For the first time since starting Museum of Wander, I’m sitting down to write about the year that’s just passed.
This site has always been two things for me. It’s a place to share trips, itineraries, and practical information, and hopefully to make travel feel a little less intimidating for other people. But it’s also ours. A personal museum of sorts. A place to keep hold of our trips, moments, photos, and thoughts. Something to look back on years from now, when memory starts to blur at the edges.
Until now, I’ve never really marked the end of a year here. I’ve always moved straight on to whatever came next. Another trip. Another post. Another idea waiting to be written.
This year felt different. It felt like it deserved to be paused.
So this is the beginning of something new. At the end of each year, I’ll sit down and write one of these. Not to extract lessons or wrap things up neatly, but simply to look back and record the year as it was. And, quietly, to acknowledge whatever shape the year ahead might take before it gets filled in.
This is the first entry, my 2025 year in review, written simply as a record of the year as it was.
The Year of Waiting
2025 will always go down as the year of waiting. The year of limbo. A quiet year of checking my email inbox twenty times a day.
The waiting started earlier, of course. At the end of 2023, Jin and I were living in Al Ain, an oasis city in the UAE, and finally admitted to each other that we couldn’t be expats forever. We wanted somewhere to call home. Somewhere to settle, get a dog, and, if we’re lucky, grow old together. I hated teaching in the UAE, which made the decision easier. South Africa, where I’m from, didn’t feel right. Korea, where Jin is from, didn’t either. We needed somewhere neutral, with clean air, good healthcare, and a healthy work-life balance.
Australia seemed to fit our needs. Apparently, there is a huge teacher shortage, and we qualified based on their point system for immigration. So we chose Australia.
That year disappeared into paperwork. An immigration agent. Endless paperwork. Payslips for the last five years. English tests we didn’t really need but had to take anyway. We submitted our application and left the UAE in April 2024 thinking it would be a few months before we landed in Australia. Jin went back to Korea to “visit” her parents. I returned to South Africa to stay with my mum. And then nothing. Months of radio silence.
In April 2025, South Australia finally sent an invitation for a permanent residence visa. It felt official. Solid. Like the waiting was nearly over. We transferred thousands of Aussie dollars to pay for the visa. Booked health checks. Told people we’d be in Adelaide soon.
As I’m typing this, we’re still waiting. Still checking email at 10:00, 13:00, 17:00, and 03:00 just in case there is an email from Canberra . Still hovering somewhere between before and after.
It’s been a year of waiting in a way that slowly seeps into everything. It’s hard to focus when your life feels paused. I’ve taken a break from teaching (because what if that visa comes tomorrow?), so in theory I’m focusing on blogging. In reality, I’ve mostly been waiting.
One good thing came out of all that waiting, though. I started running. The first time I jogged around the block I could barely breathe. Now I wake up looking forward to a ten-kilometre run before breakfast. It’s one thing that kept moving when everything else stood still.
Jin is in Seoul, working part-time teaching ESL. We video call every other day. Mundane updates. What we ate. How her work was. What I write and didn’t write. Sometimes we laugh. Sometimes she cries. Sometimes we talk about a Plan B, but after so much time and money, we usually change the subject.
So yes, 2025 was quiet. Suspended. Incomplete. A year defined by waiting. And waiting has a way of making even the calmest days feel heavy.
Travel in 2025
The Year of Waiting was also the year of almost no travel. After years of two or three international trips annually, I could almost hear my passport asking to be used.
In June, after receiving the invitation from Australia, I decided it was time to say goodbye to Africa. I assumed I’d be flying to Adelaide soon. It felt right to leave properly.
I borrowed my mum’s 2015 Ford Fiesta and drove north to Kruger National Park. They say the bush lives in every South African, and spending what I thought might be my final days there made sense. I chose Shingwedzi Camp in the far north of the park, an area I’d never explored before. It was wild and quiet, and easily my best self-drive safari to date.
On the roads around Shingwedzi I saw hundreds of elephants, buffalo herds a thousand strong, lions so close I could have reached out and touched their tails, and long, silent moments watching giraffes pick their way across dry riverbeds.
As spectacular as the trip was, it was also heavy. There’s something quietly heartbreaking about the idea of leaving home for good. About crossing a line you can’t easily step back over. About becoming someone slightly different.
By October, Australia was still silent. Jin and I had been living on separate continents for over a year, apart from my visit to Korea in late 2024. I booked a flight to Seoul.
Meeting again at Incheon Airport made the wait feel worthwhile.
I spent the whole of November in Korea, which I’m convinced is the best month to be there. Autumn suits the country. The light, the colours, the temperature.
