Five years ago, on a May evening, I sat at a borrowed kitchen table, a draft newsletter open in front of me, and pressed Send with what I can only describe as a trembling finger. The group had eight seats. By the next morning, all of them were filled.
I still find it hard to believe that was five years ago. This Thursday, May 21st, 2026, marks exactly five years since I ran my very first group expedition — and today I want to tell you, honestly, how it all started.
A blog built on nights after long travel days
My travel blog started in October 2016 with a very modest budget and a very full backpack. This year it turns ten, and I’ll save the full story of that launch for another day. But the shape of those first years was simple: during the day I traveled, and at night I wrote. Every single day, from 2016 until 2020, I lived out of a backpack, traveled full time, and built the blog on the hours in between. One of my earliest trips was to Tajikistan, where I hitchhiked along the Pamir Highway. Naive? Completely. Ambitious? Probably more than I am today.
Then the world went quiet
When COVID arrived, it caught me in Ethiopia. And to be honest — the pandemic was only part of the reason I needed a break. After years of dorm beds and full-time travel, my body was asking for stillness. I also started to suspect that a blog alone might not be a sustainable way to make a living, no matter how much I loved writing.
So I did what seemed like the obvious next step: I tried vlogging. It didn’t take. Filming yourself constantly while also actually experiencing a place is its own particular exhaustion, and by the end I’d learned the lesson well — vlogging simply wasn’t for me.
The email that changed the direction of everything
Summer 2020. The middle of it all, really. One day an email landed from a well-known tour operator. They wanted me to lead one of their trips — but not just guide it. They also expected me to promote it, bring in the clients, and build the itinerary. Pandemic travel companies were scrambling for new ways to sell, and someone who already had a base of readers sounded like a sensible plan. A legitimate plan, no illusions. So we talked, and we started working on the project.
That work carried me to Mexico in October 2020 — the most life-changing trip of my life, though few people would have guessed it at the time. I designed the foundations of what would become the expedition brand, sketched the new logo, and sent the very first email announcing our first-ever tour. I had also traveled there to see my partner, whom I hadn’t been able to visit since the beginning of the pandemic. During the first week of December, the day before flying home, she told me she was pregnant.
Shaking finger, sold out in under a day
Our son James was born in August 2021. I’ll tell you another day how unbelievably complicated it was to sort out the paperwork to bring my unmarried, pregnant partner to Spain during the pandemic — she couldn’t come until she was five months along. Meanwhile I was building the expedition project. It gave me far more work than I’d ever imagined, and the more I did of it, the clearer it became that the tour company was getting most of the value while paying me peanuts. Still, I kept going. The very first expedition was scheduled for March 2021: Iraqi Kurdistan. I remember that morning in my family’s kitchen, writing the newsletter, and clicking Send with a shaking finger. To my surprise, the tour sold out in less than 24 hours.
And then it felt real. For years I’d worked quietly behind a screen — writing, posting photos, replying to comments. But this time there would be a group of real people flying in from different parts of the world, with their time and money and expectations placed entirely in my hands. Some had been reading my work for years. I was terrified in a way I had never been before, and the fear stayed with me right up until the expedition began.
Why not do it myself?
Shortly after the tour sold, the second wave of the pandemic hit and Iraqi Kurdistan closed its borders. Everyone thought I was crazy for launching a travel company in the middle of a pandemic, and to be fair, they had a point. But I didn’t want to give up — selling that first group had been easier than expected, and I knew travelers were desperate to go again. So I postponed the trip to May 2021, two months later. Most of the original group had canceled, and I had to find new travelers to join in the middle of all that uncertainty.
It was only then that the thought finally arrived: why not do it myself? I was already building the itinerary, promoting the tour, and handling all the bookings — a huge amount of valuable work, for which I was being paid peanuts. I had good contacts in Kurdistan, including my friend and local guide Karwan. So I called him, told him about bringing a group in May, and the rest is history.
May 21st, 2021: the best group I’ve ever led
On that date we ran the very first expedition, bringing together a group of eight people from different parts of the world. It was the best, most fun group of travelers I’ve ever been part of. I still keep in touch with all of them, and six of the eight have joined multiple trips since — one of them has been on 11 expeditions and counting, another on 7, another on 6. I’ll keep their names out of the post, but ask me and I’ll happily tell you who.
Flying home, my head was full of a very mixed kind of happiness. Not only because we had pulled off the first expedition, but because I had genuinely loved being out there with that group. For the first time I could see what this could grow into — an actual community of travelers.
The offer I turned down
When I got back, I received an offer to write the new edition of a major city travel guide for Barcelona. I accepted without hesitation. It took a few months of intense work to finish — and only after that was done did they offer me the new main edition of their national guide for Spain. I honestly didn’t know what to do. The Barcelona book had already taken everything I had; the national edition would have been on an entirely different level.
So the question became the one that kept me up at night: become a professional travel writer, or build a travel company? I definitely couldn’t do both. The writing project would almost certainly have led to many more opportunities after it. But the expeditions needed my full attention now, and I finally saw their true potential — I didn’t want to postpone that.
So, very painfully, I turned down the new assignment and instead scheduled two more trips to Kurdistan for November 2021. And the story repeated itself: two beautiful, incredibly fun groups of people, many of whom I still talk to today, while others have gone on to join multiple expeditions.
The years after
In 2022 we expanded into several new destinations, including Saudi Arabia, Syria, Federal Iraq, and Mauritania. That same year I set up a separate website for the expeditions, a subdomain of the original site. In 2022, Leti and Rhenzy joined the team. Oriol joined in 2023. Tamara and Pau joined in 2024, and Jessa in 2026. All these years have felt like a marathon: working every single day, constantly trying to grow the project — and, most importantly, trying to build a community of travelers who all seem to identify with the spirit of the blog.
There have been many ups and downs. Some days I’ve felt — and I still sometimes feel — like quitting and giving my time to something else. And remember that while building all of this, I was also learning how to be a parent, so the past few years have meant building two things at once: a travel company, and my kid, who has already been to 24 countries with me. But the community — every single traveler I’ve met along the way — is the one and only reason I keep going, and the reason I still want to make this bigger.
Thank you for being part of it.
— a note from Luna: five years in, I’d trade none of the shaking-finger moments. Some nights you’re just waiting for the light to come back on. That’s the job.