Photos:Meet couple who quit their good paying job to travel, now they are broke

A South African couple, Chanel Cartell and Stevo Dirnberger made headlines earlier this year after they quit their stable advertising jobs to see how far from home they could travel.

The couple is chronicling their journey on a blog called “How Far From Home.” Since starting their trip they have posted snaps from beautiful locations all around the world.

But the couple wants their readers to know, when they aren’t doing yoga on a beach in Greece, they are scrubbing out toilets and scrounging for cash.

In a post on their blog, Cartell wrote that she and Dirnberger realized that their social media posts about their trip are not really telling the full story.

“Browsing through our blog posts and Instagram feed, it seems like we’re having the time of our lives,” she wrote. “And don’t get me wrong – we are. It’s bloody amazing. But it’s not all ice-creams in the sun and pretty landscapes.”
In fact, she wrote when they aren’t taking pretty pictures, they are doing “painstakingly hard and dirty work.”

So far, I think we’ve tallied 135 toilets scrubbed, 250 kilos of cow dung spread, 2 tons of rocks shovelled, 60 metres of pathway laid, 57 beds made, and I cannot even remember how many wine glasses we’ve polished.

You see, to come from the luxuries we left behind in Johannesburg, to the brutal truth of volunteer work, we are now on the opposite end of the scale. We’re toilet cleaners, dog poop scoopers, grocery store merchandisers, and rock shovelers.