Deux Grandes Aventures - in France!

Right now Trav and I are having two grand adventures: living in France while I’m busy writing a new book loosely based on my own travel experiences for HarperImpulse - the romance imprint of HarperCollins UK Publishers!

Great excitement - signing my Harper Impulse contract!

Until fairly recently these were both totally unexpected opportunities!

HarperImpulse offering me a book contract prompted us to decide that we needed to settle down somewhere - at least for the time it would take me to write the book - but where?

When you have no fixed abode then your only options are to stay in an affordable hotel or rent a house or an apartment within your budget OR to do some housesitting and live somewhere for free in exchange for looking after the homeowner’s property and perhaps their livestock or pets.

As we have never done any housesitting before I checked out some of the house-sitting websites. The more I read about it the more appeal the housesitting idea had for us. Some people only needed a house sitter for a couple of days or weeks but some needed house sitters for a few months.

We were actually in Vietnam at the time of doing this initial research into housesitting and we already had plans in place to travel to Kuala Lumpur, Macau, Hong Kong, and South Korea over the coming weeks – so we decided that after South Korea - we would be prepared to pay the airfare to travel onto somewhere/anywhere in the world where we could stay for three months or more without having to pay any rent.

So we applied for an assignment in France through the website called MindMyHouse.com.

The assignment was to live in and look after a beautiful chateau in South West France owned by a UK couple who needed caretakers/managers for up to six months. The house was in the French countryside, just outside the beautiful and historic city of Perigueux,  and the home of a cat called Monsieur Smudge. There were also a couple of gites (cottages) on the property that were rented out and a large garden and an outdoor swimming pool to maintain.

The beautiful countryside of SW France and the housesitting assignment caring for Mr Smudge

All these jobs at the house were easily within Trav’s remit (plus there was a ride on tractor to cut the grass!) and, although it wasn't an island in the tropics, it was certainly a wonderful and idyllic setting for me to actually get some serious writing done - and being South West France - it's not as if it would ever get really cold in the wintertime either.

You can imagine how delighted we were when after a few emails back and forth and a skype interview with the homeowners – we were offered the French Assignment - and Trav and I were going to live in France from the end of September to the end of March!

The perfect writing spot...

In order to get to France as cheaply as possible from Asia, we took four flights and two long train journeys and a bus across London.

First, we took the KTX bullet train in South Korea from Daegu to Seoul and then we flew from Seoul to Hong Kong. To save on a hotel we slept in the airport in Seoul as our flight was so early in the morning. From Hong Kong our flight was delayed. After a bit of stress, we managed to get to Kuala Lumpur just in time for our direct flight to London. In London, we had to get from Heathrow to Gatwick to meet with a flight to Bordeaux, after which we took a train to Perigueux - the capital of the Dordogne Region of France.

At Perigueux train station we were met by our lovely homeowners!

The first few days we slept lots (as you can imagine) in our super comfortable and gorgeous bedroom in the beautiful chateau and we ate lots of lovely French food. Our lovely homeowners kindly showed us around the area so that we would know where to find the local shops and markets and vineyards etc.

The lovely homeowners Piers and Fran gave us a tour of the area, the vineyards, and we stopped off for lunch in a cafe

This area has so many beautiful old buildings and cathedrals and vineyards and chateaux

It was the end of September when we arrived in France but it was still hot and sunny. After being so long in SE Asia it was especially thrilling to see so much wonderful food and cheese (I LOVE cheese!) and (as we were in wine-country) lots of wine (I LOVE wine!) and it is so very inexpensive here because wine isn’t taxed as the French consider it to be a food. What a civilised country!

I knew we were going to love France!

We don’t actually speak French but were certainly keen to learn – especially as in this part of middle France - most people (including our neighbours) don’t speak any English (and why would they?) 'Bonjour! Ca va? Et vous?'

We soon settled down to living and working at our new home in France

Things I love - markets where dogs round up ducks - Authur the donkey and our neighbour's piggies  - and cafes and wine

A week or so after arriving in France, we invited (with our homeowner’s approval) my Aunt Dawn and Uncle Ed, who were in Europe from Vancouver, Canada, to stay with us for a few days. We had stayed with them last year and we were keen to see them again. We had a lovely week with them here in France before they flew back to Vancouver and I have lots of photos to show you of our wonderful days out to vineyards and medieval towns and chateaux and the time we spent together.

