RESPONSIBLE TRAVEL MADE SIMPLE
Small changes can have a big impact. Responsible travel focuses on minimising our negative impacts and looking for ways to contribute positively to the places we go and people we meet.
WE'RE CHARLIE AND LUKE
In 2012, we left the UK with a backpack stuffed just with clothes and a camera and moved to Taiwan. It was our first travel adventure together and from then on we knew we were destined for a life of travel.
We started our travel blog from our little apartment in Taiwan to keep our families updated on our lives — the mountain hikes, black sand beaches, scooter drives through the rice paddies, steaming bowls of rice and night market mishaps. Our blog has grown and is now trusted by thousands as their source for responsible, sustainable travel guides.
Since Taiwan, we’ve adventured together in over 30 counties. We’ve lived out in the Costa Rican jungle, swum with whale sharks in Mexico, hiked the Portuguese coastline, safaried in South Africa, spent a weekend in the Amazon rainforest and explored countless cities together. Here’s to many more adventures!
In 2012, we left the UK with a backpack stuffed just with clothes and a camera and moved to Taiwan. It was our first travel adventure together and from then on we knew we were destined for a life of travel.
We started our travel blog from our little apartment in Taiwan to keep our families updated on our lives — the mountain hikes, black sand beaches, scooter drives through the rice paddies, steaming bowls of rice and night market mishaps. Our blog has grown and is now trusted by thousands as their source for responsible, sustainable travel guides.
Since Taiwan, we’ve adventured together in over 30 counties. We’ve lived out in the Costa Rican jungle, swum with whale sharks in Mexico, hiked the Portuguese coastline, safaried in South Africa, spent a weekend in the Amazon rainforest and explored countless cities together. Here’s to many more adventures!
CHARLIE
Travel and stories are my two greatest loves. There’s nothing better than waking up to the sounds of the jungle or opening the door to a blanket of mountain peaks and having that first coffee of the day.
I discovered my love of travelling at university when I was invited on a government funded trip to China for 3 weeks. I learned some patchy Mandarin and found my way around Shanghai, Beijing and up the Great Wall.
LUKE
When I was just two years old, my backpacker parents took me to Thailand. I’ve had a sense of adventure ever since and have scuba dived in the Red Sea, stayed in a treehouse in Laos and paraglided in Colombia.
I especially love the natural world and try to see as much of it as possible. From swimming with whale sharks to witnessing thousands of monarch butterflies migrating, wildlife brings so much wonder to the world.
RESPONSIBLE TRAVEL MADE SIMPLE
Back when we started our first blog in 2012, we never dreamed
that we would be travelling the world for over a decade.
Crank up the way-back-when machine and let us tell you about how we got to here. After six months of dating, we moved to Taiwan together in 2012 and became English teachers. That was a big plunge, but at the time it didn’t feel like it. We started our first travel blog, Strangers in Taiwan, and wrote about expat life in Taiwan. Living in Taiwan was an incredible learning experience for us and made us realise we wanted to be long-term travellers. When we left Taiwan, that’s what happened.
For us, travel is more than just a holiday, It’s a lifestyle choice and this is one reason why responsible, sustainable travel is so important to us. We travel slowly and house sit when we can so that we can experience local life in different countries, get off-the-beaten path, explore lesser known towns and neighbourhoods, eat where the locals eat and travel in a way which is as sustainable as possible.
We loved experiencing local life in Taiwan but we also wanted to see different places. We knew that an alternative travel lifestyle suited us and we knew that going slow was good for us too. We needed to work whilst travelling in order to fund our travels. We had a small amount of savings from our year teaching in Taiwan, but it wasn’t going to last long. We began researching slow travel options like house sitting, short-term apartment rentals and off-season travel and looked for lesser known destinations with lower living costs. This led us to travel Vietnam, Poland and Central America.
Travelling consciously and responsibly is important to us. For us, sustainable travel means being mindful of the impact your travel has on the environment, local communities and wildlife. The goal of our travel blogging is to help people travel more responsibly. This means mitigating negative impacts on the environment, engaging only in ethical wildlife tourism, supporting local people and communities, and protecting local culture and history.
We love house sitting. It’s meant we can travel for longer periods of time and lets us experience local life. We’ve house sat in some amazing local neighbourhoods that we never would have got to know otherwise. We have been genuinely touched by the kindness and generosity of the expats we’ve house sat for. Not to mention that we’ve had some beautiful animals to look after! So far, we’ve house sat in Costa Rica, Panama, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Mexico and the UK.
We have been vegetarian for as long as we can remember and travelling didn’t change that. Vegetarian travel is part of our commitment to sustainable travel and looking after the environment. After all, the UN have said a plant-based diet is one of the biggest ways we can reduce climate change. Some people reckon that vegetarian travel means you can’t enjoy all the local and traditional foods of a country, but we’re here to show you otherwise. We’ve learned so much about different kinds of vegetarian cuisine on our travels and it has made us much better cooks too.
We work full-time for a remote-working digital marketing agency while we travel. We’re not full-time travel bloggers and we’re not living off of our savings either. We’re fortunate that our day jobs mean we can work from anywhere in the world as long as there is a decent wifi connection. We’re careful with our money and keep meticulous track of our travel budgets too ;)
We like to travel over long periods of time but when we’re not travelling, our home base is in Brighton. Brighton is Luke’s hometown and it’s a liberal city with delicious vegetarian restaurants, independent coffee shops, close to great walking routes in the South Downs and is close to London airports (essential for travellers like us!)
And here we are. Charlie on Travel has grown into a sustainable, travel blog read by thousands! We’re proud to say Charlie on Travel has been recognised as a top UK travel blog, a go-to source of sustainable travel advice and used by thousands to plan their next travel adventure.