Travel stories and destination guides
Real places, real costs, and the routes we’d actually repeat. Every story here comes from a trip we’ve actually taken — browse by destination for honest tips to plan your own.
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Rodrigues First Impressions and Things to Know Before You Go
Rodrigues doesn’t happen by accident. It’s not on anyone’s route, it doesn’t appear in the rankings of the trendiest Indian Ocean destinations, and to get here you first have to land in Mauritius and then take a second flight — a small plane with just over a hundred seats, the kind of aircraft that reminds…
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Can You Swim in La Réunion? Lagoons, Rules & Safe Beaches
Can You Swim in La Réunion? Yes — here’s where, and the one rule to know before you go. Let’s start with the answer, because it’s the one you came for: yes, you can swim in La Réunion. People swim in the lagoon every day, all year round, with their kids, for hours. Shallow water,…
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La Réunion Beyond the Beaches: Wild East and Cirques
Many visitors end up spending most of their trip on the west coast. The beaches, coral reef, cafés and sunsets are all there, and it is easy to spend two weeks between Saint-Gilles and Saint-Leu and leave believing you have understood the island. We spent a month based on that same coast. What kept surprising…
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Rodrigues Island Travel Guide: What 3 Weeks Taught Us
Update — August 2026. This guide was written after our first three weeks on Rodrigues, in June. We came back in August for two more — five weeks in total. What follows still holds; what the second trip added is in the newer pieces linked below. Why Rodrigues Feels Like a Different Country Than Mauritius…
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Rodrigues Souvenirs: Local Products Worth Bringing Home
We didn’t come to Rodrigues looking for souvenirs. If anything, we’ve gotten pretty good at avoiding them — two backpacks and three months on the road don’t leave much room for fridge magnets nobody needs. But a few things here changed our mind. Not because they were marketed well — most of them aren’t marketed…
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9 Things to Do Before a Long-Haul Flight
A long flight never becomes pleasant. But it can become bearable — sometimes even productive — if you actually know how to prepare for it. At some point we got tired of arriving wrecked, so we built a pre-departure routine that’s completely changed how we land on the other side. Here’s what we always do…
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Kitesurfing in Rodrigues: Mourouk Lagoon Guide
Rodrigues isn’t a destination you’ll find in mainstream guides. Which is exactly why Mouruk is still what it is — a turquoise lagoon, steady wind, water flat as a mirror, and almost no one around. Among kitesurfers, it’s the kind of spot people mention quietly, mostly to people who already know. Mourouk: The Spot The…
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Île aux Chats Boat Day in Rodrigues: Snorkelling & Fish BBQ
There are days you don’t really plan. You leave in the morning with no particular expectations, the wind already strong enough to move anything that isn’t nailed down, and you come back in the evening with that kind of happy exhaustion that’s hard to explain but instantly recognisable. Our boat day in Rodrigues was exactly…
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Rodrigues Tortoise Reserve: A Morning with 12,000 Tortoises
I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting. Maybe something like a zoo — fences, signs, that slightly melancholy feeling some places have where animals exist purely to be looked at. But no. The land tortoise reserve in Rodrigues is something completely different. I realised that within the first five minutes, when a tortoise walked…
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La Réunion: First Impressions & What to Know Before You Go
The first thing that hits you: the scale We used an Airalo eSIM to stay connected from landing — no local SIM card hunting La Réunion is small on a map — about 2,500 square kilometres, roughly the size of a middling European city. But it doesn’t feel small. It feels enormous, in the way…
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What We’re Packing for 3 Months in the Indian Ocean (Réunion + Rodrigues)
There’s the kind of packing you do for a holiday and the kind you do when you’re actually going somewhere to live. They don’t look the same. We’re heading to the Indian Ocean for three months — La Réunion first, then Rodrigues for three weeks with family, then back to Réunion until September. This isn’t…
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Portugal Campervan Road Trip: The Route We Wish We’d Had
Some links in this article are affiliate links — if you book through them, we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. We only link to places and services we’ve actually used. Why Portugal Because it was reachable, still relatively affordable compared to the rest of Western Europe, and because someone…
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Courchevel From the Inside: What a Winter Season Actually Looks Like
There’s a version of Courchevel you see in magazines — immaculate slopes, dream chalets, people with three-thousand-euro skis and cashmere coats taking aperitivo at four in the afternoon. Then there’s the version you live when you work there. The two barely resemble each other. We did a winter season in Courchevel. Tom in front of…
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Van Life: Is It Actually Worth It? An Honest Guide for First-Timers
We’re going to be straight with you. Before we tried van life, we thought it would be one of two things: either the most romantic, life-changing experience we’d ever had — or a complete disaster involving a broken fridge, a flooded campervan, and a parking ticket somewhere along the Portuguese coast. The truth? It was…
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Working a Season in France: The Honest Truth
There’s a question we get asked constantly, in every comment section, every DM, every time we post a photo from somewhere beautiful: “But how do you actually afford it?” And the honest answer isn’t what people expect. We didn’t win the lottery. We don’t have rich parents. We didn’t build a six-figure Instagram account. We…
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Saint-Tropez: Where It Started
How we meet Neither of us planned it. We met in a restaurant kitchen in the middle of a summer season — the same long shifts, the same complaints, the same quiet corners found on days off. Something accumulated, and then it didn’t stop. We weren’t looking for a life change. We got one anyway.…
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Saint-Tropez Insider Guide: The Real Town Behind the Yachts
We lived and worked a full season in Saint-Tropez — the kind of season where you’re on your feet at 7am setting up terrace furniture before the first guests arrive, where you know which supermarket has the shortest queue on a Saturday, and where you learn very quickly that the Saint-Tropez the tourists see and…
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Lanzarote Off the Beaten Path: What the Tourist Guides Don’t Tell You
We almost didn’t go to Lanzarote. We thought it would be dry. Windy. Maybe beautiful, but not unforgettable. Just another island in the Atlantic. We were wrong — and four days later, we were already talking about going back. This isn’t a list of things to tick off. It’s the route we would follow again,…