How Far From Home: Chanel and Stevo’s Kilometre Chalkboard Journey

On 2 March 2015, Chanel Cartell and Stevo Dirnberger left their advertising jobs in Johannesburg, packed their lives into four bags and boarded a flight to find out how far from home they could get. They tracked every kilometre and chalked the running total on a small blackboard in each photo. The project, How Far From Home, became one of the best-known travel accounts on Instagram and, eventually, a full-time creative business.

Chanel and Stevo: from advertising to the open road

The couple met at Vega, a brand communication school in Johannesburg, and started dating after a blind date in 2010. Together they had nearly 15 years of experience in advertising and branding when they decided, in their words, that they “needed to do something that would charge the electrolytes in our veins again.”

Before leaving they sold most of their belongings, cancelled contracts and memberships, and saved what they could. The four bags held only essentials and camera equipment. They described the trip as a journey “to see how far we can get physically from Johannesburg, South Africa, and figuratively from our comfort zones.”

Their route followed a personal Wanderlist drawn up in 2014: a list of places and experiences that included climbing an Alpine peak, dancing in Berlin, photographing an alpaca and spending time with huskies in the Arctic.

The kilometre chalkboard

The idea was simple and very much an advertiser’s idea: one recognisable prop, repeated in every frame, with the backdrop doing the storytelling. The figure on the board is the cumulative distance travelled, so it keeps rising even when the pair circle back to the same town. That is why several Austrian stops appear more than once at different totals.

The first board read 0 km in Johannesburg. Within about two months they had covered roughly 11,000 km, and by the end of their first ten months on the road the total stood at 86,614 km.

Austria: Salzburg, Vienna and the Untersberg

After a stop in Abu Dhabi, the couple spent several weeks in Austria, much of it around Salzburg. Seekirchen am Wallersee, where many of the photos were taken, is a lakeside town of about 10,800 people some 15 km from Salzburg; it claims to be the oldest Austrian settlement still in existence, settled about 5,000 years ago. Other stops included Vienna, Eugendorf and Anif.

The Alpine highlight was the Untersberg, the massif that rises less than 16 km south of Salzburg and straddles the Austrian–German border. Its highest point, the Berchtesgaden Hochthron, reaches 1,973 m. Since 1961 the Untersbergbahn cable car has carried visitors in about eight and a half minutes from St. Leonhard (456 m) to the Geiereck summit station at 1,776 m. Local legend says Emperor Frederick Barbarossa sleeps inside the mountain, his beard growing around a round table.

Berlin, Oslo and Arctic Alta

From Austria the boards moved north: just over 10,000 km in Berlin, where the Wanderlist called for a night of dancing, then 11,185 km in Oslo. The final photos of this first chapter come from Alta, at 13,012 km, in Norway’s far-northern Finnmark county.

Alta lies at almost 70° north, at the head of the Altafjord where the Alta River meets the sea. With about 16,000 residents it is one of the world’s northernmost towns of more than 10,000 people, and it calls itself Nordlysbyen, the Northern Lights City. Its striking Northern Lights Cathedral was completed in 2013. Arctic volunteer work with huskies became one of the experiences the couple lists among their highlights.

What happened next

A blog post about quitting advertising to scrub toilets went viral in 2015, picked up by Instagram, AdWeek, BuzzFeed and the Daily Mail. Their first clients, Topdeck Travel and Tastemade, turned a planned one-year sabbatical into a nomadic business, followed by campaigns for The Luxury Collection, Expedia and JW Marriott. In 2019 they won Most Original Instagram Channel at the Traverse Creator Awards.

The couple married in South Africa on 9 February 2020, and their daughter Elodie was born in April 2023. They have now visited more than 65 countries and run HFFH Studio, a video consultancy for travel and lifestyle brands. Their full timeline is on their own account.

Planning a long trip as a pair? Our couples’ travel-planning guide covers the everyday decisions, and FollowMeTo’s India photographs show another travel series built on one repeated idea.

Related reading

• Cheetah Platt and Rhiann Woodyard’s Around-the-World Wedding Photo Project
• Tiny House Giant Journey: Guillaume Dutilh and Jenna Spesard’s Road Story
• Leaving Work to Travel: The Journey in the Gallery and Planning Your Own Break

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