Travel Interview with Career Gappers

This week we are featuring Alex and Lisa from Career gappers.

Here’s our travel interview with Alex and Lisa from Career Gappers. Alex and Lisa are passionate about travelling the world as a couple and blogs on their amazing travel experiences from around the world. They quit their london based ( 9-5) jobs to take a career break and travel the world. They are quite happy with this as this career break travel adventure has immensely transformed their lives. To know more about how they did it & what they do to travel the world- do check out their website .

1) Introduce yourself and your blog to our readers.

We are Alex and Lisa from Career Gappers. Through our blog, we aim to inspire and equip people to take a career break and travel the world. We believe that everyone should take time out of their career to travel. That’s what we did, and it has transformed our lives. By leaving our jobs for a year and exploring the world, we were able to challenge ourselves and develop in ways that would otherwise have been impossible.

It’s a common misconception that travelling for long periods is detrimental to your career. We want to show from our own experience that the lessons you learn from travelling can be a great asset to your career development.

With Capper Gappers, we are building a platform to support people who want to make the idea of a travel career break become a reality. We feature articles and resources about all phases of taking a travel career break, from the initial decision, to saving and planning, to the challenge of finding a job when you return.

We chose the name ‘Career Gappers’ because we want to build a community of like-minded people. This is a new venture – we launched in July 2018 – but we’ve got big ambitions for the future. We want to promote a positive message about travel from a career perspective, and encourage people to live their lives differently.

You can follow the Career Gappers journey on Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn.

2)What’s your style of travel?

We think of ourselves as ‘in between’ travellers. We don’t spend big, but we’re not on the tightest of budgets either. We prioritize experiences over comfort, and so we always look out for unique activities, and we’re big on trying out local food and drink. We usually look to keep our costs down when it comes to transport and accommodation.

We are always open to different places and environments. We don’t easily pigeon-hole as ‘beach people’ or ‘city people’ – we vary our travels as much as we can. But we do love to get outdoors, and we’re probably at our happiest when we’re hiking in mountainous landscapes.

3)Which place are you from? What are the must visit places in your country?

We are based in London, and we were both born in the UK. We would encourage anyone who visits our country to venture north. Many visitors only see London, Bath and Stonehenge, which are all great, but there’s so much more to see and do up north!

Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow and Edinburgh are amazing cities full of energy and culture, and you’ll find some breathtaking natural scenery in the valleys of Wales, the lochs and mountains of Scotland, and the lakes of northern England.

4)What are the top three posts on your blog?

• One of our favourite articles is a piece Lisa wrote on six steps to make your travel career break a reality. We love this because it is at the very core of what we do. The article explores how you can let go of the preconceptions about career breaks, and the practical actions you can take to prepare for travelling.
• We also write about destinations, and our favourite place we’ve visited to date is Patagonia, a huge region spanning across Chile and Argentina on the southern tip of South America. It’s a spectacular landscape of glaciers, mountains, granite towers, lakes and forests. After spending a month there ourselves, Alex put together a complete Patagonia itinerary and travel guide.
• Finally, we also compile lots of useful information about travel money and budgeting. Throughout our travels, we keep a detailed record of everything we spend. We’re using this data to produce resources for other travellers to plan with. Our foremost article on this breaks down all of our costs for taking a one-year career break to travel the world.

5)What is the message that you have for all aspiring travel bloggers?

If you are completely new to blogging, just start writing about your experiences. Blogs are never perfect, and everyone develops and improves over time. Even the most successful travel bloggers started small and learnt from their mistakes as they went.

You won’t necessarily find your niche or nail your style straight away, but it’s fine to let it evolve. The important thing is to constantly measure and analyse. Keep a close eye on what’s working and what isn’t, and make adjustments accordingly.

Also, network with other bloggers. There are tons of Facebook and Meetup groups out there, and these communities are an invaluable support when you’re getting started.

6)Do you have any funny or strange travel stories?

We have a lot! One bizarre incident occurred when we were camping in a village near Fox Glacier, in a rural part of New Zealand’s South Island. At about 2am, we were awoken in our tent by the terrifying sound of a loud siren nearby. It sounded like the sirens that were used in World War II to alert people about air strikes.

We were petrified – we had no idea what the siren was for, and assumed the worst. Was it a tsunami warning? We thought it must have something to do with natural disasters, as New Zealand is prone to them. We saw other people in the campsite creeping tentatively out of their tents as well.

Nothing seemed to happen though, and after a while the siren stopped. In the morning I asked the attendant at reception what it was about. They told me the very straightforward explanation. In rural New Zealand it isn’t feasible to have a full-time paid fire service, so instead there is a team of local volunteers. Whenever there is an incident to be dealt with, however small, the volunteers are alerted by the sirens, and middle-of-the-night episodes are not uncommon. We wish we’d known that beforehand!

