About us

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This blog is about all things travel and two South Africans, Schalk and Lauren, taking a mid-career gap year and embarking on an extended vacation.

Although we have now traveled to 31 countries, the first 21 of these visits have been quick vacations where you jam in as many tourist sites as possible over a few days.

Lauren and Schalk in Ireland in 2015

In 2016, this has been different. We want to take our time to get to know a place and its people, and immerse ourselves into the daily comings and goings, and make meaningful connections.

We have both been working in corporate environments, and this radicle change is sure to be interesting. We are used to our comforts and routines with very little spontaneity, so having a loose travel plan will put our relationship and sanity to the test.

The first destination we tackled from February 2016 was Vietnam and spent 35 days in this amazing country. Read some of the blog posts about our stay in Vietnam here. We then headed to Cambodia for most of March, where my sister joined us for two fun-filled weeks of visiting the temples of Angkor Wat.

After a short stop in Singapore, we spent almost a month in India, mainly in Rajasthan. At the beginning of May, we spent just over a week in Nepal - our only regret is that we did not stay longer. We then spent some time in Calabria and Sicily, Italy before heading to Rome. After a few days in Bavaria, Germany we went to Spain and then Portugal.

At the end of July, we travelled to Iceland for a self-drive holiday. This trip was little over a week and has certainly been the highlight of our extended vacation, with gorgeous, picture-perfect scenery around every corner.

In August 2016, we headed to the United States of America and took our time to get around. In between travelling on our own steam, we also had two periods in the US where we were house and pet sitting. We went on our first cruise ever in November and visited the Virgin Islands and the Bahamas. We also ate so much that we hardly fit into our travelling clothes anymore.

After the cruise, we travelled to Lima and then Cusco in Peru. Here we finally got to see Machu Picchu - definitely one that was on the bucket list. We are heading to Bali, Indonesia next and will meet up with some family and friends over the festive season, before heading to our final country, Australia.

Below is our original wish list of the countries we want to visit in 2016 – the grand plan. We knew that the trip might look quite different depending on our ability to stick to our budget, secure freelance work, obtain visas and adapt to a new lifestyle, but so far, so good having now travelled for over 300 days.

Follow us on our journey to nowhere in particular.

The grand plan of where we hope our travels take us in 2016

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