Drum roll please… and Here. It. Is! The long awaited (by us at least!), First Blog Post!
We just wanted to say a big WELCOME to our blog! We are Tapp and Bear Travel, made up of Will Tapp and Ellie Bearcroft (see where we got the name from), and we will very soon be off on our travels around South East Asia!
For us, this has been a very long time coming, but we appreciate that a lot of people know nothing about us and our plans, or even how we got to where we are right now, so continue reading for a bit more about us!
We both studied Marine and Natural History Photography at Falmouth University in Cornwall, UK and graduated in July 2017! We actually got the exact same percentage, what are the odds?
© Viki Blackmore
Some time towards the end of our second year (I’m probably making that up, I can’t remember exactly when we decided but it was somewhere around this time), we had to start thinking about what we were going to do after we finished our degrees. There are so many options but it just about came down to two choices:
1. Diving headlong into a career or
2. Being crazy and going travelling before starting a career
and we went with option number 2!
We then had a few doubts about whether this was the right thing to do (mostly from me, Ellie, a.k.a the worrier. I was worried that if I spent time out of the industry I would find it difficult to make my career aspirations a reality). But, after a big old chat in our little student house kitchen, Will managed to persuade me that we could make the travelling work in our favour when it comes to eventually starting a career. And this is where the idea of creating a blog came from!
At this point we were only planning on travelling for a short amount of time, around a year or so, but since then we have decided to go with the flow and take our time to explore all the incredible places we hope to visit - so when people ask us “how long are you going for?” we generally say “just for however long it takes”!
© Peter Doyle-Davidson
So we graduated, and we got very sad about not being at university or in Cornwall anymore, and not getting to see the amazing people we met there everyday (I actually felt I had pretty much lost all my purpose which was really tough to get to grips with), and then we embarked pretty swiftly into the real world - we began working full time (dunh dunh dunnnnnhh!!). We got ourselves jobs that could generate funds quickly, and after working our butts off, we are finally at a point where we have just about enough to support ourselves travelling. It's always so easy to keep pushing back the leaving date, but we ended up just picking a day (which incidentally coincided with cheap flights - how lucky was that) and whatever we have at that point will have to be enough!
© Millie Wallace
We’ve been working some crazy hours to get to where we want to be, and this has meant living over 2 hours apart (well just under 2 hours if you drive fast!) and seeing each other once every few weeks. To go from living together for the last 2 years and seeing each other all the time, to barely seeing each other at all has been pretty rubbish, but there's not too much longer to wait until we can finally go on the adventure we’ve been planning for such a long time!
We've had a lot of scepticism from people about going travelling as a couple, even from complete strangers which has been interesting! We've already overcome one of the most difficult obstacles - living together (in a messy student house as well which has got to count for something!) - and this wasn't always easy. So, if you want to find out what it’s like travelling in a couple, then watch this space.
And now, suddenly, it’s a few weeks before we hop on that 14 hour plane journey to Indonesia to begin the adventure! It’s crazy how time can both feel like it’s creeping past so slowly while also flying by so fast. On June 2nd 2018 we will be leaving the UK to start the next leg of the journey called "Life"!
To give you guys a quick idea of what's in store from our blog think travelling tips, advice, photography, itineraries, and generally what it's really like to take a risk and leave everything behind to live out of a backpack and travel. So we hope you stick around and follow what we get up to as Tapp and Bear travel!
Thanks for reading and bye for now!
Ellie and Will