Janice Horton's Blog, page 21

A fabulous month in Bucharest Romania!

Having spent close to a year in Thailand, excluding our unexpected return to the UK in January of this year and our compulsory visa runs to Malaysia every 60 days, Trav and I were feeling ready for a new challenge.
So when our friend Miha, who we’d first met over three years ago on the island of Utila in the Caribbean and then again more recently on the island of Koh Tao in Thailand, asked us if we would be interested in helping her out with the initial set up a new dive centre in Bucharest Romania - we thought about it for a little while - and then happily accepted!

Our friendship spans the world. Miha and I first met in the Caribbean.
This is us catching up in Koh Tao Thailand.
Miha is a highly qualified diver – a PADI Staff Instructor – like Trav. She is also an astute business woman and she had identified a growing appetite for scuba diving in Romania (her home country).
Miha’s plan was to teach diving courses in confined water (pool training) in Bucharest and then to offer open water training (to complete PADI dive qualifications) in various high-end beach resorts in Greece and elsewhere. Being able to help out a friend as well as enjoy some diving in Europe, we agreed to fly to Bucharest. I’d never been to Eastern Europe before and I knew nothing of Bucharest – even confusing it with Budapest initially – but all that changed at the beginning of April this year when, after visiting our son and his wife and our grandson in South Korea, we flew on from Kuala Lumpur to London and then to Bucharest Romania.
Romania is a breathtakingly beautiful country. In many ways, its landscape reminded me of south west Scotland, with its lush farmland and rolling hills. Old town Bucharest is a beautiful city with ancient buildings and a rich history. It has a Parisian feel too with many pavement cafes and its own ‘Arch of Triumph’.




It soon struck me how affordable it is to live there and I estimated the cost of living and of goods to be around half that of the UK. With low cost flights from the UK to Bucharest – and a hot and sunny summertime climate - and a flight time of just an hour or so, it is a truly amazing getaway destination for Brits. From the moment we arrived, I started snapping photos of the breathtakingly beautiful city.





To get over our jet-lag and catch up on sleep, we checked into the Intercontinental Hotel for our first few nights. The Intercon is the tallest building in Bucharest and, from the top floor lounge, the city-scape, especially at sunset, looked magical. Here we met up with Miha again. It was so lovely to catch up with her and to discuss our exciting plans together.
Bucharest Old Town at sundown as viewed the Intercontinental Hotel
The Intercontinental Hotel is the tallest building in Bucharest
Meeting up with Miha again in Bucharest
Fun lift selfies!
Trav and Miha discuss business in the boardroom!
Miha so generously shared her home, her family, and her country with us!

Then we moved into our new home – a generously proportioned house that Miha was renting just outside the city close to the airport. Trav and I had a large bedroom with an en-suite bathroom downstairs and Miha had the same upstairs. The large living room and outside balcony area was a great space for entertaining and for study/classroom work. There was also a kitchen downstairs and a spare room for all the dive gear. At the front of the house there was a busy highway and at the back open farmland.
Our spacious new home just outside the city
The sitting room and outside balcony were great spaces to entertain and train/study


At the front of the house there was a busy highway and at the back open farmland
Some of the most memorable times we had in Romania were when Miha generously introduced us to her family and we were invited to parties with Romanian food and traditional dancing! We were also invited to spent a weekend in the countryside with more of Miha’s wonderful family, who generously shared their Easter lunch with us on their apple farm. In contrast to city life in Bucharest, they have an idyllic and timelessly wonderful rural lifestyle, with hens and goats and acres of rolling fields filled with apple trees.





Above: pictures of us at a family party with traditional Romanian food and dancing!








Above: Photos of our amazing Easter weekend in the Romanian countryside with Miha's family
Country life: Romany with their horse and traditional wooden cart
We stopped at the side of the road to chat to this man and his wife and to buy smoked cheese from him. The most delicious smoked cheese I've ever tasted.
In Bucharest, we met lots of Miha’s good friends, who we now consider to be our good friends too. Special love and thanks to Ana and Claud and to Roxana and Kookie for their kindness and hospitality.


Evening drinks on the terrace with Claud and Ana at Roxana's and Kooki's house
A party at Roxana and Kooki's house
Me and Miha
Ana and Claud Me and Roxanna
One day, while Miha and Trav were busy with diving business, my lovely new friends Anna and Claud, who were also our first dive trainees, took me to Mogosoaia Castle, a beautiful Brancovesc style palace with an ancient chapel. It was an amazing day and the weather was so sunny and perfect - as you can see from the photographs.







Photos above are from Mogosoaia Castle




Photos above of pool training sessions with PADi Open Water Trainees Ana and Claud and Theo
Also during our time in Romania, we did a trip into nearby Transylvania and got to visit Bram castle – otherwise known as Castle Dracula! I absolutely loved this trip – a big tick off the bucket list for sure!














The beautiful countryside of Transylvania
On the way back from Transylvania, we also got to stop off at the equally famous and historic Pele Castle.
Sadly, a month after being in Romania, we heard news from family in the UK that Trav’s dad had become gravely ill. Although he had been ill for quite some time, it still came as a shock when it had only been three months since the death of Trav's mum in mid-January. Trav returned to England to be with his dad during his last days. He then returned to Bucharest after his father had passed away and, just a few days later, with our work in Romania done, Trav and I said a fond farewell to Miha and to our new friends and we returned to the UK to be with the family and to prepare for the funeral.


Sadly, Trav's mum and dad both died within three months of each other.
Again, we were grateful to our best friend Dina, who once again so generously offered to share her home with us for what would be another month back in the UK. The silver lining in the dark cloud of our bereavement was that we got to spend time with our UK based sons Ben and Iain, and with Dina, and with my own mum and our much-missed family in the UK.

You can find out more about Miha's dive center by clicking this link to her website Blue Rides Planet and her Facebook Page.
Next time here on the blog, I’ll be chatting about our month reconnecting with family and friends. I’ll also be sharing my newsy lunch with writer friends in Edinburgh attending the Scottish Romantic Novelist’s Association and my big trip to London to attend the Romantic Novelist’s Association Summer Party.
Love, Janice xx

Horton-Kang family time in South Korea!

It’s been a little over a year since we were last in South Korea visiting our son James, our daughter-in-law Sujeong, our grandson Aaron who is now two years old, and the rest of our Korean family.
Sitting in the springtime sunshine with Aaron outside Daegu library in South Korea
We originally booked this much anticipated trip as a visa run from Thailand - taking advantage of an Air Asia sale earlier in the year - but since then we’d had a big change of plan and now, after our week in South Korea, we were heading back to Europe instead of Thailand.
(You can read about this big change of plan by clicking HERE).
Our son James teaches English in South Korea and he and his family live in a big city called Daegu. Since our last visit they have moved into a new and bigger apartment, so instead of us having to stay in a hotel, this time we could stay in their home. It was wonderful to be able to help with Aaron, who is now two years old, especially at bath time before bed and in the mornings when he was full of energy and wanted to play. His favourite toys are his musical instruments and his play kitchen. He also has a great fondness for his small toy buses in the same way that James used to love his Thomas the Tank Engine toys many years ago.
Our grandson Aaron is now two years old
The weather was mostly dry and sunny for our visit and we had lots of opportunities to take walks out and about in the city and in the park – especially lovely at this time of year when it is cherry blossom season.












We also took several trips to Daegu traditional market – one of my favourite things to do - as the market is very close to the apartment and it is so interesting and colourful and has so many types of fruit and vegetables, fish and meat and yummy spicy kimchi and my very favourite dumplings.









Another highlight of the week was spending time with and having meals out to celebrate being with our Korean family again. Sujeong’s parents and her brother and sister - the Kang family - are so lovely and welcoming and hospitable and it was so great to see them all again.





The week went by so quickly and soon it was time for Trav and I to say an emotional farewell and take the KTX fast train back to the airport. The distance between Daegu and Seoul is about the same distance between Manchester and London in the UK and the train journey takes around two and a half hours.
Our flight back to Malaysia on the 5th April (our son Iain's birthday - who we were thinking of all day too) would take seven-hours. Arriving late in Kuala Lumpur, we would stay overnight in KL before taking a direct fourteen-hour flight to London early the next morning. Then after a night at London Heathrow, we had a three-hour flight to our destination of Bucharest Romania.

A total in the air/flying time of twenty-four hours with two quick stops!

Next timeI’ll be chatting about our fabulous time in Bucharest Romania!
Until next time, please do consider signing up for my book news updates. I only ever send out a newsletter when I have writerly news to share, a new book coming out, or special offers and competitions with themed prizes to tell you about. Every new subscriber receives a free copy of my bestselling ebook 'How To Party Online' just for signing up using the form at the top right hand side of this page.
Love, Janice xx

A big change of plan….

Right now, I’m in Bucharest, Romania - yet in my last travel related post here on the blog we were back in Thailand - and I’d indicated that we planned to stay in Thailand for the foreseeable future. Well, it seems that I spoke too soon!
We returned to Koh Tao Thailand in the early part of February 2017 after dashing back to the UK on hearing that Trav’s mum was gravely ill (you can read about our bittersweet month back in the UK by clicking HERE) but then soon accepted an invitation to help a friend in the initial setup of a new diving venture in Eastern Europe during the spring and summer of 2017. It seemed like a great opportunity and an exciting venture.
But before we could leave for Bucharest, we still had some time to settle down and to relax and to honour the diving commitments we still had on Koh Tao.

Plus, we were looking forward to our lovely friends Jenn and Gregg coming over from the UK for a two-week diving holiday mid-March. Also, at the end of March - which would have been our visa-run had we stayed in Thailand - we also had a trip to South Korea planned to visit our son James, his wife Sujeong, our two year old grandson Aaron and our Korean side of the family.
So, during the first week of February, exhausted from the highs and lows of the past month back in the UK and from all the travelling, we were more than happy to arrive back to Koh Tao and get back into a routine. We’d kept our rented villa on Ban's Diving resort on Koh Tao while we were away, and we soon settled back into the easy vibe of island life, enjoying the heat and the sunshine.
Settling back into the easy vibe of island life on Koh Tao

Our home on Ban's Diving Resort Koh Tao
Ban’s Dive Resort on Koh Tao is a large sprawling beachfront island resort. It is an oasis of swaying palm trees with beautiful gardens and many types of accommodations for all budgets – dorms, rooms, villas and suites – and  it primarily and very successfully caters for scuba divers. I loved living on the resort and our villa was only a few minutes’ walk from one of their four swimming pools that I used every day to swim and then to sunbathe. I enjoyed the restaurants and the beach bar too – to meet with Trav and friends for lunch and later for sun-downer cocktails at the Darawan restaurant in the hills or for fun and food and live music at Fishbowl Beach Bar.
The entrance to Ban's Diving ResortThe bridge from reception into the resort garden and accommodationThe spirit house outside our accommodation


Asparagus and cheese salad lunch at Fishbowl Beach RestaurantBan's meet and greet transport to bring you to the resort from the pier
The pool I like to use each morning for my swim and sunbatheOne of the other pools at Ban's - used for dive training



Trav and I enjoying sun-downers at the Darawan RestaurantTrav enjoying a beer at Fishbowl Beach Bar at Ban's Resort Swaying palm trees and a blue blue sky...
In early march, we were notified by PADI that Trav had earned PADI Elite Status for his work in 2016. As an instructor, in 2016, he had trained and certified over 100 new divers. I am so very proud of him and all he has achieved with his diving.


Also in early March, we were invited out with friends to celebrate their birthdays. During this time it was also my birthday. Trav took me out for a delicious meal at a gorgeous restaurant up in the hills. We arrived at sunset to amazing views. The sunsets on Koh Tao are always breathtakingly beautiful. Afterwards, we were able to wine and dine under the moon and the stars. It was a wonderful birthday.




A delicious birthday dinner in a restaurant up in the hills with an amazing view
Mid March we helped with the resort's official annual beach games. That was a lot of fun. Life was good. The monsoon season was over. High season was just around the corner. The weather was hot and sunny and I appreciated it even more for having been away in the cold wintery UK.














Then our friends Jenn and Gregg arrived and we were so excited to see them again. We’d managed to meet up with them in Liverpool back in January but we’d first met three years ago in the Bahamas. They were staying at the wonderful Sandals Resort Nassau and we were staying at an AirBnB accommodation near Cable Beach. (You can read about our fabulous month spent in the Bahamas by clicking HERE).
On Koh Tao, Jenn and Gregg were looking forward to doing their PADI Open Water dive training at Ban’s Resort and being taught by PADI Staff and Elite Instructor Trav. They both worked very hard during the classroom and pool training and then we all went out on the Ban’s dive boat, where at some fabulous dive sites, Jenn and Gregg completed their course and became qualified open water scuba divers!











During their ten days on the island we had a lot of fun. We ate amazing Thai food from both street vendors and fabulous restaurants. We lazed around the pool and had plenty of time to take trips to explore and enjoy the island.








To finish off their holiday in style and for us to further enjoy our lovely friend’s company, we all took an early boat off the island and a flight over to Malaysia to spend a couple of nights in the city of Kuala Lumpur, from where Jenn and Gregg would fly back to London and we would fly over to Seoul, South Korea.
We had a fun and fabulous time in KL. We all stayed at the Intercontinental but also explored other hotels in the city – like the Mandarin Oriental and Trader’s -  for the best views of the city and for the (expensive!) cocktails.
Trav and I now think of KL as our home from home, as we have stayed there so many times over the past couple of years. We use it as our hub to South East Asia in the same way we used Houston Texas as our gateway to the US and to Central America and the Caribbean. But Jenn and Gregg hadn’t ever explored this fabulous city before, so they did more than us this time around, by visiting the Petronas Towers and walking along the famous Skybridge and enjoying all the other attractions.
We said our fond farewells to our lovely friends in KL, knowing they had enjoyed their well-earned holiday and that they had achieved so much by qualifying as open water divers. We are sure that we will share many more fun times with Jenn and Gregg in the future – no doubt somewhere in the world at a dive resort!

A fun selfie from beneath the Petronas Towers KLThe view of the city from the cocktail bar at the Mandarin Oriental KL Another fun lift selfie at the Mandarin Oriental KL
My next blog post will be all about our fabulous week in South Korea, where we stayed with our son James and our daughter-in-law Sujeong. We enjoyed lots of quality time with them and our grandson Aaron, and also with the rest of our lovely Korean family, whom we hadn’t seen for just over a year – and I took lots of photos!

Our grandson Aaron is now two years old. 
Until next time, please do consider signing up for my book news updates. I only ever send out a newsletter when I have writerly news to share, a new book coming out, or special offers and competitions and offers to tell you about. Every new subscriber receives a free copy of my bestselling ebook 'How To Party Online' just for signing up using the form at the top right hand side of this page.

Love, Janice xx

Observations and Snippets from my Favourite Trippets #1

As we venture into our fourth year travelling the world, I’m planning a new series of retrospective blog posts to focus on some very special places that I’ve only previously covered on this blog in overview.
In this post, I’m highlighting Hemingway’s House in Key West Florida.
Our visit to the Hemingway House in Key West was one of the highlights of our trip to Florida. This was the home of Ernest Hemingway, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954 "for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated with The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence he has exerted on contemporary style". The house too is impressive and has the distinct air and rich ambiance of old world elegance.

The house is impressive and has the distinct air and rich ambiance of old world elegance
A high brick boundary keeps the property private but the view from the first-floor wrap around porch takes in not only the garden but the adjacent street in what is an affluent residential part of town.
I loved walking around the airy rooms and the book-lined hallways, taking in all the family photographs and the personal effects. I could almost pretend I was a house guest exploring the place while the Ernest and Pauline (Hemingway’s second wife) had just popped out momentarily.

I could almost pretend I was a house guest exploring the place while the Ernest and Pauline had popped out momentarily
The house gives the visitor a real feel for the life the Hemingway’s led in Key West during the 1930’s.
Ernest and Pauline Hemingway
The life of Ernest Hemingway from photographs at his home in Key West
Our tour guide happily gave out lots of insider information about the history of the house, the escapades of the children, the Hemingway marriage, the huge row over the swimming pool and Ernest Hemingway’s ‘last penny’.
The story is that the swimming pool, which replaced what had been Ernest's personal boxing ring, was contracted at great expense by Pauline after she found out about her husband’s affair with Martha Gellhorn, his third wife to be.

