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 each 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 I remember vividly and with a lot of affection.

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. I bought an old book of Trains at a jumble sale and learned 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. I was fascinated about nomadic Arabs 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 and unimaginable wildlife. These were really wonderful experiences from my 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 and they should not be forgotten. 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 express 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 exciting and amazing to us. Over time these wonderful dreams that we had as kids fade away and become a distant memory from the past as sensible adult life 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. It was then that I lost my job of 14 years and when I 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 was made redundant 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 head straight up to Whinlatter forest park to hit the Mountain Biking trails or drive to some random spot to do some fell riding. On an evening I would head down to the shores of our favourite lake, Bassenthwaite.

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 at the ripe old age of 42. 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 celebrate the start of 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 fulfilled.

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 on a scooter. 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 always 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 coming to an end. Dani had her flight back home booked and with just a little bit of my redundancy package left 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, constantly asking me if I was coming home for Christmas that year. And it had indeed been a long time. Being home for Christmas with family and friends felt nice.

After the first trip

Many things changed after that first adventure.

For a start we were well and truly bitten by the travel bug, we knew that for sure. Within a few days of being home we knew how much we missed being out in the world. Sampling different cultures, meeting new people, we just wanted more.

We made a very firm to decision to immediately get working as hard as we could, live as cheaply as we could and save enough to pack our jobs in again and get back on the open road as soon as we possibly could.

Thankfully I was lucky enough to get a job pretty quickly and miraculously after just 2 weeks in that new job I was head hunted to do some consultancy work. I wasn’t sure if I could even do what they wanted from me but the amount they were offering was simply too good to turn down. I was incredibly lucky I have to say.

Just when everything was coming together so quickly and nicely things took a very sad turn for me.

The reason my mam wanted me back for Christmas so badly was that she was dying. She hadn’t been to the doctor or been diagnosed with anything but I have a pretty strong hunch that she already knew that she didn’t have long left. She had a terrible cough when I returned and had lost a load of weight. After eventually hounding her to go to the docs she finally went. 

That same afternoon she was at the hospital getting a scan and 3 days later she was diagnosed with cancer. It had spread so far and aggressively in her that it was far too late for any treatment to have an effect. She was dying. They told her she had maybe 5 weeks left to live, she only lasted for 2 more. She was gone. 

Those last two weeks with her were precious. We hadn’t always seen eye to eye in my adult life, but we talked like we had never talked before.  We spoke about dreams and what’s important and how just how precious life is.

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. All I had to do was type up my entry, upload some photos and videos if I wanted to and Travelpod 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 also 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 fantastic and I loved it.

What next?

Our second trip lasting around 9 months was just as exciting and adventurous as our first. It might not have been as long as the first but it was full of new places and new experiences. Notably Myanmar, Sumatra and Cambodia. We had a great time and I kept the blogging up the same as the first trip. Using the same website at Travelpod and the same style of it being a diary of our travels.

Once back in the UK it was time to get our heads down again. Getting a job and trying to save money for another adventure. I think after losing my job that first time I found it much easier to then have the confidence to just walk away and quit a job. Safe in the belief that if your hard working you will find something, somehow to get some income going when the time comes.

It took a bit longer this time though to pull the funds together for another trip. This time we decided we wanted to do either Japan or Canada as part of the trip. Both of these would cost much more than our previous trips which mostly centred around South East Asia so we had to work longer and save more than we had ever saved before.

It took just over 2 years of saving before we felt comfortable with our finances to tackle the next chapter in our travels. We had already decided on Canada as we had looked into buying a van. This would allow us to live cheaper and travel for longer compared to Japan.

As our plans came together I turned back to the blog again and I was horrified. Travelpod didn’t exist anymore. It had been taken offline and all our stories and photos from our first two trips had vanished overnight. I was devastated and at a loss.

Once I calmed down and started fishing around on the internet a little more I discovered a website called Travelark. The amazing folks at Travelark had taken a copy of every single blog that was hosted on Travelpod and archived it. What an absolute life saver this was. I am so grateful to whoever had done this. Our stories were all nicely packaged up into zip files ready to extract and they had transfered the blogs and actually republished them on their own website for free. What an amazing thing this was for them to do, I appreciate it so much.

Just recently I checked back on Travelark and our original blog in all it’s old style web glory is still there to view exactly as it originally looked. You can find it here if you fancy a blast from the past. For myself it’s very nostalgic to look back on this and remember how all this blog stuff and travel writing began.

But the landscape for blogging had changed and it was time for us and our blog to move on as well. The fact that Travelpod had shut up shop without me realising signalled that it was time to take a more sustainable approach to the blog. The only option that would really work was to build our very own website and transfer all of our original stories into it somehow.

