Welcome to our travel diary, a written testament about our thoughts, impressions and experiences during our around-the-world travels. Our names are Irena and Igor and we come from a tiny little country called Slovenia somewhere in the middle of Europe.

The idea about doing a trip like this has been in our heads for quite some time and we always contemplated whether we should do it or not. But this idea finally started to become real when Irena gave Igor an unusual gift for his 30th birthday – a one year working holiday visa for New Zealand. She decided to apply online through New Zealand’s immigration office website “just to see what happens”, like she normally does (Igor of course did not have a clue about this), and surprisingly got them visas. Timing was critical since this was the first time that Slovenians were able to apply for the 100 visas that were offered to our country and you had to be aged between 18 and 30 to be eligible for it. So a couple of days before Igor turned 30 the confirmation e-mail came through and this was it – we now HAD to go. :)

So on January 4th we packed our bags and hopped on a plain for South America. The rough plan is to first travel across South America for four months and come to New Zealand before the end of April 2011 (since there’s a one year deadline to enter New Zealand starting from the day you get your visa), stay there up to one year, maybe find some work, and then continue on to Australia, South-East Asia, China, India, … who knows.

And why are we doing this? Well, we always loved to travel. We did it before – we travelled in Europe, Turkey, Cuba, USA, Thailand, Argentina, we’ve even been to New Zealand twice already. But we practically always only had our three weeks of vacation time available for the trips and we hated that. We also wanted to “break the routine”, get away from office work and all the monotonies of everyday life. So we decided to take a year off (well it’ll probably turn out to be more than a year). This meant making some sacrifices like quitting jobs, leaving our friends and family, our great little apartment and our lovely cat behind, and spending all our savings for this.

So call us crazy, bold, lucky, stupid, smart, … we don’t really care. We want to do this – to see the world through our own eyes, meet new people, try out new things… It’s no epic journey, we’re simply doing this for fun. :)

We hope you’ll enjoy reading our blog!

Thanks to:

• Besso & KruH for putting together this blog site on such a short notice. Check some of their really creative and high-tech stuff on Appoteka.com.
• Our friends and family for being supportive and true to our cause. We miss you dearly!
• Marjeta and Aleš for spending long hours with us discussing all the travel necessities. They did a similar trip two years ago, this is their blog site – http://alesmarjeta.blogspot.com/.
• Our great (former) work colleagues at Studio Moderna for their really nice going-away gifts. And to our bosses for not hating us but being completely cool with it, since we both resigned on the same day. :)
• To everybody that’s following this blog site and not being too jealous about it – it’s nothing to it really, if you want to do something like this, just DO IT.