Chris & Adenike Daramola Joondeph - Love, Visas, and Entrepreneurship: How Immigration Restrictions Led Us to Build a Tour Company in Nigeria While Traveling the World

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.