At the end of 2019 we had just spent two months in Phnom Penh, Cambodia in a serviced apartment to focus focus focus on launching our tea blog and shop. We had a found a place with a rooftop bar and terrace, fast internet and decent restaurant in the building. A new experience for us that we enjoyed! Apart from the nights on the terrace with live music and both our birthdays, we spent most our time working away on our screens. During this intense period of work, we decided: w

Wow. 5 months since our last post, December 31st 2020. This is the longest we've gone without posting our surely-completely-essential-to-the-meaning-of-life travel blog...and for that we apologise for the detrimental impact this has had on all your lives. This winter-spring has seen a very very busy and non-photogenic lockdown for us, focussing on progressing and occasionally completing Portuguese bureaucracy, and renovating the upstairs apartment down to all electrics and pl

The second part of our Gers or Occitanie album from our 6 months in South West France in 2018-2019. All animals all the time!

We spent the winter and spring of 2018-19 house-sitting on a country estate in the Occitanie region of France, eating + taking these photos!

Our trip to Nong Khai last autumn was to focus on our tea shop. The locale however, made for some irresistible photography opportunities!

We visited Czechia in May 2019 for a culture-filled week with my artist sister. This album captures that week, with plenty of art and sweets

In this gallery, I shift focus to the streets of Penang, from the far side of the island and its industrial regions, to its trendy centre

"Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life"

Vienna is a jewel box. A city made of several hundred palaces (not a typo), connected via grand boulevards and narrow cobbled streets. In keeping with this opulent ambiance, and the key reason we visited Vienna, was to see the Spanish Riding School. These stunning white Lipizzaner stallions ('grey' in the horse world) were shipped all the way from Spain, the home of the Escuela Alta and the very peak of international dressage. Why the journey? A too-long and too-complex histo

We spent a couple weeks in July 2018 exploring Busan, a dense coastal city full of museums, beaches and flame-grilled pork. Lots and lots of of Korean barbeques which were fun and delicious! Especially one particular little back alley one close to our airbnb, where they just kept bringing us amazing things....and charging accordingly it turned out :-) We left fuller in stomach, lighter in wallet, and happy. It was fun to be in a city that spoke so little English unlike the do

We spent a full two months in Penang in 2018 (Georgetown the capital to be precise), including a driving weekend to the mainland to visit Ipoh and the tea highlands. Simply put, we loved Penang. There is an incredible cultural mix with ethnic Malay, Straits-Chinese, mainland Chinese, Indian and international (i.e. non-Malay which make up a significant minority of 9%). Similarly, the religious side is similarly split between Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity and Chinese

We visited New Orleans for a family Christmas and New Year in 2014-15 and what an interesting experience it was: the culture, food and music....and the in-your-face inequality. It's a very pleasant city and we enjoyed some exceptional restaurants at all price ranges, a jazz concert and random jazz on the street several times. Highlights which we would recommend were trips to beautiful and serene bayous and swamps and the New Orleans Museum of Art and Sculpture Garden, which a

With a significant amount of time in Madrid, I was surprised to see how few photographs I took over the years! Happily though I took enough to fill a gallery :-) Madrid is one of our most favourite places and cities in the world. It is Spanish in a way that Barcelona isn't (which is so touristy and international that you could be in another country), and is most definitely one of the classic grand European capitals with its boulevards and palaces. Surprisingly given the lack

In 2017, we spent 6 weeks in Tokyo with family. After 28 years in Japan, they were moving to Hong Kong later in the year and so we thought it was a good time to see them as well as Tokyo and its nearby towns and cities. This also included a trip by bullet train to the countryside a few hours north of Tokyo. Our family took us to enjoy a Ryokan, a type of traditional traveller inn which has existing for well over 1000 years in Japan. The classic Japanese dinner of more than 2

In 2018, after our year in India, we desired a little break in a location where we didn't need to be so alert when walking the sidewalks, and so opted for a week in Singapore. 'Twas an expensive week, but we really enjoyed it and left it with opinions differing from all the criticisms we had heard - such as it is a 'boring' and 'clinical' city. We stayed quite central in a high-rise hotel but still were surrounded by streets of low rise shophouses full of hipster cafes, stree

In 2017 we spent several weeks in the US, with the galleries on Minnesota and New York having already been published. Most of our time was of course in Vermont with Elizabeth's parents, arriving in the middle of winter. Winter in Vermont is a very white and pine affair, with temperatures falling to -10C while we were there (although it can get much colder). For Elizabeth and I this is far too cold (for any real length of time!), but we still enjoy it very much as a change of

In 2017, we were lucky enough to visit Hong Kong on three occasions (although this gallery reflects just the first two). The first visit was surprise-organised about a day or so before we left - by a family member who was moving to Hong Kong and needed to visit to pick out a flat. This made for a less common experience, as we flitted between potential flats across Hong Kong with the estate agent and their 8-seater van and driver. One of many hundreds and thousands sprinkled a

[Gallery 10: Photographs from our time Kochi, India 2017] Finally! A gallery of our favourite photographs of this Keralite city. Please enjoy the gallery of photographs: please click the photo above, the title, here or visit the Galleries page at https://www.travellingfortea.com/photography Vientiene ------------------------------------------------------------- P.S. For any photography enthusiasts or professionals reading: I use a Panasonic G5 (micro four-thirds), and mostly

[Gallery 9: Photographs from our time in Scotland, Wales and England] We returned home to the UK for the winter of 2016-2017 including a wonderful Christmas and New Year with family, before travelling to the US. Special thanks to all our friends for the dinners, Scottish birthday party (and gin distillery tour) and English Christmas dinner with morning-after outdoor winter barbecue, and many other occasions. We had a really fantastic time. :-) ---------------------------- On

Gallery 8: Photographs from our trips to Tenerife & Gran Canaria in 2016 In 2016 Elizabeth and I were living in Madrid and made use of the wonderfully cheap flights to the Canary Islands on two occasions in the April and June. Despite not having visited there recently (a family holiday when I was a child), we had already decided we wanted to live there at some point in the future due to their ticking of so many boxes in yet another of our spreadsheets. (Spreadsheets for every