Travellers of the Month: Mitch and Colin from Very Tasty World

Welcome to Traveller of the Month! Each month on Teaspoon of Adventure, I’m featuring a fellow world traveller and travel blogger to share their best travel stories and wisdom with you. This month, we’ve got a duo!

Without further ado, let’s meet July’s Travellers of the Month, Mitch (she/her) and Colin (he/him) from Very Tasty World.

And if you missed last month’s TotM, get to know Elena here!

Please introduce yourselves. What is your travel story?

We’re a couple who live in Coventry in the UK. We met as students and have been travelling together for over 30 years.

Travel is our passion – we love exploring the world, particularly seeing amazing landscapes and wildlife as well as learning about the local culture.

One of the greatest pleasures of travelling is to discover the local cuisine and we love learning about the food and tasting as many dishes as possible.

How did you decide to start your travel blog and what sort of stories do you share there?

We started our travel blog in 2020. We love eating and cooking (as well as growing food and foraging) so, as well as sharing stories of our travels, one of the elements of our blog is recommending typical dishes from a country that we are visiting.

We love trying to recreate recipes from dishes that we have tasted whilst on the road. We regularly post recipes on our site and try to find substitutes for ingredients that are difficult to source at home.

What is your most unique travel moment?

We spent some time living with a nomadic family in the Gobi Desert in Mongolia.

It was an experience that was a big challenge – we stayed in the family ger (the Mongolian name for a yurt) which had no heating (temperatures dropped to -15C at night) and no running water (we didn’t shower and the toilet was a hole in the ground 50m away from the ger).

We helped the family with their day-to-day work, separating out the kids and lambs, putting the sheep out to pasture, watering the cows and cleaning up a fair amount of poo.

But it was one of the most amazing experiences we have ever had – we were privileged to spend time with such a welcoming family and to join in with their daily lives.

Best food you’ve eaten on the road? Worst?

There are so many delicious dishes, it’s really difficult to choose a best.

Japanese cuisine is our favourite – we could eat it every day. But then Mexican, Vietnamese, Thai, Spanish, Italian, Korean and so many more are all utterly delicious.

We make a point of accepting hospitality whenever it is offered and sometimes this has resulted in us trying some challenging foods. We’ve eaten frog stew in Laos, sweet sticky grasshoppers in Japan and termites in Peru – actually they were all surprisingly good.

The most contentious food for us is liquorice – especially salty liquorice from the Netherlands. Colin loves it, Mitch hates it.

What destination would you go back to over and over again? What destination would you never go back to?

Japan is our favourite country in the world. We are totally in love. We have visited eight times and would go back in an instant.

We love the contrast between the loud, exciting, vibrant neon cities and the tranquillity of the beautiful countryside, as well as the temples and gardens. Japanese culture is fascinating as well.

There aren’t really any destinations we wouldn’t return to. We may have had a few ‘off’ days on our travels but there’s nowhere we’ve really hated.

How do you see your travel life changing in the next 5-10 years?

We’re hoping to retire within that time period and that will very much change our travel style.

Because we’re working, our trips are usually restricted to a couple of weeks at a time and, although we always try to get great value from our travels, we can afford to visit more expensive destinations.

Retirement will give us more flexibility in terms of when we can travel and for how long, but of course we’ll have less money. So that will be an interesting shift in perspective. But we’ll have more time to plan those trips!

What’s your favourite travel snack?

In Japan we love eating onigiri – a triangular rice ball with filling inside. You wrap it in nori seaweed and eat it like a sandwich. It’s very portable and highly delicious.

We also really enjoy bento when we’re travelling on the trains in Japan – they are boxed lunches and you can get regional variations at different railway stations.

A bento and cup of beer of sake whilst watching the world fly by on the bullet train is the perfect way to travel!

Which celebrity would you want to travel with and where would you go?

We would love to travel with any foodies – the late Anthony Bourdain’s love of Vietnamese cuisine shines through in his writing, so we would love to have explored South East Asia with him.

We also really enjoyed watching Stanley Tucci’s Searching for Italy TV series and would very much enjoy accompanying him on any future foodie journeys.

How do you keep your wanderlust up when you’re stuck at home?

Planning trips! The best thing to do apart from actually being on the road is planning our travels. We love researching new destinations, places to visit and the local foods to try.

We usually create an itinerary – plan the accommodation and transport but leave enough flexibility to be surprised when we reach the country.

We do also look out for cookery courses and book those if we can – nothing beats learning how to cook with a local.

What is the best local festival you’ve attended?

We’ve been lucky to have attended several festivals around the world. Day of the Dead in Campeche, Mexico was a wonderful celebration, but we think our favourite was Holi in Nepal.

Holi is the festival of colour marking the beginning of spring, and everyone spends the day ‘playing Holi’ – daubing each other with powdered paints and water pistols.

It was great fun joining in with such a happy, inclusive and colourful festival.

What do you do when you’re not travelling or writing about travel?

We’re both film fanatics so when we’re not working on the blog, you can usually find us watching movies on the big or small screen. Films have often influenced our travels.

For example, the spectacular landscapes in the film Dust Devil made us want to visit Namibia and the curious films of Sergei Paradjanov saw us visit Armenia and Georgia. There are also loads of great foodie films from all over the world.

What do you want to inspire other travellers to do?

We would be delighted if other travellers are inspired to discover new places to visit and new cuisines to explore.

It makes us very happy when people tell us that they’ve tried our recipes… and enjoyed them!

What destination is calling your name in 2024/2025?

Guyana is a place we have longed to visit. It looks like something from The Lost World.

As well as flying to see the world’s tallest waterfall, the Kaieteur Falls, we would love to spend time in the pristine Amazon rainforest, travelling along the rivers to explore a unique ecosystem and hopefully see amazing wildlife.

And apparently the food scene is really diverse. We would particularly like to try the food of the indigenous people.

Lastly, where can we find you online?

Our blog is: https://www.verytastyworld.com/

We’re on Twitter: https://twitter.com/VeryTastyWorld

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VeryTastyWorld

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Thank you for joining my Traveller of the Month series, Mitch and Colin! Head on over to Very Tasty World to drool over all of their delicious travel stories and try their recipes.

Then stay tuned for August’s Traveller of the Month back here on Teaspoon of Adventure!