Alex Brown left his small hometown on the south coast of England at sixteen and spent his teens travelling the world as a professional kiteboarder. What stuck with him was not the sport but what surrounded it: the photography, the filmmaking, the stories of people who had chosen movement over stability. Today he lives in the Spanish Pyrenees with his fiancée Mascha Blome — whom he met in 2012 on an island in the Indian Ocean, each of them carrying a plane ticket, five hundred pounds, and no plan beyond the departure gate — and publishes Advanture Magazine from the back of an old VW T3 camper van.
The magazine began as a digital-only publication, launched with an explicitly environmental rationale: no trees cut down, no printing machines, no toxic ink, no delivery trucks. Blome wrote the founding manifesto, arguing that a vanlife publication should have the smallest possible footprint. But the pull of print proved irresistible. By issue seven, Advanture had undergone a complete redesign and emerged as a 100-page, coffee-table-format journal printed on uncoated FSC-certified paper. Fourteen issues later, it has become exactly the kind of object its founders once argued against — and it is beautiful.
Each issue is crafted with the deliberate pace that Brown calls slow journalism. The stories come from vanlifers around the world: DIY builds and remote destinations, personal essays and long-form interviews, photo essays shot on film with the grain and imperfection that digital smoothness cannot replicate. The magazine is not interested in shiny new vans or the performative side of Instagram vanlife. It is about the grit and beauty of life on the move — imperfect photographs, writing that took weeks to get started, and the moments when everything goes wrong and somehow still feels right.
Brown has published entire issues while travelling with his young family through Europe in a Sunlight camper van, his cat riding shotgun in the passenger seat. This is not a side project with lifestyle branding. It is the way the people who make it actually live, and that authenticity is what gives Advanture its voice — intimate, unpretentious, and aimed squarely at the kind of reader whose friends and family back home do not understand what they are doing out there. The magazine does.
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