This is a first-person YouTube video by Nate Buchanan summarizing two years of full-time travel (started January 2016). Nate and his partner travelled extensively—30 new countries in their first year and a total of 66 countries by the video—setting a goal to visit 100 countries before Nate turns 30. The narration highlights major 2017 adventures across South America (Bolivia salt flats, Galapagos, Patagonia, Amazon), Europe (Italy, Iceland, Latvia), and Asia (Trans-Siberian railway across Russia, South Korea). The video also notes travel milestones such as redeeming over one million frequent-flyer miles, visiting 15+ airport lounges, and taking a two-week repositioning cruise from England to the Caribbean.
Questions this video answers
January 2016.
30 new countries.
22 new countries.
4,000 miles (Moscow to Vladivostok).
Over one million frequent-flyer miles redeemed.
Chapters
We're Karen Nate and we've been traveling the world full time for the past two years. After we got married, we visited 13 countries together and totally fell in love with Trav.
So in January 2016, we booked a one way flight to Tokyo and started this YouTube channel. Our first year of travel was a crazy adventure to 30 new countries.
Cage diving with great White shark. The original plan was only to travel for one year, but at that point we knew we couldn't stop. That's when we made it our goal to visit 100 countries before Nate turns 30. At that point, that felt like a long ways away. This year we made it to 22 new countries and one of the best years of our lives. 2017 started in South America. We drove on the largest mirror in the world in the Bolivian salt flats, Swam with sea lions in the Galapagos. This is the greatest moment of my entire life. Trekked on a glacier in Patagonia, slept in a pod on the side of a mountain in Peru and went to the Amazon jungle where we ate grubs, caught piranhas, drank spit beer, wrestled caymans, and I swam in the Amazon river.
Hi everybody.
Next, we spent the summer in Europe. We completely fell in love with Italy. So much so that we planned a vessel tour there. Almost froze to death swimming between two tectonic plates in Iceland. And we crawled through the basement of a secret Soviet prison building in latv.
After that, we boarded the Trans Siberian railway and rode 4,000 miles across Russia from Moscow to Vladivostok. That was a crazy trip. We had forgotten how much we love Asia until we arrived in South Korea. Seoul turned into one of our favorite cities. We ate live octopus, us spent the night in a Jim Jilbang and went to the North Korean border, the dmz.
We ended the year by taking our first two week repositioning cruise across the Atlantic from England to the Caribbean.
Along the way, we have redeemed over a million frequent fly miles.
Visited over 15 airport lounges around the world.
Drank way too many cups of coffee.
And of course tried tons of delicious local food.
If you like what you've seen, make sure to subscribe so you can follow our adventures to the last 34 countries. If you want to start from the very beginning, you can binge watch all of our videos from day one in Tokyo. We will link that playlist in the description below. If you do that, make sure to cut us a little slack. The beginning was rough. We had no idea what we were doing. We'd like to think we've gotten a lot better since then.