When Ernest came back from assignment to find out the exorbitant cost of the pool, he was reported to have thrown a penny onto the ground in front of Pauline, saying, ‘you’ve spent all but my last penny, so you might as well have that!’
Pauline had the penny set into the path where it lay. It is still there today.
The swimming pool that Hemingway said had cost him his last penny
Another extraordinary feature of the house are all the cats that reside there.
These are descendants of a six-toed cat called Snowball. One of Snowball’s kittens (named Snow White) was gifted to Ernest Hemingway by a salvage and shipwreck captain (a respected and official position in those days) called Harold Stanley Dexter. Ever since, the six-toed gene has been passed down through all the generations of cats at the Hemingway house. All were named after Ernest’s famous friends. The cat in this photo is Rita Hayworth.

On the left - Rita Hayworth. On the right - a six toed paw!
I was so engrossed and enthralled by the house and its history and the life of Hemingway, that the following day we visited the Hemingway museum in town. 
There are many exhibits and pictures and movie posters reflecting his work but the centerpiece, which captures a young, enthusiastic, and adventurous Hemingway fishing of his beloved boat ‘Pilar’, is the bronze sculptor by Terry Jones (2005).
The bronze sculptor of Hemingway by Terry Jones (2005).
Ernest Hemingway’s first visit to Key West in 1928 was only meant to be a way stop, but once he’d felt the sun on his face, smelt the salty air and met the locals, he knew it would be his home with second wife Pauline.


A photograph of Ernest Hemingway with his parents and his second wife Pauline in April 1928
He soon became an avid sports fisherman. In 1938 he established a world record for catching seven Marlin in one day. He also garnered a reputation for hard drinking with his new friends Josie ‘Sloppy Joe’ Russell, fisherman Eddie ‘Bra’ Saunders and his brother ‘Burge’ and later Toby Bruce who became his right-hand man and life-long companion.
I’ll give you a tour of the Hemingway museum using my photos.




A model of Hemingway's beloved boat 'Pilar' in the Hemingway Key West Museum
If you ever do find yourself in Florida I urge you to explore the Keys. We took a Greyhound Bus from Miami and stopped off in Key Largo for a couple of days (which really should warrant another #Trippets post!) before heading across the famous bridges down to Key West. There is so much to explore and lots to do there. The food is fabulous and restaurants plentiful. In Hemingway tradition, bars are a fun feature too. Sloppy Joe's is still there and a new addition is the first and original of Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville.
Here I am enjoying a Margarita at the original Margaritaville Key West!
I loved finding out more about one of my writer heroes and we adored Key West!
Author note: I so enjoyed meeting the six-toed cats that a fictional six-toed offspring features in my next romantic adventure novel 'Island in the Sun' and is aptly named 'Hemingway'!

January 2017 - a bittersweet month back in the UK

At the end of my previous blog post written just after New Year – a summary of our travels in 2016 that you can read by clicking HERE – I mentioned how we had no immediate plans to leave Koh Tao in Thailand. But that all changed very quickly on the 4th January when we had word that my mother-in-law was gravely ill.
Happier times: Trav's mum and dad celebrating their 50th Wedding Anniversary
We checked for flights back to the UK straight away - but as it was still peak time for new year holiday travel - we had problems with availability. We left Koh Tao by boat and bus and plane and headed to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where we knew there was a flight to London with British Airways the following day, on which could be on standby.
We managed to get the last two seats on a flight back to the UK via Hong Kong. 
We were hoping to get back to the UK in time to say goodbye to Trav’s mum before she passed away. Trav was on the phone several times a day with his mum’s nursing carers, and the good news was that his mum had improved slightly, so allowing us more time to get back to her. The bad news was that we heard Trav’s dad had fallen and badly broken his hip. He was now in hospital and due to be operated on the very next day.
We managed to get the last two seats on a flight back to the UK via Hong Kong. 

Then from London we flew straight up to Glasgow because our son, Iain, had kindly allowed us to use his car to save us the cost of car hire. We also managed to see our son, Ben, while we were in Scotland. We had a meal out on the night we arrived in Edinburgh with him and his girlfriend Hayley and her family. I hope they didn’t mind that we were suffering from climate change, we were totally jet lagged, and hadn’t slept for 48 hours!


It had been two years since we’d been back in the UK and it felt quite surreal to sudden find ourselves back there. I had been missing my family very much over the Christmas holidays, so I knew this albeit unplanned trip would be bittersweet time, because it would be wonderful to see family and friends again but very sad indeed to see Trav’s dad in hospital and his mum for what would be the very last time. We had been warned she was now in the last days of her life.
After buying some warm clothes and footwear more suited to the UK in January, we headed down to England, shivering under gloomy grey and rainy skies. I couldn’t help but to think of the sunshine we had left behind us in Thailand – until I checked my Facebook notifications to discover that the very day after we left Koh Tao a monsoon had hit – bringing the worst rainfall in decades. I’m sure that as we had left so quickly and unexpectedly some peeps might have thought we knew something was about to happen – but we didn’t – honest!
Once in England, we visited Trav’s mum and dad, who were in two different locations: Whiston hospital and a Runcorn nursing home. My best friend, Dina, who happens to live an equal distance between the two places, kindly said that we could stay with her for which we were extremely grateful.
Often, while Trav was with his mum and dad, I went to visit my mum and it was so wonderful to spend time with her. I also got to catch up with my brothers and sisters. It was hard to arrange to see everyone during this unplanned trip, even though we were back for a month, when everyone worked during the week and often had plans over the weekend. I did manage to have a meal out with my brothers one evening and to spend a couple of nights with my sister Lorna and her family at her house.
With my mum and brothers David and Steven
Sadly, on the 17thJanuary, with her three sons and daughter-in-laws at her bedside, Trav’s mum, Dorothy Horton, passed away peacefully in the early hours of the morning. She was 84 years old and she had been suffering with dementia and Alzheimer’s. She hadn't known or recognised her family during her last months but, in the moments before she drew her last breath, I saw her open her eyes, shed a tear, and look with absolute clarity upon her boys.
Sadly, as my father in law was still recovering from his hip operation, he wasn’t able to be with his wife at the end. As you might imagine, this made for an extremely difficult and emotional time, when we had to break the sad news to him later that day at the hospital.
The funeral couldn’t be held for another 15 days due to the Christmas and New Year holidays and with January apparently being a busy time for the funeral services generally. This posed a problem for Trav and I as we had a return flight to Asia booked a couple of days before the funeral date.

We spent a long time on the phone speaking to several departments within British Airways until we finally got someone who could help us. BA were more than helpful and, although there should have been hefty charges associated with changing our flights, they wavered all of them and moved our flights forward by one week to allow us to attend the funeral.
During the next two weeks, we continued to stay as house guests at my lovely friend Dina’s house. As we hadn’t seen Dina since she had come out to see us in Koh Tao the previous January. It was wonderful to see her again.


My best friend Dina and I on Koh Tao Thailand last year
Trav and I were aware that we needed new visas to get back into Thailand, so we made a trip into Liverpool to the Royal Thai Consulate there. I hadn’t been to Liverpool for decades and yet I had been brought up there. My family moved to Liverpool when I was 6 years old and moved out of Liverpool to Runcorn when I was 14. I have to say that the Liverpool I knew back then is a far cry from the rather swish cosmopolitan city that it is today.


I immediately wished we’d been able to spend more time staying in Liverpool at the Albert Dock than the one night we had planned. Especially when a lovely friend who we met on the island of Utila in the Caribbean last year – who plays with the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra – got in touch on Facebook messenger and offered us ticket for the following evening’s performance.
We did however manage to catch up with a couple of lovely friends who we’d met a couple of years ago while we were in the Bahamas. Jen and Gregg live in Liverpool and are planning to come out to Koh Tao in March to see us and do some diving – so it was great to meet up with them in Liverpool while we were there. They showed us a great night out in the city. We stopped outside Horton House for a photo and went on to a fabulous Brazilian all you can eat restaurant called Fazenda followed by a cocktail bar called The Alchemist where the cocktails all look like science experiments!




We also managed to catch up with our closest friends Jeannette and Nigel and Sara and Douglas and Jane and Pete in Scotland. It was so wonderful to see them again and to catch up with each other over a wonderful dinner that Jeannette cooked for us all. 




While in Scotland, we also briefly go see our eldest son Ben again in Edinburgh and to stay with my sister Lisa and her family who live in Ayrshire. While staying at Lisa’s I was very keen to have a ride on my niece Shannon’s new pony. Her pony, called Star, was her Christmas gift. Lucky girl!




Then we returned to England for Trav’s mum’s funeral. It was a sad and poignant day. Again we were able to meet up with friends and family we hadn’t seen in a long time. Unfortunately, Trav’s dad wasn’t able to attend, as he was still too frail and that made for an even more difficult and emotional day for the family. After a service at the crematorium everyone gathered at a nearby old Cheshire pub that is opposite All Saint’s Church in Daresbury. The church is famously the burial place of Lewis Carol and there is a beautiful stain-glass window there dedicated to Alice in Wonderland.

Trav’s mum’s funeral. It was a sad and poignant day.
Rest in Peace Dot Horton

The day after the funeral Trav and I headed back to Asia with heavy hearts. We decided we needed some down time before heading back to the island of Koh Tao and our busy lives of teaching diving and writing projects. We decided to take a short diversion and fly over to the island of Penang in Malaysia. It is very easy and inexpensive to fly to Penang with Air Asia from Kuala Lumpur and it's a place we had yet to visit. Not that we planned to explore much – that would have to wait for another visit – we just wanted time to rest and recuperate and to get over our hectic and stressful month and from the jetlag of travelling. We were very fortunate, due to Trav being a card member with Holiday Inn - that we were given a fabulous top floor suite upgrade for the three nights of our stay and so were able to get our R and R in absolute luxury!


Next time on the blog I’ll be back on Koh Tao in Thailand. We have lots to do there – Trav is heading up a team of Dive Master Trainees and I have a new book to bring out soon and another to start writing.
So pop back soon for island updates and writerly news and please do consider joining my 2017 mailing list. Every new subscriber will receive a free copy of my bestselling ebook 'How To Party Online' just for signing up to my occasional newsletters by using the form at the top right hand side of this page.
Love, Janice xx

2016 – An epic year of world travel and amazing adventures!

2016 was a truly epic year. Throughout 2016, we have been fortunate to travel to many fantastic places in far-flung corners of the world, where we have met lots of wonderful people we can now call friends.
This time last year, I posted a travel map showing a total of 37 countries that we had visited to date. This year, our updated map shows a total of 46 countries – that’s nine uniquely new destinations for us during 2016 and of course many repeated ones too in the USA and the Caribbean.



We saw this year in with a fabulous new year’s eve party on the island of Koh Tao in Thailand. We stayed on the island for the first six weeks of 2016 and then - just six weeks before the end of the year - we returned to Koh Tao again. It felt like a wonderful fate to be coming full circle in 2016!
This year, we have not only travelled a lot, we have achieved a lot.
While my husband Trav and I were staying on our island home of Utila in the Caribbean Sea (for a total of six months this year – although we did a visa run to the USA and Mexico between each of our three month stays) Trav added to his scuba diving qualifications and experience by qualifying as a PADI Staff Instructor. He also became a boat captain by passing the International Commercial Small Powerboat and Rib Master ITYW course. I am SO proud of all his hard work and all he has achieved this year.


During our second trimester on Utila, Trav, as a newly qualified Staff Instructor, was working as a volunteer dive instructor with Operation Wallacea – an organisation that works with marine biologists and eco-students at Degree/PHD level.
The emphasis was very much on reef ecology and marine conservation and Trav’s part in this exciting venture was to teach students how to dive and also to maintain a safe underwater working environment for them in which they could undertake their marine studies.
While Trav was busy doing all of the amazing stuff above - I began working on my next romantic adventure novel entitled ‘Island in the Sun’ and also to write world travel features for lifestyle magazines – and of course to hang around in a hammock drinking cocktails!
Highlights of 2016 include:
* My best friend Dina coming over from England to Koh Tao Thailand to visit in January.
* Trav and I visiting South Korea for the occasion of our baby grandson’s first birthday party in February.
* Our eldest son Ben and youngest son Iain coming over to the Caribbean with their girlfriends to be with us in April.
* Our USA visa run from the Caribbean in May/June, during which time we renewing our wedding vows in Las Vegas while celebrating our 33rd wedding anniversary where we took a trip out to the Grand Canyon before ‘honeymooning’ in Cozumel and Tulum in Mexico.
* After spending a combined total of six months on the Caribbean island of Utila, we flew to Florida to spend a week there before flying on to visit family in Vancouver, Canada.
* After two weeks in Canada, we flew onto Asia via Japan to visit Malaysia and Indonesia before coming full circle back to Thailand at the end of 2016.
It’s been a heady twelve months and so I thought I’d best review the highlights now before we get too involved in 2017. I’ll take it one month at a time – starting at the beginning. If you click on the links after each month’s summary you can go to the full blog post with more details and more photos of that trip.
January 2016. We saw in the new year on the beach in Thailand, dancing with the fire dancers, setting our wish lantern up into the sky, and counting in 2016 with our Koh Tao friends

Seeing in 2016 on Sairee Beach Koh Tao Thailand
Later in January, my best friend Dina, whom I’ve known all my life, came out to Thailand to visit me and to have a holiday/vacation in the sun. During this time, Dina and I travelled from Koh Tao to Koh Samui and onto to Chiang Mai and Bangkok. On the return journey, we took an iconic train journey through Thailand and we had many fabulous adventures and lots of fun. Dina also got to discover scuba diving for the first time on Koh Tao. While we were off on our BFF adventures, Trav was busy doing an PADI Instructor Development Course to become a qualified scuba diving instructor.




You can read more about our fabulous BFF travels in Thailand HERE .
February: Trav and I travelled to South Korea to attend our grandson’s first birthday party, which is a special occasion in any country, but in Korea it has special significance, and so a big party was planned. We arrived looking forward to meeting our extended Korean family although had underestimated how cold it would be – in the minus’s C – and we only had summer clothes. Trav bought socks to wear with his flip-flops and one of our first priorities was to buy warm clothing for the week.





You can read more about our celebrations in South Korea HERE .
March: Trav and I flew back to the Caribbean and it didn’t take us long to settle back into island life on Utila, the smaller of the Bay Islands off Honduras. We have now spent a total of over a year on this beautiful island and it felt good to be back. During our first week, it was my birthday and we had a party with friends on the dock and a meal out in an island restaurant. My birthday present this year was a bicycle. I was thrilled - it’s a perfect way to get around this small island - and I haven’t owned a bicycle since I was about twelve years old!
Settling back into Caribbean island life on Utila I haven’t owned a bicycle since I was about twelve years old!
On Utila Trav completed his Staff Instructor course at Coral View Dive Centre and also took and passed his International Commercial Small Powerboat and Rib Master ITYW course and so became Captain Trav!
The months whizzed by – otherwise filled with sunshine and fun and diving and snorkelling and boat trips and picnics and BBQ’s over on beautiful Water Cay – one of the small islands off Utila and a favourite spot for spending time on the beach and catching up with friends.


You can read more about our experiences on the Caribbean island of Utila HERE .
April: We were so excited that two of our sons, Ben and Iain, were arriving from Edinburgh UK with their girlfriends, Hayley and Brogan, to spend two weeks on the island with us.






They were looking forward to lots of sunshine and fun and diving. Ben and Iain are already qualified dive instructors and the girls wanted to do their Discover Scuba Diving courses. One of those days out on the boat with Ecomarine Dive Centre turned out to be very special indeed because we spotted and swam with a whale shark and, not one, but two pods of dolphins. It is such a joy to swim so close to these beautiful and wild creatures. 

Our wild dolphins - photo credit Dave Thatcher  Family fun diving
During their holiday, it was Iain’s 23rd birthday and we celebrated with a day at the beach and with lunch and cocktails and birthday cake. Over the following weekend, we all rented a private island called Little Cay – which is amazing in itself - but also something that is totally affordable in this part of the eastern Caribbean!

