I don’t even really know where to begin. But what the fuck is even happening?! The world as we know it is crumbling under our feet and I am half way across the world, pretty much the furthest I could be, from my home. My sanctuary. My safe place.

After thinking we could ride out this storm and go and ‘self isolate’ in the car in the epic road trip we had planned for our last few months of the tour, our dreams were brutally dashed as inter state travel bans and a crack down on non-essential travel were implemented by the Australian government. We didn’t want it to end here but, after a lot of heartache and discussion, we decided to book a flight home. Our trip of a lifetime was ending.

If only it was that simple. As time went, and goes on countries tighten the restrictions on public movement and governments shut down borders and refuse flights entry. Our flight was cancelled. No surprise really. Then, and only then, does the Foreign Office decide to issue the advice of ‘come home now if you can get the flights’. Now. If. And if we can’t? Well it so happens that if we can’t, I bet you can guess how many fucks they give. A big fat zero. Calls to the insurance, calls to the British Consulate, calls to the travel agent. Setting up Twitter accounts, joining Facebook groups and topping up the data on my SIM card to keep on top of the rapid changes in news. Watching the local news, checking our apps for the latest at home and keeping family and friends up to date. I’m done. And so bloody bored of having my phone in my hand! It’s a constant barrage of information and messages.

Apparently the Foreign Office is working on it, and I’m sure they are, I’m just very disappointed in them. Me and the thousands of other people stranded around the world, with no information, as they only decide to tell us to come home after the world closes its borders. I’m very much aware we are in an extremely fortunate situation and we have some lovely friends to stay with, we have access to supermarkets (albeit with limited stock) and are healthy. We are staying on a farm so lots of space to explore with fresh air, and not many people around. But so many others are by themselves, nowhere to go, nobody to rely on, travelling with children, medications running low. And funnily enough not many of us can afford the £20,000 flights home which were being advertised by one airline! It makes the £1200 ones that are available now seem cheap, but considering our initial flights cost about £350 I feel like the airlines are turning you around, pulling your pants down and rubbing their greedy little hands together.

And I say ‘available now’ but actually, even though they’re online to book, the conflicting information about where you can transit through, reports of overbooking and cancelling left, right and centre does not encourage me to book.

Bojo has finally taken notice, and hopefully soon they will realise that regular travellers, like us and many others, simply cannot afford to pay over a grand for a flight especially when our money has already been spent on flights that have been cancelled and the airline refuses a refund. ‘Credit vouchers’ my arse. I’ve called the credit card company to cut them off at the source. Greedy wankers.

Can you tell I’m a bit pissed off? I’m so up and down with it to be honest. We keep getting the comments ‘why don’t you just stay there?’. It’s not that simple. We have no income. We have one backpack of belongings each. Australia is going to be on lockdown soon, I can feel it; every day new restrictions. It’s easy to say this when you’re in the comfort of your own home, in the same country as your friends and family. Don’t get me wrong there is nothing I would rather do less than sit on a plane full of people for 24 hours, possibly not being able to get off, but if we can get home we can get jobs and we can get on with our lives. Even if it is in quarantine for a bit, we can start to work toward the future and even help others out. At times I feel utterly useless here.

That said, I’m fine really. Just having an ‘arrggghh’ moment, and I clearly needed to get that off my chest.

Oh yeah, warning: this article may contain strong language. Maybe I should have put that at the start…? Ah well, fuck it. Here’s some photos.

Aye-corona! What the fudge is going on in the world?! I’m swinging quite rapidly back and forth between ‘this is the end of the world as we know it’ to ‘nah, we gonna be fine!’.

Being in rural New South Wales we feel relatively far removed from the dreaded virus, but of course we are glued to our phones for updates. Yes, it’s pretty bloody depressing to know the infection rates and death tolls but also super interesting to follow the updates of this unprecedented, unknown situation. We are worried about friends and family back home, and those we know around the world so it’s become an addiction to finding out what’s happening.

I’m glad we made it to Australia when we did – seemed to have timed our visit perfectly between the end of the major wildfires and the start of the pandemic. A few weeks apple picking and a few weeks chilling with home comforts whilst we got the car ready for our road trip have been great.

