About

For many people, travel is simply a fun activity and escape from everyday life, but for us it’s about much more.

Juliana is a 27 year old Japanese Brazilian who grew up in Japan. She is passionate about traveling, trying new food (especially fruit), and befriending the local cats. She dreams of building a life in the countryside where she can start a food forest and make her own cheese.

Trevor is a 32 year old nerd from California. He has lived in Japan for nearly a decade and is fascinated by history, culture, science fiction and craft. He dreams of building a beautiful homestead where he can pursue his vision of a solarpunk future for himself, his family, and his community.

For us, travel is the key to learning about the world we live in and our place within it. We hope to break down barriers by visiting less famous places, volunteering and staying in local communities and learning as much as we can about how people live in each place that we explore. The ultimate goal is to discover where we want to settle down ourselves to build a home a family and a community.

So, onJanuary 10, 2024, we left our home in Japan and hit the road.

Taking just a backpack each, we intend to travel throughout the Americas, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Europe and Oceania, all while spending as little as possible and learning as much as we can.

To reduce costs and get to know each country better, we are avoiding travel by plane when possible, instead giving preference to buses, vans, ferries, trains and even hitchhiking. As for accommodations and food, we avoid fancy hotels, resorts and luxury restaurants and try to live closer to the local population and culture. When we can, we do work exchanges for accommodation and food or do couchsurfing.

It has been quite the transition but after 6 months it has started to feel almost normal.

We will share our experiences here and hope that, in some way, our trip encourages other people to get out of there comfort zone and see more of this crazy beautiful world.

HOW IT ALL BEGAN?

It’s difficult to define when exactly the plans for this trip began, but as children we were both always interested in seeing the world.

JULI:
I grew up watching a lot of movies and TV series. My father is a movie lover. For as long as I can remember, the TV was always on at home, showing something interesting. For me, that little square box was the first contact I had with another world. Once I understood that I could go and discover the world myself and see it with my own eyes, instead of through a lense, my desire and journey to travel the world began. Since I started my first job at 17 as a waitress, I have been saving money to travel. I traveled to India and Macau and I was hooked. Even while studying hard for my nursing exams, I kept working to pay for my graduation trip to Europe and was able to visit Italy, France, Monaco, and Spain. After that I started working as a nurse at a hospital in Japan. I had already decided that I would only work there for few years, to save up enough money and go out into the world trip backpacking. It was always my dream.

TREVOR:
I have always had a passion for world history and learning more about the different cultures and and places around us. I grew up moving around a bit and spent my school days in both Califórnia and Hawaii. I was lucky enough to experience this odd and beautiful mix of cultures which pushed me to explore even more. I went overseas for the first time when i was 15 on an exchange program to Japan. From then on i knew that i wated to experience life in another country and explore even more. In university, i studied world history and lived with and met so many wonderful people from all over the planet. It became clear to me that i neede to leave the US to know what the world really had to offer. After graduating from university I decided to move to Japan first. I thoroughly enjoyed it, however, I knew that I wanted to see more of the world before deciding where to settle down.

While both of us were pursuing our dreams of seeing the world we happened to find each other. We were both visiting Thailand from our homes on opposites of Japan. That moment would end up changing the course of our lives.

Even though we lived far apart, we stayed in touch and stayed together. After nearly 2 years of long distance we finally reunited for good and began our life as a couple. We both still wanted to travel the world but that dream was put on pause while we worked to save money and built a comfortable home in Hamamatsu, Japan.

In September of 2021, during the height of the pandemic, we finally got married. That’s when our plans for the future really began to take form.

We both knew that we wanted to live a simple life in the countryside, surrounded by nature, animals, and fruit on our own peice of land. We knew that we would have to find a place to build this life soon if we wanted to start a family. The race was on.

Japan was always the first option, since we both had plenty of experience living there. However, with our backgrounds in other countries and cultures we really couldn’t be sure that it was the best choice for us. We thought about exploring Portugal and Brazil and we spent a few months visiting family in California and Hawaii but we soon realized that it would be impossible to decide without seeing what the rest of the world had to offer.

That’s when we began to seriously consider our world trip.

AROUND THE WORLD

Given the work culture in Japan, it would be nearly impossible to see everything we wanted to in short separate trips. Therfore we began planning to quite our jobs. We decided on a few countries that we needed to see to learn about the kind of environment and culture we wanted to settle down into and then built a route on top of that. Knowing we would need to be flexible, we planned out an outline of our journey that would bring us all over the world.

Starting in Japan, we would head south into Southeast Asia and experience the warm tropical environments there and see if we could handle the heat. From there we would explore Central and South Asia and, traveling by land as much as possible, make our way through the middle east to the Mediterranean. From there we planned to head south into Africa and eventually loop back up north into Europe. Then we would cross the Atlantic into South America and come back north overland to California, finally crossing over back home to Japan and completing our journey.

Obviously, this would take years, and events in the world and our lives were sure to derail our plans at any point, but it was enough to get started. We began researching and putting together our gear and making arrangements for visas and all the other bureaucratic burdens of modern life.

Finally, we were ready to take off in January of 2024.

HOW ITS GOING

Though we have only been on the move for a few months now we have already seen and done so much and met so many wonderful people. Already our trip has started to take on a life of its own and our goals have become clearer.

If you would like to join us on our journey to discover our new home and learn more about the world we live in, you can follow along here on our site, subscribe to our YouTube channel, follow us on Instagram, and support us on Patreon.

In the meantime, thank you for reading and we will see you at our next destination!

Tchau!
– Juli & Trevor