Who are we?

Pippa Robinson is English.  This means she is prone to eccentric adventures, and needs her nice hot cup of tea at least twice a day.  After studying French and Business at university, she lived life in the fast lane for over six years in the City of London, most of it running recruiting and training for an investment bank.  She loved her job and could never imagine any other kind of life.

Eric Gleason is American.  What's more, he's a Californian.  Need we say more.  After a few years in the Army and an MBA, he also lived life in the fast lane with the same investment bank, spending several years each in New York and London.  He loved his job too, but often dreamed of getting away...

One day, whilst cruising along in said fast lane, we caught sight of one another.  Shortly thereafter, we decided to make for the exit-ramp.  Within 10 months of meeting, we were married, unemployed, and chugging out of London on a train, bound for Siberia.

In September 2000, after 18 months on the road in Asia and Oceania, we added an extra passenger when our daughter Amber was born.  After four months to prepare and immunize, we took a very deep breath and headed off together on our first family vacation, to Latin America.  It went swimmingly.

Where are we going, and why?

We hope to visit as many developing countries as we can in a 2-3 year period ... or for as long as our money lasts.  This means potentially some 40 nations in Asia, Oceania, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East.

The reason we want to do this is simply the desire to explore as much of the world as we can in our lifetimes.  Enriching our experience of life through travel is, for us, a primary goal, not an option.  But we knew that work, kids, and eventually age would eventually make experiencing much of the developing world more difficult, particularly given the independent way in which we prefer to travel.  Our solution was to seize the opportunity whilst we had it.

Although our original objective was simply to cover as much of the developing world as we could in about a year and a half, over time we have become more ambitious.  We now consider 2-3 years as the minimum period required to even superficially visit all the places we want to see (we will undoubtedly have to save some things for future trips), and our objectives have now expanded to include:

How do we travel, and with what?

We learnt from some of our previous travels that it is generally not possible to experience the best that developing countries have to offer from the well-appointed premises of a five-star hotel or air-conditioned tour bus.  This doesn't mean that the cheapest way is always the best; only that to make the most of our trip we do not want to be too insulated or inflexible.  At the same time, the responsibilities of parenthood have caused us to curtail our more adventurous tendencies; we now sleep exclusively in hotels.

We each travel with a backpack, containing:

In addition, Amber requires an extra two bags of her own, containing: