About Me

Hello and welcome to The Rocky Safari! I’m Rocky Trifari and solo travel is my passion. I’ll help you design a travel-friendly lifestyle. 🦜

The Rocky Safari is one of the fastest growing sources of information online about long-term slow travel, wildlife conservation, and cultural preservation.

My ultimate mission on The Rocky Safari is to help you find creative ways to travel more frequently!

I have been traveling and blogging for over 10 years and counting. In addition to sharing informative travel stories for your entertainment, I also publish digital nomad resources, blogging business advice, and posts about creativity, psychology, and wildlife.

In 2013, when I first started this blog, I didn’t know if being an introvert might hinder me from being able to travel the world, unable to pursue my dream of visiting every country on Earth. Backpacking trips and long-term travel are the types of things you usually see extroverts doing.

As an introvert, I have learned to love solo travel and found a connection with nature and wildlife in the process. 😄

Now I blog to share my story and help people like you learn how you, too, can explore, travel, and design your dream lifestyle.

Overcoming your fears and establishing the mindset required to travel the world is perhaps the biggest hurdle that stops people (and introverts in particular) from taking that leap in the first place. You can do it!

I am determined to help you make it happen! Here are some resources I’ve put together:

• Creative ways to make money online
• Search this to find a remote job
• Kickstart your online blogging business

Let’s find a solution that perfectly meets your individual needs whether that means learning how to book a quick solo getaway, obtaining the flexibility to work remotely from anywhere on Earth, or achieving total financial freedom so you can spend less time at an office desk and more time doing the things you love!

Now that you know more about why I blog, I’d like to share a bit more about my blog’s story.

Why is my blog called The Rocky Safari?

In 2009, my Chinese teacher gave me the name 泰山 (Tài Shān) based on my English name, Rocky Trifari. The inspiration behind my Chinese name comes from the famous Mount Tai mountains of China.

While “Tàishān” technically means “big mountain,” it also translates back into English as Tarzan! So whether you think of me as a safari adventurer or like Tarzan the jungle man, the bottom line is that I love to be in and around nature. I gravitate toward birds and I have had a passion for travel and exploration from an early age.

Using that play on my name, I was inspired to create The Rocky Safari: a wild place where I can blog about all of my weird, unusual, and unexpected adventures while also showing individuals much like yourself exactly how to: explore, travel, and design your own traveling lifestyle.

My audience consists of aspiring travelers, digital nomads, introverts, and all-around wildlife and nature lovers.

In terms of my educational background, I graduated from Rutgers University where I studied psychology and entrepreneurship. My life experience has shown me that through harnessing the full power of our minds, we can become capable of accomplishing absolutely anything.

Since our mindset plays the single most influential role in guiding our journey through this unpredictable life, why not choose to have a positive mental attitude?

In Swahili, “safari” means “journey.”

I love to test my own limits and I’ve come to realize I’m the happiest when I’m trekking far beyond the border of my comfort zone.

People are sometimes surprised to learn that I identify as an introvert because I also happen to be very outgoing. (A distinction I discuss in great detail on my blog.) As a matter of fact, I love meeting new people and discovering new things. I’m definitely not shy. I frequently speak to large audiences for work and I readily introduce myself to strangers. I guess it’s because I love to learn and I’m curious about seemingly everything.

In 2013, I graduated from a vocational high school where I studied graphic design and spent my senior year taking all of my classes at a local college. While I decided not to pursue digital design in college, I continue to treat photography and web design as two hobbies I deeply care about. That’s why I have continued to publish original, new content on here since 2013. I love to travel and blog whenever I have any free time.

Aside from that, I am also a huge fan of foreign languages (as you may have guessed from the intro, namely Chinese!) Then in 2019, I moved to Spain where I studied Spanish. You could say I’m somewhat of a “polyglot-in-training.”

A few things that are interesting about me: I volunteered as a tour guide at a Chinese Summer Camp for over two years and led approximately 200 Chinese students to famous landmarks all along the US East Coast. At the age of 15, this was one of my earliest experiences leaving home to travel independently.

We ate at 14 Chinese buffets in a row during our travels (but they never warned me about that when I signed up!) Each day as our tour bus would pull up to the next Chinese buffet, I would turn my head to the window and shed a tear. That opportunity allowed me to gain both a large amount of experience and weight. 😉

Some of my other interests include birdwatching, drinking different types of tea, and of course, traveling! So you’ll probably read a bit about all of those things on my blog.

Can you tell I like animals? x) Anyway…

To help pass the time while flying and moving about, I also enjoy solving Sudoku and reading books on my Kindle. I have now visited more than fifteen different countries around the world (as of the time of writing) and I have no intention of stopping there! My goal is to eventually visit every country on Earth!

This blog chronicles that journey.

You should know by now that I adore birds!

I’m wholeheartedly obsessed with them. When I was a Resident Assistant in college, my dormitory was bird-themed and I even had a real bird feeder hanging out from my dorm room window. I want to think that the random bird feeder hanging off the side of the building by a piece of rope was somewhat of a landmark on the College Ave campus during my time there. Maybe? Wishful thinking?

While living in Spain for a year, my fascination grew and I was oftentimes called “Señor Pajarero” [meaning Mr. Birdkeeper] because the locals would see wild birds constantly flying and landing on me.

Anyway, I am definitely getting a pet bird in the future! (Still in the process of deciding which kind. I’m thinking maybe a Cape Parrot!)

In 2018, I left behind my career in the financial services industry to set off on a trip to travel the world with nothing but my backpack and a one-way ticket to Athens, Greece.

Using money earned from this blog and other digital nomad gigs, I was able to pay for my entire trip in cash without creating a cent of debt afterward. On my blog, I teach others how to make this possible by making money online.

A good place to visit next is my Solo Travel FAQ!

Please remember to follow my blog and connect with me on social media so we can stay in touch. Especially if you would like to know how all of this unfolds!

Remember, you’ll always get the WHOLE story from me. The good. The bad. All of it. Every single time.

I know my trip overseas has been (and will continue to be) the craziest lifelong adventure imaginable. You can read more about my backpacking plans here.

Don’t be afraid to reach out and say hi! I blog to reach and connect with people so I’d love nothing more than to connect with you now that you have ended up here! 🙂

For those of you who know your MBTI personality type, I am an INFJ which is the least common of the 16 Myers-Briggs personality types, especially in men. They say INFJs are the old souls, the listeners, the caretakers, and the advocates who seek to create a better world.

I was surprised to learn that male INFJs make up less than 1% of the global population. More specifically: gay, male INFJs represent less than 0.25% of all people in the world.

With stats like those, you can imagine why I might feel like a bit of a square peg in a round hole trying to fit into society. But what makes us unique can also be our greatest strengths. So much like a bird, I’m going to do what comes naturally to me, spread my wings, and fly.

Ironically, the MBTI personality type “most suited to travel the world” is the ESTP (the complete opposite of what I am…) So once again, I guess the stats are stacked against me in that regard. We’ll see how it goes!

JUST A HEADS UP, MY BLOG IS REALLY RANDOM. AND WEIRD.
But that’s why I love it.

Enjoy!

Drop a comment down below or use this button to send me an e-mail.

E-Mail Rocky

Please remember to follow! 🙂 <3