TOPIC – KEYNOTE

Love, Visas, and Entrepreneurship: How Immigration Restrictions Led Us to Build a Tour Company in Nigeria While Traveling the World – Chris and Adenike Joondeph | 60-minute Keynote

Chris and Adenike met in Lagos in 2021. It was Chris’s 110th country and Adenike had traveled to 5. Flash forward 5 years, they’re now married and run a company offering cultural group tours to Nigeria making the country accessible to foreigners. Chris has visited over 170 countries and Adenike recently surpassed 100 on her Nigerian passport.

This is a story of love, travel, and making the best of a very challenging immigration situation.

Chris and Adenike first met through Couchsurfing on a quick weekend trip to Lagos. What followed was a love story, a traditional Yoruba wedding with a with a dowry that required everything from kola nuts to a live goat, and a crash course in just how hard it is for an American and a Nigerian to simply live in the same country.

They applied for a spousal visa for Adenike to join Chris in the USA in June 2024 and they’re still waiting for an interview. Rather than live their lives apart, Chris and Adenike made the decision to call Lagos home and start a company bringing small groups of curious travelers into one of the most misunderstood countries on earth. They completed eight tours in their first year, with more on the way. Together they are selling Nigeria to a world and showing that there is more to this country than the headlines.

Between tours, they travel the world using their combined over 3M social media followers to generate enough income to cover their travels. Adenike has now visited over 100 countries on a Nigerian passport, a document that faces enormous restrictions just to even apply for a visa. What started as meeting up in third countries around the world due to US visa restrictions led to a nomadic lifestyle for both Adenike and Chris generating a ton of fascinating travel stories about cultural differences between African and Western travelers, precarious border situations, and visa and passport stories that will make your head spin.

This is a story about how two people separated by bureaucracy managed to build a life and living together across borders. How they took a country that is so often misunderstood in the media and welcomed over 100 people to visit by going beyond the headlines and showing people the real Nigeria that never gets covered in the media.

Key Takeaways:

  • What US immigration actually looks like for international couples, and how you build a life when there is no timeline
  • How Adenike traveled to 100+ countries on a Nigerian passport and what that means for anyone navigating a world that was not designed for them
  • Understand the unique cultural differences and perspectives between African and Western travelers and how one can laugh and joke about many of these misunderstandings in the travel world
  • How one couple is changing the way the world sees Nigeria, one tour group at a time
  • An open invitation to visit Nigeria, the one Chris and Adenike actually live in

BIO

Adenike Daramola Joondeph, known online as “Dara” and found on Instagram at @dara_for_enjoyment_only, is a Lagos-based travel content creator, tour operator, and one of the most widely traveled Nigerians in the world. She has visited over 100 countries on a Nigerian passport, a feat that requires not just money and time but an extraordinary amount of persistence, creativity, and the willingness to appeal a visa rejection and try again.

Her first trip abroad was to the United Arab Emirates in 2017. She barely made it through all the bureaucracy required for a young Nigerian woman to travel by herself, but after she came back, she knew she wanted to see the world. With no roadmap for how a Nigerian could afford to travel the world, she built one herself, founding Tha Globetrotters, a travel company serving Nigerian clients with group trips, private travel planning, and visa assistance. The business started as a way to fund her own adventures while working in human resources during the day. Over time the business became a full-time career and a lifeline for Nigerian travelers who needed someone who had already figured out the hard parts.

And the hard parts are genuinely hard. Adenike has applied for the same visa multiple times only to be rejected, appealed to national tourism boards just to get a foot in the door, and found workarounds that most travelers would never have to think about. She talks openly about all of it to her audience of over 100,000 followers, making her one of the most prominent advocates for Nigerian travelers navigating a world that was largely not designed to welcome them.

In 2021 she met her now husband Chris Joondeph on his first visit to Lagos. The two married in 2024 and together run Authentic Traveling Tours, bringing foreign visitors to Nigeria on culturally immersive group experiences. Adenike brings to that work everything she has spent years learning: how to move through bureaucracy, how to read a destination beyond its reputation, and how to make travel feel possible for people who have been told it is not.

You can follow her journey on Instagram at @dara_for_enjoyment_only.