Written by Kirsten

Hello family!

Countless times this has been the start of the many emails sent back home since the start of Robert and my travels together and it seems an apt way of introducing us and our story.  Typing these two words has generally been followed by a period of contemplation, me sitting with the laptop, staring at the screen for anything from a few minutes to an hour, wondering where to begin.  Robert, my other, sometimes better half, practical being that he is then says “Well, just start at the beginning”.   For us, that beginning was 19 May 2013.  When people ask us how we met, Rob likes to give them the short version, that version being that we met on the internet.  And no, that does not mean on LonelyHearts.com!  The slightly longer, more accurate version is that we were introduced by a mutual friend of our mothers, but because at the time Rob was working in Cape Verde as a captain on a private yacht and I was in Johannesburg, our initial introduction and subsequent “getting to know each other” time was via internet.  After being told about Rob and a little bit about who he was, I decided to take the plunge and send him an email.  A few hours later my inbox pinged with a reply and so began an exchange of many personal, brutally honest emails on a daily basis and shortly thereafter multiple WhatsApp messages.   It was during this cyber courtship that we started to dream, and dream big we did.  After delivering the yacht he was working on to Brazil, Rob made the decision to fly back to South Africa so we could meet.  After a nerve-wracking first face-to-face date on 2 August 2013, a successful climb of Kilimanjaro together (more of this adventure in another post), and a couple more months of long-distance dating we realised two things: we both had a serious case of wanderlust and wanted to travel the world, and we both knew we wanted to do it together.  It was at this point that our lives made an abrupt about-turn.  Rob had spent 26 years working in the maritime industry and I was slowly making my way up the career ladder in the pharmaceutical industry.  He was between contracts, I decided to resign from my job, and so we set off on our travel adventures, me being the travel scribe and Rob the photographer.  After much encouragement from family and friends who have read our emails sent home, we decided to share our story.  Two years, and 16 countries later, sitting on a yacht on a rainy afternoon in Fiji, our blog was born.  Part travel adventure, part food review, part love story, and part journey of personal growth, what follows on these pages is our Walkabout Diary.