We were supposed to already be on the road, being good citizens and practising our ‘self isolating’ – basically just the two of us in the car running away to the mountains and the outback! What better place to see through the apocalypse, right? Alas, it was not meant to be as the ladder on the roof tent went and bladdy broke didn’t it, so we have had to order a replacement (as none in stock nearby) and wait for it to be delivered.

So, we have been making the most of our extra days and today we took a road trip to the nearby Blue Mountains National Park. What a beauty. We went to a couple of view points and did a short walk down into the canyon where we walked through waterfalls and passed bubbling creeks. With bright green ferns all around us I reckon we stumbled across the set of Fern Gully!

Feast your eyes on these…

We are in the land of big sky. And it’s awesome.

Before going on this trip I wanted to see big skies. No buildings in the way, just big beautiful openness. Freedom to see the weather coming and going and to see the moon and sun doing their thing, uninterrupted. Our current destination has certainly provided!

The area we are in is relatively flat so just a few small green hills and paddocks so you can see really far. Working on our current orchard gives us an amazing view over the valley under Mount Canobolas and the track behind the house has the best sunsets. We’re even lucky enough to see the milky way each morning when we leave for work (thanks to getting up at silly o clock each day!).

Feeling lucky.

There is so much I could write about my time in India. As expected it provided some ups and downs, and round and rounds and I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Well, maybe a little, but we had an amazing three months there and have so many stories to tell.

There were some things that went wrong and not as expected, which led us to change our plans entirely (several times!) but then there were some times we were in the right place at the right time. To summarise my time in this crazy country extremely briefly:

• I was stung by a swarm of bees
• I was bitten by a dog
• I shit my soul out
• I puked my guts up (twice!)
• Took terrifying tuk-tuk rides where I genuinely feared for my life at times
• I got harrassed (a lot!!)

• I watched the sunset into the Arabian sea more times than I can rememeber
• I tattooed myself
• I made a painting for the first time since a child
• I learnt how to macrame
• Worked at a reggae festival and met some brilliant musicians
• I cycled around some ancient monuments
• I met so many wonderful, kind and funny people (you know who you all are!)
• I reignited my love of yoga
• I ate so much delicious food, and discovered the most incredible curries!

One of our change of plans ended in us booking flights to somewhere completely off piste and not at all in our original plans but here we are, in STRAYYYYA!! And my goodness how different it is.

With a brief weekend stop off in Kuala Lumpur, we landed in Sydney, bought a car and made our way west through the burnt out forests of New South Wales to stay with an old friend near to the town of Orange. We’re currently enjoying being in farm country and seeing all the green hills. Everyone is so bloody friendly and everywhere is so freaking clean! The local village is a throwback to the late 1800’s when it was built and has lots of pretty verandas and cute shops and cafes. We have a resident dog called Pickle and cat called Eric who are both awesome and love a snuggle. Our plan is to be here for a little while and then hopefully explore the country a bit more – we have some friends we want to see on the east coast, and the west coast!

For now, I think I might go back out onto the porch and read my book.

Sometimes it’s a game of endurance. Enduring the long, less than comfortable travel. Enduring trying to find somewhere to eat for every meal (and often it turning out to be shite). Enduring other people snoring in dorms and bathrooms that you’d rather not have to visit. Enduring the feelings you get from seeing such abject poverty. It’s a game of never having enough ‘me time’. A game of ‘where next, what shall we do?’.

But also, sometimes it is being a few minutes walk from the beach. It’s having a private room with breakfast included. It’s seeing old friends and knowing the community around you. It’s going on adventures to local beaches and getting the van stuck in the sand (and out again!). It’s watching the sunset from the rocks and listening to local musicians and watching local dancers. It’s reading your book for hours on end.

Sometimes…it’s magic.

Problem is, when you love books is that you can’t seem to put them down, or stop picking them up. Even when you do live out of a rucksack!

One of the joys of travelling is having time on our hands to read a lot of books, and one of the bonuses of staying in hostels is that they almost always have a book shelf to swap your old reads with new ones.

Not ones to pass up an opportunity of a good read, we often find we pick up a book to read for after the one we are currently reading, and we often want to read what each other is reading so we hold onto those ones, then there are the travel guides too – they’re usually pretty beastly! So, as you can see from the photo, we usually end up with a bit of a travelling library.

