About Phil & Michaela
There is probably no saying more true than “travel broadens the mind”. Each trip we make broadens our horizons and teaches us at least as much as any textbook could about people, places, cultures, history and of course cuisine. Our chosen style of travel wouldn’t suit everyone, and certainly not people of “our age” – we retired in 2019 – but the journeys we have taken so far are journeys of enlightenment, learning and experience. Our favourite journeys, pre-COVID at least, were backpacking holidays where we booked nothing but the flight, and set off in search of adventure and experience, never knowing where our next bed for the night would be. This way we meet and mix with the locals – we live amongst them, we eat their food, we drink in their bars, we try and do as the locals do. It is particularly satisfying for us to know that every penny we spend goes directly into the local economy and not into the hands of faceless international companies. Package holidays, particularly all-inclusive, would be our worst nightmare!
We are Phil & Michaela, both from the Midlands originally, now living near the sea in Kent. For some time we had written travel journals, then lots of people suggested we started a blog – well, no, just Michaela’s Mum actually. Our adventures pre blog took us to Dubrovnik, the Aeolian Islands, Montenegro, the islands of La Gomera, Gozo, Elba and Sicily, rural Turkey, cities as diverse as Zagreb, Amsterdam, Paris, Palermo, Thessaloniki, Marrakech, St Petersburg and Dar Es Salaam, to Greece, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Zanzibar and Estonia, just to name a few, each place bringing excitement and learning, and experience.
Highlights for us amongst those experiences are…… being invited in to join a party in a remote Turkish village, which turned out be a celebration of a young man’s accession to circumcision (!), living in the upstairs half of a private house on a Greek island, the collapsed Greek economy having forced the family to give up half their home , being befriended by Mangala and his family in Sri Lanka who, despite having very little, invited us into their home and laid on a positive feast of fresh food from the jungle around them, being walked by Johnson through the remote Tanzanian town of Magulo, a place too unfamiliar and unsettling for us to have walked through alone. Incidentally, Sri Lankan custom meant that, as guests, Mangala’s family couldn’t join us – we had to eat alone while they stood and watched, only eating their own after we had had our fill and left the home. Everywhere we meet good and kind people.
In Tallinn we were moved by The Museum Of Occupations, with its histories of human displacement on a major scale during WW2, resulting in a nation now harbouring an innate sadness over its lost identity. In Amsterdam, Ann Frank’s House brought her moving yet inspiring story to life, and, in Palermo, we were given the creeps by the catacombs with its bizarre array of preserved cadavers. Dog sled rides, live volcanoes, white water rafting, tombstone diving and elephant bathing have all featured. As for accommodation well, of course there have been some disasters, but if you are going to enjoy this type of adventure to the full, the disasters are soon forgotten.
Food travel is a huge part of our experience and no trip is complete without an odd experience or two! We have eaten Chips Mayai at a very dodgy street food stall at Stone Town market in Zanzibar, joined the locals eating curry and rice with our bare hands (well, one bare hand of course, very bad manners to use your left hand), and from the gourmet restaurants of Tallinn to king coconuts at the roadside in Sigiriya, from burek to cheese pie, from dodgy tagines to the outrageously huge portions served in Zabljak in the mountains of Northern Montenegro (order a steak, you get two!), sampling the local cuisine is one of the essential sense heightening experiences which makes travel so stimulating. Again there are disasters (we would probably say calves’ spleen boiled in lard was our lowest point) but these too somehow add to the full experience.
Then in 2020 we set about realising our dream; to retire and go on to travel the world, writing of our experiences as we go, only for COVID to intervene and upset the plans we’d spent years laying down. We travelled where we could, during the pandemic, then resumed the dream when normality mercifully returned – and now, the world is once again our oyster…
15 Comments
Gilda Baxter
Phil and Michaela, such a great blog you have here. Nothing like eating your way around the world to fully understand about people and their culture. Mixing with the locals, eating with them and hearing their stories is very enriching. We have just recently retired…we recommend 🙂
Toonsarah
Your travel style is different to ours (we tend to plan and book in advance, although NOT package holidays!) but I share you desire to get out there and see the world, meet its people and taste its food 🙂 And like you I retired at the start of last year, planning to travel more than had been possible while working, only to come up against the challenges of COVID. We haven’t ventured abroad since last February so we’re desperate to get moving again as soon as we can!
Phil & Michaela
Thank you for reading and following. Lets hope we can all start travelling soon. We are hoping to spend some time in the Mediterranean when travel restrictions allow and then who knows, we will head to wherever will let us in that has plenty of warm sunshine. Happy travels 😊
InsideMySlingBag
Hello Phil and Michaela so glad to meet you. I have just started to browse your beautiful website.
Phil & Michaela
Hello, thank you for following, and welcome! Let’s hope that we can soon be posting current travel stories rather than old ones.
Curtis Mekemson
I love your approach to travel, Phil and Micheala. I hit follow so I can be part of your adventures. –Curt
Phil & Michaela
Hi Curt, so glad you like our travel story. Many thanks for following 😁. It actually doesn’t register that you have followed us, can we ask if you followed us through the reader? someone else had trouble following through here. Can you try again at the end of one of our posts please. Anyway let us know what happens. Many thanks again, Michaela & Phil 🙂
Suzanne@PictureRetirement
Hi Guys, I found your blog via Sarah at Travel With Me and have enjoyed exploring your site this morning. We like to travel, but are not as adventurous as you guys. We typically have a plan and most of our lodging booked in advance. Now that the world is awakening from the deep sleep, I look forward to following your adventures. We are off on a fifteen day road trip from Florida to Rhode Island in just a few days. That’s as much adventure as we can muster right now, but grateful for it!
Phil & Michaela
Hello there, thank you so much for following our blog. As you will have seen, it has been a frustration with the pandemic coinciding with our retirement and dream of travelling the world. However, we made the best of last year and as restrictions ease we are eagerly awaiting the day we can catch a flight and head off again. Great that you are off on a road trip, we look forward to reading about your adventure and will follow your blog too. Happy travels 😊
Jo
Hi guys, (fellow Brits!) – you found me online with my Jamaica post and left a comment. Stopping by to have a read and to say hello. Love the site! Happy travels. Jo
Phil & Michaela
Hello! And thank you!
Image Earth Travel
Your travel style is the same as mine has always been and now ours.
I don’t like pre-booking much in advance as anything can happen as it did when I pre-booked flights, buses, etc. for the 6 weeks returning to Australia (from Italy) in 2020. Then, COVID hit on the day we arrived in Australia, and everything turned to cr*p thereafter. It took 6 months to recoup most of our booked costs and we were marooned in Australia barred to leave. But you need to adapt, move on, and reinvent your situation. That’s travelling. 😉
Phil & Michaela
Exactly!
Mary O Richardson
Hello, I was wondering if I can use your picture of Al Capone for a story I am writing about Hot Springs. If I have your permission, how do you want the photo credit to read? If you would rather I didn’t use it, I understand. I was just there and somehow neglected to take my own picture! And your photos are bette than mine anyway.
Mary Richardson
Phil & Michaela
Hi Mary, thank you for taking the time to visit our blog. Please feel free to use one of our photos. It would be great if you could credit Michaela & Phil thehungrytravellers.blog with a link or just the blog site with a link. either is cool for us. Hot Springs is such an interesting place, we would be interested in reading what you say bout it. Please give us a nudge when you have written it. We Would also appreciate it if you followed our blog too. Many thanks Michaela & Phil 😁