We had such a great time when my Uncle Ed and Aunt Dawn came to stay with us in France

Ed and Trav in old Perigueux France

Trav and I in beautiful old Perigueux France

Back at the house... Dawn and I enjoying a glass of wine and conversation by the pool...

The lazy hazy days of a French summer with Ed and Dawn and our lovely French neighbours Charles and Christelle

The autumnal courtyard through an open window

The weather stayed amazing for us all the way through October - warm enough to use the outdoor swimming pool a few times. We took a delivery of chopped wood for the winter courtesy of Fran and Piers – which we stacked into the woodshed while it was around 26 deg C. But, once November came around, the weather turned very cold.

In November it is Trav's birthday and this year he was delighted to receive a bottle of his favourite tipple (thank you Ben and Hayley) and something he'd enjoy whiling away any free French time - a drone. Happy Birthday Trav!

SHOCK! I could hardly believe it! In December it snowed and it was apparently the first time it had snowed in this part of France in FIVE years – and as we have lived in mostly hot and tropical places – it was the first time WE had experienced snow in around five years too!

We spent our French autumn evenings by the cosy log fire...

As we didn't actually have any cold weather clothes, we had to buy a couple of cold weather outfits to wear over the winter. Leggings and sweatshirts and socks. Our lovely homeowners did send a message to say we could use some of their knitwear from their wardrobes – which was very kind indeed – as we were reluctant to buy too much of anything that couldn’t go in our backpacks when we leave here in March.

I find this to be the most difficult thing about being a (woman) traveller. 

There is only a limited amount of stuff you can own and buy - as you have to be prepared to carry it around in your backpack with you - so less is always better.

We had a nice quiet Christmas – just the two of us and, of course, Mr Smudge – sitting by a lovely warm log fire with lots of wine and cheese. We didn’t have a Christmas tree but Trav found a string of lights to wrap around a tree in the courtyard outside. We did miss our family and friends but we did get to send and receive cards this year at least and to chat with most people on Messenger and Facetime and Skype.

Our lovely neighbours Charles and Christelle took us out for a pre-Christmas traditional French meal and also to a fabulous Christmas market in the nearby historic medieval town of Sarlat. This year’s market was on a British theme!

It was great fun and I took lots of photos!

And, except for these occasional outings, I was writing All The Time!

Harper Impulse had sent me a contract to sign and I was working to a tight end of January deadline. This meant I had just three months to write a full-length novel and to submit it on time. As an author, I’m often asked the question ‘how long does it take you to write a book?’

Well, my first book took me four years to write (I had three youngsters and two day-jobs back then) and the second one took two years. The third book, I recall, took three years. From then on, books usually took me about a year to write. So, I’ve never had to write a book quite as quickly as this before.

No pressure then!

To help, I made a spreadsheet and gave myself a set word count to achieve each week and a set time to work each day. I did try to include an hour of exercise each day too - walking in the beautiful countryside surrounding the house - as all the wine and the cheese I'm eating has piled on the weight. Consequentially, I’m a stone heavier than I was when I first arrived here. The countryside here is beautiful and reminds me very much of South West Scotland where we lived for many years.

But I'm now delighted to be able to tell you that the story is written and it's currently with my lovely editor. I do hope she loves it as much as I do. There will be of course be revisions to work on next. I expect to be working on them over the next couple of weeks. After which, the manuscript will go back to the publisher once again for line edits and then digital publication.

The title of this book – to be published as an ebook in Summer 2018 is:

‘The Backpacking Housewife’

I’m very excited about it I can tell you!

And I can hardly wait to see what the cover will look like and for it to be finally available on Amazon and on Kobo and Apple’s iBook stores. I'll be sending out a newsletter to my newsletter subscribers (see the top right sidebar of this page) when The Backpacking Housewife becomes available and also to alert you to any offers and competitions and prizes to be won around publication day.

So what’s next?

Well, we have some lovely friends from Scotland coming to stay with us for a few days soon and, if the weather allows, we’d love to take them out to a few vineyards and to explore some of the beautiful and historic local towns and to have lunch in some French cafes.

