Travel

After years of globe-hopping, professional travel blogger picks Anchorage to be her hometown

Have you ever dreamed of being a full-time traveler? You know — just wandering from one incredible destination to another, learning about the culture along the way?

Well, it's one thing to have that dream — and it's quite another to actually map it out and make it work. A central consideration, of course, is developing an income stream to fund the plane tickets, apartments and food on the table.

Jiyeon "Juno" Kim grew up in Seoul, South Korea. By any standard, she seemed to be doing well. As a mechanical engineer, she landed a job with a prestigious Korean company and seemed poised to enjoy a fruitful and prosperous career designing oil and gas refineries around the world.

"I quickly realized the work environment was not what I thought it was. I became miserable — and even became mean to my parents," she said.

I first learned about Juno while reading a book by Chris Guillebeau called "The Happiness of Pursuit." Chris' big pursuit was to visit every country (193 in all) in the world before he turned 35. Then, he wrote a book about others who had found meaning and inspiration in their pursuits, including Kim.

[Take 12 months. Add 10 stops. Fly around the world.]

Ever since she took a monthlong backpacking trip to New Zealand, Kim had made "bucket lists" of all the things she wanted to see and do — and travel was at the top. Having enough money to travel was a challenge, though.

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"When I finally got the money, I didn't have the time, since my company wanted my loyalty," she said.

But the company lifestyle didn't fit her style.

"I'm a dreamer," she said. "I already had started writing a blog from my travels, making a little bit of money. So with the money I had saved from my job, I just decided to change my career and become a travel blogger."

The transition was very difficult. "My family did not understand," she said. "In Korea, you just don't quit your job. The external pressure is very hard. You feel like you're disappointing your family — and you doubt yourself. I think this is why more Asian women don't do this."

Further, travel was not something that Kim's family had done when she was growing up.

"Although we're on a peninsula in Korea, we're essentially an island. So you have to fly to travel — and when I was growing up that was very expensive," she said.

Kim's blog, runawayjuno.com, is full of photos and stories from around the world. After six years of full-time travel, she has developed packages to work with tourism bureaus to help promote their destinations.

Along the way, she and two partners started a travel company, Unquote Travel. In the process, she's been able to check off many of her favorite destinations on her bucket list, while discovering new places.

"Mongolia is amazing," she said. "We drove south from the capital of Ulan Bator. As a Korean, we knew a little bit about the country, but I was surprised at how little I knew. The land is so big — and the people are so proud. They have their own unique musical instruments, singing style and sports. And yes, we stayed in yurts."

Recently, Kim and her husband, Stephen Bugno, set their sights on central Europe. "My husband's family is from Poland and Slovakia, so we picked Budapest as our first stop," she said.

"We loved it: the food, the architecture — it's really a hipster city," she said. She even wrote a guide to the city for digital nomads, including tips for short-term housing, remote workplaces (coffee shops) and Budapest's thermal baths.

Since they stayed for a month, they sought long-term accommodations through Airbnb. And because she was working on the road keeping up with her blog and doing other freelance work, she needed more time.

"You really need double the amount of time you think. We just moved slower," she said.

Next, she and Bugno moved to Bucharest, Romania. "We started by taking a trip around Transylvania, then settled in Bucharest. It's very cosmopolitan," she said. "The city has great public transportation and the people are nice and interesting." Bugno also writes a travel blog, bohemiantraveler.com.

After traveling around the world for months at a time, Kim became more interested in other people's cultures, particularly indigenous people.

"People like the Rapanui of Easter Island or the Sami people of Lapland are deeply connected to the land," she said. "It's as though these people belong to the land. And whenever I meet these people all over the world — I am overwhelmed by their connection to the land."

It's been six years since Kim adopted the role of travel blogger, which enabled her to adopt the lifestyle of a digital nomad. She's able to work anywhere as she travels and learns more about people and their cultures around the world.

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Chatting over a cup of coffee at Williwaw in downtown Anchorage, she confessed, "I don't want to continue the nomad life."

"When you're a nomad, you miss the connection with other people," she said. "It's nice to have a neighbor. I've always wanted to find the right community."

Kim's husband is a U.S. citizen. Still, they were limited to three-month stays in either the U.S. or Korea (or another country) before one of their visas expired.

"We were always just visiting," she said. They decided to make a home together. And between Korea and the U.S., they chose the U.S.

Juno has visited Alaska several times to share her stories and photos with her online audience. She's even visited the state in the winter.

In the process she's made many new friends, and now they're neighbors. Alaska had cast its spell on one more traveler.

So "Runaway Juno," the travel blogger who has traveled all over the world for the past six years, chose Anchorage. "I find Anchorage to be very open-minded and outdoorsy. I feel very comfortable here," she said.

The mountains of paperwork, the controversy about immigration reform, the travel bans and the sharp rhetoric from Washington, D.C., all weighed on Kim as she made her first flight as a prospective immigrant to the U.S.

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At the Honolulu airport, her port of entry, "my final step to becoming an immigrant was painless. It was very much about the paperwork," she wrote in her blog.

The coffee was cold as we shut our laptops and got ready to go. But Kim had the glow of someone who's still infatuated with the state we call home.

"I've always wanted to live somewhere that's inspiring every day," she said. "And to me, Anchorage is the most beautiful place in the world — inside and out."

Scott McMurren is an Anchorage-based marketing consultant, serving clients in the transportation, hospitality, media and specialty destination sectors, among others. Contact him by email at zoom907@me.com. You can follow him on Twitter (@alaskatravelGRM) and alaskatravelgram.com. For more information, visit alaskatravelgram.com/about.

Scott McMurren

Scott McMurren is an Anchorage-based marketing consultant, serving clients in the transportation, hospitality, media and specialty destination sectors, among others. Contact him by email at zoom907@me.com. Subscribe to his e-newsletter at alaskatravelgram.com. For more information, visit alaskatravelgram.com/about.

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