Couple make £16k a month and rescued five puppies vanning around the world

A British couple have figured out how to make an extraordinary living while travelling across the world in a quest to visit every country.

After meeting at Exeter University halfway through the last decade, Cazzy Magennis, 29, and Bradley Williams, 28, vowed they’d never get stuck behind a desk, but would travel for as long and as far as they could.

What began as a promise over a drink once winter’s evening soon saw the couple visiting some truly remarkable corners of the world.

In the six years since, through a combination of more typical backpacking and life on the road in a van, they’ve slept in the Amazon Rainforest, watched the incredible sunrise at Torres Del Paine and driven across Sri Lanka in a tuk-tuk.

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What sets Cazzy and Bradley apart from the many wanderlust-filled couples making a life on the road is their sheer appetite for travel, and how they’ve managed to turn their passion into such a thriving business.

When the Mirror caught up with the pair they were in the mountains near Alberta, Canada someway along the road to Alaska.

Once as close to the top of the globe as travel on four wheels will allow, the couple are planning a year long drive down the Pan American highway to the tip of Argentina, before shipping their converted van home to Japan.

So far they’ve mapped out a route that will take them well into 2023, but they’re almost certain to continue long past that point.

“We got here in March after we shifted our campervan over from Liverpool,” Bradley explained.

“We’ve been driving through. The plan is to drive round the world so we’ll come back the other way.”

Cazzy jumps in: “We saw two moose and recently we saw five bears. It never gets boring.”

An average day for the couple begins with them waking up at around 8am follow by a spot of breakfast cooked on the van’s hob or in its oven.

A few hours down the road they’ll stop off at Tim Horton’s, a chain that’s across Canada which serves good coffee and wifi.

Usually at this point Cazzy and Bradley either speak to friends back at home, or settle down to do a bit of the work that sustains their lifestyle.

When they first set out after university they’d make just enough cash to get by on during their travels by working as copywriters, something they can do easily online.

Now they run their own hugely successful website Dream Big Travel Far, on which they share their secrets, top tips for travelling as a type one diabetic like Cazzy, and offer an insight into their lives.

After years of carefully building their brand, it now brings in £16,000 a month through a mix of advertising revenue and commercial sponsors, meaning scrimping and saving to get by is no longer a worry.

Now they spend just a couple of hours each day ensuring the website is looking good and full of fresh content.

For many of their followers, how Bradley and Cazzy decided to convert a van into a home during lockdown, and then embark on a tour of Europe in the second year of the pandemic, is fascinating content.

“When you close the curtains and are parked up, it feels like a little home on wheels,” Cazzy said of the van, which took them three and a half months of ten hour days to convert in 2020.

When sleeping in the van in colder areas such as the Canadian wilderness or northern climbs of Scandinavia, a gas powered heater warms the back of the van up.

When in warmer areas such as Portugal and France, their newly installed air-con has proved a lifesaver, as it likely will when they brave plus 40C heat in South America.

The couple have found that even when travelling in late 2020, the pandemic did not prove much of an impediment when it came to getting around Europe.

Now that they’re both triple vaccinated, very few countries are likely to turn them away, and they have few issues getting over the boarder.

What’s having a bigger impact on their global route are political tensions, such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which saw them end their plan to head to the east of the country.

A strange rule which requires all foreign travellers to have a guide in China has also led them to skip that one.

Along their travels Cazzy and Bradley have got into quite a few unexpected situations.

“There’s quite a bad dog situation in Serbia,” Bradley explained.

“You’ll see stray dogs everywhere. We got into the habit of buying dog food. We’d be stopping every ten minutes and throwing some food out.

“We were driving through the mountains in Serbia early one morning and I had this feeling. I pulled in. There were a couple of little heads in the bushes.

“When I looked in I found there were five puppies sitting there. I got them into a box and then into the van.

“I checked there was no mother. They’d just been left there. We turned all the heating on so we could dry them and went to Lidl to get some food.”

Cazzy continued: “We had to find somewhere for them to go, but that 24 hours was amazing. The love they gave me. We didn’t sleep though. It was amazing. We fell in love with them.

“We searched for people in the UK to adopt them and now we’re in the process of getting them over to the UK. They will be adopted.”

When it comes to offering advice for other people, young or old, who are considering a life on the road, Bradley urged them to just jump in and give it a go.

“Having a van in general is probably the cheapest way to travel,” he said.

“A lot of people live in their vans now. To live off the grid, travelling as two people is a lot cheaper. I’d recommend that people try to earn a bit of money as they travel.

“Some days we would work for ten minutes online and you’d make 15 pounds, and you can travel for a full day or two on that. The internet has endless opportunities for making money.”

To get their work done over the years Cazzy and Bradley have found Starbucks to be a regular source of comfort and steady internet, as has the Rainforest Cafe in Vietnam.

They also recommend putting a door between the driving compartment and living space when converting a van, in case you need to speed away during the middle of the nigh due to extreme weather.

“We stayed on the north coast of Nova Scotia for a while,” Bradley said.

“In the middle of the night it was like the van was going to fall over it was so windy and we were so exposed. We could not get out of it.

“All the brakes had frozen on from the icy sea water. At those point your mind starts to play tricks on you. You think (the wind) is roaring.”

Perhaps the most important thing they’ve learned during their travels is how to keep getting on with each other in a space about a tenth of the size of an average flat.

“If you want to test a relationship, put two people in a van,” Cazzy said.

“It will make or break you. If I get annoyed with Brad, I can stomp two steps to the other side of the van.

“(If you’re annoyed”, you have to talk it out, say it, and move past it.”

Over the next week Cazzy and Bradley are continuing their trip north on the Dempster Highway, a 450 mile long road made of gravel for truckers to get to the Artic Ocean.

You can follow all their future adventures here.