Olá! My name is André and I was born in Lisbon, Portugal waaay back in the 1980s. To be perfectly honest with you, even I am not sure where my love for travelling comes from but I suspect it may have been influenced by the Tintin comics I worshipped as a teenager. I’ve always been a curious guy (nerdy, even) but truth is I didn’t start travelling until I was in my 20s, mostly with bands on tour.
I moved to London in 2007 and in 2010, after being forced to take time off because I was working far too much, I somehow ended up in New York City. The experience was so overwhelmingly good that I went back to the United States twice within the next 18 months. My life changed when I saw the Grand Canyon on one of those trips. It’s one of those immense places that really puts things into perspective, and I decided there and then I wouldn’t spend the rest of my life behind a desk working for someone else.
I saved a bunch of money over the following three years and in September 2014 set out on an 18-month round-the-world trip from Russia to Brazil, with 32 other countries in between. To say it was life-changing is a severe understatement. After that I went back to London but things wouldn’t quite be the same again as I’d constantly feel like something was missing. Particularly every time I came back from abroad. The post-holiday blues always hit me hard!
Then in late 2018 I decided I’d had enough and quit my job. I figured it was about time to focus on the writing and see if I could somehow rely on it as a source of income to travel full time. It wasn’t an easy decision to make, especially because you suddenly depend solely on your savings but I had to at least give it a go — the thirst for adventure so required.
I travelled for most of 2019 and was in India when the pandemic started, which resulted in a bunch of cancelled plans as I was forced to spend a 3-month lockdown in Kolkata before being able to return to Lisbon, where I ended up spending a year and a half. During that time I was not able to find my mojo to edit and publish the travel books I’d written and it wasn’t until I moved to Colombia for a few months in late 2021 that the creative juices started flowing again.
Despite all of that, the plan is still the same: to visit all 193 sovereign nations (plus a few others) and write about the adventures as I go along. I’m constantly hungry for visiting new places and trying to figure out the world around me. As I like to say, home is wherever I don’t stay for longer than two weeks. May it be like that for a very long time. Thanks for dropping by and tagging along!
André