Guest Interview – The Moment Keepers

This week’s guest post comes from Jeremiah and Joanna, travel bloggers behind The Moment Keepers. They explain ‘Moment Keepers are people who keep their memories alive through travel and photography. They are the one who doesn’t waste moments that are worth keeping. Please don’t search it in your Webster dictionary as we only create this definition! ? We cannot always rely on our memory as it will weaken over the years. Thus, capturing significant moments in our life and travels has been our way to encapsulate the experience and share it with you. We hope to inspire you by sharing our moments of unpredictable travels and fiery passion in photography.’

1. What is your name and where do you come from?

We’re Jeremiah and Joanna Villanueva, married couple from the Philippines. Currently resides in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. We’ve been here for more than 6 years now.

2. What sort of traveller are you? Full time / part time / business / backpacker etc?

We don’t travel full time but we do manage to squeeze in a bit of travel and photography during holidays and make the most of our 30 days annual leave.

3. How do you fund your travelling?

Currently, we’re paying for all our travels from our respective company benefits. Our travel blog was launched last July 31st only. We really hope to expand our network and hope to get something from this blog in funding our travels.

4. Where is the best place you have ever been and why?

So far, Greece is our favorite place. Aside from the beautiful attractions and beaches, out of this world caldera panoramic view, charming whitewashed houses, delicious food, friendly locals – we had a perfect weather during our whole stay here. After exploring countries, we’d realized how the weather can greatly affect one’s experience when traveling.

5. Where is the worst place you have ever been and why?

I guess it would be Hongkong as the humid was very bad during one of our visits. But the Asian country did not fail to amaze us during the winter months.

6. Do you have a Bucket List? If so where are the 3 top places on it?

So hard to choose and we haven’t created a proper bucket list as we want to visit a lot of places : ) But for now our top 3 would be, seeing the northern lights in Iceland, Machu Picchu in Peru and see the Grand Canyon.

7. What 3 things (apart from the essentials – food/water etc) do you always travel with?

We always bring our camera tripod as we don’t like to always ask people to take our “awkward” couple shots, powerbank, and medicines.

8. What makes you happy and why?

Travel makes us happy and helps us to be motivated at work. More when the travel dates are fast approaching! Wanderlust activated! All the process of itinerary planning, taking beautiful photos, experiencing different cultures, trying local food, and writing travel stories are always fun to do. If we can only leave our corporate jobs and travel the world we would do so. But we’re a family starter and we’re not rich so we just enjoy the short time trips.

9. How long have you been blogging and why did you start?

I’ve been blogging since 2012, it was a personal blog where I simply write anything under the sun – my designs, celebrations and more descriptive stories about my photos in Facebook. It serves as a digital journal of my important life events where I can look back after years. Later on when we decided to visit more countries I discovered the happiness in writing about the travels we made and sharing the great photos captured by my husband.  And when a lot of my friends and colleagues asked about our travel itineraries, tips, expenses and experiences we decided to create a professional platform – one that is worth sharing, easy to navigate, detailed and clear. Then one evening in June 2016, this blog was born.

10. What makes your blog unique and why should people read it?

Not only do we try to provide information about places we have been and give tips and recommendations about different destinations, we make sure to add our real, honest and personal experiences. Even it’s a bad experience, we will share it on the blog as we want to help and guide our readers not to experience the same.

From ESLT – thank you Jeremiah and Joanna for taking the time to answer our questions. Safe Travels 🙂

You can also find The Moment Keepers on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest