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Meet the family behind the travel guides

Hi! We’re Alex and Victoria, a couple from Copenhagen travelling with our two young children, Adrian and Zoe.

We met in 2010 and have travelled together ever since.

Some trips keep us moving from place to place for months at a time, like our trip to Nepal, New Zealand, the Cook Islands and Indonesia.

Other times we settle in one area, like our four months in Scania, Sweden, or the seven months we spent in southern Sardinia, Italy. In between come the shorter, more spontaneous trips, often closer to home.

Travelling with children has changed the pace (and the amount of stuff we bring), but we still spend as much of the year travelling as we can.

One family trip took us through Thailand, Laos and Indonesia over five months. Adrian even spent two months at nursery in Bali.

Northabroad is where we share detailed travel guides based on places we have visited ourselves, often more than once. We cover things like what to see, what to avoid, where to stay, how to get around and where to find good vegan food.

Northabroad is also available in Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Dutch.

How we create our travel guides

A travel guide often starts well before we leave home. We read up on the destination and sketch out a rough plan.

During the trip, we write down the details we know we’ll forget later.

Then we come home with far too many photos and try to turn the whole thing into something useful.

We take plenty of pretty pictures, or at least we hope so. But the camera comes out in the car park as well.

Photos of a crowded entrance or the start of a trail probably won’t make it onto Instagram. Sometimes, though, those are the photos that answer the question you actually have.

When writing travel guides, we try to be honest about what we liked, what we didn’t and what might suit a different kind of traveller better.

Of course, visiting a place doesn’t mean we suddenly know everything about it. That means we check facts before publishing and use further research where needed.

We can’t stay at every hotel we recommend, so we make it clear when we’re writing from research.

Hitting publish isn’t quite the end. We often return to our travel guides when we have new tips or visit the place again.

If you know something we don’t, please tell us in the comment section of the relevant travel guide. Perhaps your experience was different, or something has simply changed since our visit. Either way, we’d love to hear it, and it may help the next person planning the same trip.

We grew up travelling

We were both lucky to travel a lot as children, and it started before either of us can really remember.

When Victoria was one year old, she was already throwing hand signs in Gran Canaria. A few months after her third birthday, she set off around the world with her parents and sister. The trip took them to Thailand, Indonesia, Australia, Fiji and the United States.

Travel was already part of Alex’s family story before he was born. His parents met in Turkey through their work in the charter holiday industry and later lived in Egypt for a time. Apparently, Alex’s own story began there too.

Alex had already been on a holiday to Thassos in Greece before he turned one. His other early childhood trips included Egypt, Tunisia, Turkey, Germany, Italy and Cyprus, along with regular visits to his family in Sweden.

With that lucky upbringing, it perhaps isn’t so strange that we keep longing for foreign adventures. Thanks, mums and dads!

From backpackers to Northabroad

Neither of us needed much convincing to start travelling together. Our first trip was to Barcelona.

In the beginning, travel had to fit around university, work and fairly small budgets. We slept in crowded dorm rooms and took cheap night buses and trains, like any other good backpackers.

Alex began freelancing full-time in 2014, dividing his time between photography, video and website work.

Victoria completed a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration and Project Management at Copenhagen Business School in 2016. During her studies, she worked as an online culture journalist for Politiken. She later moved into animal welfare at the NGO Animal Protection Denmark.

In 2017, Victoria left her office job to focus on our shared projects. We could now both work from wherever we chose, giving us the chance to spend longer periods abroad.

We still worked on the road, sometimes more than planned. But travelling more slowly meant we could stay in one place long enough to see more than its main sights.

Northabroad began around the same time and grew out of this way of travelling.

Travelling with children

In recent years, Adrian and Zoe have joined us on our travels.

Seeing the world through their eyes has profoundly changed what we notice. These days, playgrounds, animals and simple everyday moments can be just as exciting as the grandest views.

We won’t pretend that travelling with two small children is always easy. Reaching the jagged peaks and tropical waters we still want to see takes more effort than it used to.

