Who are We?
We are Jade and Frankie from South London, England.
We both love to travel; so, at the start of February 2024 we decided to leave our jobs in London for a while and take a once in a lifetime round the world backpacking trip through South America, Central America, Australia and Southeast Asia.
At home, Frankie is a Civil Engineer and after 7 years of working alongside completing his degree, he finally graduated and was ready to take a well-deserved break from it all. Jade decided to quit her (stressful) job working for a Mental Health Charity after working in the Mental Health and Social Care Sector since graduating 4 years ago. She has done some travelling in South America before and couldn’t wait to go back and explore more. We also wanted to incorporate a visit to family and friends in Australia and then thought why not finish off our trip in Asia on our way home.
Whilst our backpacking route is quite unconventional, we couldn’t choose just one area of the world we wanted to visit – so we are attempting to do it all! It has taken some planning, but generally we only turn up to a country with a rough idea of what we want to do there and decide the rest as we go along.
Why we started this blog?
Currently we are about halfway through our trip at the time of starting this blog, having explored Brazil, Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, Belize and Guatemala: and we have realised we really want to document it all as we are already forgetting things we did right at the start of our trip! So, we’ve created this blog to share our journey which is hopefully helpful to anyone else who wants to learn more about travelling to any of these places.
We kicked off our backpacking trip celebrating Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. From here we decided not to follow the typical ‘gringo trail’ South and instead ventured North to experience some of the most beautiful beaches South America has to offer.
However, when we started research into travelling the Northeast Coast of Brazil, the number of blogs from other travellers was very limited in comparison to other more popular backpacking routes. Luckily, we had a lot of time to do this research as Brazil was our first destination, but it would have been a bit trickier had we already been travelling and planning things at the last minute.
This was what sparked our interest in starting up our own blog page, as the Northeast coast of Brazil was home to some of our favourite places on all our travels and we would love to share our experience of this route alongside all the other countries we visit on our 9-month trip. We will be sharing everything we learnt along the way including our itineraries, how to travel from place to place, our favourite things we did in each location and any recommendations or things we would do differently if we were to do it again.