Happy birthday to Iain!  The tiny private island of Little Cay - our family weekend retreat
You can read more about this amazing time together as part of the same post as above – which is also HERE .
May: Trav and I had to leave our Caribbean island home of Utila on a visa-run to the USA, where we celebrated our 33rd wedding anniversary by renewing our wedding vows in Las Vegas, took a 600 mile round trip on a bus to drive over the Hoover Dam and to travel along ‘the mother road’ of Route 66 before exploring the South Rim of the Grand Canyon and grabbing a last minute flight to Mexico for a second honeymoon!





You can read more about this whirlwind of adventure and romance HERE .
June – July - August: We returned from Mexico to our Caribbean island home of Utila and stayed for another three months. During this time Trav was very busy indeed volunteering as a dive staff instructor for the marine conservation and educational organisation Operation Wallacia (OpWal) at Coral View Dive Centre.
While Trav was diving I had another couple of tattoos. My new tattoos came about because a guest tattooist from the USA came to Utila and after seeing his work I decided to finally get my 'mermaid and diver' tattoo done on my thigh and, to cover the nasty scar on my foot, a 'marine' montage with a shell, a starfish, a sand dollar and a sea turtle.
No pain no gain - getting tattooed
The rest of the time I was working hard on my next novel entitled ‘Island in the Sun’ which I hoped to have completed by the end of the summer. While I was researching and writing about a hurricane in the story, we actually had a hurricane warning for our part of the eastern Caribbean Sea. Hurricane Earl had started out as a tropical wave and, during my research watching the National Hurricane Centre website, I watched it progress to a tropical storm and then become a hurricane.

You can read more about Caribbean island life and hurricanes HERE .
September: We left Utila when our visas expired in early September and we flew back to the USA. As Trav and I were feeling pretty exhausted, after working and playing so hard all summer, so we took a week’s vacation in Lauderdale by the Sea in Florida. We booked into an inexpensive hotel right opposite the beach in this beautiful laid back little town and we took it easy.
On the beach at Lauderdale by the Sea Florida
We also ate really well too - it was such a treat to go to a big US supermarket and to see the huge variety of foods available - after our long stay on a small Caribbean island that only got supplies by boat twice a week. We could hardly believe our eyes and we enjoyed shopping for food and cooking for ourselves in the BBQ back at our apartment.

We did eat out a couple of times too and we took walks on the beach and lazed around in the sun at the pool and we slept - we did a lot of sleeping to make up for the sleep loss on Utila - where we were woken every morning by our natural alarm clock of ear-piercingly loud cockerels crowing outside our bedroom window at around 4.30am!
You can read more about our summer of island life HERE
September: Revived and refreshed, we set off on our next adventure by flying from Fort Lauderdale to Vancouver Canada, where we were to stay with family for the next two weeks. My Uncle Ed (my mum’s brother) and his wife Dawn have, over the years, often invited us over to stay with them at their home in Hope, British Columbia, so we thought we’d take them up on their kind offer at long last and visit. We had THE most amazing time – hiking up mountains and exploring the wilds and having fabulous experiences – all while looking out for bears. We concluded our trip with a fabulous visit to Whistler Mountain and a ride of the world’s highest and longest peak to peak gondola ride!

In Hope BC Canada with my Uncle Ed and Aunt Dawn





You can read more about our amazing trip to beautiful British Columbia HERE .
At the end of September: Trav and I flew from Vancouver Canada (via Montreal, Houston, and Tokyo) to Kuala Lumpur (KL) in Malaysia. A total flight time of twenty-five hours and a leap in time of eight hours.
Thankfully, we managed to get a few hours of sleep before we had to dash back to the airport to meet up with our son James and his lovely wife Sujeong, who were flying in from South Korea to meet up with us in KL for the weekend.
We hadn’t seen James and Sujeong since February of this year, when we were in South Korea for our grandson Aaron’s first birthday celebrations. Aaron wasn’t with them this time though, as this was a strictly grown-up affair, to help James and Sujeong celebrate their second wedding anniversary.
With James and Sujeong in Kuala Lumpur
We had a wonderful weekend, sightseeing at the stunning Petronas Towers and its famous sky bridge, shopping in KL’s sophisticated malls, and celebrating their anniversary by eating out in restaurants, drinking in our hotel club room, enjoying each other’s company and catching up on our busy lives. It was such a special weekend.
You can read more about our very special weekend in Kuala Lumpur HERE .
October:From KL we flew to Bail. We stayed just a few nights in Bali and we explored the island interior town of Ubud – famous for its monkey forest and reputedly the cultural and culinary centre of Bali. We enjoyed Ubud but not so much the busy coastal touristy town of Kuta. We didn’t explore further – although I’m sure there is more to see in Bali – but we were keen to move off island to the more remote Indonesian islands off the neighbouring island of Lombok – the Gili Islands. Gili Trawangan, Gili Air and Gili Meno.


The Gili islands are a vision of paradise in Indonesia that have white sand beaches and palm trees and no motorised transport. Gili T is the larger and most developed of the three and it has gained a reputation from backpackers as a party island. Trav and I like to beach party on occasion, but on this trip we were looking for quiet, relaxation, diving, snorkelling, great seafood, and a beach bar with a laid back ambience, so we stayed on the boat when it made its stop here and we went onto Gili Air. We stayed here in a lovely homestead cottage for a week for the princely sum of £100 (equivalent) before moving on to the even smaller and, dare I say it, even  more beautiful island of Gili Meno. Here we splashed out a bit and stayed in a boutique hotel amongst a coconut plantation. It was idyllic.





I do urge you to see my full post on this trip - as the photos are stunning. Not that I’m an expert photographer – it’s just the islands are so visually spectacular.
You can read more about Bali and beyond HERE
From Indonesia we flew back to KL and onto Langkawi Malaysia.We were looking for somewhere to settle down for a period of six weeks before we went onto Thailand to finish the year where it started - on the island of Koh Tao. As October was rainy (monsoon) season on Koh Tao, we went house hunting in Malaysia, where it was the beginning of the high (dry) season. We stayed a week on the island of Langkawi and then a week back in the city of Kuala Lumpur. We viewed lots of apartments in both places but we were unsuccessfully (mostly due to it being high season). BUT then, unexpectedly, we were offered not one but two fantastic opportunities back in Thailand and we took one of them – which would help Trav to work towards his Master Instructor scuba qualification – his goal for 2017. So everything worked out far better than we ever could have planned!

You can read all about our house hunting failures in Malaysia and our impromptu return to Thailand HERE
November: This is Trav’s birthday month and it happily coincided with a visa run (as we only had a 30 day entry visa for Thailand) so after 30 days on the island of Koh Tao we hopped on a boat, a bus, a plane, a train and an uber taxi, and headed back to KL to celebrate Trav’s birthday and also to secure a 60 day tourist visa from the Thai Consulate.
The Thai visa takes up a whole page of a passport and then there are the additional in/out stamps too. It was pointed out to us in the KL Thai Consulate that we had now run out of blank pages in our passports.


This was not so much a problem but an immediate crisis. Our passports still had 18 months before they expired but if we had no more blank pages then no pages – no visas – no stay – no travel – and the clock was ticking and the days counting down to our next visa run. Did we have to dash back to the UK to replace our passports? Thankfully, we found a way to renew our passports via Her Majesties Passport Office in Bangkok. It took just three weeks to get our brand new passports. Stress but then Success!
You can find out more about how we overcame our visa and passport problems HERE
December: Even though the monsoon rains where heavy over Koh Tao, we had a pretty amazing December. We had in hand our new passports and visas that allowed us to stay in Thailand until the first week in January. So we forgot about travel for a while and Trav spent his time diving (he gets wet anyway so a little monsoon rain doesn’t bother him!) and I knuckled down indoors to finish my next book ‘Island in the Sun’.
I have now finished the first draft and it has now been sent to my lovely editor for a story edit. This part of the editing process is when a fresh set of eyes (my editors sharp ones) reads the manuscript for readability, story structure, plot and character development.


