhere and all around us. I am continually amazed and astounded by the natural beauty and wonder that exists everywhere we choose to look.

Yet, in no way did I embark on my circumnavigation in the hopes of finding God. You could make a very good argument that such a journey is in fact an abdication of your responsibilities, perhaps even your duty, as a human.

That said, alone, thousands of miles from land and help, with nothing between you and the universe save for your wits and a bit of plastic, it is impossible to ignore that which is greater than one’s self.

Where have all the whales gone?

Which animals did you encounter?

My encounters with marine mammals were extremely rare and far less than I expected. Encounters with dolphins and porpoises are very common and on my other trips, they’re almost a daily occurrence. Not so on my circumnavigation. Whale encounters, while less frequent, can also be expected. When traveling in the Northeastern Pacific and the Gulf of Alaska, encounters with Humpback, Blue, Killer, Gray, and Minke whales are normal. I was shocked and disappointed that on only one occasion did any whale come near the boat. Similarly, I saw no evidence of them as spouts or breaches.

Would you have an interpretation for that?

Why that is, I can only speculate. I can say that the industrialized commercial fishing fleet is alive and well on the high seas. The population of pelagic seabirds, especially Albatross, has been decimated by a drastic reduction in food supplies by commercial fisheries. I can well imagine that similar industrialized fishing pressure throughout the food chain has resulted in reduced populations of marine mammals and other species that occupy the top tiers of those ecosystems.

If you want to see the whales in their natural habitat, check our experience during the Tenerife whale watching trip!

Regarding the constant entertainment afforded by those species of birds that spend the vast majority of their lives on the open ocean, the Albatross reigns supreme. There are many species of Albatross scattered all over the globe, but the one species that symbolizes all that the Southern Ocean is to sailors is the Wandering Albatross. It is huge, curious, almost friendly, and a wonder. The smaller species, like the Black-Browed Albatross, were more frequent visitors but no less majestic. Of all the birds that accompanied me around the world, the one that captured my attention was the smallest of them all, Wilson’s Stormy Petrel. They are, in fact, the smallest warm-blooded creature to breed in the Antarctic and one of the most numerous bird species in the world. They were with me through every kind of weather imaginable.

Yes we can

Were sea fish your source of protein, or you mainly lived from canned food? How did you deal with food rationing?

I caught no fish. The open ocean is like a vast desert, as most fish, especially those that one person can reasonably eat, are limited to coastal waters and the tropics.

Double-smoked sausage lasts an extraordinarily long time if cared for and canned tuna, salmon, chicken, and ham last indefinitely as long as the cans remain dry.

I rationed food the minute I left the dock. In that regard, I was extremely disciplined and rarely wavered. I had calculated how much food I needed and had provisions on board for more than eight months. Unfortunately, I made a very serious, very basic error.

On other trips, my appetite had waned. I based my caloric intake on my normal diet thinking that, like on my other trips at sea, my appetite would reduce. Thus, my nearly nine months of provisions would be ample with lots to spare.

It turned out that my appetite was huge and I was eating fully twice as much as was normal. 9 months of provisions divided by two makes 4 ½. I very quickly realized I was going to run out of food if I didn’t drastically reduce my rations. As a result, I was down to less than 800 calories a day. At 800/day, I would have enough to complete the trip albeit the last month or so would be rice and oats only.

The beauty and the beast of the ocean

Besides an extreme physical feat, this also had to be a really emotional journey. What were your highs and lows?

The lows were definitely being becalmed. I was becalmed for more than 50 days. Going nowhere, the boat slamming around, barely able to move around the boat all while mowing through precious food and water is emotionally, physically, and mentally challenging to say the least.

The highs have to be the evenings and early nights. The entire universe bursts into being in a way unlike anywhere else I’ve ever been. Moreover, it’s all for you. There is no one else there to see the show.

It certainly sounds like a privilege. Can you be more precise about what have you seen? I am aware we live in highly light-polluted societies, so being on such a boat could be an astronomer’s dream come true. Is that the main reason behind it?

The near-constant haze that hangs near the surface of the ocean obscures the night sky to some degree. There are occasions, however, when the haze clears off and the skies are otherworldly. It is only ‘pitch-dark’ when the cloud cover is thick and low. Otherwise, even on moonless nights, the visibility at night is remarkably good. When the moon is full and the skies are clear, it is astonishing how bright it is. You could read a newspaper by the light of the stars, planets, and moon.

The twilight hours, just after the sun has set, and the moon is yet to appear, were magical. There are only a few places on land that can come close to the vast expanse of the heavens that are on display for anyone willing to get on a boat and sail away from shore. The expanse alone is a thrill. Realizing that it is for you and you alone is humbling beyond words. Arrayed as it is, there is nowhere else anywhere on the Earth like it. As twilight fades and night falls, layer upon layer of splendor reveals until one is at an absolute loss for words.

What were the most beautiful aspects of your voyage?

This is not an easy question. What is beauty? What aspect of the voyage shall we talk about? I think witnessing how perfectly adapted to that vast wilderness of sea and sky the tiniest of creatures were, and how effortlessly they existed there, was a privilege afforded only a handful of humans. I would say there is something beautiful in that.

Social distancing at extreme

The pandemic happened and the world changed while you were away. The planet went into lockdown. Some protested against the limiting of their “freedom of movement”. Some get dramatic even if they need to self-isolate for 10 days! You’ve spent 267 days alone at the sea. Is there a lesson there you could share?

There is opportunity everywhere. It comes in all shapes and forms. In no way am I trying to diminish the suffering that Covid-19 has wrought. The lockdowns do represent an opportunity to reconnect with family and loved ones, to take the time to read important books, or to indulge in a hobby that you’ve missed or given up on. My own father took the lockdown as an opportunity to brush up on his Indonesian and Malayan.

Lockdown or not, we live in a country that still allows us to choose what we do and how we do it. I would say choose and if possible, choose wisely.

What things did you miss the most on this journey?

Beyond the obvious like my wife Nani, my children, and my family, I missed the simple things. The things you take for granted. Sitting down to eat. Putting a pencil down and finding it in the same place 10 seconds later. Dry socks.

After returning, you experienced a sort of stardom. How do you cope with it?

Universally, the feedback has been extraordinary. People are fascinated, curious, motivated, and inspired. The attention has been somewhat overwhelming but incredibly uplifting. I would argue that anything you may have heard, or perhaps believe, about the cynical nature of humankind is not just unwarranted, but flat-out wrong.

Bert terHart, the safest person in the world?

Paradoxically, embarking on this rather risky adventure earned you the title of “the safest man on the planet”. Pandemic aside, what is your view on the notion of playing safe in relation to still living life to the fullest?

Although at zero risk of getting the Coronavirus, I was in no way, shape, or form the safest man on the planet. The Shoreteam and I took a lot of flak, especially from the sailing community, about that. During the time I was in the Southern Ocean, I was perhaps the least safe person on the planet. I just couldn’t die from Covid-19. Everything else, however, was on the table.

In the Southern Ocean, I was perhaps the least safe person on the planet. But how many people die in their sleep every day? My time will come as it must. All I have is my nowBert terHart

There is no safe. Safe is an illusion. My friend, Glen Wakefield, is a testament to that (Editor’s note: Glen Wakefield died from a stroke while sailing solo to the southern tip of South America, in September 2020).

How many people die in their sleep every day? Or are killed walking across the road? Falling down the stairs? My time will come as it must. All I have is my now. What do you think I should do? How do you think that time is best spent?

Of course, there are risks. But there are rewards beyond our imaginations if we can put aside what we perceive the risks to be. I will tell you that one risks far more than I in seeking safe harbor.

If you don't find taking risks stimulating, check out which are the safest countries in the world for travel!

New adventures on the horizon

Was this your “Mount Everest”, or are you already dreaming of some new adventures?

Oh no. I have other adventures planned. All following the same thread: An attempt to discover something about our world and our shared experiences by following in the footsteps of the great adventurers and explorers who have shown us the way.

Are those adventures a secret?

I plan to sail back to the Aleutians next year and sometime shortly after that into the Eastern Arctic. If I can talk my wife into another cold-water adventure, we’ll hopefully head back down to Patagonia and beyond.

With respect to the first, I plan to walk across Canada in the footsteps of Alexander MacKenzie, David Thompson, Henry Kelsey, Jean Baptiste de la Verendrye, and Simon Fraser. By threading portions of their journeys together, I’ll be able to walk from coast to coast navigating only with a sextant, tables, pencil, paper, and a watch. The idea is to compile a then-and-now retrospection of their shared journeys and experiences in the exact places where they were.

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The post Bert terHart Sailed Around the World via 5 Great Capes: Safe Is an Illusion appeared first on Pipeaway.

Slaven Škrobot is the first wheelchair traveler who reached the top of Pidurangala in Sri Lanka and Petra Monastery in Jordan

Well, that’s at least how he presents it. Pidurangala in Sri Lanka is a challenging hike even for those of us who don’t deal with quadriplegia. Slaven Škrobot became the first person in a wheelchair to hike to its top! Reaching Petra Monastery was another ‘first’ in his portfolio of extraordinary achievements. The adventurous spirit always made him find his way!

While many people will dream about traveling and justify why they are not able to execute their dreams at “this moment” of their life, this disabled guy in a wheelchair unmasks their reasoning. As he learned a decade ago, life can change in a wink of an eye. One can continue dreaming and living with the handicap of excuses, or one can – make a move.

The COVID-19 pandemic has grounded planes, but this inspiring quadriplegic continues sharing his amazing journey in a wheelchair on his blog slavenskrobot.com. Patiently waiting for the day when rolling around the world will again become his reality.

Faced with their children becoming blind, this Canadian family decided to show them the world while they can still see it. Read an inspiring interview with Edith Lemay!

Precious mobility

How are you coping with the lockdown?

It doesn’t bother me that much. As a disabled person, I am used to this way of life. So the only thing I miss is nature walks. But now it’s getting better and I’ve already started going out.

These quarantine times have reminded many of the value of mobility. Some people cannot handle this type of isolation. You had a whole decade to adapt to a new life and a new definition of normal. Do you have any advice for people who have to learn that life after the pandemic will not be the same again?

People need to learn about themselves and how to love themselves, be happy with themselves, and like to spend time with themselves. People are not used to it, but when you do those things, you don’t need anyone, and you learn how to spend time on your own and not get bored. I’m actually never bored, I always find something to do and something to occupy myself.

Slaven traveled the Great Ocean Road in Australia, one of the best road trips available to electric vehicles too!

Slaven Škrobot’s first trips, on medication

Your disability is 100 %. How did it happen?

Correct! I broke my neck, c5, 10 years ago. Some friends and I were jumping from the jetty on the island of Krk. I jumped on my friend who stayed under the water, so I wasn’t able to see him. I smashed my head into his body.

While still in the hospital, you started hallucinating that you were in the Northern Pole and Hawaii. How was that and did it pin these destinations on your bucket list?

Heh… Well, I’ve been put on a lot of medication, including morphine. Those were crazy times and I remember most of the events as if they happened yesterday. I’ve had really cool hallucinations and I had really bad ones. I flew over Hawaii, hunted polar bears, rode a train, etc. I don’t like to speak about the bad ones, they were really bad and I don’t like to remember them. I’ve been hallucinating for about a month and still, to this day, I’m not sure if some stuff was real or not. I have a totally different bucket list than what I experienced in my hallucinations. I wish to visit Namibia, Egypt, Iran, Vietnam, Madagascar, Monument Valley…

The Morocco trip was a big step out of my comfort zone. Since then, I fell in love with travelingSlaven Škrobot

Such an accident could bury many under a lot of layers of depression. Slaven Škrobot before the accident and Slaven Škrobot after the accident are not the same person. How did it all affect you, especially as you led an active life before? What was the turning point for your decision to become unstoppable?

Well, when I came home from the hospital, I was annoyed by Facebook pictures of my friends traveling and skiing, as well as seeing people riding bicycles or doing sports. I was furious that I couldn’t do anything or that no one invited me to join them. I knew I was going to spend most of my days alone with myself and that I had to find something to give me peace. Music and concerts helped me out. As time passed, I wanted to do something more and to travel somewhere outside Europe. Morocco came to mind. It was a big step out of my comfort zone but my friends made it work and it was the best journey ever. Since that trip, I fell in love with traveling.

Wanderlust and disability don't exclude each other. For more inspiration and information on overcoming challenges when traveling with chronic pain, follow Jenn Lloyd, the U.S. blogger behind Sick Girl Travels. 

Obstacles are in the head

With the level of disability you have, what does your everyday life look like?

I have a kind of routine now because it’s pretty hard to be spontaneous when you can’t walk. When I don’t travel, I explore and research my next destination, do something for my father’s company, exercise, listen to music, go to some concerts, and movies, write about my travels, etc. I try my best to find happiness in the little things. I always say, give me sun and warmth, and I’m happy! All is in the little things!

Many people see a traveling lifestyle as a luxurious privilege, as an activity that could be complicated, and unaffordable. They easily find obstacles in the plan, and even when they can afford it, they opt for the security of travel agencies. Yet someone who is traveling the world in a wheelchair, like yourself, has to organize one’s journey on one’s own! How does one overcome the true handicap – our brain telling us that traveling is a difficult adventure?

People whine that travel is a luxury while sitting at home in front of a 3000 $ TV setSlaven Škrobot

If you really want something, you will do whatever it takes to achieve it! If you don’t want it 100%, you will find an excuse. I don’t find traveling luxurious or hard, especially nowadays. People whine that it’s a luxury and sit at home looking at a 3000 $ TV set. I’ve traveled over half of Australia for just half of the amount. So would you rather have a 3k TV or travel halfway around Australia? People will always make excuses, but it’s all about priorities.

One Australian is in love with discovering the planet's secrets in a very special way. Erik, the free ranger, reveals all secrets of the naked hiking in our interview!

Traveling in a wheelchair – the adventure of a lifetime

Some think that traveling can be dangerous as well. Have you ever been in such a situation?

Haha, I’ve been in some dangerous situations, yes! I think the most dangerous and crazy one was a hike to the top of the Pidurangala in Sri Lanka. It is a volcanic rock positioned next to the Sigiriya, another volcanic rock on top of which the king built a fortress. A wrong move by anyone climbing, and that would probably be one’s end.

Another situation that I always remember is when a guy pulled a knife on us in El Jadida, Morocco.

Even if traveling in a wheelchair, you’ve climbed mountains, hiked deserts, and touched oceans. What are your favorite travel memories?

I like each of my destinations and travels in its own way. I love deserts, the Middle East, and history/culture on one hand. On the other, I like palms, sea, and beaches. Australia is special because it seems like a different planet, but Sri Lanka is very beautiful as well.

With every new trip, I bet your hunger for adventure grows more and more. But what are the achievements you are most proud of?

Correct! But now I am well aware that I can’t keep going like this and do crazy, stupid, and dangerous stuff for the rest of my life. I’d like to be more independent, start a full-time job, and have a family soon, so I need to concentrate on that and make that a priority. I will still travel to exotic locations, just maybe not as crazy as before. But you never know what life brings! If you’d asked me 8 years ago, and showed me what I did, I’d tell you you’re crazy! I was the first person in a wheelchair to reach the Monastery in Petra, Jordan, and climb Pidurangala in Sri Lanka. I traveled across half of Australia and, most importantly, I remained positive and happy in my head!

Slaven Škrobot is the first tetraplegic who reached the Petra Monastery. To see what traveling in a wheelchair looks like, check out his video on YouTube!

Slaven Škrobot on challenges of disabled travelers

The world is not really adapted for traveling in a wheelchair. It can be discouraging, but hopefully, you have some advice for other travelers with disabilities. What destinations would you recommend?

When it comes to traveling for people in a wheelchair or with disabilities, many are afraid to travel because of various reasons. It’s a big step up out of the comfort zone. Many are afraid their wheelchairs will get damaged during the flight (it happens a lot!). And many don’t feel comfortable sitting on a plane for long, and not being able to use the toilet, so they don’t drink/ eat. When it comes to me, I’m not shy and I don’t care about other people, so I just do the toilet in my seat, for example… I just find my way. What matters the most to me is a strong will, so if you really want something, you will go and get it!

There are many destinations that are pretty well accessible for travelers in wheelchairs. But I usually don’t go there. I don’t have the money to travel with accessible agencies, so I do everything on my own. Most of Europe is pretty accessible, the USA as well, and which I experienced the most, Australia! I’d move there tomorrow!

In your situation, it would be hard, if not impossible to travel alone. Who are your companions, and how do they help you?

Yes, unfortunately, there is no way I could travel alone. Till now, it has always been my friends or I’ve found someone randomly through my page to go with me and help me. I always find my way.

One Swiss photographer has travel companions on wheels too! Kim Leuenberger is traveling with vintage toy cars, check it out!

Travel blogging without the finger function

Traveling in a wheelchair requires a lot of research. Can you describe the process?

Oh yes! I do a lot of research! For my trip to Australia, I’ve spent four months researching, exploring, reading, watching, or sending e-mails. I try to find the cheapest possible place that can offer me the most things to see. Or I really like something, like Pidurangala in Sri Lanka, and create my plan around it. It also depends if someone invites me somewhere or if I find cheap tickets. I like to plan everything and see as much as possible on my trip.

You document your travels on your blog, but sadly it’s only in Croatian. Would you like to be fully immersed in travel reporting, and what are your plans in that sense?

I’d like to write in both Croatian and English, but sadly I’m in this all alone. Without mobility or finger function, it’s hard and slow. I write all my stories on my laptop. I type with both little fingers when I am in a good position to type, which is not the case all the time. Since I can’t move them, I don’t type with the tips of my fingers, but with the middle part of them. I wish to stay true and honest, and I don’t want to present my life as perfect, because it’s far from it!

As for destinations, what’s next on your radar?

It was supposed to be Iran but due to the virus, everything stopped! Now I have no idea when, where, or how I will travel next.

Besides on his blog, you can follow Slaven Škrobot and his adventures of traveling the world in a wheelchair on his Facebook page, Instagram profile, or Youtube channel.

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