We are J (Dad), R (Mum), E (the eldest) and e (yes, two e's — and "ee's" the boss!). A well-travelled family from the UK who recognised the limits that mainstream education has for our two boys, sold most of what we owned, strapped on four backpacks and booked one-way tickets from Heathrow to Bangkok.
We have backpacked around India, Nepal, Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam. The West's promise — work until you retire, then live the life you want — assumes a perfect health and a surviving pension we are not prepared to bet our family on. So we are showing the boys, rather than telling them, that there is more than one way to live.
A deep breath before plunging into a new year — kumquats, red envelopes and bunting between the flag and the hammer-and-sickle.
read on →
"Yeah… I mean, they don't bother me…" — the eldest, on fireworks and a city he is beginning to call his.
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Water buffalo in shallow paddy water, dousing themselves with their tails. Content and untroubled.
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Tourism, Western influx, and what happens when the things that make a place itself are diluted by their own success.
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Hội An local life, seen through the steady rhythms of a man who knows every street by its produce.
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Google Translate as accidental poet — and the strange beauty of weddings, mistranslations and good fortune.
read on →A few of the threads that keep coming up in the writing.
There is more than one way to live, and more than one way to thrive.— from the about page
A short letter every other Saturday — one dispatch, one photograph, and one daft thing the boys said this week.