12-15 minute read. Note: We are currently in southern France, house-sitting through April this year. // Welcome to 2019! The start of a new year always seems to be the best time to think back upon the last, a society-wide moment for self-reflection. The past year was a busy one. Busy physically, busy emotionally, busy professionally. Physically, we pulled up our nomadic socks and got a move on, visiting fifteen countries in the year, eight of which were new to us. We honed ou

7 minute read. // India is one of the great tea producing nations in the world, and we were lucky enough to spend almost a year there through 2018. Commercial tea production only came to India in 1837, which in the 4000-year history of tea feels like yesterday. However, in the 4000-year history, the brutality, injustice, racism and hypocrisy of the past 180 years deserve more attention. It is easy to simply enjoy India’s tea while ignoring the history. Tea is an everyday drin

Sunset, in the hot summer months of February, March and April, signals the end of that day’s ordeal. From 1pm onwards the empty sky turns an impervious cyan and the land becomes a tandoor: street dogs lie in the shade of curbs or benches, too hot to even scratch their mange. Palm fronds hold their breath and coconuts roost like bats. Walking through the air is a viscous task as the sun melts the tar roads and chars the dust. The only survivable strategy is lying still inside.

We are at the t-minus nine days point now and it is time to concentrate on packing. Considering we’re wandering digital nomads we have been quite stationary for a while: ten months in India, albeit with a month or so in Hong Kong and an unexpected six hours in the Colombo airport thanks to Typhoon Hato. We are leaving for a brief week in Singapore before two months in Penang, Malaysia, followed by Vietnam in June. It is now time to reverse-Mary-Poppins our lives. When we arri

They say tea is the most popular beverage in the world, after water. Saying water is the most popular, though, is to me like saying sunshine is more popular than electric light; popularity doesn’t really come into it. Meaning that tea is really the most popular drink of choice, for the entire world. Even in coffee-loving America 80% of households have tea in their cupboards and iced tea is now even more popular there than soda (the third biggest news piece of 2016 after Brexi

In 2017, we visited the UK, the US, Denmark, Norway, Thailand, Japan, India and Hong Kong. Boy did we accomplish a lot. Such as... In 2017, we realised that our favourite restaurants in Tokyo were Chinese or Korean as shown to us by my sister and brother-in-law, and many of our favourite teas were oolongs (we also learned their correct name is wulong). For the sake of research, we taste-tested sakes at a tiny festival in northern Japan, including sparkling sake, and ate a sta

While there are many shocking things here (see my last post), these are by far outweighed by the daily amusing experiences. Also, you may have noticed some slowness in posting in recent weeks - the past two months have been very busy with two large family projects. Regular posts will resume soon! Now, entertaining India... First off: The Endless Curiosity: It is lucky there is not a finite supply of certain words, as by now we would have used up our allotment of ‘United Kingd

Every country has its own sounds. The UK has bird song, sirens (in the cities anyway) and the random motorbike that revs by at 3am on a weeknight. Spain has the murmur of voices from the terraza, the morning ‘chssssssss’ of commercial coffee machines dispensing morning pick-me-ups, and the incessancy of dogs barking across the countryside. India in June and July has its own song, whose bassline is the Southwest Monsoon, the first of the two monsoons per year. Young grasshoppe

I spent the flight relaxing my muscles and jiggling back and forth due to turbulence. It felt like the pilot had hit a washboard on a dirt road, and was refusing to back down. Judder judder. As the captain prepared for the final descent, and we all tightened our belts for a rough landing, the clouds parted and we steadied. Below me slept India. It was 12am in the middle of June and a tiny amount of moonlight leaked through clouds high above us. The land below was dark and for

Photographs from our family trip to Kerala, India in July 2014 This trip involved family travelling from the UK and Australia to meet up with family already in India, and was Elizabeth's first time in India too and meeting my maternal grandmother, so it was a big trip for the family. Kerala is a state is the south of India: 'God's Country'. It is quite an unusual state given the contrasts of a communist government (very little street poverty) and also the vast quantities of r