I had zero knowledge of building a website. With only a few months until our flight to Canada I had to get researching and started pretty quickly on pulling something together. It was fairly intense stuff and a very steep learning curve. I had to shop around for a hosting provider. Someone who would provide the server space and place where our little blog would live on the internet. I had to secure our domain name which is when the name ‘Travels in flip flops’ was born. And then the really hard work started. I had to design and build the framework of how our blog would look. Both aesthetically as a layout and also the structure of how the different parts of the website were connected together.

By the time it came to leave the UK and head to Canada I had built our website. I painstakingly copied over 152 diary entries and uploaded over 1,500 photos and arranged them all into some kind of order within the website. It was tough going but it was done and we were ready to head off on our 3rd adventure. An adventure that would completely change our way of traveling. A way that would make travelling self sustainable.

Covid and a new way to travel

We headed off to Canada in the April of 2019 and little did we know at the time but we wouldn’t return home again until December 2021, over 2 1/2 years later. 

After a great 3 months driving and wild camping our way through Canada we headed back to South East Asia. It was great. We headed back to some favourite spots in Thailand then on to Malaysia to do some more volunteering at the Lassie animal shelter in Langkawi. Everything was going swimmingly well until early 2020. Covid hit.

We all know what happened around that time. Everyone had their own experience of it. Ours was on the other side of the world from home.

Things changed so fast with the pandemic, literally by the minute. Lockdown was enforced in Malaysia and we were no longer out walking dogs and feeding cats. We were confined to our wooden room, with no windows and natural light. Only allowed out twice a day to go and get some food from the kitchen then straight back to what was increasingly becoming a dark wooden cell.

It was a huge unknown. Would the pandemic and the lockdown last a few weeks, would it be months, how long would it be? We talked about our options constantly. Should we go home, should we try and sit it out. I guess there was no right answer. The money was already getting a bit low before anyone had heard of the word ‘Covid’ and as we checked flights on a near hourly basis it soon became clear that we wouldn’t be going home anytime soon.

As countries around the world started to close their borders the price of flights were skyrocketing in real time. What was a £1,000 flight one day was a £1,500 flight the next. In just a matter of a few days flights back home were costing around £5,000 each!!! We simply could not afford to go home. Given how serious everything was sounding around this virus I didn’t want to either.

The UK looked like it was handling things very badly, where we were on a smallish low population island seemed like a relatively safe place. Most importantly not passing through airports and sitting on busy flights with hundreds of others seemed pretty sensible especially with my dad being in his 80’s. I couldn’t have lived with myself if I contracted it on the way home and then passed it on to my dad. The decision was pretty much made for us, we were staying put.

Our cell like wooden room combined with the heat of Malaysia and aircon that was like an old woman breathing on you quickly became unbearable. We had to move out.

We got in touch with a few places and eventually decided on a small homestay out in the rice fields. Seeing as tourism had instantly died due to the virus the price was incredibly cheap. As our funds ran out we started to survive on our credit cards. We hadn’t used them before when traveling as they were only for emergency but this certainly felt like one of those emergency moments.

As the months went by the balances on the cards obviously got higher and with monthly payments to make we were fast approaching financial breaking point. It was either go home somehow or find an income online. 

With time on our hands we both enrolled on a course to gain our TEFL certificate to be able to teach English to foreign students. The rest as the saying goes really is history. Covid completely changed us both and how we travelled. 

For many Covid was a truly terrible time to get through. For us however it was a massive turning point and something incredibly positive came out of it. We were able to sustain ourselves financially while out in the world. We haven’t looked back since.

The usual routine of returning home, working, saving then eventually traveling was flipped on it’s head. Now going home is a short holiday and being out in the world is our normal way of life. Covid was the catalyst that allowed our travel dreams to become a reality.

That’s pretty much it really. I realise this is isn’t your usual ‘About’ page that you find on most other blogs but then again this isn’t your usual travel blog either. This is our brief story of who we are, how we started and how we got to where we are now.

A few other things have changed as well. For instance as well as teaching online now we also do pet and house sitting when we travel. This is great as when we are lucky enough to get one of these sits it means we get free accommodation which his obviously a huge bonus when it comes to our finances. It’s also allowed us to visit places we may not have been able to afford otherwise, such as our trip to Taiwan.

It also means that the way we travel now is different. When your backpacking your usually moving on from place to place relatively quickly. Taking in the sights, meeting new people, going out quite often etc. Now because we teach we need quieter more stable environments to stay and work in. We now look for longer term rentals and stay settled in one place for much longer. It’s became a bit of a trade off. Yes it’s slightly less freedom compared to before but hey we’re still out in the world enjoying ourselves and to us that’s all that matters.