Ryan Shirley is a popular travel YouTuber.
He has over 840K subscribers on his eponymous YouTube channel.
Introduction
Ryan Shirley hails from Provo, Utah, United States.
His brother Matt is also a traveller and he featured in a few of Ryan’s videos.
El Salvador
Ryan decided to go on a two-year mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, at 18, after graduating from high school.
He was assigned to travel to El Salvador but at the time, he had no idea of the country.
Upon researching Ryan found that it was one of the most dangerous countries in the world due to gang violence and the country had one of the world’s highest murder rates.
Even though it scared him, he assumed that he would be safe as he would be serving there as a missionary.
So, he flew to San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, for his mission in October 2013. It was his first trip outside his home country.
Silver lining
Ryan spent his first six months, as a missionary, in Cuscatancingo in San Salvador.
Those were the most difficult moments of his life as he experienced extreme culture shock and felt the place to be dangerous and dirty.
Ryan got attacked by feral dogs, a guy threatened to shoot him in the face and some of his friends got murdered by the gangs.
He grew depressed and homesick as he was able to talk to his family only once a week through email.
But the silver lining was that all those experiences forced Ryan to grow outside his comfort zone.
He befriended locals and was fulfilled to observe people being happy despite living in difficult circumstances.
Belize
After living a year in El Salvador, Ryan got reassigned to travel to Belize where he served his Mormon (LDS) mission for around a year.
He spent four months in Benque Viejo Del Carmen town where he made some good family friends and became a part of the community.
For the last part of the mission, Ryan got reassigned to Belize City.
His mission ended in September 2015 and he returned to the United States.
The Europe dream
Ryan joined Brigham Young University (BYU) in Provo, Utah to study for a bachelor’s degree in Arts, Entertainment and Media Management in 2015.
He landed an internship as a Content Creator at Geneva Office For Human Rights Education in Geneva, Switzerland, in May 2017.
Thanks to this opportunity, Ryan was able to realize his lifelong dream of living in Europe, especially Switzerland.
During the internship, he produced animated educational videos to educate children around the world of human rights.
He also created and managed the YouTube channel, Geneva Office For Human Rights Education and interned from May to July 2017.
Exploring the continent
At the beginning of 2017, Ryan felt the urge to travel all over Europe and shoot videos. But at the time, he had just a GoPro, a cheap camera and average videography skills and felt travelling to be expensive.
But as the year progressed, he started exploring Geneva city and Lake Geneva. He visited places like Edinburgh, Scotland and Shipwreck Beach in Greece on the weekend trips.
As living in Geneva was very expensive, Ryan starved himself and survived on foods like pasta, chocolate and Coke.
Living there allowed him to travel to other European countries and he started getting into travel videography at the time.
Ryan rented a car, after completing his internship, and drove all around Switzerland, visited Grindelwald and ended his trip in the iconic town of Zermatt.
All these experiences cemented his love for Europe.
He spent a lot of hours improving his videos and started seriously posting travel videos on his channel from 2017 onwards.
Travel over university
After his Switzerland trip, Ryan returned to Utah and took a leave of absence from the university for a two-week trip to Europe in the fall.
He bottomed out his bank account for buying new camera gear and his travel expenses.
Ryan and his brother travelled to Athens, Ibiza, Meteora and London before ending the trip in Iceland.
Ryan resumed college the following winter.
Beautiful Destinations
He shot beautiful footage, thanks to his two-week Europe trip. With this and his earlier footage of Switzerland, he published a YouTube video, “My Year 2017 – Ryan Shirley”.
After a few months, this video helped Ryan to secure an internship at Beautiful Destinations. He interned as a Video Editor in New York City from June to August 2018.
One way ticket
Ryan, while interning at Beautiful Destinations, used to live in a one-bedroom ghetto in Queens, New York for $1,200 a month.
He used to commute daily for an hour to reach Manhattan for work.
Ryan didn’t like living in New York as he wasn’t a city person. He also hated paying $1,200 for a room and the long commute to work.
Fortunately, after finishing the internship, he won the DJI’s Now It’s Epic Contest and won $3,000 and bought a one-way ticket to Milan, Italy to visit Dolomites.
After spending a couple of weeks travelling around Dolomites, Ryan, along with one of his friends, travelled to Rome, Greece and visited Santorini and Zakynthos and returned to Dolomites before travelling to Northern Norway to see northern lights.
This trip cost him $3,000.
The footage of the trip took Ryan’s videography career to the next level.
Hawaii & Heather
After returning from the Europe trip, Ryan decided to enroll back in the university. But he changed his plan at the final moment, dropped the classes and moved to Oahu, Hawaii with a plan to join classes in December.
Living in Hawaii was a lot cheaper relative to living in New York.
Ryan met his future wife, Heather, in Hawaii and signed up for online classes instead of attending the university.
After living for nine months in Hawaii, he returned to Utah and graduated.
While living in Hawaii, he, along with his friends, swam with a group of over 20 dolphins in the ocean at the island of Hawaiʻi.
Ryan married Heather in 2020.
He worked as a Creative Director for Trift in Laguna Beach, California, from 2018 to 2020 and created video content.
In 2019, he travelled to Europe again and visited Scotland, Switzerland, the Alps, Austria and Bulgaria. This trip cost him $3800.
It all started with magic
Ryan started his eponymous YouTube channel on 6 June 2009 and published his first video, “Best MAGIC trick EVER!!!” in October that year.
After occasionally publishing magic and travel videos, he started seriously working on his channel only from 2017.
Ryan became a full-time travel YouTuber in April 2020 and is self-employed.
Besides earning from YouTube, he also sells footage, LUT and travel guides. Thanks to all these, all his trips are highly profitable.
Ryan uses Sony α7S III camera, GoPro MAX 360 degree action camera and a DJI Mavic 3 drone.
He also has other YouTube channels, Scenic Relaxation, Ryan Shirley Español and ShirleyFilms.
One of Ryan’s videos won first place in the Travel Film for SkyPixel worldwide Aerial Film contest in 2019.
He loves cliff jumping. His favourite places to cliff jump are Mallorca, Cala Varques, Belize, Idaho, Hawaii, Lavertezzo, Ibiza, Zakynthos and Lake Tahoe.
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