Make Life An Adventure

Alesha Bradford and Jarryd Salem, Australians by Birth, are Citizens of the World in the truest sense.Travel Writers, Photographers, Adventure Travel, Sustainable Tourism, Overland Journeys, Off the Beaten Path destinations, whilst they manage Australia’s most popular Travel Blog Nomadasaurus

With an insatiable appetite for adventure, happiness, prosperity, and hilarity, Alesha is someone who has never accepted the unremarkable to be a part of her life.Raised on a farm in a small outback town in Western Australia (when we say small, imagine 200 people and her closest neighbor being 10km away) Lesh felt the wanderlust for the bigger world and left home at the age of 20 to explore her home country and its neighbor, New Zealand.

‘When farther flung places called my name, I leaped over the ocean to the US and Canada where I worked and partied her way across the continent’. With more than a handful of countries already under her belt, she stares out into the distance and constantly dreams about what is on the other side of the horizon. She’s grown tired of just wondering and now is taking the next step to discover for herself what is out there.

She is also the harmonica player, despite not knowing how to play the harmonica.Sounds like music to our ears, right?

Bringing a dose of sensibility to the partnership, the yin to her yang, Lesh adds direction and purpose to the adventure. He describes himself as ” The humble photographer behind the majority of the wonderful images seen on Nomadasaurus”. Explorer and anthropologist. Writer and teacher. Musician and artist. Philosopher and travel guide,  are professions that Jazza has very little skills but that doesn’t stop him from trying.

Born in Sydney Jazza was bitten hard by the travel bug early on . At  20 left his home to be a ski bum in Canada. 8 years later, he still wants to be a ski bum, but has instead substituted that life for one of discovering new, exciting places all over the world.

With an all-encompassing passion for snow, mountain and water sports and a love for travel and adventure.” I  endeavour to bring his enthusiasm for life to the far corners of the globe and inspire us to do the same”.

Jazza is the chief author of the stories and writings found on NOMADasaurus. His writing skills peaked at 12, when he was awarded the coveted “Letter of the Month” in an Australian surfing magazine. He won a custom made a surfboard. I continue to write to this day, still hoping that someone will give me another surfboard for my ramblings.

They met in a hostel in Vancouver in the sweet summer of ’08, then spent the next few years travelling 40’000km around Canada and living in their awesome van, Latoya. It was during this time that they fell in love with overland travel, and in particularly road trips. They recall some of the happiest days of their  lives spent being dirt poor, eating crackers and sleeping inside the van.

Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” they live by this adage day in and day out.

Vagabonds in the truest sense, they had plans to drive Latoya to Alaska in 2011. However, fate had better plans. 3 weeks before starting out on their next big road trip Latoya broke down in Southern BC.  “In a fit of spontaneity, we sold Latoya to a friend and bought one-way tickets to Guatemala” says Lesh with her trademark humour in place.

Central America was their new home  the next year as they bounced around from place to place, hanging out, learning Spanish and studying the Mayan culture. They managed to fit in a whole bunch of fun adventures, from scuba diving in Mexico’s cenotes to trekking to El Mirador.

At some point, they were crewing on a catamaran and learning to sail as well. A freak storm off the coast of Nicaragua forced them to abandon that dream and set back off onto land. When they weren’t breaking world records with friends, having wheelchair races, slacklining in Mayan temples and hitchhiking between remote villages, they were eating mangoes, sleeping in hammocks on the beach and smoking cigars in Cuba.

On a bus in Mexico one day Alesha declared that she wanted to go to Africa, so they started making plans to backpack around the continent. Later that night over cervezas the idea kept growing until they finally settled on travelling from Cape Town to Thailand without taking a single flight. “We returned to Australia, bought another campervan to live in and started saving some money to fund the next dream”. But, at the last minute flipped the trip in reverse, bought a one-way ticket to Phuket and started wandering.

We bought motorbikes in Laos, rode 15’000km around Southeast Asia, got engaged inside the biggest cave in the world, finally moved into China after 14 months, hitchhiked and caught buses for four months to Mongolia, Travelled across to Central Asia,road-tripped along the border of Afghanistan, crossed the Caspian Sea in a cargo ship and somehow ended up in Istanbul, two years after we landed in Phuket. Phew, sounds exhausting, isn’t it? But, we loved every minute of this adventure.

We started to document our travel and help fellow travelers to take the “Course  Uncharted “ Since, we seemed to have traveled more than we remember, and Remember more than we Traveled, Jazza muses. The blog turned into a business, they wrote an article about spending some time apart (that subsequently went viral), broke their no flying rule and ended up back in Thailand, thinking that a break there would do them good.

Naturally after 3 weeks, the “itch” resurfaced, they booked one-way tickets to Europe and spent the summer of 2016 hanging out, got married and did some soul searching, that took them back to Thailand. Our longest stint of 19 days in 03 years they say with pride. In 2014 Jazza was announced as the winner of the World Nomads Travel Writing Scholarship. He was awarded a writing course from a Lonely Planet author, an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe and opportunities to become a freelance travel writer with some of the biggest names in the industry

As they take off for their next trip they say in unison “MILES TO GO BEFORE WE SLEEP………”