About Us
Are you looking for a different travel experience? Are you fed up with package holidays? Like many travellers, we used to travel like this. Then we realised we wanted more from a holiday than a nice beach and hotel. Now we travel the same way as locals. Locals are our guides. Authentic is our style. Learn with us how to make unforgettable memories.
How we can help you
Thanks for dropping in to find out more about us.
We travel the world and are passionate about getting to know new places, cultures and people. Along the way, we enjoy capturing these moments in photographs and videos. We want to pay less and put money where its needed. Why pay for an expensive package holiday when you can have more authentic experiences by doing it yourself? This website is about this principle and we’re going to guide you to achieve this goal.
Quite simply, we write blogs and articles which share our trips around the world. These posts contain our personal experiences and reflect our style of travel journeys. We love to include great photos and videos of the amazing sights we have seen so far.
Our hope is that these posts will firstly inspire you to visit somewhere new, somewhere unusual or somewhere out of your comfort zone. Secondly, we want to help you plan your future trip by sharing our first-hand experience of:
• Interesting places to visit;<
• how to travel in a country;
• ideas about where to stay;
• where and what to eat;
• how to stay safe.
Our story
Now that we’ve met, bienvenue! We’re Olivier and Sarah, a forty-something French-English couple living in the heart of Sussex. How did we meet? Perhaps an old cliché now but it’s true that fate led us to meet 2 years’ ago via an online dating app.
As you might expect, we have a shared love of good food and great wine (bien sur!). We are also passionate about getting to know the incredible cultures, people and places the world around us has to offer. Both of us love photography and we enjoy capturing these moments in moving and still images.
Although we’ve just embarked on our shared travel adventures, Olivier is no stranger to this life. He’s spent two years sailing on a catamaran and has lived and worked on the French Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean. In the past, we have travelled individually to many countries and this is one of the reasons we had much in common when we met.
Why start ‘Off the Tourist Treadmill’?
As we said before, travel is in our blood. When we organised our first trip together to India, we shared our knowledge to make this trip as ‘Off the Tourist Treadmill’ as possible. On our return, we started to tell people what we did and what we saw. A lot of our friends told us that it was amazing that we could organise so many things. They expressed their desire to be able to do this for themselves.
We have a great experience during our travels because we genuinely care about people. It’s important to us to take time to talk with locals. Furthermore, we always want to help people because it benefits us. We gain something too. What can be better than to talk to a local and receive a simple smile? Or receive advice about seeing a beautiful waterfall hidden next to their village? In our fast-paced world, we often forget the humanity of people.
When our friends showed interest in how to create this kind of travel experience, we decided that if they didn’t know, a lot of others didn’t know either! We wanted to share our knowledge with everybody and ‘Off the Tourist Treadmill’ was born. Our aim is to help the community. This blog is your blog. You can leave comments and we will reply.
If you want to be part of the ‘Off the Tourist Treadmill community’, you can subscribe below. We will send you your first 10 Amazing Tips to get ‘Off the Tourist Treadmill’.
Just before you do, we are going to give you your first tip. Like you, we consulted popular guide books and waded through travel blogs to help us plan our trips. Yet, often we just didn’t find what we were looking for to keep ‘Off the Tourist Treadmill’. What you need to do is to plan a rough itinerary with all the travel sites you want to visit but don’t fix everything. Leave space for the unknown surprises that you will learn about during your travel from locals or other travellers. We learned about a very peaceful island called Phu Quoc in Vietnam from the locals and this turned out to be one of our best memories of Vietnam.
The more we share, the more we have …
