Oliver Mayerhoffer

I was born in Cheltenham in 1990 — British mother, Austrian father. Childhood tasted like Richard’s garden next door, Great Aunty Gabbi’s bread, and Mediterranean holidays where salt and lemon did the seasoning.

Even then I carried the strongest feeling of not belonging. Britain raised me until sixteen, when I finally left — and by eighteen I had left for good, stopping back only when life demanded paperwork, family, or a door I could not yet close.

Those returns still pull me towards a person and a time I am not. I am a free spirit. I never flowed easily with society’s normals, and I thrive in turbulent environments — immersing myself in culture, trying to find myself along the way.

At fifteen I crossed India by train; spice markets and street food rewired how I read a plate. Teen years in Uncle Wolfgang’s Austrian kitchen taught me careful hands and mise en place without making me announce them in every paragraph.

Oman and Dubai came next — hotel floors, booking channels, the pressure of filling rooms. Then sailing out of Spain, backpacking through Cambodia and Laos, and a monk chapter on Koh Chang that slowed the noise long enough to listen.

I met Natalia on that island in 2014. We married in Krasnoyarsk the following year.

By the time we were expecting our first child, the road had already changed shape. Victor was born in Koh Samui in November 2016 — and the journey stopped being only mine.

Six UK years followed: documents, school, weight. We lost my mother Julie and my brother Daniel. Natalia’s grandparents Valentina and Victor Moskalenko passed too.

Mangoes & Palm Trees began in 2018 — not as a brand exercise, but as a place to turn what we had lived into something another family could use. We sold the house and came back to Asia.

Oddly, it was when I felt most lost that I recognised who I was meant to be. On the road with Natalia and Victor through unsettled years, the free spirit stopped apologising for itself.

Vietnam in 2024. Southeast Asia still, now — growing, documenting everything I can. This site is where I tell the world about us: the Mayerhoffers as individuals and as a whole, and what this beautiful, painful world of food and travel means to us.

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