After graduating from High School, Paul Sarfati decided to take a year off and go backpacking around the world.  During this trip he had the chance to live with the Bedouins in Egypt, live in a Kibbutz in Israel, live with a Masai Tribe in Kenya, teach English in an orphanage in Tibet, live in a Buddhist monastery in India, learn how to dive in Thailand, spend time with an Aboriginal community in Australia, and off course got to do many adventure activities such as Skydiving, Bungy Jumping and Skiing in New Zealand, Parapenting in Turkey, White Water Rafing in Uganda, Scuba Diving in Egypt, Thailand & Australia, off-roading in Australia's outback, trekking the Himalayas in Nepal amongst other amazing adventures. 

After traveling in Australia with the OZ Experience he thought that Mexico and Central America are great places to visit and that there are no local companies who target the backpacker market in Mexico.  He then studied in Babson College in Boston, number 1 school for entrepreneurship in the U.S and was guided since Freshman year to create a Business Plan.  Since his first year in College he started thinking of doing a business related to traveling and discovering off the beaten path destinations in Mexico and Central America.   During the summer time he invited his best friends Juan Brando, Felipe Pimentel and RIcardo Korda to go with him to explore Mexico.  During this trip they found many different amazing destinations and found out that Mexico is indeed one of the most beautiful and safe countries to travel around the world.

This in one of the stories told by Paul Sarfati about this trip: "We were driving on the coast of Oaxaca looking for a beautiful virgin beach where we could create an amazing hostel and have lots of great activities to do, we were also looking for a name for the business idea we had and had not found one, we were thinking: the Happy bus, the Pink bus, the Aztec Experience, GOGO Bus, HOHO Bus, amonst other many many ideas.  Suddenly we saw from far far away a beautiful virgin beach and thought, let's go check it out.  Once we got to the end of the mountain, we saw an off-road street and decided to take it, we drove for 10 minutes and suddenly we reached a cliff, from where we could not see anything.  We went out of the car, walked towards the cliff and we saw the most impressive beach I have ever seen in my life, it was a pure sand stretch 100 meters wide, with a beautiful lagoon in the middle of the beach with a huge stone in the middle of the lagoon, at the end of the beach you could see some huge sand dunes and the most beautiful part of it all was that there were no other people on the beach.  We were all very very excited and we ran all over the beach and spent some good three hours relaxed and very happy about finding this place.  On our way out, we wanted to see the name of the beach and it was called Concepcion Bamba, which means the birth of Bamba.  Immediately it came to my mind that the business would be called: Bamba."

In 2005, Paul graduated from college, and was looking for a local partner.  His very good friend, Arturo Martinez had been living in Mexico and had traveled around Mexico extensively all his life.  Arturo Martinez studied accounting at the Tec de Monterrey in Mexico City and worked for KPMG accounting firm for two years before he was asked to join the Bamba Experience team by the end of 2005.  Arturo loves Mexico, loves traveling, loves nature and is in love with the idea of starting and running a business.

Bamba has grown it's size from having one van running the route Mexico City to Oaxaca in 2006 to creating an extensive travel network covering most parts of Mexico, Guatemala, Belize & Costa RIca.  Bamba has created Bamba Group: a group of companies composed of: Bamba Experience, Bamba Adventures, Bamba Travel, Bamba World, Bamba Rent, Bamba Films & Bamba Music.  They were all created with the same vision of showing people the real Mexico and Central America through Transportation, Tours, Film and Music.