The week before Christmashowever, Trav caught a head cold and due to congestion he couldn’t clear his ears. This is bad news for a diver as being underwater puts lots of pressure on the ear drum. Diving with a head cold is therefore not recommended.
As it was raining heavily on Koh Tao island – and had been for almost three weeks – we checked the weather forecast to find that on the mainland just a few hundred miles north of us in the Thai resort of Hua Hin – the sun was shining. So we took a boat to Chumphon the mainland (1 hour) and then a bus (5 hours) to Hua Hin.
The trip was inexpensive and the bus was actually a well-appointed and comfortable coach. At Hua Hin, we stayed at the Intercontinental Resort, where we got three nights for the price of two (a member of the Holiday Inn Group, we collect their points). This mini-break was to be a wonderful pre-Christmas gift to each other. The hotel was right on the beach and the resort was very beautiful – plus it was indeed hot and sunny.



After being in Hua Hin, Trav’s head cold was much better and so we returned to Koh Tao to carry on as before – Trav doing his diving and me finishing my novel. Unfortunately, I didn’t feel too good at this point and so I spent the next week, up until Christmas Eve, not able to eat or drink very much. I didn’t have a cold but I had something – maybe a stomach bug.
Despite feeling ill, I got back my story edits from my lovely editor and finished working on the second lot of edits of ‘Island in the Sun’ on New Year’s Eve. It felt great to be finished, especially on the last day of the year. The next stage in the editing process is the copy edit – my editor will check the novel for grammar, spelling, typos over used words etc.
Trav and I celebrated Christmas and New Year on Koh Tao with our lovely friends. The weather improved and we had a fun Christmas Eve night out with Bans Dive Centre at Fishbowl Bar and, on Christmas Day, it was very hot and sunny so we walked along the beach. It was kind of amusing to see everyone walking along or sunbathing in Santa hats.
We have been travelling for three years now - and we haven’t experienced a cold winter in a long time - but it still feels strange to me to experience Christmas in 35+ degrees C of heat!

We had a wonderful night out on Christmas Day night with our friends from Sunshine Dive Centre. We had a ‘proper’ Christmas roast dinner at Barracuda Restaurant and we all did a fun Secret Santa. Trav received a dive equipment thingy and I got a spa voucher. Very suitable and wonderful gifts indeed!


It was truly wonderful over Christmas to chat and to have facetime with our family and friends using social media / Skype /Viber etc. It was great to see how everyone was celebrating the holidays and to reflect on what an amazing year of travel and adventure 2016 truly was for us. I’m amazed by it all and also very thankful.
So now we are into January 2017 and I’m excited for what the New Year will bring. We don't have any immediate plans to leave Thailand - except for another visa run - so that will no doubt be the subject of my next post. 
Happy New Year to you all!
Do pop back next time and feel free to leave a comment. I’ll be sure to reply.
If you enjoyed reading about our travels in 2016 and are curious about the places we visited in 2015 - you can read the highlights of those travels HERE .
Love, Janice xx
If this is your first visit to janicehorton.co.uk then I’d like to wish you a warm welcome. Please visit my ‘About Janice’ page HERE

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Passports, visa issues, and other first world problems…

I’m pretty sure you must often think from reading my blog updates or seeing my Facebook travel posts that our life of nomadic world travel is all fun and adventure and frolicking on the beach – and it mostly is – except for when there are problems.
Problems can range from: delayed flights, missing flights, broken aeroplanes, feeling ill and wondering if you need a doctor, having toothache but no dentist, feeling sea-sick with no sight of land, getting hurt and wondering if you’ll ever get better, fleeing from a typhoon, being in the path of a hurricane, etc etc…. 
Those are just a few off the top of my head.
But some problems are really tricky to overcome – they are usually first world issues to do with having no fixed abode - and we have been dealing with some of these recently.
Like what to do when you have been travelling for a while and you want to continue travelling but you know that at the end of the month your bank debit card will expire and, in the tiny remote place you are in, your debit card is the only card that works at the only ATM?
Add to that, knowing that every month after, each one of the credit cards in your wallet is going to expire in turn (like a row of dominos falling down). 

Having no debit card means no access to our bank funds and no credit cards means no flights can be booked online leaving us pretty much penniless and stranded.
Do we have to go back to the UK just to visit our bank?
Then there is the visa issue. We are so lucky to have UK passports – one of the most powerful passports in the world (erm, well, right now at least) which allows you a visa and entry – often on arrival - to many wonderful countries. Recently we were in Malaysia were we were given a 90 day visa on arrival and Indonesia were it is a 30 day on arrival visa.
We are now in Thailand, where with a UK passport you get a 30 day visa on arrival. But what if we want to stay longer – and we do? 
This is a problem that can be both costly and exhausting. For example, to get a 60 day visa you need to apply outside of Thailand at a Thai Embassy or Consulate for that visa every time. This is what is known as a visa run.
I mentioned passports – and that brings me to the main topic of this post. 

Many countries insist that you have at least six months valid on your passport. We knew our passports were good for another eighteen months. Or so we thought - until we went on a visa run to the Thai Consulate in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia recently. The Thai visa takes up a whole page of a passport and then there are the additional in/out stamps too. It was pointed out to us that we had now run out of blank pages in our passports.
This was not so much a problem but an immediate crisis.
No pages – no visas – no stay – no travel – and the clock was ticking and the days counting down. Did we have to dash back to the UK to replace our passports?
Thankfully we found a way around having to take the hit of buying expensive holiday time air fares (our current visas expire a few days after New Year) and, after contacting Her Majesties Passport Office in Bangkok, we were told we could replace them as overseas citizens through their office. Hurray!
It took exactly three weeks from us sending off our current passports and all our paperwork to Bangkok, them checking it all and sending it onto London, for us to receive our brand new passports.

Out with the old and in with the new!
During that time I tracked our returning passports with DHL passing through their depots in London, Liverpool, Birmingham, New York, Hong Kong and back to the passport office in Bangkok for collection.

Our new passports have travelled far and wide without us!
We were saved the cost and inconvenience of having to go all the way to Bangkok by enlisting the help of a friend (thanks Mark) who lives in Bangkok and who did the drop off and pick up for us and posted our passports back to us on our tiny island in the Gulf of Thailand.
I have to point out that the Thai postal service is excellent and so we had no problems doing this. However, there are many places in the world that doing sensitive stuff like this by post would be inadvisable if not absolutely impossible. What do you do then? I have no idea.
And the credit and debit card problem? It wasn’t easy but again we had help. We had a family member to post out our new cards, once they’d been issued by the bank, to a friend in another country whom we planned to meet up with at some point. And, on another occasion, we had to time things perfectly so that we were in a country/place/address where we could rely on a courier getting to us. Making this all like a game of worldwide tag.
But now we are viable once again. We have our new bank cards, we have our new passports and we are once again prepared to take a boat and a bus and a plane and a train and then probably an Uber taxi - to get to the next place outside Thailand which has a Thai Consulate or a Thai Embassy - where we can get our next visa back into Thailand again. Which we don’t consider to be a problem at all!
Until next time,Love, Janice xx

House hunting failure in Malaysia and other adventures...

After our amazing trip to Bali and the Gili Islands in Indonesia, which you can read about HERE, we headed back to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia.

We stayed two nights at the Intercontinental Hotel in KL city centre, then two days later, we flew with Air Asia over to the Malaysian island of Langkawi.

This was our second visit to this duty-free island. We stayed here for a week exactly one year ago during our Grand Asian Tour of 2015. We decided to come back here because we had been enthusing about Langkawi to our friends Mark and Rebecca, who live on the island of Koh Tao, in Thailand, and whom we met up with on Gili Air.
Mark and Rebecca were looking for a place to relax and unwind for a week after their hectic final F1 destination and we were looking at Langkawi as a possible place to settle down for a couple of months.

I felt the need to stop travelling for a while and to find somewhere conducive to finishing the manuscript of my next romantic adventure novel. After which, in late December, we planned to head to Koh Tao Thailand for the start of high season – which had always been our plan for the end of 2016.
So the four of us arranged to meet up again in Langkawi.
We thought Langkawi might be a good choice for us as a place to settle for a while as it was just the start of the high season there (and still rainy season in Koh Tao) and we had three month visa, which is standard for UK Passport holders arriving in Malaysia. We also expected it to be relatively inexpensive to live there too. So we booked ourselves into a budget hotel for a week to give us enough time to find a small house or apartment to rent.


