I met Sylvain about three years ago, in an hostel in Iceland. A huge snowstorm forced my travel buddy and I to stop for the night in an hostel when I heard a french couple behind me at the reception. Let me tell you that as a french person, you can be really judgemental over other french persons when you are travelling. So I didn’t say anything at first and just listened. Just to be sure. You know…

   

I am always surprise at my first reaction toward french travellers when I meet them.
A part of me is attracted by them, afterall we are sharing the same langage and maybe, somehow, the same culture. an other side of me is to reject directly and in a block everything about them. I have a terrible secret… I love french people as much as I can’t bear them.

You start to travel young usually and most people never really stop. Anytime I think about my last trip, I remember that my great grand mother, Barberine, was cruising in the Mediteraneean sea until she was 98 years old.

I recognize that we have in general a sense of travel that many other travellers could have mistaken with a passion for adventure. A lot of us are indeed from the Indiana Jones team but the majority of frogs just love taking holidays abroad for exotisme sake of it. With a backpack in Myanmar or around a swimming pool on a paradisiac island, maybe one of the reason I try to avoid my dear French compatriotes is because we all are guilty to do what I call a new kind of colonialism. We love discovering what’s up outside our borders but isn’t it to brag about the perfection of our romantic langage, beautiful art and fashion, amazing éducatif system and so and so?

  
I met tonnes of french girls travelling by themselves and as much as I was afraid to start doing a preference for my nationnality for the documentary, the number of girls I interviewed in french was simply due to the big number of solo frenchies “getting lost” with a backpack in South East Asia. Miguel told me before hiking the Ijen Volcano in Java that he travelled a lot in his life and that the bravest women he met on the road were French. “Why?” I asked. “Because they are not afraid of discovering the world alone”.

That day in Iceland, I made two friends. Léa and Sylvain. We did cool stuffs together like walking, chasing the northern lights, partying in Reykjavik and braving a hurricane.

And like it rarely happens in life, I met Sylvain in a dramaticaly different weather kind of place on earth.

And because life is full of surprises, at the other side of the world, we shared an amazing trip under the sea.