As for our onward travel plans, we do already have plans in place to leave France in mid-March. Our plan is to fly back to Asia initially, as we will be attending our son and daughter-in-law’s wedding in South Korea at the beginning of April. So, we will fly from Bordeaux to London, and then directly to Singapore. We’ll spend a couple of weeks in Malaysia (exact plans not yet decided on) before we fly over to Korea to meet up with family.

After our week in South Korea, we will fly directly from Seoul to San Francisco USA. I’ve always wanted to go to San Francisco – and I'm super excited about it so we have planned a three-day stopover there - I’ve already pre-booked our tickets to go over to see Alcatraz!

From the USA we will fly to Honduras and then onto the beautiful Caribbean island of Utila.  If you've followed this blog for a while, you'll know that Utila - the smallest of the Bay Islands - is our favourite island in the Caribbean and, although we have stayed on this beautiful island many times, it will have been two and a half years since we were last there.

I’m really looking forward to going back to Utila, hopefully, we'll stay for the whole summer, and to seeing all our island friends again. Trav, as a PADI Staff Instructor, is also looking forward to diving in the sea every day again as I know he’s really missed being in the water.

So lots of posts and lots more adventures to come in 2018.

Thanks for reading and visiting my blog. Please do pop back soon for more writing and travel news and please do consider signing up for my newsletter - I hardly ever send one out - only when I have news - so promise not to spam you.

Until next time

Love, Janice xx

Getting our his and her travel-theme sleeve tattoos in KL!

The Tattoo Parlour Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur

On the last day of August this year, we were back in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia after a month in beautiful Vietnam (you can read about Vietnam in my previous post). We had just a few days to spare in KL before our next adventure – two nights in Macao (the Las Vegas of Asia) and three nights in Hong Kong - before we flew onto South Korea for a ten day visit to see our son and his wife Sujeong, and our grandson Aaron, and the rest of our lovely family in Korea.

In Kuala Lumpur, we checked into one of our favourite hotels outside the city, very close to the place Trav had researched and found to do the tattoos we have been talking about getting this year to celebrate our 34^th wedding anniversary.

We wanted to mark this anniversary by getting his and her half-sleeve travel tattoos in black and grey that would represent our love and our nomadic lifestyle.

I'd rather be getting tattooed!

We wanted a compass and a map as the main theme with individual touches such as our astrology signs of Scorpio and Pisces. We wanted palm trees to represent our love of tropical places and three little birds in flight to represent our three boys flying the nest. I wanted a quill pen to represent my writing and Trav wanted a diver to represent his passion for scuba diving.

These are our final approved designs. Mine on the left. Trav's on the right.

We consulted with the very talented young artists and tattooists at The Tattoo Parlor Malaysia at Petaling Jaya, Kuala Lumpur. It took many hours of consultation and skill and patience for them to fine-tune our ideas and to get the tattoo designs just right for us. During this time, while tattoo artists Bruce and Oren Lee were busy designing, Cheryl the owner of the shop looked after us, bringing us coffee and food. The atmosphere in the shop was really friendly, fab, and fun.

Tattoo artist Bruce Lee positions the design template onto Trav's arm

Tattoo artist Oren positions the design template on my arm

With the design templates in place that tatttoing can begin!

Then the tattooing began and after over eight hours in the shop, including five long hours in the chair and under the needle, Trav and I finally had the tattoos we had wanted so much and which meant so much to us. We were more than thrilled with the results. I do have a few tattoos already but this was Trav’s first tattoo. I'm so proud of him and we both agreed that the pain was worth it!

The outline is being tattooed and I'm in a bit of a sweat!

The amazing results - photographed raw - after five hours under the needle!

Thank you to ace tattooists Bruce and Oren at The Tattoo Parlor Malaysia!

We love our his and her’s travel tattoos and we will wear them with pride.

Now that our tattoos have healed they look even better!

 Do you have a tattoo/s? What do you think of our new tattoos?

In my next post, I’ll be sharing our fantastic trip to Macao and Hong Kong and explaining to you how the trip very nearly didn’t take off!

