Welcome adventurer, to this traveller's tales!
I'm Joe, I'm glad you could join me
Hi I’m Joe, it’s nice to see you here. If you’re reading this, it’s probably because you want me to tell you more about the handsome fellow in the photos, and tell you I shall!
My journey really started in 2015, I got my first full time job as an apprentice IT Technician in Nottingham, UK…it’s a fairly normal city with nothing too exciting happening there. Within the first week of getting up at ungodly hours in the morning, commuting on a tram and falling asleep at 7am, then sitting on my behind for 9 hours a day talking to people who weren’t very friendly on the phone to me, I thought to myself “I’m a week in to work, there’s no way I can do this until I retire at 70”.
From that moment on I had crazy ideas ranging from opening a café in the Caribbean, to opening an IT repair shop in South America or Asia. Something that would break the mould and allow to me escape the glum rat race of the UK.
Player 2 has joined the game!
A month in to my job, another young chap, called Mat, joined as an apprentice too. I didn’t know it at the time, because I thought he was quite chavvy and not someone I would associate with, but over time we became best friends, and eventually lead to us travelling Asia for 8 months!
This didn’t happen overnight however, we schemed about escaping, from volunteering for a few weeks in Africa to help communities build infrastructure, to teaching IT in South Africa, then to teaching English in Asia. I did my TEFL during work hours (don’t tell my boss!) and we were set on the idea.
Both of us saved relentlessly for over 3 years, we cut down on spending to the minimum, sacrificing Pepsi at the pub for tap waters, cycling where I could to save on petrol, and just spending as minimally as I could on the essentials. We officially signed up to do an internship teaching English, me in China, and he in Cambodia (due to his Polish nationality, he couldn’t get a Chinese internship). In April 2019 however, I got a rejection letter from my application due to ‘better applicants’ apparently.
At first, I was downhearted, and then Mat scrapped his internship too, we both thought “sod it, we’ll ditch the teaching and just enjoy our travelling together!”, and so we did. On the evening of 25th September 2019, we took off from Heathrow Airport, London and began our journey across the world. It was basically the first time outside of Europe for both of us, so we started with China…and boy what a whirl that was!
To get started, head over to the Destination Index Page.