Travelling couple make incredible 'elusive' find on outback road during epic world tour
The young couple left their 'normal jobs' and now say the whole world is their garden. Here's how they do it.
It started with a simple pre-Covid road trip to Croatia, but for Nick and partner Mathilde, it ended up being the start of a life-changing, globe-trotting tour to see just about every corner of the Earth.
"On our way down we just enjoyed it so much we thought, 'Why don't we just keep going?'.
"We didn’t even know what overlanding meant back then," Nick told Yahoo News Australia.
The couple, both 31, had "normal jobs" in Paris and Brussels but did some research and soon decided to throw caution to the wind.
"We thought it would cost a lot and that's why everyone does it at retirement," Nick said. "We noticed it wasn't as expensive as we thought it would be if we lived in the car, cooked in the car and didn't go to restaurants or hotels and stuff like that."
They are now 'overlanding' their way around the entire globe — a style of self-reliant adventure travel to remote destinations where the journey itself is considered the primary goal. The couple have just finished the Australian leg of their world tour after travelling our dusty continent for the past nine months.
While the distances in Australia took some getting used to, "there are so many good places to see," Nick said. "Tasmania, Cape York, Karijini, Gibbs River Road, N'gari, Alice Springs and Uluru, Esperance, Ningaloo Reef and the Daintree rainforest, those have probably been our favourite places."
Speaking to Yahoo from Darwin, they had just put their truck in a shipping container bound for Dili, East Timor, where they'll pick it up after a jaunt through New Zealand over Christmas and the New Year period.
Couple fund trip with social media to tune of about $60,000 a year
According to Nick, the endless travel costs including everything from shipping and insurance works out to be roughly $60,000 a year in expenses, with that being an average over time between poorer and wealthier countries.
Nick and Mathilde are able to fund a vast majority of their costs by sharing their journey on social media and monetising the accounts. They left with some savings and about a thousand followers on Instagram, and just a couple hundred on YouTube. But have since grown that significantly to help pay their way, with their content "taking off" when they were travelling in Alaska.
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"Today, we're practically at 90 per cent funded by our social media," Nick said. "Which is a lot of work, it's probably 20 hours each per week of work ... but it doesn't stop us from travelling."
What was originally conceived as a three-year trip has now blown out to five years, simply because there is simply no need to rush it. "It's honestly just so much fun," Nick said.
Travellers thrilled by find on outback road
When it comes to entering a new country, the couple typically have a bucket list of places and local wildlife they want to see. And in their last remaining weeks in Australia, they were lucky enough to finally see the only one that had to that point eluded them — the thorny devil.
"This spiky little lizard was nearly invisible against the tarmac, but there it was—our final animal sighting," they wrote online after luckily spotting one while driving.
"We spent the following days searching the trails at King’s Canyon and the roads of the desert in search of another one. But as far as we’re concerned, that was the only thorny devil in the Outback."
'The world is our garden'
After starting in North America, the pair have been on the road for nearly three years. From January they will head through Asia before eventually beginning the "third leg" of their world tour through Africa.
A big motivation for the ambitious trip was the advice of elder relatives and family members not to have any regrets in life.
These days they mainly speak with friends they've met along the way. "Our friends (back home) don’t bother us so much, they don’t really write to us so often," Nick said.
Previously Mathilde worked with the United Nations while Nick worked in start-ups. When they complete their world tour, he's not sure if he'll ever go back to a regular job.
For now, "the whole world is our garden," he said.
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