Road Junky - Behind the Scenes

Behind the Scenes is where you can stay up to date with what the Road Junky team is planning, what new features we’re considering and find out about all this before it hits our frontpage. Everything we do is aimed at – you – the reader, so we would love to hear your feedback on our ideas.

About Road Junky

Road Junky Travel Guides are by no means the authority on the world. They are instead written to make you think, laugh and get a rough feel for a country. We go the extra step and tell you things other guides don’t and won’t dare to discuss. We’re for the inspired, independent traveler. The person who can just get up and go. The person who is moved by what she sees. The dreamers.

Road Junky was founded in 2004 by the prolific writer and musician Tom Thumb and the multifaceted James Klee. With the help of a team of dedicated travelers they weave together guides that put the spirit back into travel.

In addition to Tom and Jim, the full Road Junky team includes Sarah Fretwell, Stefan Kendrew and J Sim. We’re always looking out for useful additions to our team, so if you are interested have a look at the available travel jobs with Road Junky.

We always welcome comments and feedback and will try to answer any questions you may have for us. Don’t hesitate to get in touch

J Sim

J. Sim – our newest contributor to Roadjunky moderates our travel forums and keeps the site honest. Jaded and insightful, we believe assigning him the Sisyphus-like task of getting the ball rolling in the forum community good punishment for whatever his former sins may be. This is what he has to say for himself:

J.Sim, aka JamJam, is a wharf rat born and bred who went on to become a soldier, teacher, financial and media analyst. He has travelled in six continents, including a return overland trip across Asia with only two tapes in his walkman – Trainspotting and Astrud Gilberto, which explains why he is slightly unhinged and is allergic to bossa nova.

JamJam is incapable of patience, singing in tune or moderation in any aspect of life. But he more than makes up for it by being an accomplished tapas cook and having very elegant fingers.

His ideal island paradise has Andaman beaches, Himalayan hills, Spanish lasses, Californian grub, Celtic craic and Hawaiian weather.

Stefan Kendrew

Stefan Kendrew – is the guy helping us build the website into something even bigger and better. After wasting too much time on useless websites he’s finally found a project to spend his days on.

Originally a stressed out neuroscientist working for big pharma, he switched to fixing people’s busted knees for a biotech company and then finally ditched it all in to start working on the big WWW. He now has nightmares of pixels and css bugs.

He’s visited Southeast Asia 6 times, motorbiked around Vietnam and Thailand, spent 6 weeks in the Philippines and Bali, a week in prison in Bangkok (terrible misunderstanding) and has had far too many Changs on Thai beaches. He keeps getting lured back to Asia for “just one more trip” and is currently planning to drive a motorbike from Brussels to Bangkok. His return can not be guaranteed.

Stef loves fast cars, bikini watching, his new EOS and dim sum.

Sarah Fretwell

Sarah Fretwell – A recent addition to the Road Junky team, photographer Sarah Fretwell has been traveling the world since the age of 16, when she and a friend conned a high school teacher into taking several students on a trip to Europe.

Her love affair with travel was instantaneous and her love for adventure in foreign places has been insatiable. Her favorite memories are the curious smiles and warm faces that have greeted her on several journeys as she has traveled, worked in hospitals, schools, orphanages, and with families enslaved in the sex trade.

For Sarah, no trip is complete without what some would consider “misadventure,” like getting stuck on the wrong side of the river during a flash flood, 15-hour truck rides sleeping on sacks of oranges, or being pulled into the middle of an Indian street fight.

Her life’s journey and work have taken her to six continents and she’s working on her 7th. If anyone would like to sponsor a trip to Antarctica, please feel free to contact her at www.sarahfretwell.com.

Jim Klee

Jim Klee – sports a mangled passport and hair that is getting to be too long. He believes travel to be a form of therapy for modern civilization’s madness.

In 2002 Jim embarked on a journey starting with a one-way ticket no return to Mexico City. Some months later he discovered Tom Thumb sleeping in the shade besides his tent on a beach in Costa Rica. After surviving rip currents in Mexico, nearly freezing to death trekking solo in Patagonia, and getting knocked unconscious by submerged rocks while surfing in Australia, Jim decided to clear his head by beelining his way (mostly overland) to the Himalaya. There a regimen of Sufi poetry, yoga up in the mountains, and cheap gel pens resulted in a stack of notebooks containing an unpublishable travel novel. He re-emerged in New York City in late 2004 and Road Junky was born soon after.

Tom Thumb

Tom has been on the road since he was 18 pretty much nonstop and ended up in any number of adventures including hitchhiking to India, dancing with sufis on moonlight beaches in Goa, helping people get out of jail in Delhi, selling fake Rolex watches in Tokyo, living as a gringo in Brazil and a Goy in Israel, he’s been robbed, laughed at, swindled, attacked, betrayed and exploited in over 40 countries around the world and recommends nothing so much as travel for building character.

After his 17th nervous breakdown, he traded in a life of living on crumbs fallen from heaven and decided to cash in on his travel experience by founding www.roadjunky.com which allows him to sit around looking important with a laptop most anywhere in the world with a wireless connection.

He now writes novels for children between the ages of 10 and 80 and pretends to live in Sardinia, Italy where he has a pretty shabby yurt set up on a friend’s bit of land in the hills. Having become a cult underground media figure and hero of children all over the world, he values his privacy and refuses to give out his address or phone number to anyone who doesn’t happen to be female, 23 years old and looks good in a bikini.