Featured Meet TheDestination: Low SeasonZimbabwe Travellers
Low Season
Travellers
Bryony Simcox and George Webster are filmmakers, storytellers, and changemakers. After starting their video production company, Broaden, whilst living and working in Australia, Bryony and George planned an ambitious journey to drive their newly acquired 1994 Toyota Hiace named Suzi from the UK to Southern Chile, via India, before Covid derailed their plans when they hit València, Spain. In this interview I caught up with Bryony and George to discuss how Broaden started, their time living in a van in Spain during lockdown, the kindness of strangers, and how they have developed a passion for sustainable travel.
Ryan: Tell me about how Broaden started. George: Broaden started when we lived in Australia. I was a self-taught filmmaker and Bryony was an Urban Designer and Placemaker. We were coming up to the point where we had to decide whether to stay in Australia or not, and we realised that we didn’t like the idea of just coming back and living a ‘normal life’. So we decided to live out an idea that I had had for years of driving from England to Chile. Bryony: I was loving my career in Urban Design at the time, but in different ways we were both feeling the frustrations of working for a boss that wasn’t yourself. We were having creative aspirations alongside a realisation that we really wanted to travel. The company that I was working with had commissioned George to make a video about an urban design transport plan, and through that project we realised how much we liked video as a form of storytelling.
Bryony working in current day Broaden
George: We decided that we would make a YouTube channel and create documentaries as we travelled. Before we left Australia, we filmed a test documentary for a placemaking project that Bryony was working on as a proof of concept, and we had a series called Place Portraits which was about capturing cities in Europe with an analogue camera. So the concept was around further developing the 2010s ‘vlogging’ movement, focusing more on cinematic storytelling.
Bryony: For us, living in the van was about so many things; self-sufficiency, self-reliance, self-determination, exploration, pushing ourselves to the limit, and celebrating old technology. The videography was the curse of the creative, we couldn’t experience something like that without feeling the urge to document it. So for us, using filmmaking as a way of telling the stories that we encountered along the way was the tool we used.
(Left) Bryony and George stood with Suzi the van
Low Season Traveller
We moved back to the UK and then started looking for a very specific campervan, a Toyota Hiace 1994, which we spent our savings on purchasing and building.
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