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| Faces behind the name. |
Lidya and myself, Rich, decided to blog our adventures together purely as something creative to do. I've never been big on social media so it never really entered my mind, however, I do write up my travels and opinion on places in a travel journal. Ironically it was social media where we met and amazingly, despite living on the other side of the world and being in different hemispheres when we first chatted, we are now happily married and living in Sheffield, England together (Lidya is starting a vlog very soon, as you can see, she is the one with the good looks, and I'm sure this may be covered as a weird kind of love story). Lidya is Indonesian, a Jakartan, with routes in Sumatra and China and also having lived in Timor for a period when younger, while I have lived in two homes during my life, both in Sheffield, about two miles apart. No guesses who's had the most exciting upbringing with regards to travel! My childhood consisted of holidays to islands around Europe, your typical family vacation destinations such as Majorca, Corfu, Santorini, Menorca etc. but now that I am older and free to take on my own travel adventures I have begun to spread my wings. I've always had a keen fascination on travel and the world we live in. Having studied Geography, Environmental Sciences and Geology I feel I have a sound knowledge of the world as much as is possible without having actually been to a place and lived in its environment. I also read travel books, naturalists journals, ancient historians, city and country biographies.
Lidya's father, a construction company owner who specialises in major infrastructure projects in Indonesia, has given me a unique opportunity to live on the island of Java, Indonesia and work along side him. I currently work, fitting the stereotype perfectly, in a large independent steel works, the defining industry that has put Sheffield on the map globally. Lidya and myself will hopefully be taking the plunge in 2016 and starting a new chapter in our lives and one that fills me with excitement. Having visited Indonesia 9 times in the last 5 years, I've had the privilege of seeing many things; I've seen Jakarta grow as a city, I've witnessed festivals, seen how a typical family live day to day, I've seen monuments, wildlife, tasted things I never knew existed! I spent my days in school reading Alfred Russell Wallace's 'Malay Archipelago' and being entranced by his encounters, how he must have felt being the first Westerner to step foot on the remotest of islands, the densest of rain forests. I studied Krakatau as a Geology student, watched video's and read books about the aftermath of what was one of the Earth's biggest natural disasters of recent times. Living in Indonesia for me would be a surreal dream and one I never thought would present itself, never mind while working on projects that cover a whole host of potentially environmental issues and urban planning design, two criteria I've learned during my college years.
While our goals at TwentyToesUK was to show you the forgotten, lesser known areas of the world, we might be turning our sites extensively on Indonesia in the not so distant future. While I continue to write on our blog, share the best photo's on Instagram and Facebook, Lidya will be starting her vlog after Christmas on all things you could ever be remotely interested in!
In the meantime, we head to Indonesia on the 11th of December for 30 days! So stay posted, we'll have daily photo's and updates to the blog as we go and hopefully we'll inspire you along the way.
Rich
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