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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
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| 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.
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.
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!
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| Settling back into Caribbean island life on Utila |
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| 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.
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.
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| Our wild dolphins - photo credit Dave Thatcher |
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| 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!
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| Happy birthday to Iain! |
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| 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!
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.
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| 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.
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| 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!
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| 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.
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| 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.
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.
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 Christmas
however, 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
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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