I’m not complaining. Far from it. A few years ago I discovered the joy of reading several books at once – I always used to think you read one after the other, but by dipping into books simultaneously I’ve found you can take in a lot more. For example Scott’s The Last Expedition is pretty hard reading as it’s just his journal entries but they are so interesting and whilst I can’t wait to read them all, it’s nice to break it up with a novel here and there.

Being surrounded by books is also a little bit of home comfort that’s nice to have on the road – that’s the reason why we built a bookshelf in the van!

Escapism, stories of the unknown, real life, real places and learning things you never knew before…I’ve already read one book this year. Here’s to the next ones!

And if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some reading to do…

I do believe something very magical can happen when you read a good book

J. K. Rowling

We needed a change. After the shambles of nothing really working out for us in north Goa we considered our options.

Fly east? Fly north? Go to Nepal? All a bit expensive and we wanted to limit plane travel so we decided the next best thing, without heading back to the beautiful south Goa beaches straight away, was to get a 10 hour train to Mumbai.

We had a great time at the reggae festival – Ike was artist liaison (meet and greet at the front gate) and I was on the artist bar so we got to meet all of the people and got free snacks in the artist lounge! We met some great people and saw some great music. Unfortunately I picked up a sickness bug on the last day so spent the day in bed feeling sorry for myself.

After a few days we were on the move, and after a long day on the train we arrived into the big city.

Seeing the Taj hotel after watching Hotel Mumbai about the terror attacks certainly brought it home. Since my last visit 10 years ago, and since the attacks, security had definitely stepped up a notch; there was a security guy with a huge gun, and to get into the Gateway to India you have to go through barriers and bag scanners. Not how I remember it.

We spent the days wandering and chilling and eating in places recommended to us by friends and fellow travellers. We moved hostels to another part of town and realised we were actually near to the marathon route – biggest event like this in Asia, so we thought we would get up early this morning, go for a wander and see some runners.

What actually happened was Google took us through the shittest part of a city we have ever been through; proper local markets, chickens shoved in trucks, chai stalls, people sleeping on the side of the road, trash everywhere, fruit and veg stalls, small goats with t-shirts on, big goats with balls down to their knees, toddlers sitting in the roads, and a very, uh, fragrant air about the place. The last part definitely took us past some slums and through a questionable underpass to the water where the city stretched out in front of us into the gloom. Visibility was shocking. Sorry lungs.

We made a hasty retreat, a different way I hasten to add, but definitely found ourselves in an interesting part of town. Again, chickens, goats, beds and sofas on the side of the road which appeared to be where people live, tuk tuks, street dogs, and crows. So many crows.

We quickened the pace and finally arrived at a part of town with pavements again and have come for a coffee. It’s odd, we feel strange about what we have seen this morning. Such acute poverty and poor standards of living. Makes us not want to do the slum tours that all the hostels offer. All this in a city which is the home of Bollywood and a lot of wealth, judging by some of the designer shops we walked past this morning and the fact that the world’s most expensive house is here. And yesterday we walked past a chai wallah who’s chai pot was leaning like the tower of Pisa and a man getting a shave on the street corner. Such a mix. But then I guess all cities are. You get the good bits and the bad bits. Just seems that here, the bad bits are amplified.

I’m not much of a city girl anyway, far too many people 🙂 but it’s been an experience. Not one I’m sure we’ll be in a rush to do again.

After spending a few weeks in the super chilled hostel in Palolem we moved north to another hostel that we had committed to volunteer at for about four weeks.

We knew the beaches in north Goa were a bit more ‘party party’ than its chilled cousins in the south but I don’t think we were quite prepared for how shit it was going to be!

For a start the hostel was really disorganised and we didn’t really know anything for the first two days as the hostel manager was rather elusive; we didn’t chase it as we were still getting a free room and breakfast. The room was actually passable, a seven bed dorm, and was cleaned every day. Our room mates didn’t appear to like sleeping during the night time hours and regularly came in in the wee hours, if at all. Nice bunch though.

The area we stayed was just a bit crap. For us there were not many nice places to eat, the beach was shocking (pumping psy trance allll day), and there seemed to be no central hub of the place. To say it wasn’t our scene was an understatement and I definitely missed the chilled vibes of the south and being able to walk around barefoot; on the beaches here I saw so much broken glass I was even wary in flip flops.

