Both of us grew up in households that really prioritised travelling. We were both fortunate enough to visit amazing places with our families as children, and that little travel bug just grew and grew as we got older! We knew that just a vacation wouldn’t cut it - we really wanted the independence and time to explore all these amazing and far flung corners of the world. We spent 2 years budgeting and saving, and finally quit our jobs in January of 2023 to embark on our world adventure! It’s been the best decision of our lives.

Travelling is a lot cheaper than most people realise! The two of us generally average under $90 USD per day while travelling, including accomodation, transportation, and food. Check out this detailed post to see exactly how much we saved for this trip, how we budget, and how we made this dream a reality!

You can check out our Adventure Map to see all the countries that we’ve visited in our travels!

This question is too hard so we’re giving the top 3:

Swimming with whale sharks in Indonesia

Watching the sunrise in a hot air balloon over Cappadocia, Turkey

Scuba diving in Raja Ampat, one of the most biodiverse dive spots on Earth!

Honourable mention to our worst travel experience - getting misdiagnosed with appendicitis and hospitalised in Vietnam

We are budget travellers…with standards. We save on accomodation and transportation when we can, but we will never sacrifice our safety to do so, so we don’t consider ourselves shoestring travellers. We generally stay in both hostel dorms and private rooms, and also love to use the Couchsurfing app to meet local people to host us.

The things that we enjoy most about visiting a new place include being out in nature, hiking, swimming, snorkelling, exploring the area on foot, and photography. We love immersing ourselves in the local culture, trying the street food, and meeting new people. We really only splurge on activities if it’s something really special, such as our Amalfi Coast Tour in Italy, our Big Dream Boat Man trip through the Philippines, and our 2 week expedition through Turkey. Otherwise, we mainly spend our time wandering the streets, trying the local cuisine, and taking in what makes each place special.

We are not super into museums, and have found that we prefer to be in nature rather than the city. We are also not foodies at all, and don’t like to waste money on “luxury” dining. We will eat at the same hole in the wall restaurant every single day we’re in a place if it’s yummy!

Click here for a detailed post on what’s in my camera bag!

To peek inside our travel bags, check out our packing guide for long term travel.

To be honest, this is one of the most draining and mentally taxing parts of full time travel. It takes a lot of time and energy to look through flights/transport/accomodation/things to do to make an itinerary. There can be a lot of decision fatigue when the whole world is your oyster! We try to have at least 5 nights booked when we first arrive in a new country. This gives us time to get our bearings, get local recommendations, and see if there are good local deals.

The most important factors we take into account are safety and cost. We are very aware of the fact that we are two smallish women travelling, so we are very careful in choosing where we go. We have found that the US State Department website tends to over exaggerate the danger of some areas, so we prefer to use the Canadian government travel advisories, as well as read travel blogs written by other female travellers.

We are both very lucky to have strong passports that afford us visa free travel to 170+ countries. We’ve only travelled to two countries so far that needed a visa in advance - Turkey and Vietnam. Most places that we have visited either have a visa free period for American and Canadian citizens, or have a visa on arrival scheme. We make sure to research visa and onward ticket requirements before we head to a new place, and always double check the immigration stamp in our passports to know what date we need to exit by.

If a country requires an onward ticket to enter, we always use the Expedia app to book a random flight out. Expedia has a 24 hour grace period with free cancellation on most flights, so we just show the airlines our booking, wait until we are through immigration, and then cancel the ticket. Just make sure that you double check on the Expedia app that your chosen flight includes 24 hour free cancellation before booking. For a more detailed description on how we get onward tickets, read this post.

We’re pretty straight passing so we haven’t personally dealt with any homophobia or felt unsafe regarding our sexuality. We definitely take note of the local culture and attitude towards LGBT people, and scale back any PDA in areas where it’s culturally taboo. Generally though, we found that even in “homophobic” countries, people don’t really take note of us. We take the same normal precautions that any female traveller should!

The name of the game in budget travel is flexibility! We have a general idea of where we’d like to visit, but we leave our schedule very flexible to change plans if a cheaper option arises! We compare transportation options such as boats, trains, ferries, buses, and flights to see which transport method is the cheapest.

We also like to compare Airbnb, Booking.com, and other travel aggregators for accomodation. We do most of our booking with Booking.com and get great deals through their “Genius” program.

It’s not always the most glamorous, but it’s worth it to us for an opportunity to see the world!

The 2 most important apps we use are Google Maps and Google Translate. You can download offline maps and offline languages to help you in areas that don’t have wifi. Google Translate has saved us on many occasions, especially using the camera feature in countries that don’t use the Latin alphabet.

The best app to track your spending for travel is called TripCoin. We use this app to log every single expense so we can have a good idea of our daily average, how much we’ve spent, and how much more of our budget remains. You can log your spending in different categories, split expenses across multiple days, and even enter your spending in the local currency and it will automatically convert that to your home currency (USD in our case).

We also use Booking.com and Airbnb apps to compare accomodation prices in each of the places we stay.

Walking! We love to explore a city on foot. Not only does it save money, but we’ve found that taking things slow and exploring on foot is the best way to meet locals, find hidden gems, and really feel immersed in the new landscape.

We use (and LOVE) HeyMondo! They saved our butts when Wini got hospitalised in Vietnam, and are very affordable and easy to work with. For everything you need to know about HeyMondo, click here.

We originally planned to travel for 1 year, before returning back to our “normal” lives. After almost 11 months on the road, it’s safe to say that it’s not even close to enough time! We’ve never in our lives felt so free to do whatever we want to do, on our own schedule! We’ve both gotten in the best shape of our lives with no time spent in the gym. We’ve escaped the mundane, and everyday being a new adventure has really improved our mental health. We’ve met so many amazing and friendly people on the road that have shown us true compassion and kindness. We’ve realised how small the world truly is, and we’re not all that different after all.

We are actively looking at ways to extend our time on the road, including growing our blog, looking into working holiday visas, and exploring work-away programs.

Some remaining bucket list items include:

Hiking Machu Picchu

Scuba diving in the Galapagos Islands

Visiting Antarctica

Going on an African Safari

Spending Christmas in Finnish Lapland and see the Northern Lights

We read tons of other travel blogs to get inspiration on things to do, places to visit, and where to stay. Our all time favourite travel blogger is Jackson Groves. His adventures and photography are both huge inspirations to us. Check out his blog here.

Our favourite adventure photographer is Emmett Sparling. His photos are truly breathtaking and he has an eye for photography like no other!