About us

Hi! We are Pavel and Alexandra Volkov. This blog is about our travels: the big round-the-world trip it started with, and the trips we now take as a family of three, with Leia.

Round the world

In Russia we worked in the most ordinary offices. The idea of a big Journey came to us about a year before we set off and grew into a goal: we gathered information and our things, got US visas, and bought our first tickets. The Journey began on March 3, 2015. Posts about the round-the-world trip are in the “Round the World 2014–2018” category and on the trip pages.

Our first country was Sri Lanka, which we toured on a rented scooter. Then came India — from Goa to the Himalayas and Varanasi — and Nepal. In Phuket we bought our own scooter and rode it through Thailand, Laos, and Malaysia. After selling the scooter we went on to Cambodia, Vietnam, Singapore, and Indonesia with the volcanoes of Java.

In the spring of 2016 we had to go back to Moscow, and on May 23, 2017, the Journey continued in the USA: in Los Angeles we bought a car and in five months drove a loop around the country — 27,000 kilometers, 33 states, 29 national parks. From San Francisco we flew to Phuket and lived there until the spring of 2018.

Trips with Leia

In November 2022 we moved to Phuket, this time as a family of three: we chose it for the sea all year round and the local food. In Phuket we celebrated the Thai festival of Loy Krathong, and from there we went to Krabi. In the summer of 2024 we picked up a car in Italy and over a little more than two months drove a loop from Rome back to Rome — through Switzerland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark, by ferry to Norway, through Sweden with the IKEA Museum, back through Denmark and Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria, and the Dolomites.

We tell the story of these trips from Alexandra's diary. The same diary gave us stories that were never in the old blog, such as the photo essay “America 2017”.

What you'll find here

Trips — the route and all the posts of a trip in order.

Practical notes: visas and visa runs, renting and buying a scooter, a Thai driver's license, Indian trains — in the “Tips” category. Our car in the USA gets a post of its own.

Stories about places are in the country categories, and photos are in the albums.

Where this blog came from

We ran the Travel4Live blog in 2014–2018 at travel4live.su. In 2026 it moved here in full, to blog.volkv.com, with its posts, photos, and readers' comments; old addresses lead to the new ones. Pavel's website is volkv.com.