A supermarket pit stop between Suchitoto and Playa El Cuco in El Salvador is where it all started. Joe Norling, a 52-year-old former police officer from Cambridge, New Zealand, and Nicole Nideroest, a 38-year-old travel agent from Zurich, were strangers on the same 16-day Intrepid small-group trip through Central America in 2024. He was chasing a goal of 50 countries by his 50th birthday; she was rebuilding after a long-term relationship and ticking off Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica.
Neither was looking for romance, but after a shared bakery lunch and some memorable 'weird-tasting orange juice', they kept drifting towards each other — beach walks, a ziplining excursion, sneaky hand-holding during group dinners. The first kiss came on a hotel rooftop in Leon, Nicaragua, and by the final five days of the trip they had stopped hiding it.
The obvious problem: 11,000 miles apart. Both assumed it would stay a holiday fling. Then Joe called Nicole from the airport drive home, they messaged daily, and within about ten days they had committed to a relationship, complete with marathon Sunday FaceTimes across time zones.
Six months later they met again in Sri Lanka for two weeks of safaris, hiking and good food — and realised this was the real thing. Nicole spent eight weeks in New Zealand over Christmas, meeting Joe's daughters Sage, 28, and Sam, 27. A Lisbon trip and a visit to Switzerland followed, and the decision made itself: with fewer ties and English as her language, Nicole would move. She emigrated to New Zealand in July 2025, and the couple bought a house together — with all the paperwork headaches and compromises of merging two solo lives that entails.
The happy ending came on an anniversary trip this April: a 20-day Intrepid adventure in Peru. In Puno, after a hike to a lookout over Lake Titicaca, Joe proposed. The couple celebrated that night at a restaurant called La Receta. The wedding is unplanned, but the honeymoon is decided — Antarctica, the one continent neither has set foot on.
Why should travellers care? Because it's a nice reminder that small-group tours are about more than logistics. Shared buses, local guides and unscheduled stops create exactly the conditions where genuine friendships and relationships form — and the couple are repeat customers, having booked Intrepid again for the Peru trip specifically because they like its community focus and local guides. If you're travelling solo and on the fence about a group trip, this is the argument for going: the worst case is five countries of memories, the best case is a fiancé.
It's also a practical nudge on long-distance love: it worked for them through daily contact, a fixed six-month reunion plan, and an honest conversation about who would relocate. Worth noting that emigrating, in Nicole's words, isn't easy — 'countries don't make it easy' — so factor in serious documentation time if a holiday romance ever turns into a visa application.
Their next chapters: Pacific Islands trips from their New Zealand base, more living abroad eventually, and an Antarctic honeymoon. Not bad for a pastry and a strange juice.
Story first reported by the Intrepid Travel Blog.