But we love sharing those experiences as a family and watching them grow up just as curious about the world as we are.

What matters to us

With two small children, we tend to choose somewhere a little nicer to stay than we did in our backpacking days. That might mean a family hotel on one trip and a good deal on a month-long apartment on the next.

We still prefer travelling outside the busiest seasons and going slowly enough to settle into a place.

Nature is one of the main reasons we travel, and the pull of somewhere pristine or downright pretty is often enough to make us start planning a trip.

We became vegan in 2018, so it naturally shapes where we eat. Animal welfare has long mattered to us and affects which activities we choose not to support or recommend.

We made a documentary film about sustainable coffee

In 2015, our concern for the natural world led us to start making a full-length documentary about shade grown coffee.

We travelled to coffee farms in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama and Jamaica, followed by Ethiopia in 2017.

We met the people growing coffee beneath a canopy of trees and learnt how choosing the right coffee can help protect some of the world’s most biodiverse areas.

Then came the small matter of turning several years of travelling and filming into a finished documentary.

Shade Grown Coffee was selected for the CPH:DOX film festival in 2020, just as the world closed down. Our planned cinema premiere never happened, but the film is now free to watch on YouTube.

Read the full story behind the film here.

A bit more about us

Victoria…

• Is two years older than her sister, Juliane.
• Does yoga and is quite a bit more flexible than Alex.
• Loves animals. Especially all of them.
• Has no problem eating gelato three times a day.
• Is a bookworm who could happily finish a good book in a day or two on the beach (before we had kids…).

Alex…

• Is 24 years older than his brother, Vilbert.
• Looks after the technical website stuff and handles most of our photography, video and drone work.
• Wants to climb, run and cycle through every mountain, canyon and valley he comes across.
• Loves cooking, coriander and kale, and always craves a true Neapolitan pizza.
• Is half-Swedish and can pretend to be fully Swedish for a little while before being exposed.

A few things we agree on

• Most spectacular beach in the world: Anse Source d’Argent, La Digue (Seychelles).
• Most beautiful lake in Europe: Difficult tie between Eibsee near Garmisch-Partenkirchen (Germany) and Lago di Braies in the Dolomites (Italy).
• Favourite islands: Sardinia (Italy) for the beaches, Corsica (France) for the accessible ruggedness, Koh Phangan (Thailand) for the vegan vibes, Bali (Indonesia) for the delightful culture and Asu Island (Indonesia) for the cute dogs.
• Best place for beautiful churches: Tuscany (Italy).
• Best coastal road for cycling: Strada Panoramica della Costa del Sud in southwestern Sardinia (Italy).
• Most epic coastal stretch: Costa di Baunei, eastern Sardinia (Italy).
• Yes, Italy is probably our all-time favourite country.
• Most beautiful temple: Wat Xieng Mouane, Luang Prabang (Laos).
• Most awe-inspiring place: Canyonlands, Utah (USA).
• Favourite ancient sites: Palenque (Mexico), Ta Prohm (Cambodia) and Abu Simbel (Egypt).
• Favourite waterfall: Sekumpul, Bali (Indonesia).
• Most Pacific moment: Listening to a band play “Somewhere over the rainbow” on the ukulele as we cruised across Aitutaki Lagoon in the Cook Islands.
• Best road trip country: New Zealand.
• Most underrated country: Jordan.
• Most challenging country we’re still very glad we visited: Ethiopia.
• Country Alex has been to that Victoria wants to visit: Japan.
• Country Victoria has been to that Alex wants to visit: Australia.
• Places we both want to visit, but haven’t: South Korea, the Canadian Rockies, Ibiza, Iceland…
• Best street food: Por siempre vegana taqueria, Mexico City (Mexico).
• Best croissants: Leve, Malmö (Sweden).
• Favourite café: I am vegan babe, Canggu, Bali (Indonesia).

Join us on the journey

If you’re interested in seeing what we’re up to on a day-to-day basis, follow along on our Instagram account @northabroad.

Countries we’ve visited