Welcome Inside my Backpack!
My name is Matthias, I’m a French travel enthusiast, passionate about writing and amateur photographer, and I’m very happy to welcome you on this page! But first, if you don’t know me, I think a little presentation is necessary, from an eventful journey around the world to the creation of this website.
I was born in January 1988 in Saint-Nazaire, a town on the French Atlantic coast where I spent my entire childhood. At 19, I left the family home for the first time and went studying chemistry in Rennes, in Brittany. I graduated as a chemical engineer in 2010, and a few months later I found a job in Switzerland, more precisely in Neuchâtel in the Jura mountains.
But the peaceful day-to-day life I had there eventually became to quiet for me. In 2016, I took a radical decision: I left Switzerland and went to Australia for a year on a Working Holiday Visa, with nothing more than my backpack and my camera. This journey changed my life forever; after that, nothing ever was the same anymore.
During the 12 months I spent in Australia, a new version of me came to life. I travelled for thousands of kilometers with my own campervan, I worked in a farm picking pears and apples, I became a barista in Melbourne, and I met dozens of other travellers from all around the world. When my visa came to an end, I couldn’t picture myself going back to my old tedious job, so I decided to keep on travelling: a few weeks around Europe, a month in Canada, an extraordinary stay in Hawaii, a second trip to Australia, but also a mixed experience in New Zealand, a huge cultural shock in Japan and a road trip in the American West. And then, in June 2018, I finally came back to my hometown of Saint-Nazaire.
I worked the entire summer at the Tourism Office, enjoyed it a lot, then got hired on a permanent contract in March 2019, the first step of a big career change, and settling down in the region where I grew up for the first time since 2007. But once again, I felt like something was missing. The successive Covid-19 lockdowns made me realise than even if I deeply loved Saint-Nazaire, it wasn’t where I belonged. I eventually quit my job in 2022, and in March 2023 I flew back to Melbourne, my favourite city in the world. I am now studying and working there, focusing on my desire to go further into my career change. I’ll stay in Australia until mi-2024; what will come next is still a bit blurry and uncertain, but I’m sure of one thing: there are a lot of great adventures ahead!
Learn more about me
My traveller’s alphabet
26 letters for 26 places, atmospheres and travelling anecdotes, have a look at my traveller’s alphabet!
Countries I have visited
For a few hours or for many years, here are the 30 countries I have visited so far!
My website – Inside my Backpack
During my first trip to Australia between 2016 and 2017, I regularly updated a very basic travelblog intended to my parents and friends, on which I described the wonderful adventures I was living on the other side of the world. But after a few months, my articles and stories slowly became more and more personal, while I realised that I enjoyed a lot publishing them. When that first initiatic trip ended, I decided to keep on writing and I created my own website in August 2017: Inside my Backpack was born.
I also simultaneously launched a Facebook page and an Instagram account to share my travel stories and pictures. Over the following years, I published more than 100 articles related to my various trips, all of them translated in English and French.
This is now the third version of this website, entirely updated in July 2023 to improve your visitor’s experience! I decided to delete all my previous content, but I’ll republish some ancient articles as well as brand new stories in the future. I hope you’ll enjoy reading them as much as I take pleasure writing them!
