Hey!

I'm Chris.

This is me and my family.

The Unconventional Route is my travel blog. The Zag is my life blog. I also enjoy spending time playing beach volleyball, participating in my wife's dinner parties, and going on adventures around town with my son.

I'm from Vancouver, Canada, but now spend almost half my time living in Cape Town, South Africa.

Q&A

Yes. I really work a lot on blogging.

I have this travel blog and The Zag, a personal development blog I fashion as a "gym for your comfort zone."

In 2016, Kim and I were hiking the Banaue Rice Terraces in The Philippines and had the half-baked idea of making a TV show called, "Blending In," where we'd go to some exotic place and connect with locals who could help us source ingredients that come from the region to make into smoothies.

We decided to try it when in Coron, Philippines the next week. And we told the people helped with our smoothie that we had a blog. So, after our trip, we felt obliged to make that blog a reality.

We set up BlendingInTravel.com and posted our experiences there, including our "Hello Hello!" smoothie recipe.

Hello Hello blending in
It all started here.

Those posts got decent traffic, and I enjoyed writing our travel stories, so we made posts about our travels in 2017. Readers were more interested in our travels than our "Blending In" idea, so we changed the site's URL to TheUnconventionalRoute.com.

In 2018, our cheap rental apartment in Vancouver was getting torn down, so we decided to relocate to Medellin. With nothing better to do in Colombia, I decided to become a full-time travel blogger.

I worked 4.5 years in Corporate Finance for Procter and Gamble in Geneva and Panama, "pretired" in 2013, then attempted various (misad-)ventures including a fruit export business, hostel, and bug-based protein powder and oil company.

You can read my pretirement story on my main blog, The Zag.

Botero-ized photo of Kim, my sons, and in-laws having dinner back home in Vancouver.

April 2025

  • Enjoying: The stability of being back in Vancouver, Canada after being abroad (Australia, Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica) the past five months.
  • Working On: Finishing up with my beta ARC program clients and applying the most powerful part, the 'innate edge' process on friends, friends' friends, and anyone else I get in touch with who can experience the power of honing in on your 'innate edge' and help me spread it.
  • Watching: White Lotus. Severance, eventually. Most evenings are spent socially or working/learning.
  • Reading: Just finished "Replay" by Ken Grimwood. Considering "Barbarian Days" next.
  • Current Challenge: Leveling up the perceived value of ARC. I see some coaches making $250k/year/client. My programs provide the leverage to be worth at least that… eventually.

80% comes from the ugly display ads you see all over, unless you have a really good ad blocker.

I also make a little bit of affiliate commissions on some hotels, gear, and books I recommend. I don't think it's enough money to bias my opinions, but I suppose that's what a biased person would say, too.

All over Argentina, Northwestern Mexico, Senegal, Japan, Taiwan.

Where else would you recommend?