An Instafamous couple are on a ‘never-ending honeymoon’ – and it’s making everyone really jealous.
Jean Hocke, 34, and Camille Demyttenaere, 32, are aiming to make their post-wedding holiday last a lifetime – and they have already been travelling for two years and visited 52 countries.
The Belgian pair have set up the Instagram account @backpackdiariez to document their adventure – and they have already racked up 240,000 followers.
The countries they have been to include the Maldives, Jaipur, New Zealand, India and Ecuador.
The couple tied the knot in Santorini in September 2017, and they set off on an ‘extended honeymoon’ to Asia and just decided to keep going.
They quit their London jobs and decided to ‘live their dream’ – now they travel full time, staying at luxury hotels for free.
They get paid by brands to show products on their Instagram page – charging up to 1,000 EUR (£892) per post.
Camille says this new lifestyle is exactly what they have always wanted.
‘We are not tied to any “number of holidays” you can take every year,’ says Camille.
‘We travel whenever wherever we want, and we are super flexible with schedules, e.g. when we like a place we can decide to stay longer without having to answer to anyone.’
But she says it’s not always an easy ride: ‘There are no weekends as we work every day of the week! So we do not have that “yay it’s Friday feeling”, and we actually work much more than what we did when we were working in strategy consulting.
‘It’s not easy to make money out of it. Yes we get a lot of stuff for free, but actually monetising your Instagram account is an entire different story.
‘Being a travel blogger is not always accepted as a “real” job by some people.
‘Many people, including some of our family and friends, think we are just always on holiday and don’t understand the work and effort we are putting into it, so we end up having to explain what we do every time.’
The couple were in the news a few weeks back for a picture of them hanging off the side of a train in Sri Lanka, which critics said was dangerous and irresponsible.
But the couple said the pic was much safer to take than it appeared.
‘This picture looks much more dangerous than it actually was,’ said Camille.
‘The train was moving at walking speed and it looks as if we’re hanging above the cliff where as in reality we’re only hanging above the tracks.
‘This picture is the result of a significant thinking and planning process and we took every precaution to make sure we were safe.’
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