7)How does travel make you feel? Can you share with us 3 top insights that you gained from your travels.

Travel is incredibly liberating. Leaving the nine-to-five routine and becoming the master of your own journey gives you a completely different perspective of decision-making in life. More than anything, we love the freedom of being able to choose what to do in a day when you wake up, or where you will go next.

Travel has also told us that in our previous lives, we had way too much stuff! When you’re on the road, you learn to get by with very little. Before our travel career break we put lots of our belongings into storage, but when we returned a year later we threw a lot of it away anyway or gave it to charity, because we just didn’t need it.

Finally, travelling teaches you to be much more open to different cultures and perspectives. In our own little corners of the world, we’re fed information in a very particular way, and life just isn’t that simple. Travelling enables you to see the world through different people’s eyes.

8)Name your top 5 bucket list travel destinations and why?

There are so many places we still want to see, but these are probably the frontrunners:

● Chilean Patagonia. I know I mentioned Patagonia before, and we have already been there, but there’s so much of it we didn’t get to see the first time. We want to go again and cruise on the Chilean Fjords, and take a road trip up the Carretera Austral.
● Colombia. One of the big regrets of our first travel career break was that we didn’t make it to the northern parts of South America. Colombia’s cities and jungles look amazing, and we hear that the country’s people are the friendliest in the world.
● Japan. There are many reasons for this, but the main one is sushi! We are big sushi lovers and we often make our own in London, but we would love to try the best in the world in its place of origin.
● Croatia. We have visited a lot of Europe, but we’re yet to make it to the south-east region. Croatia’s islands and cities look mesmerizing. We’re also scuba diving enthusiasts, and this is reputedly one of the best places to do it in Europe.
● West Papua. Did we just mention scuba diving? The Raja Ampat Islands of West Papua are often cited as the world’s most spectacular diving location. So we couldn’t miss it off this list.

9)Where do you prefer to stay – hotel, hostel or AirBnB etc? Why?

We love staying in hostels. They’re cheap, but more importantly they’re great for bringing travellers together. Meeting people around the world has been one of the most enriching aspects of travel for us.

We particularly love the hostels that make an effort to build a social atmosphere, without necessarily being party hostels. We stayed in one in Slovakia recently that hosted quiz nights and meal nights. It’s such a simple thing to do, but it creates lasting memories for people. We’ve met travellers in hostels who are now friends for life.

10) As travellers we all love collecting souvenirs. What do you love collecting?

Lisa has been amassing a collection in wristbands. She gets a new one in every country we visit. These are great souvenirs when you’re travelling long-term because they hardly weigh anything and they’re easy to carry.

11)When do you find time to blog on your travels? How long do you usually take to finish a blog post?

It’s always a challenge to manage your time when blogging on the road and make sure you’re allowing enough space to enjoy the journey as well. We tend to get up early and spend time blogging in the morning around breakfast, and then again towards the end of the day, just before dinner.

We also make use of scheduling tools to plan ahead. We’ll often try to stack up several posts for days in advance so we can take some time off.

It can take anything from a couple of hours to a few days to produce a blog post from start to finish. If it’s a big cornerstone article that’s several thousand words long, then it can even take up to a week. But for a standard post of 1,000-2,000 words, it’s usually around a day to do the research, writing, editing, images and other work that goes around it.

12)What’s your favourite cuisine? Do you like trying out local food when you travel to places? If yes, what’s your favourite dish you’ve tried?

Trying new food is one of our favourite things about travel. We’ve had lots of incredible cuisine around the world, but our favourite is probably Vietnamese. We spent the last three weeks of our one-year travel career break in Vietnam, and spent a lot of that time eating pho and bun cha!

As we love a good steak, Argentina was also fantastic. The quality of the meat in Buenos Aires was like nothing we’ve tasted anywhere else in the world.

If we had to pick a single dish, however, we would go for ceviche in Peru. It consists of raw fish piece marinated in citrus, chilli and coriander. The best we found was in a restaurant called Punto Azul in the Miraflores district of Lima.

13) What are the apps or resources that have been an absolute life-saver during travels or planning your trip?

We use lots of apps for travel, but one of the most useful is maps.me. It’s a bit like Google Maps, but you can download maps for different destinations that will then work offline. This got us out of a lot of tricky situations when we were lost with no wifi.

Another that we use is Revolut for managing our travel money. It’s a prepaid card that works all over the world, and has no charge on withdrawals up to a specified monthly limit.

Travel Interview conducted by COUPLE TRAVEL TALES (Achu & Unni)!

Those who wish  to participate in our travel interview series ,please feel free to contact us via email at coupletraveltale@gmail.com .