Hey friends! We are Alesha (Lesh) and Jarryd (Jazza), a couple of young Australians who are addicted to adventure travel. We’ve been exploring the world together for over 9 years, and have decided to take our current mission to a whole new level!
Want to know more about us? Then check out our about page and follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
We met in a hostel in Vancouver, Canada in 2008, and spent the next 3 years travelling around the country, living in a campervan, driving to Newfoundland and back, making bases in Revelstoke and Montreal, and falling in love more and more with each other.
After that we booked one-way tickets to Central America and spent just under a year wandering more-or-less aimlessly around there. In 2012 we headed back to Australia to pay off the debt we had accumulated, and made plans for the next adventure.
In 2014 we set out on an ambitious goal to travel from Thailand to South Africa without flying. Originally we expected this to take us 3 years total, with our style of slow travel and trying immerse ourselves in every culture we come across expectedly taking time.
After two years we finally crossed the Asian continent! We spent 14 months in South East Asia, and riding motorbikes for 10 of those months. Then it was through China for four months, with a few detours to Hong Kong and Macau. Our plans changed (as usual) and suddenly we found ourselves travelling across Mongolia over two months via hitchhiking, bus, horse and camel.
Then it was time to tackle intrepid Central Asia and the magical Silk Road. We found ourselves in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, jumped on a cargo ship and sailed across the Caspian Sea to Azerbaijan (an 18 hour journey that ended up taking 96 hours). Finally it was through Georgia and into Turkey, where we crossed the Bosphorus Strait and officially entered Europe.
We’ll be honest – we were exhausted. Travelling the way we did, for as long as we did, to the places we went to, was amazing. But at the same time we were running an online business (this blog), which was growing larger every week. China proved to be difficult for us on a personal level, and we ended up having strains on our relationship. Not ideal when you’re with each other 24/7 and have no close friends or family around to let off steam with.
If you want to know more about it, we wrote our most personal (and widely read post) here: Behind The Scenes.
After taking some time apart we met back up, moved to Thailand for 6 weeks, got bored, booked one-way flights to Germany and spent the summer of 2016 hanging out in Eastern Europe.
We flew home when summer ended, and in October 2016 we finally got married after 8 years together.
Needing some time to work on the business we moved back to Thailand after the wedding, managed to last 2.5 months, then jumped on another one-way flight that took us all the way to Argentina. We travelled down through Patagonia, spent 11-days in Antarctica, overlanded all the way to the Atacama Desert, and then ended up back in Argentina. We overlanded through Brazil and into the Peruvian Amazon.
After that we flew the Galapagos Islands, spent 3 weeks cruising around there, flew to Ireland, picked up a campervan and spent three weeks driving around the Emerald Isle.
During some random internet research we found cheap flights to Iran, booked them immediately, and spent a whole month backpacking around what quickly became one of our favourite countries with no plans, no itinerary and no guide.
2018 was a different year for us. We decided to spend the first half of the year based in Sydney, Australia, focusing on health, community and business. It was a great decision, and we did fit in a cheeky 5-week trip to New Zealand in there as well as some road trips around the state of New South Wales.
In August of that year we headed back to Kyrgyzstan for one of our most challenging and rewarding experiences ever – we organised, operated and led two successful adventure and photography tours around the country!
6 weeks in Central Asia ended and we flew back to Canada to work with the national tourism board there. We spent almost two months in the country that ignited this travel bug, then flew down to Chile again to embark on a 14-day photography symposium to South Georgia, the fascinating subantarctic island.
As soon as that finished we headed to Peru and backpacked around some places we missed on our first trip there, crossed into Bolivia, drove around the salt flats, then landed in Canada for a week of snowboarding before flying home for Christmas.
Which brings us to the start of 2019. What will this year bring us? Well to start with we’re heading back to Canada for a winter trip with the tourism board again, then we’ll be making Sydney a base again for a few months while we figure out our long-term plans.
Our goal is to bring our NOMADasaurus concept of promoting sustainable, long-term adventure travel with us across the globe, using photography, journalism and video as our tools for storytelling. By continuing to write for this site, and other publications we freelance for, we aim to entertain, inspire and educate along the way by documenting our first-hand experiences.
There is nothing set in concrete on this adventure. No confirmed itinerary, no definite mode of transport, no schedule to follow. We will travel free and easy, open to all worthwhile distractions that present themselves to us during the journey.
Join us as we embark on this truly epic adventure!