Hi, we are Gareth and Dani, Travels in Flip Flops.

How it all began and the first adventure

This blog and our traveling adventures began in 2013 but I guess this story really starts a long long time ago, probably when I (Gareth) was around 7 years old.

I was born in the early 70’s, a wonderful more simple time before the birth of the internet and on demand media. It was a time of books, imagination and in the UK a time of only 3 TV channels that only broadcast for around 10 hours a day.

My Mam and Dad would take me and my sister to our local library every Monday night. One of them would be in the library with us while the other went to get the food shopping in and we would spend a good couple of hours there just moseying through whatever looked interesting. I loved it. Flicking through classic books of exciting far off adventures or being mesmerised by books with big glossy pictures of amazing wildlife in exotic locations. There are many things from those days that are still perfectly clear in my head now.

I remember reading about the leafy steaming jungles of Borneo and being in awe of the glorious colour photos of it’s beautiful birds and wildlife. Learning about the Trans-Siberian express for the first time and how you could travel on it for days from Europe all the way to Eastern Asia. Being fascinated about nomads living in the deserts of the middle east long before Dubai became the tourist hotspot that it is now.

Sitting on a Sunday night as a family in front of our black and white TV watching a much younger David Attenborough stepping off a boat at Galapagos to show us wonderful giant tortoises. These were really wonderful experiences from childhood that enchanted me and have stayed with me for life.

Yes, I’m sentimental, I know this. But I also believe that childhood dreams are the most pure innocent dreams we ever have. When your a child everything is possible. You can be a spaceman when you grow up. You can go and climb Everest, you can go and travel on the Trans-Siberian or visit Borneo to see it’s beautiful Orangutans in the wild.

Far too often I think that as adults we forget what was once important to us. Over time these wonderful dreams that we had as kids fade away and become a distant memory from the past as sensible adulthood takes hold. I never forgot my dreams, I’ve always clung to them in the hope that one day I could make some of them come true.

Fast forward around 35 years to 2013 when I lost my job of 14 years and was given a tidy little redundancy package there was only one thing I was ever going to do…travel!

It was early in the summer when I lost my job and as well as being given a nice little package I was also granted 3 months gardening leave. I had a rough idea of the route I wanted to take on my backpacking adventure and I started to plan it out in a bit more detail, but with no job and no time commitments I wasn’t in any hurry to get started.

I was heavily into mountain biking at the time so I figured I may as well enjoy the British summer time during my gardening leave. I gave my notice on my flat, packed up everything I had and moved it all into family and friends houses. I bought an old banger of a VW Polo for £400, threw my tent and bike in the back and headed off to my favourite place in the UK, the Lake District.

What an amazing summer that was. Most days I would wake up to beautiful sunny weather, grab some breakfast then heading straight up to Whinlatter to hit the Mountain Biking trails or driving to some random spots to do some fell riding. On an evening I would head down to the shores of our favourite lake, Bassenthwaite. With a few cans of IPA I would sit for hours enjoying the serene calmness of the pristine lake, keeping an eye out for Ospreys hunting fish. There’s something special about British summers when you get that beautiful blue glow on the horizon all the way through the night and Bassenthwaite being the only lake that isn’t allowed to have boats on it is the perfect place to enjoy it. It was a truly wonderful and memorable time spent on home soil.

I lived out of my car and tent for 3 months straight that summer and as much as I really didn’t want to leave Autumn was drawing close and it was time to head off. My childhood dreams were about to become reality and I finally headed off on my first backpacking adventure. Dani would join me in South East Asia 6 months later when she got her career break from work.

She came to Amsterdam with me to start the trip and we spent a few nice days there before we said our goodbyes and parted ways. The first 4 months was a solo adventure. Through Sweden, Estonia then on to Russia to board the famous Trans-Siberian train. South into Mongolia, on to China and down to Hong Kong before flying on to Malaysia and SE Asia. What an experience that was. Boyhood dreams well and truly ticked off.

I met back up with Dani in Kuala Lumpur in the February of 2014 and we spent the next 7 months together exploring, volunteering and riding our way through South East Asia. Solo travel is great but it’s also nice to have your partner and a great travel buddy with you to share the experiences. SE Asia was breath-taking. Bali, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Borneo, so many places that I’d wanted to visit. 

Sadly by the time it got to October the money was running low as well as Dani’s time off for her career break. Dani had her flight back home booked and with just a little bit of my redundancy package I decided to have one last month relaxing in Bali and Nusa Lembongan before flying back West to Europe.

It seemed fitting to end it in Amsterdam where it first started 14 months earlier. Dani booked a flight over from Newcastle and we spent a few nights in the Dam before I finally and reluctantly flew back to the UK. My mam was missing me a lot as well and it had been a long time, so being home for Christmas did feel nice.

A  little bit about the blog

So how does this blog fit in to all of this. When I started planning the first trip I wanted to keep a record of it and I also wanted a way to share my stories and adventures with our friends back home. When I left my job my colleagues were very kind and they bought me some Amazon vouchers as a leaving gift. With those I bought myself a good little budget Canon DSLR as I’d always fancied a decent camera to record some of the moments along the journey.

I started looking at how to keep some kind of digital diary online that I could share with my mates and also capture some of the details of the trip. Sometimes when you travel a lot you forget the smaller things. The people you meet along the way, the funny little stupid things that sometimes happen and a blog/diary seemed a great way to do that. I found a nice simple free one called Travelpod. I simply had to type in my entry, upload some photos and videos if I wanted to and the website took care of the rest. Even giving me a nice little option to share it automatically to my Facebook page so that my mates would see it. I could even pin my location on a built in Google map plug in and it created this wonderful interactive map of our journey that linked to our posts in each place. It was wonderful and I loved it.

Having been massively bitten by the travel bug from our first adventures we made an instant decision to travel again as soon as possible. That meant I had to find a new job and we both had to get saving and live as cheaply as possible. 

I settled on a popular travel . If it still existed I would be using it to this day and I’m massively thankful to whoever it was that launched and maintained it. It’s been priceless in helping me preserve a load of great memories.