I’m Cynthia Bil, a Belgian travel blogger and photographer born in the sweet summer of 1984.

Over the past 14 years, I’ve lived and traveled in more than 30 countries. I like to travel slowly and often spend months in one place. To give you an example:  I wandered around Turkey for 9 months, lived in Georgia for 11 months, traveled for 6 months in Morocco, and spent one entire year in Kyrgyzstan and Central Asia (where I return to every year).

I prefer to take the time to get to know a country, interact with the locals, and immerse myself in different cultures. Every destination has its own unique energy and beauty and I love exploring the depths of that.

I have a special love for nature. I feel most at home in the wilderness and surrounded by the beauty of our natural environment. It brings a sense of calm and joy that I can’t find anywhere else.

I also love outdoor activities, like hiking, camping, kayaking, rock climbing, and horse riding. It makes me feel alive and deeply connected with myself and the world around me.

my Life journey

In my early twenties, I worked as a special needs teacher in a primary school in Belgium. While I had “everything”, I felt something was missing.

I didn’t feel like I was living my life but more the life that society expected from me. I wanted something different than working a 9-to-5 job (or in my case an 8-to-4 job), buying a house and having kids.

On my 26th birthday, I decided to expand my horizons and travel for a year. I quit my job, packed my most essential belongings in 2 backpacks, said goodbye to my loved ones, and took an airplane to Australia. It was the start of a whole new chapter and the beginning of my life as a nomad.

I lived on the road for more than a decade, adventuring, exploring, and working whatever jobs I could find to fund my travels: from waitressing and life modeling in Australia and shepherding on farms in New Zealand and England to grape picking in France, gardening in Ireland, and teaching English in Turkey. It was a journey that taught me so much about life and myself.

In 2015 I embarked on a 3-year hitchhiking journey from Ireland to Central Asia, during which I created the travel blog Journal of Nomads. I made this journey with Niko, a Canadian hitchhiker I met in an extraordinary way in the autumn of 2014.

When we met, we were both dreaming of making an overland hitchhiking journey across the world to experience the vastness of this planet, witness how the land and culture change while crossing many borders, and learn from the world and its many inhabitants through firsthand experiences.

We hitchhiked across Central and Eastern Europe, spent one month on the Greek island of Crete, sailed across the Aegean Sea to Turkey and traveled for 9 months in Turkey before crossing the border into Georgia in August 2016.

In Georgia, we took it very easy. We based ourselves in different cities where we worked as online teachers to save up for the next leg of our journey. It also gave us plenty of time to explore the country fully.

In August 2017 we resumed our journey by hitchhiking across Azerbaijan for nearly 3 weeks. In Baku, we took a cargo ship to cross the Caspian Sea and entered Kazakhstan in September 2017.

On the boat to Kazakhstan, we met 2 English travelers with whom we went on a road trip across the Kazakh steppe. Our initial idea was to travel for only a couple of months in Central Asia, after which we would take a boat in Vladivostok (Russia) towards South Korea and Japan.

But as soon as we entered Kyrgyzstan, we immediately fell in love with this country’s culture and beauty. That’s when we decided to spend the winter here while also taking time exploring Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and more uncommon places in Kazakhstan.

During our time in Kyrgyzstan, we decided not to continue our overland adventure. It was a hard decision as it had been an unforgettable journey to hitchhike from Europe to Central Asia, roughly 12.000 kilometers across 13 countries.

This wasn’t the end of our travels but rather a new chapter in our journey around the world. We traveled f.eg. to Morocco where we hitchhiked and traveled for nearly six months. We also kept returning to Central Asia.

When the pandemic hit the world, I followed Niko to his home country Canada. After the first lockdown, we explored his home region Quebec and enjoyed a beautiful summer with many outdoor activities in the Canadian wilderness. It was my first time in Canada, and I absolutely loved it there!

However, after the summer in 2020, Niko and I decided to go our own way.

Just like we constantly grow and change, our path in life is also continuously transforming itself. We changed our relationship from lovers to friends and were grateful for the time, lessons, and adventures we shared.

If you’d be wondering who that guy is in so many of my pictures on this blog and why I often wrote in the plural pronoun, now you know the story behind it! I didn’t feel like removing Niko from the photos and posts as he’s been such a big part of my journey, and he often helped me write useful travel guides.

While Niko settled in Mexico, I continued traveling and leading adventure tours. In 2022, I met Samantha – a writer and film photographer based in the Lake District, UK – on one of my tours in Kyrgyzstan and we immediately became great friends. I was looking for someone to assist me with Journal of Nomads and she turned out to be the one I was looking for!

She loves rock climbing, hiking and mountaineering while discovering wild places in nature. You’ll mostly find her name on the guides about Madeira, where we traveled together, and Tajikistan, where she also led an adventure tour on my behalf in 2024.

After more than 10 years of living nomadically, I started craving a home base. In 2023, I returned to Belgium to settle with my life partner. I traveled the world for so long to find love with someone who was born in the same town as me…

In 2024, the year in which I turned 40 years old, I dared to take the step of buying a house (one surrounded by a big garden and next to a forest) in a village near Bruges. The biggest adventure that year, however, was on the 9th of September when giving birth to my beautiful daughter Fran.

While I’m now taking a small break from traveling, I’m still working on my travel blog, creating new and updating existing content, going on local walks and cycling trips with my daughter and coordinating my Adventure Expeditions in Central Asia, currently led by my local partners and experienced guides.

My life has changed a lot again in the last couple of years and I’m grateful love how I can keep creating my circumstances to match my ever-evolving dreams. I have no idea what and where this next chapter in my life will take me and I’m enjoying every step of it!