Love, Janice xx

Rainy season on (เกาะช้าง) Elephant Island Thailand

After an amazing and exciting month in Malaysia during the whole of June this year - exploring caves in Kuala Lumpur, helping out at a turtle conservation in the Perhentian Islands, seeing Orangutans and Sunbears in the wild in Borneo, and riding through towns and jungle on the North Borneo Railway, all of which you can read more about by clicking back through my last few posts – Trav and I decided to head onto somewhere for the month of July where we could take things easy for a while and I could get down to some serious writing and Trav could do some serious diving – all while not having to pay too much for our travel or accommodation costs.

As an easy option and with the help of a bargain-priced flight with Air Asia, we looked at travelling back to Thailand for a few weeks. We know Thailand quite well by now – having travelled extensively throughout the country - although we had still yet to discover the eastern part of Thailand and Trat Province. On this side of the Gulf of Thailand there are a string of tropical islands that are known for snorkelling, diving, jungle hiking and waterfalls. The larger of these islands in the archipelago is known as Koh Chang or Elephant Island (เกาะช้าง).

These islands are also reportedly much quieter and less-touristy than other islands in Thailand – like Phuket or Koh Samui for example – so they sounded exactly like our kind of place. There was only one catch - in July it is rainy season in this part of Thailand.

In the off-season, especially on island resorts in Thailand, you have to be aware that not all hotels or restaurants or shops will be open. Some close up for the whole season but for those that remain open in off-season that also means lower prices for tourists. We managed to bag two whole weeks in a luxury resort on Koh Chang using Booking.com for a fraction of its high season price.

If you are flying into Thailand (with a UK passport - other passports holders may be offered different entry visa options) on arrival you will get a thirty-day entry visa. We intended to stay for the month and then perhaps look for an even cheaper hotel deal for the second half of our stay.

It couldn’t rain there all month, could it?

We flew from Kuala Lumpur to Pattaya in Thailand. Pattaya is a town with a seedy reputation for crime, prostitution, and drugs - so not our kind of place at all - but it was a necessary transiting point for us on our way down the coastline. 

In Pattaya, we booked a room for one night at the Holiday Inn – always our preferred hotel chain - as we benefit hugely from collecting points for stays with their customer reward programme called IHG.

On checking in at the Holiday Inn Pattaya Beach we were given a penthouse suite upgrade with a wraparound balcony and spectacular views of the beach as well as club access at the rooftop bar – meaning complimentary cocktails and canapes. Score!

The next morning, as you might imagine, it was difficult to leave our luxurious surroundings, but after breakfast, we had arranged for a taxi/minibus to take us on the seven-hour road trip down to Koh Chang.

Yes, really, seven hours – including a ferry crossing - and this is the only way we could see how to get there. The Google map shows a five and a half hour journey - but if you are heading to Koh Chang from Pattaya then be prepared for it to take you a little longer.

The journey was a little laborious but we had a very good driver, and on the ferry, we were delighted to meet a Buddhist monk in his orange robes. He was happy to speak with us and to practice his English. One of the things I love most about travelling is the wonderful people you get to meet along the way.

It was overcast and raining as we travelled but still incredibly warm and humid, and as we approached Koh Chang island, it looked beautiful in the mist. But we still had another hour or so to get to our destination – a resort on Klong Prao Beach – and our driver and car were still with us on the ferry.

On arrival, our hotel far exceeded our expectations – we had a lovely room in a palm-thatched deluxe bungalow with a covered private balcony overlooking the gardens and the pool. I decided that even if it did rain the whole time we were here, I really wouldn’t mind.

Of course it didn’t rain the whole time – only about half the time – but then I did have lots of writing to do. Trav didn’t mind the rain either because he planned on going diving and so he knew he would get wet anyway.

Sometimes, though, when we did venture out on showery days – to find a 7/11 shop for essential supplies of snacks and wine and beer - we ended up sheltering in a street side café or bar.

Not such a hardship - and it was hot rain after all!

On the days when the sun shone, it was really beautiful and we made the most of them. We sunbathed and swam in the hotel pool, or we took walks along long empty beaches, that I’m told get incredibly busy in high-season.