When Jin worked, I stayed home speaking broken Korean with my in-laws, relying heavily on hand gestures and guessing, or wandered Seoul alone. After eight years of living there, it still amazes me how quickly the city reinvents itself. This year, it was bakeries. Serious ones. People lining up for an hour or more for bagels, croissants, or some inventive combination of the two.
On Jin’s days off, we revisited familiar places and took a weekend trip to Busan by the sea, followed by another to Gyeongju, the ancient capital of the Silla kingdom.
Busan used to be a favourite escape when I was still an ESL teacher in my twenties. Back then, weekends there were loud and indulgent, fuelled by cheap drinks, late nights, and the feeling that life was moving quickly and endlessly forward. This time felt very different. It was a grown-up trip in the best way. Long walks, slow sightseeing, and some of the best meals I’ve had in Korea. Same city, completely different versions of ourselves
.Gyeongju, though, has always been something else entirely. It’s the most unique part of the country for me. A place where history feels unusually close to the surface. Tumuli rising quietly between streets, temples tucked into hillsides, and ruins that aren’t fenced off so much as lived around. We spent two days in Gyeongju, wandering between sites, eating well, and being reminded just how different it looks and feels from the rest of Korea.
I had planned to do much more, but a tooth broke the day before I flew to Korea. What I hoped would be a quick dental visit turned into a root canal and a crown spread across seven appointments.
Still, that month in Seoul was exactly what we needed. Time together. Time with family.
I joined in the annual kimchi-making ritual in November, when Korean households prepare enough kimchi to last through winter. My sister-in-law joked that tourists pay good money for an experience like that. I stood there, elbows deep in chilli paste, coating napa cabbages under my mother-in-law’s watchful eye while K-pop played in the background. No tour or cooking class can ever give you that.
Museum of Wander in 2025
For a long time, I thought blogging full-time was the goal. The dream. After “doing it full-time” in 2025, I’m pretty sure it’s not for me.
Blogging is lonely work. You spend hours alone with your thoughts, editing photos, checking facts, rewriting sentences, and staring at screens. I missed the classroom. I missed the strange, funny, unexpected things students say and do. I missed being around people.
Before sitting down to write this, I was convinced I’d slacked off this year. That I could have done more. Written more. But when I actually counted, I realised I published 37 stories in 2025.
Good job, De Wet.
Looking back, it’s not the numbers that matter anyway. It’s the emails. Messages from readers sharing where they went, what they saw, and how something they read here helped them plan a trip or made travelling less intimidating. Those messages are a reminder that Museum of Wander isn’t just mine. It belongs to the people who spend time here.
This year also marked a shift in how I approach writing the blog. In the past, I fell into the trap of writing for search engines, and our voice softened along the way. Some posts drifted into guidebook territory, and rereading them now makes me cringe. I’ll go back and fix that.
In 2025, I consciously pivoted. More personal stories, more photo essays, and more of our own experiences and opinions woven into guides. Writing like this feels better and more honest.
Museum of Wander turned five this year, and it’s been the most successful year so far. Just over half a million people read something on the site in 2025, which still feels surreal for what is, most days, a one-man operation.
The five most-read posts published this year were:
Somewhere along the way, without much fanfare, the blog also grew into something more than a hobby. Museum of Wander is still very much a passion project, but in 2025 it quietly became a small business too. It covered my basic expenses and allowed me to step away from full-time teaching for the year, something I never imagined would be possible when I started the blog.
Most of that support comes from the unglamorous things: the (often annoying) ads you see while reading, and the small commissions earned when someone books a hotel through one of my links.
Museum of Wander is, and always will be, free to read. No paywalls, no subscriptions, no locked doors. I’m deeply grateful for the readers who make that possible, simply by being here.
Quiet Plans for 2026
If 2025 taught me anything, it’s that you can whisper your dreams to the universe and it will laugh, take notes, and then do something else entirely.
Still, it feels wrong to step into a new year without at least a loose direction. Not a plan, but something faint to move towards.
In 2026, we’re hoping to finally get that damn visa. If all goes well, maybe next year’s end-of-year post will be written from Adelaide, with something cold and celebratory in hand. If not, we’ll adjust, as we’ve learned to do.
There are no real travel plans on the horizon. If Australia does become home, Museum of Wander will slowly start filling with stories and guides from South Australia and Adelaide, written as we find our feet. Starting over on an entirely new continent is something we’ve done before, but it still feels exciting and unsettling in equal measure.
For the blog, the plan remains simple. Keep writing. Keep it human. Provide real and useful travel information in a world where AI answers questions instantly and influencers make viral videos about “hidden” cafés that turn out to be Starbucks. We’ll stay grounded, honest, and practical, and trust that the right people will keep finding us.
Thank you for reading, for coming back, and for taking the time to write when something here resonated with you.
Let’s do this again in 2026.
Happy New Year.