So, there was limit to my apathy and we decided we couldn’t hang around. The work was easy, showing people to their rooms, but super boring. And considering we weren’t going out every night we didn’t need the time for our hangovers to wear off and subsequently were bored out of our brains.

Luckily, fate intervened and we have somehow managed to get a volunteering gig at Goa Sunsplash – ‘India’s biggest reggae festival’! Up the coast we went and booked ourselves into a relatively new hostel, a private room no less after weeks in shared dorms.

Our excitement was short lived.

After a less than successful evening where we saw a puppy run over and had a bit of prawn on our veg momos that we had waited an hour for, we retired to our room defeated and somewhat heartbroken. Clearly more so over the poor pups than the food; seeing the sad Mumma dog howling just broke my heart and made me cry at the dinner table. The girl on the scooter who hit the puppy was equally as distraught and the restaurant assisted by burying the pups close by. An awful thing to witness.

After going to bed we were soon woken up by the shouts of drunken Russians and duf, duf, duf of their shitty trance music in the common area just outside our room. I eventually called the manager who asked them to turn it down, then we asked them to turn it down, then they finally either went out or went to bed about 3am. The relief was short lived and at 6am people arrived back from their nights out and played their music and were talking loudly about how they were a ‘hot blooded Russian’. They went to bed but then another person was there at 0730 watching something on their phone really loudly (I swear people here have never heard of earphones!). All of this was coupled with wafer thin walls and stinky drains.

Needless to say we cancelled the rest of our booking here and instead of a relaxing day today we are tired and moving on again to another room. Another day another accomodation roulette. What will happen?

Wish us luck!

This isn’t exactly award winning writing. I have no amazing sponsorship deals from my travel updates, and I certainly don’t have many followers. However, it hasn’t stopped me getting a bit of writer’s block!

I can’t even blame being busy as I am fully embracing beach life right now (think slow, hot days where not a great deal happens) but I haven’t written in a while as I didn’t quite know what to write. But, today’s apparently the day where you all get an update!

Since my last post we have turned the travel speed right down and have essentially been in the same place for a few weeks now. The place I am currently calling home is Goa. On India’s west coast the small state is known for its beaches and Portuguese heritage. From sleepy fishing villages to full on trance raves, Goa has it all.

We’re based in a little place called Palolem in the south and, through a last minute change of plans, have actually been here a few weeks volunteering at a hostel (long story short we got let down by another guy but the guys here did us a massive favour by taking us on for a short while). Ike mans the front desk on the manager’s break and I am working with the social media (I’m an influencer now dahhhling) – and in return we get a bed and breakfast. Nice work if you can get it.

The first week we were here was brilliant – first as guests and then volunteers we met so many people, and actually the first bunch of British people that we had met our whole trip! The squad was a good one – people from many different backgrounds, spanning a wide age range we all got along really well. There were even a few Aussies thrown in the mix. It was nice to have a little community around, always bumping into each other at the beach or at our favourite cafes. Since everyone departed we have met loads of new people – every day new faces, every day new names to learn and every day new smiles to return.

Time off has mainly been spent on the beach and eating food – what more could we want! After spending a long (long!) time moving on every few days its been great to have a base and not have to think about travel plans or where we will stay the next night, or the next. Palolem beach is a few minutes walk away so we often go for a swim in the mornings. Swim / float about…same same. We’ve been doing some yoga, eating amazing local and western vegan foods and learning new frisbee tricks. Often hiding from the heat of the day, many hours can be whiled away nursing a smoothie or a bowl of hummus (although, who am I kidding, the bowl of hummus is gone very quickly!). There is a gorgeous sunset most evenings, cows on the beach and the roads (everywhere!), and pigs roaming the fields and snuffling the bushes behind the hostel.

I think soon we will be ready to move on, but for now, being a beach bum is good.

As I’ve said before, it’s not all sunshine and lollipops. Sometimes it’s waiting at the station for your train which turns up two hours late, after a shit night’s sleep as there was a snoring walrus in the room and missing breakfast as the cafe at the hostel wasn’t open early enough and you wanted to get to the station on time and then surviving on station snacks of crisps and sprite and tea and crying at local street dogs because they’re so teeny and helpless and all you can do is feed them a few crisps.

So, yeah. If it’s easy, it’s a holiday. If it’s hard, it’s an adventure.