Ольга i Jordi

Since we noticed that our travel blog is traveling the world faster than us, here is our short introduction to those visitors who find us through friends, links or (very unlikely!) search engines.

We are Olga and Jordi. I am Olga, originally from Belarus, and Jordi is from Spain. Our countries are very different in terms of how they are integrated into the "global scene". Belarus is a country which even immigration officers and consulate employees around the world have never heard of, a country which being a dictatorship is at the very bottom of the list of countries ranked by their visa agreements, a country the citizens of which can change their passport only inside its borders. Spain - well, you all know Spain - is a country which even people at the remotest villages in the world know without fail (mostly due to its unprecedented football performance last year), a country at the very top of the above-mentioned visa list, a country the citizens of which can change their passports anywhere else in the world in a matter of a couple of weeks. For the purpose of this round-the-world-trip we both embraced the challenges of my passport (which in essence means that we both have to go to all the embassies to get my visas) and it's been working out pretty fine so far, except that my passport pages finished in Asia, so for us to continue to South America, Belarus became a compulsory (although welcome) destination of this trip (Jordi has already changed his passport without any problem :-).

We met in the Netherlands at a salsa course in 2007, got married in 2009 and in 2010 left our comfortable life back in Holland and with our modest one year savings set out on this "trip around the world". We both have always loved traveling and at some stage started to get a bit frustrated by the 2-week vacation limit of our trips. Eventually we stopped complaining and started saving... and here we are!

The slogan of this trip being "when around the world, do as the locals do", as we travel country after country, we try to soak in as much of the local culture as possible. By now having seen all those "biggest Buddha statues of the world", and "biggest temples of the world", and "oldest jungles of the world", and "highest mountains of the world" etc etc (and all of it - only in Asia!), we are noticing that this trip is becoming less and less about "seeing", and more and more about "experiencing". Having started with quite a fixed itinerary, we keep adding things to the list, but lately instead of places we are adding experiences, with some of the most exciting ones still to come.

A few notes regarding this website: the photos are uploaded in quite a small resolution, as we chose for performance rather than look. Each post usually includes a lot of photos taken with our travel zoom Canon SX210 and unfortunately we don't have the time to process them as updating this travel diary is secondary to travelling which still keeps us really busy. With images our main intention is to maintain a kind of photo chronicle of what we saw in the countries we travelled. As to text, this is our travel diary and most of our posts are "country reports" (so even with some stories, one paragraph per place we visited and some general remarks about the country they do get pretty long), so unless you are curious, you don't need to read it - you can get an impression of what it was like by looking through the pictures.

We never really planned this travel website to be anything else rather than our personal diary and a way to share some photos with friends and family, so for those of you who end up on this website through key words, links or by mistake, our only ambition is to be a living proof of how it's possible to travel this amazing world on a really small budget and how the best things of the trip usually come free of charge!

If you have any questions, suggestions or comments, you can contact us at info@jooiworld.com.

Cheers, Olga and Jordi