We also strolled along jungle tracks looking for elephants. There really are lots of elephants on Koh Chang, so we made sure to always take some apples with us so that we could feed them and stroke them and talk to them. Some are left wander freely in fields or some you meet just strolling along the road and being ridden by their mahout (elephant keeper). They are such lovely animals and this was the first time I’d ever been up close to an elephant.

There are several elephant trekking camps on Koh Chang where tourists can ride on the back of an elephant through the jungle. As I don’t agree with elephants being ridden, I didn’t go near them.

You can learn more about elephant camps on Koh Chang HERE.

One of the most wonderful things we did on a sunny day was a jungle trek by foot to the nearby Klong Plu Waterfalls. It was a testing walk uphill on slippery muddy steep tracks, but it was so worth it, as the waterfalls were magnificent – another bonus in rainy season - and we could swim in the water pools that were full of beautiful fish.

In the evenings, we were entertained with live music at our hotel bar. Sometimes we ate at our hotel and other times we went to other restaurants and bars. We also ate street food – some of the best we’ve ever had. Our favourite bar was called Sabai Bar on White Sand Beach where they had a fire dancer show on most nights (when it wasn’t raining obviously). Many of the nicer restaurants on Koh Chang will pick you up at your hotel for free in an open back truck/taxi and our favourite restaurant who offered this service is called Iyara, which is famous for its yummy seafood and river estuary location.

On one beautiful clear and starry night after having dinner at Iyara, Trav and I took a ride in a small boat along the riverbank to see fireflies. It was a magical moment to sit in the dark and the silence and to see all the trees and bushes on the riverbank twinkling with tiny white firefly lights.

Painting (public domain) Fireflies at Ochanomizu by Kobayashi Kiyochika. 1847-1915

After our two weeks at our beautiful resort, we would have loved to have stayed on but reluctantly we had to find another hotel on the island. The reason for this was an upcoming week-long Thai holiday, that we hadn’t previously known about, which would put our resort’s prices up to high-season levels.

We were lucky and found an inexpensive but very nice hotel further along the beach. This was a newly built resort and although it wasn’t fully open in the off-season as their bar and restaurant were closed, they rented out rooms, which were small modern villas built around a swimming pool that we could use. Hence the lower prices.

We decided this would do us fine. The resort was quiet and I was still working hard on structural edits for my next book. Over our month on Koh Chang, I’d planned to rewrite 30,000 words of the mid-section of the book and add another 20,000 words to the storyline bringing the novel to around 90,000 words. It was a grueling task that meant spending many hours at the laptop but at least I had a swimming pool available to swim away the knots from my shoulder muscles and plenty of Thai massage places to go to if I needed it - which I did on quite a few occasions!

By the end of July, we had had a wonderful time on Koh Chang but Trav was bored with me writing for so much of the day and the weather and rain on Koh Chang was getting steadily more persistent and that was causing bad visibility in the sea and so he wasn’t diving either. I heartily agreed that we both needed a change of scenery, so we decided to move on to somewhere where the weather might be improved, and where we could also have a bit of fun together.

So we headed back the same way we arrived in a taxi/mini-bus but this time we stayed in Pattaya a few nights so that we could make our new travel arrangements. While we were there we explored the town and saw that it was indeed a bit of an eye-opener!

But where to go next? We did our research carefully because while some regions and countries in South East Asia are in the middle of their rainy (monsoon) season in July and August, others were just finishing theirs and others were just coming into it. Spotting a bargain flight, we decided to head over to Singapore for a few days and then take a ferry boat over to Batam Island - which is part of Indonesia and stay at their Holiday Inn Resort - which we paid for entirely with our IHG loyalty points.

So in my next post, I'll be blogging about our amazing time in Singapore where we went to Universal Studios for a day and had a lot of fun - and also our lovely week spent at the Holiday Inn on Batam Island in Indonesia - before we headed back to our south-east Asian home hub of Kuala Lumpur to make the decision on where in the world we would travel to next!

Do pop back soon – and please consider signing up to my mailing list on the top right of this page. I only send out newsletters when I have news or offers or something exciting like a new book release to share with you and you will get a free download of my bestselling book ‘How To Party Online’. Thanks!

Love, Janice xx