But even though we took lots of time to look for suitable accommodation in various places on the island, while Mark and Rebecca chilled out in their plush hotel, we discovered a complete lack of affordable availability and we were told over and over again that rental accommodations had been booked out for months in advance. So total house-hunting failure!
The Langkawi trip wasn’t a complete failure however, as we got to enjoy Mark and Rebecca’s company again. We had wall to wall sunshine for a week. And we got to eat the most amazing seafood – tiger shrimp and lobster - at the most incredibly affordable prices.





And we also got to throw away our worn-out clothing and buy new ones from the market on Langkawi, where they have the softest, lightest, coolest, cotton clothing we’ve ever found. I think I replaced my entire wardrobe (and by that I mean suitcase) for the equivalent of £60. We also stocked up on wine (£3 a bottle for good stuff) and bourbon (at £8 per litre).


So what and where next?
Well, to help us out of our house hunting dilemma, Rebecca and Mark generously offered us their place to housesit on Koh Tao, as they were planning to go back to the UK until just before Christmas. But as it was only the start of the rainy (monsoon) season on Koh Tao and we knew the island would be quiet, with most boats to the island on stand-by and many places closed, we weren’t sure it was the right place for us at this time.
So we headed back to Kuala Lumpur (we had a return ticket) and we went house hunting there instead. For five nights we stayed for free at a very nice Holiday Inn Golf and Country Resort just outside the city, using our hotel loyalty points. 
The lovely view from our room at the Holiday Inn Golf and Country Resort KL
The weather in KL was hot and sunny and the (a free stay on loyalty points) hotel was lovely
While in KL I went to the Malaysian version of Specsavers for some new reading glaases
We used public transport and uber taxis to get around and we searched for and viewed several apartments. Some of them were quite luxurious serviced apartments with outside balconies and swimming pool and gym facitities - yet affordable. However, they were all for long term rental only and not just a couple of months.

During this time, although we both love KL, I still wasn’t quite convinced that I actually wanted to live in a busy city and I worried what Trav would do with himself if he couldn’t go diving while I was busy writing? I mean, you can only go to the cinema so many times before it starts getting a bit repetitive, can’t you? 
KL Monorail - just one of the inexpensive and efficient ways to travel around KL
We viewed a rental apartment here in KLCC
Many apartments in KLCC are serviced apartments with a pool and gym
Coming to the conclusion that we were island people rather than city folk, and as we had been planning to go back to Koh Tao in another six weeks anyway, we decided to speak to Mark and Rebecca and take them up on their kind offer of house-sitting their place while they were away.
Except, that very soon after making our new plans, Trav was immediately offered a fantastic diving opportunity on the island of Koh Tao that would help him towards gaining his PADI Master Instructor certification (his goal for 2017) and which also included our accommodation during our stay.
So, it seems that whether it was still the rainy season or not, we were destined to be heading back to Koh Tao and suddenly I couldn’t wait!
We had a wonderful welcome back to the island and I was so delighted to find that our new home on Koh Tao was a modern studio villa with a lovely big covered porch that would be great for sitting outside whatever the weather. 

Our accommodation is on a huge diving resort here on Koh Tao - so we'll have access to all the resorts facilities including the shops, bars, restaurants and swimming pools - they have three pools and are in the process of building a fourth. The beach is just a ten minute walk away. Things really have turned out really well for us - we simply couldn't have planned it better.


Our beautiful villa on Koh Tao
When we settle anywhere for more than a week then the Trav and Janice's Hoose sign goes up!

This fabulous swimming pool is just a few minutes walk from our new home.
A lovely welcome back to the island from our lovely island friends











First week back on Koh Tao and Trav was diving with whale sharks again
It all sounds so blissful, right? It is EXCEPT for one wee glitch - and that was that at this time we only had 30 day arrival visa for Thailand.

SO, we knew that after just three weeks or thereabouts, we would have to leave Thailand again on a visa run. We decided to 'run' back to KL as it was the most affordable option to get a 60 day visa. You may wonder why we didn't get one to start with but at that time the Thai Consulate was closed for a few days and getting a 60 day visa is a two day process - meaning we would have had to stay in KL for almost another week. So before our 30 day visa expired, we took a three hour boat from Koh Tao to Surat Thani on the mainland. Then a bus for a hour or so to the airport. Then an Air Asia flight back to KL.


While we were in KL this time around we would also be celebrating Trav's birthday. His treats included birthday cake, chocolates and champagne and wine and cheese (ooops, okay, the last three items were for me - and you'll know how much I miss cheese when we are travelling and living on tiny cheese-free islands!) and of course there was lots of bourbon drinking for Trav - plus a trip to the cinema - to watch the new Magnificent Seven Movie.


Trav's Birthday Cake
My wine, champagne and cheese!
The trip to the Thai Consulate in KL to secure our new 60 day visas got a bit stressful because it is a two day exercise and the first day we arrived very early and before opening time to find there was already a huge queue around the building block. We waited in line and then we waited some more once inside and, after almost three hours, when we eventually get to see an immigration officer, he asked for additional documents to be produced, above and beyond what was stipulated - but of course it is at their discretion to do so - which had us running back to our hotel to get online and to print stuff out and to race back to the consulate again in an exhausted and overheated stress before they closed for the day. We made it with only ten mins to spare!

The following day, we did manage to collect our 60 day visas for entry back into Thailand. BUT it was pointed out to us that we don't have any space left in our passports for any more entry/exit stamps or visas.

Our passports are still valid but we have travelled so much we have now run out of empty pages - and this is something we need to address before our current visas expire OR our fabulous travel adventures will come to a grinding halt and we will have to leave our beautiful new home on Koh Tao and Trav's diving ambitions will all be on hold!

Don't panic though - we are dealing with the situation right now - and we have found that we are able to apply for new passports (the ones with extra pages!) as overseas UK Citizens through Her Majesty's Passport office in Bangkok and we should in fact have our new passports in our hands in the next week or so. *Fingers crossed*.

So now we are back on Koh Tao and we are finally able to settle down to the slower pace of island life after the excitement of all our recent travels and adventures and our visa/passport stresses. 

I have been able to focus on getting some writing done and to finish my novel Island in the Sun, which is now with my editor, and also meet my looming deadlines for travel magazine features. Meanwhile, Trav has been busy and happy in equal measures doing lots of new and amazing stuff to develop his diving career while we are here on Koh Tao.





Next time here on the blog – I'll be taking a look back at the highlights of 2016 month by month to recap on all the countries we have visited, the adventures we have had, and the lovely people we have met over what has been a truly amazing and fantastic year.

In early January, just after New Year, Trav and I hope to have our new passports with which to do yet another visa run. We plan to go to the Malaysian island of Penang next time around as we haven't been there before - so that will be another new adventure to tell you about.

Until next time, Happy Christmas to you all and all best wishes for 2017.Love, Janice xx

Bali and beyond...

We arrived on the Indonesian island of Bali on a flight from Kuala Lumpur on the 20th September 2016. Knowing it would be both late and dark when we got there, I’d booked a hotel conveniently near to the airport in Denpasar, so that we would be well rested and ready to explore Bali first thing in the morning.

My first impressions of Bali was that it was hot and humid and very busy.
The first thing that impressed me was a huge modern sculpture that stands at the first intersection just outside the airport. I didn’t get a photo but the Satria Gatot Kaca statue is truly breath-taking, with larger than life gods and horses and chariots embroiled in a Balinese mythological battle scene.
For our first day on the island, we planned to venture inland to a town called Ubud. The owner of the homestead where I had booked our second night’s accommodation got in touch with us to offer his services as a taxi and apparently this is a common and much less-expensive way to travel in Bali. 
Ubud is considered to be the cultural heart of Bali - and if there is one thing I love just as much as tropical beaches then it’s interesting culture.

We drove for an hour past green and picturesque rice paddy fields and through the stone carving village of Batubulan. Stone carving is important in Bali it really is amazing to see a whole village full of stone carving studios and carvings of every subject you might imagine – from small and devilish deities to life size rearing horses – all lining the streets. Bali, it seemed to me, is full of artist and art!
I knew that the town of Ubud is famous for its markets, restaurants, temples and its monkey forest, and as we only planned to spend one night here, we knew we would have a full day ahead of us if we wanted to make the most of every minute and opportunity.
Stone carvings and beautiful architecture is everywhere on Bali
The market was colourful and noisy and crazy busy. I loved it and took my time to browse the fabulous trinkets and fabrics and spices and shoes. I bought myself a beautiful pair of sandals after haggling the seller down to a reasonable (for both of us) price. Trav absolutely hated the market and trailed in my wake with his face set with misery. He hates crowds and people pushing and waving stuff in his face. After a while, I started to hate it too – especially when being spoken to by the locals (who for no fault of their own expect you to be Australian) with constant cries of ‘good’ay mate.'
After the market we roamed the street looking for one particular restaurant. It took us many wrong turns down narrow streets to find it – and when we did eventually stumble across it – both Trav and I were convinced we’d found it purely by accident. The restaurant is called Ibu Oka and it specialises in the Balinese culinary experience known as ‘Babi Guiling’ which is roasted suckling pig. You can get this traditional dish in lots of places on Bali but this particular restaurant is world-famous and is a place of pilgrimage for lovers of roasted pork. I have to say that it was delicious and worth the effort to find the original ‘Babi Guiling’.
A stone piggy welcome
The world famous Ibu Oka Restaurant in Ubud - for the original  Babi Guiling roasted sucking pig.
Next, it was a sightseeing trip down the main streets and then a visit to the monkey forest. The monkeys, who you can see plenty of on the street too, are very cute especially with their babies – but they will steal from you and  they apparently have a penchant for handbags and cameras.

I saw a monkey grab a bottle of water from a woman stood right next to me. It then sat down in the middle of the road, unconcerned by the traffic whizzing around it, where it unscrewed the cap of the bottle and drank the water!
The Sacred Monkey Forest is a leafy nutmeg and banyan tree forest and monkey sanctuary close to Ubud town centre. In the forest, there are many old temples and statues, all covered in moss and monkeys. It’s a beautiful and ancient looking place and it’s perfect for photo opportunities but beware because many tourists report being ‘terrified’ ‘chased’ and ‘mugged’ by the monkeys!
A cute ticket collector Old temples covered in moss and monkeys
We stayed overnight in Ubud and the next morning our homestead owner drove us back towards the coast and Bali’s primary resort town - a place called Kuta. Which we had been warned was the worst place in Bali. It was.
We hated Kuta. It is a touristy, dirty, sleazy, horrible mess of a place, with fast food restaurants and a noisy beach packed with hawkers and tourists. We couldn’t wait to leave – which is why we went there in the first place – we were being taken from Kuta to the ferry point where we would travel over to the Gili Islands.
The Gili’s are an archipelago of three picture perfect tropical islands.
The larger Indonesian island of Lombok as seen from Gili Air
Gili Trawangan (known as Gili T), Gili Air, and Gili Meno, are situated off the neighbouring island of Lombok, Indonesia. There are fast boats and slow boats to take you there from Bali and I highly recommend you do a bit of online research before you make your choice of sea transport, as there have been many recent incidents of sinking, near sinking, capsizing, on board blasts and explosions, that have resulted in tourist fatalities.
So heed the warning HERE and don’t just go for the cheapest boat tickets.
The Gili Islands are a vision of paradise that have white sand beaches and palm trees and no motorised transport. Gili T is the larger and most developed of the three and it has gained a reputation from backpackers as a party island. Trav and I like to beach party on occasion, but on this trip we were looking for quiet, relaxation, diving, snorkelling, great seafood, and a beach bar with a laid back ambience, so we stayed on the boat when it made its stop here and we went onto Gili Air.
We stayed on the boat while others disembarked at Gili Trawangan
Gili Air offers that laid-back vibe we were looking for but it also has a few good restaurants and bars and dive centres. Trav went diving with Manta Divers and I went along too for snorkelling on the reef. We stayed in homestead accommodation, which was clean and basic in a small garden villa with a nice bedroom and separate bathroom and very inexpensive at around £100 - that's the rent for the whole week not the night - and the local owners were very friendly. 
Approaching Gili Air by boatPony taxi - there is no motorised transport on the Gili Islands Main Street in rush hour on Gili Air

Our homestead villa for the week on Gili Air

The first few hours that we were on Gili Air, totally by coincidence, we bumped into two friends on the street (I use the term street but as you can see from our photos it was actually a sand path along the beach). Mark and Rebecca run Sunshine Divers on the Thai island of Koh Tao and we had enjoyed socialising with them during our six weeks on Koh Tao back in January. They had been travelling in Malaysia and Indonesia following the F1 Grand Prix and were taking some time out in the Gili Islands. What an amazingly small world it really is when you meet people totally by chance like that!
It was so great to see Mark and Rebecca again!
It was so great to see Mark and Rebecca again and we got to spend the next few days in their lovely company, going out diving, Rebecca and I relaxed at the spa and we all enjoying lunches and dinners and some really fun evenings together.
Mark and Trav's bar bill while Rebecca and I were at the spa....
Gili Air is a great place to go scuba diving


We went out with Manta Divers
Pony and cart transport for the dive tanks - poor pony!
Mark and Rebecca

Me and Trav


Getting ready to go diving!

Going in - Trav is ready to dive...

We had a great day out on the dive boat
Goodbye Gili Air
After a week, Trav and I moved on to the smallest and least developed of these islands, Gili Meno. I was really looking forward to this non-commercial, wild and peaceful and tropical experience of this island, which boasts the best white sand beaches and peaceful romantic setting. On this island, I found a gorgeous little boutique hotel and eco-resort in the middle of an old coconut plantation and tropical garden. It also had a swimming pool and the most beautiful villas. So we decided to treat ourselves and make this place our home for the next few days and nights. 
Our paradise hotel on Gili MenoOur room on Gili Meno - a bit of luxury

Friends we met on Gili Meno Patrick and Michelle from the Netherlands
What an amazing and totally relaxing experience we had on Gili Meno – our kind of tropical island – so no apologies for all the photos of the island!
Pony and trap taxi on Gili MenoMain Street Gili Meno

The most beautiful white sand beachesFun in the sun

On the beach. Gili Air in the backgroundTaking a walk around the entire island and snapping away

The art shopFruit seller

The harbour on Gili Meno - Lombok in the backgroundMy fav photo - a cure for the blues...

Next week's accommodation, perhaps?Turtle sanctuary

It felt so good to eat dinner on the beach every night on Gili MenoRomantic dinner and sunsetAnother romantic dinner and a sunset - bliss.

The only downside to this part of our trip was that on our last day on Gili Meno I suffered from sunstroke. I’d spend most of the day lounging around the pool in the hot sun, drinking a few (to be fair, only two) gin cocktails when by evening I felt really very sick indeed. Not having eaten since breakfast, I made the effort to go out to dinner with Trav. We had planned a lovely last night and we had a reservation for a sunset dinner on the beach.


As it was, it wasn’t a great night, as I ended up being sick and passing out. I felt to ill too be embarrassed about it and was escorted back to our villa by a very concerned Trav. Thankfully, as we had two boats to catch and flight from Bali to Kuala Lumpur the following day, I was happy to be more or less recovered by morning.
We used Blue Water Express again for our boat transfers back to Bali and once again we had a very good sea crossing with them on their fast, safe, and comfortable boats. Then we flew with the wonderfully efficient and inexpensive airline Air Asia back to KL.




Next time here on the blog I'll be telling you about our need to settle down somewhere for a while and how that led us to house hunting on the island of Langkawi in Malaysia. Being on Langkawi also brought us back in touch with Mark and Rebecca and we had a great week with them on the island although we never did find somewhere to live. Our house hunting failure led us back to Kuala Lumpur again, where we viewed some amazing city centre serviced apartments with their own swimming pools.

We also celebrated Trav's birthday in KL and then we got TWO fantastic offers that would take us back to the island of Koh Tao in Thailand - but only after a rather stressful albeit successful visit to the Thai Consulate in KL - where we went to get our Thai entry visas. To Trav and I, it feels like a wonderful fate that we are going full circle and back to the island where we began this year.

Until next time,Love, Janice xx