When we embarked on our overland crossing of Asia in 2017, we took a DSLR Nikon camera to photograph the journey, deciding to also make some videos for our memories and to share with family and friends. Sticking to a publishing schedule was never part of the plan, and so it’s no surprise really that we’ve only completed editing the videos and popping them on our YouTube channel this week.
Indeed, the FINAL episode of this series just went live on our channel last night, a busy one where we visit China’s 300-million-year-old Stone Forest, hang out with baby pandas, and make a big decision to cut our time in China short and bee-line for Japan, where we complete the trip in Hakuba, Nagano, snowboarding and regenerating after our epic four month journey.
These videos are raw. We filmed the entire series handheld as we had to gift our tripod to hotel staff on our first day of the expedition in Jaipur due to space issues; no matter how well you think you plan and minimize your luggage, when you’re crossing Asia for months as a family and anticipating temperatures from 40C down to subzero, it’s really hard to optimize on space. And yet, with a trek in the Himalayas on your itinerary, you just need to get serious about weight.
At times I regret not finding a way to carry the tripod. We missed the opportunity to get great wide angle shots of the landscapes we passed through and time lapses. We also really struggled with filming video on the Nikon DSLR; it’s a great camera for still photography but not amazing for video work. Technical challenges aside, I’m proud of the intimacy of this series. We really show you the unfiltered highs and lows of backpacking across Asia with kids on a minuscule budget.
So what’s next? Well, we’ve been keeping you updated with our upcoming plans, but we do intend to make some videos to help bring you up to speed with life since our Asia crossing. For several years since we made this journey, we’ve been asked countless questions about the trip, from how much it cost to the challenges of traveling in countries like India and Nepal with young kids, to what it was like trekking through the Himalayas. We’re currently planning a video to go over all these questions and chat about the trip in retrospect. The kids are much older now - 12 and 14yo - and we love to hear how they remember the adventures from watching the videos.
We also want to share with you our backstory. It’s been almost seven years since Remy and I met and he joined the kids and I to make up our little mixed nationality family, and we actually started our journey pre-Crossing Asia living in tents on the East Coast of Australia, and doing a road trip to Far North Queensland. We filmed most of that trip on a handheld 360 camera, pretty obsolete footage today, but we have a bunch of 2D clips and iPhone videos we plan to cut together to share with you all, and hey, we might even put up some of the 360 footage. Hunter actually loves watching 360 videos on YouTube, so if anything we will publish it for his enjoyment and for us to enjoy the memories. There’s one spectacular moment when a kangaroo jumps over Ryder’s head…right in front of the 360 camera. Remarkable and pretty scary at the same time.
We also need to catch you up on what we did after we reached Japan following the Asia crossing. We put the video camera down for a while, but we did indeed embark on more journeys, living in Indonesia and Canada for a time, before visiting France for the passing of Remy’s grandfather, traveling around Morocco for a month, doing a road trip through California for one of my professional documentary premieres, and then running into some visa issues that saw us have a three-month geographical separation before we finally decided to relocate to France and have been here for the past five years.
Which will then bring us to live in France, from trekking through the Pyrenees, learning to sail in the Bay of Biscay, and introducing baby Sahara and catching up to real-time, as we prepare for our biggest adventure yet, creating the Floating Stories Lab.
It’s a strange thing to share parts of our lives publicly on the internet, but we really love the community we are building together, and importantly, we love sharing stories and knowledge we learn along our nomadic adventures with you all across different mediums. The end goal is the hope that we can learn together, broadening our perspectives to be more diverse and thus shaping much needed behavioral change towards more regenerative futures.
I thought about this last part a lot whilst editing the final Crossing Asia video. China was a difficult leg of the journey for us, primarily as we had simply run out of money and it’s not really an easy country to travel through as foreign backpackers on a tight budget. But I’m really glad we made the effort to see as much as we could in the short time we had there. The Stone Forest was astonishing. I wish we were able to capture it with a drone. To walk through 300 million years of natural history is something else, yet I felt so uncomfortable that we needed to fork out $100+ for tickets. In the video, I question what it would be like if these natural spaces didn’t need to be conserved, if we were able to integrate society harmoniously with them? What would it be like to wake up and go about your daily life amongst such ancient landscapes, as our ancestors once did? Would we respect the more-than-human world more? I had a similar feeling years ago when I visited Machu Picchu.
I’ll leave those thoughts with you, and would love to know what you think?
Thanks for being here, and creating this community with us.
Angie,
xx
