After meeting our first guests for “World Traveler Series” Emma & Trevor, I am excited for you guys to meet our second guest PAUL RYKEN.
Please Introduce yourself
My name is Paul RYKEN and together with my wife, Sandra ROSENAU, I am a full-time traveler and digital nomad. We run a website called Minimalist Journeys, where we help others with tips and advice around simple living and sustainable travel.
How long have you been on the road and how it all started?
We have been location-independent since September 2016. We both had well-paying corporate careers, myself as product manager for an international IT company, Sandra as management consultant for Australia’s largest financial institution. But we realized that our comfortable, middle-class life in Sydney wasn’t really what we wanted.
After a three month backpacking trip around the world in 2012, we slowly embarked on a life-changing journey: from assessing our values and discovering minimalism to a life on the road full of amazing and humbling experiences. So far, we spent a year in the Americas and experienced a year of #Vanlife in my home country New Zealand. This year, we are exploring Europe.
What was your first trip ever and when?
When I was in the New Zealand Army, we were sent to the Cook Islands as part of a military exercise for a month in 1987. We slept in Army tents at the edge of the International Airport runway and participated in joint exercises with other Pacific countries.
The best place you have been to and why?
When you return to a country three times, you know it must be special and worth visiting, and this is the case with Cuba. I had started to learn Salsa from 2007 and wanted to visit the country where it had originated. I visited Cuba for the first time in 2009, and again with Sandra in 2012 and 2017. Each time, I have visited different cities and towns, but also some old familiar ones such as Trinidad. Cuba has changed over time, but the people are the same. They are friendly, welcoming, family-orientated. I love being about to dance with the Cubans in the bars, clubs and on the streets. Music is everywhere.
What was your scariest travel moment?
Needing to catch a red-eye flight from Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, we took a taxi to get us to the airport, about 30km away. That probably was the scariest ride we ever had, though some bus rides in the Ecuadorian Andes come pretty close.
The tires were bald, the driver stunk of alcohol and appeared to be aged at least 80 in the good light. But the worst part was his reckless driving and excessive speed. He even swerved into oncoming traffic, looking for his mobile phone when it rang. We are not religious, but we both prayed that morning, and our knees were shaking when we finally arrived, in one piece, at the airport.
How are you documenting your trips?
We document our journey in a number of ways.
We write articles based on what we have seen and done in each country and publish those on our website.
We also share an interesting fact we learned, something really cool (or cringe-worthy) we happened to come across on our travels or a link we think might be useful via our Minimalist Journeys on Facebook and Instagram.
At a personal level, we use Tripit.com to store our ever-changing itineraries. We share it with our close family and friends, so they know where we are on any given night. I also have Google Maps Location History turned on. Photos we take on our smartphones also have GPS coordinates embedded. So we can always recall where we were/what we did on a certain day.
If you enjoyed Paul & Sandra’s adventures, make sure you check their website and let me know if you have any questions for them.