Born by the sea,
pulled by every horizon
I grew up in Albufeira, on the southern coast of Portugal, where the Atlantic is never more than five minutes away. The ocean was never something I discovered it was just always there, pulling at me the way it pulls at everyone who grows up next to it.
I trained as an architect at FAUTL and later studied management at NOVA SBE. For 13 years I built a career as a marketing director and strategist across fintech, consumer electronics and luxury travel, leading teams, launching products and managing P&Ls. I was good at it. I was also, somewhere underneath all of it, saving for something else.
Why I travel the way I do
I'm interested in the feeling you get when you're standing somewhere that makes the rest of your life go quiet for a moment. The Bay of Kotor at dawn. The train street in Hanoi at night. Padang Padang when the swell arrives.
I've visited 28 countries across Europe, Asia, Southeast Asia and the Americas. I've surfed in Bali and ridden trains across Germany. I've eaten my way through Thailand and watched cherry blossom fall in Japan. Every trip changes something in the way I see things.
The moments my jaw dropped
Every trip has the ordinary and the extraordinary. These three stopped me completely:
Mount Fuji. Standing in front of it on a clear March morning, I understood for the first time why a mountain can be sacred. Nothing prepares you for the scale of it.
Chichen Itza. The architecture alone would be enough. But standing in front of El Castillo and understanding the astronomical precision behind every dimension of it that is something else entirely.
The Votiv Church light show in Vienna. A projection mapping show on the interior of the church. Light filling the nave, the arches, the ceiling architecture transformed into something that moves.
What this blog is
Traveling Ana started as a way to document what I was seeing and feeling while I traveled. It became something more. I write the way I talk. I tell you what I actually thought of a place, what surprised me, what disappointed me and what made me want to stay longer.