Today’s Explorers

ConU Alum The Expeditioners Live to Travel the World

SportsJustin Blanchard — Published October 30, 2012

Their next adventure is anybody’s guess.

This is the life of Roberto Gibbons Gomez, Marco Antonio Wang-Tsu Liu Roqueni, and Cherine Tarraff-Koujock. Together, they are The Expeditioners, a group of former Concordia students who’ve been traveling the world since 2006.

“Sometimes we’ll plan a trip an hour in advance,” said Gomez, a Montrealer. “We say, ‘Let’s go here,’ buy the tickets and then we’re on the plane.”
Packing up for some remote corner of the world on a moment’s notice may seem a little crazy, but it’s nothing new to Gomez and Roqueni—who hails from Mexico—the two have had a knack for exploration since their childhood.

“Our moms were best friends in university,” said Gomez. “So [Roqueni and his family] would always come up and visit a couple times a year.”
And they always made the most of that time together.

“[Roqueni and I] have been going on camping trips together since we were 12 years old,” says Gomez. “We simply wanted to get outdoors, go have fun.”
When Roqueni moved from Mexico to attend Concordia with Gomez in 2001, they took their passion for travel international.

“It went from camping trips when we were kids to just going to the most remote places we could find,” said Gomez.

Together, along with Gomez’s wife Tarraff-Koujock, the group does just that for weeks at a time year after year—taking pictures, filming videos and doing extreme sports like sea kayaking, rock climbing and back-country skiing, everywhere from Australia to Antarctica to British Columbia and back.

“About six years ago we began working with companies that–in return for pictures of our trips– would give us equipment,” said Gomez. “So they would send us kayaks, canoes and even [finance] trips.”

Just three years later, the team expanded its business online.

“The simple desire of going to photograph, and ski, and climb developed into postings on Facebook, and suddenly people started to follow significantly,” says Gomez. “And we thought we should make something out of it.”

“The first evening we got to see the Northern Lights. We got to see the lights in a perfect location known as Jökulsárló—a glacial lagoon—and they roared for eight hours straight.”
—Roberto Gibbons Gomez

And so they did, beginning to regularly chronicle their memorable journeys on Facebook under the name The Expeditioners starting in 2010.

Some were memorable for all the right reasons.

“The first evening we got to see the Northern Lights,” said Gomez of their Iceland trip, “We got to see the lights in a perfect location known as Jökulsárló—a glacial lagoon—and they roared for eight hours straight.”

Others, not so much, however.

“We all camped at a beach in Nova Scotia just two months ago, and while we were making dinner, this sketchy guy came and camped a stone’s throw away from us,” said Gomez.

“While crossing our camp with their stuff, Cherine noticed that one of them was carrying a baseball bat and while making their fire they were sitting facing us […] We managed to pack the car and the kayaks without using our headlamps and ran away in the middle of the night.”

But the trio can’t escape everyday work altogether—gear and free trips don’t mean much when it comes to covering daily needs back home. For that, they are forced to work like the rest of us.

“Roberto and Cherine have a small soap company and sell stuff through eBay,” said Roqueni, who himself has a job as a night manager at a market research call centre.

Their jobs provide them with enough money to get by, all while making room for any potential trips, something few ever thought they would be able to pull off.

“People told us, ‘You’re never going to make this a viable way to live your life, you should be working in an office,’” said Gomez. “It was a lot harder to convince them we could do this when we had just 55 [Facebook] followers and two active users a week.”

But now, with over 20 sponsors, an average of a quarter million hits a week on their Facebook page and preparing to launch their own travel magazine—appropriately titled The Expeditioners —these world travelers don’t plan on giving up their unconventional lifestyle anytime soon.

“My goal would be to launch the magazine and get as much ad revenue as possible to make it sustainable and live off it permanently,” said Gomez.