• Made in Holland

    These past few weeks were busy, very stressful. Preparations, our house was sold, the moving, a rescheduled flight, our missing passports… but now it’s finally time to go. Our friends take us to the trainstation and say goodbye for a long long time. We hug five times, six… one more, and wave each other off like in a dramatic movie scene. While we are in the train with my daughter and son-in-law, it still feels like a dream. Pinch me, am I awake?! Halfway through the trip, my daughter gets off and my brother enters the train. I hug my little girl for as long as possible and when the train doors close, I’m having a lump in my throat, for the first time I feel emotional. We wave with a big smile until we no longer see each other.…

  • Our route

    We have been dreaming about this for years, so we’ve had a lot of time to study the theory. Topography has become our main subject with weather prediction as a second. The last thing we want is to get into a hurricane season or a heat wave, so some planning is necessary. Eventhough we have a global route, we do not want to get stuck in a plan, and so we’ll only put a dot on the map after we’ve been there… Connecting dots… We’ll tell you what this awesome global route contains: We’ve started in Cape Town, roadtripping through South Africa and moved through Mozambique, Zimbabwe and crossed Zambia by train to Tanzania where we had some awesome adventures. Then we crossed the blue waters to the Seychelles for a relaxing week, we made an extraordinairy roadtrip through Madagascar, a week of hiking on La Réunion…

  • Our packinglist

    Perhaps the most discussed topic in Casa di TravelDNA before we left: what will we take with us? During a vacation of two or three weeks, we usually carry a backpack of about 6 kilos. For our worldtrip this is not realistic, so we will travel with about 10 kilos per person. Unfortunately, this means we can’t always take our luggage as carry on. Traveling lightweight has it’s pros and cons. Apart from saving a lot of check-in fees with cheap airlines, it’s very relaxed, your whole body is grateful and that minimalistic life does something to your brain. And yes, there is a downside. You’ll have to make strict choices what you can and cannot bring. Your laptop, a range of Lonely Planets and that extra pair of shoes… choices choices. Well-considered and unanimous, we decided to bring only…

  • Passport gate

    After we applied for a visa at the Mozambican embassy in Brussels four weeks ago, our passports were returned by registered mail. The package turned out to arrive in the Netherlands, however, addressed to a wrong (non-existent) house number and therefore: return to sender. We had already planned to drive to Brussels last Tuesday, but unfortunately, something went wrong at the distribution center in Brussels so the package was sent back to the non-existing address in the Netherlands. Again. Drama, I say. Error, says the Belgian B-post, who cannot do anything because the package is back in the Netherlands. Calling with B-post and calling with our Dutch PostNL, but no matter how friendly they are, there seems to be no one who can free the package from his infinite drama. It should be easy to solve, but no, our worst…