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.

At the beach in front of our apartment in Cape Town.

Loving the sunset views at our way-too-expensive-but-only-thing-we-could-find apartment in Cape Town.

This is our fifth-straight year spending the Canadian winter here. We arrived in November and will go back to Vancouver at the end of April just before Zac turns two.

I just finished developing TheZag.com and moving all my personal development content over there. Now, I’m praying Google embraces it. I’m also looking for other ways to reach more people who I know I can help zag—that is stop exhausting themselves on the grind toward conventional success and start pushing themselves toward an unconventionally successful life that gets better every day.

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?