Chris and Marianne Fisher aren’t your average travel YouTubers. Forget glamorous locations and designer outfits in five-star hotels. The couple, from Telford, Shropshire, are more likely to be seen at the wheel of their six-metre long 2005 Fiat Ducato van than sipping cocktails in infinity pools.

“We’ve done shots of whisky with a real human toe in the glass,” says Marianne, 56, a surgical theatre secretary.

“We’ve lived in a garage on Vancouver Island for six weeks while we waited for spare parts for the van, we’ve driven through the most frightening mountain passes imaginable in Georgia and been lion and elephant spotting in South Africa’s Kruger Park.”

These are just a few of the adventures that the couple had on a four-and-a-half-year trip around the world, living and travelling in their six-metre-long van, nicknamed Trudy.

The Fishers headed off from Ironbridge on January 5, 2020, driving to Dover and then to France, Monaco, Italy, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Albania, North Macedonia, Greece, Bulgaria and, by March, Turkey, where, as borders closed because of the pandemic, they decided to stay until normality resumed.

Like the rest of the world, that took longer than expected, and they were forced to spend 95 days living in an Istanbul carpark where their YouTube channel – which they started to keep their children and travel-mad relations up to date on their experiences – began to take off.

“Istanbul was amazing for three days, then the border closed, and we knew we just had to make the most of it,” says Marianne.

“We grew vegetables in the mud by the side of the road, we made friends with people in the tower blocks behind us, who’d throw us bread, and with not much else going on, Chris posted regular videos of our lives.

“Because we never tried to be beautiful people living in luxury, but showed the reality of the rather bizarre situation we were in, it seemed to really cheer other people up around the world, stuck inside and in need of something to put a smile on their faces.”

It was certainly a departure from their old, settled life in which Chris, 54, an NHS catering manager, and his wife felt stressed by the long hours demanded by their jobs.

Chris’s GP told him his blood pressure was dangerously high and bluntly advised him to “work less” but one of the biggest catalysts was Marianne donating a kidney to save the life of her best friend Katie in 2017.

“Our three sons were all grown up and had left home, so we were rattling around this big house, thinking the clock was ticking, we could be the next to ‘check out’,” says Chris.

“We asked ourselves what we’d do if someone told us we had just one, or five years left, and in a shot both of us said, ‘Travel the world’,” says Marianne.

In 2018 they invested £18,500 in Trudy, which has a double bed, a sink, two gas rings, a fridge, wardrobe, shower and toilet. The next step was resigning from their jobs, renting out their five-bedroom house and selling most of their belongings.

With £14,000 spending money left over, they calculated they could survive on just £25 a day to cover all food and bills, over a 20-month journey through 20 countries.

But as their YouTube videos became more popular – attracting 200,000 followers, with 28 million total views – the couple inadvertently created an income stream that enabled them to “just keep going”.

In the end they visited 29 countries, only finishing their expedition two months ago.

“We always wanted to go off the beaten path, to let locals take us to special places most tourists don’t normally go to,” Chris said. “As well as amazing beaches, mountains and wildlife parks, perhaps too often we’d end up stuck somewhere you’d never really choose to visit, but that was all part of the journey.”

“Perhaps our favourite story out of the thousands is when we found a woman called Seher camped on a beach in Turkey,” said Marianne.

“She was trying to protect the turtles who came up to lay their eggs because there were no laws to stop people driving on the sand and disrupting their nests. She’d given up her well-paid job as a legal secretary and wanted to build a sanctuary.”

Chris made a 10-minute video on Seher and her campaign and within a week of posting it with a GoFundMe link they’d raised the £12,000 needed to build the sanctuary.

When the Fishers finally left Turkey and Georgia in September 2021, they couldn’t travel east as planned due to covid, so, after essential repairs, shipped Trudy out to North America in February 2022.

They then travelled through the US, Canada (where, in Yukon, they drank a Sourtoe Cocktail containing the preserved frostbitten toe of a 1920s prohibition rum-runner) and Mexico.

In May 2023 they went to Japan, and as their social media following grew, they carried on travelling to South Korea, Malaysia and Singapore before arriving in Thailand in 2024.

In March they headed back towards home and entered India, shipped Trudy from Mumbai to Durban in South Africa, and they then travelled through Africa, taking in Mozambique, Eswatini, Zimbabwe and Botswana, before finally shipping Trudy home from South Africa at the end of July.

After being united with Trudy, they docked in Southampton on September 8, where they were met by more than 30 vans, which formed a convoy on their way back to Ironbridge.

Once back in Shropshire, they were treated to an official welcome from 150 people including family, friends and the town’s mayor.

“I went to my GP who measured my blood pressure and just said, ‘Maybe more people should get a van and go travelling’,” said Chris, who insists he’s working “harder now than ever before”.

He’s currently creating a special episode of their best bits from their travels, including previously unseen footage, and plans to write about their trip.

But they have no plans to put their feet up. In January they will tour the European countries they didn’t visit the first time around, followed by North Africa.

The couple, who are grandparents, say that with video technology it’s easy to keep in touch with family on the road. “Our niece, Molly, came out to Borneo and we jungle trekked together, so we all got the best of both worlds,” says Marianne.

“We left the UK as a rather boring middle-aged couple in a second hand van, and came back as YouTubers,” laughs Chris. “Everywhere we travel now we get random people coming up to us in the street asking for a hug or an autograph, which is simply lovely.

“To say we don’t regret dropping everything for our travels, is the biggest understatement imaginable.”