Month: December 2019

After more than 2 months we will say good-bye to Guadeloupe tomorrow evening and celebrate the New Year in Barbados.

We are curious to see another quite different Caribbean Island with monkeys on it (really missed those cute fellows!), but also some sort of snakes on it (didn’t miss those at all! But luckily only non poisenous ones).

We are also so much looking forward to speak English again, our French knowledge and also Google translator is just a mess. It surely will be much easier for us to get in contact with the locals on an English speaking island. At the beginning we imagined to somehow get along here with our freaky and weird kind of English/French mix and some funny gestures and a lot of nice smiles, but unfortunately we had to accept that it’s not always that easy. I also would not recommend Guadeloupe for single female travellers as some guys here can be quite annoying 😉

Due to the language problems and as the locals enjoy being on their own here, we stayed the last two months quite on our own in our airbnb house. Good for us that we love being with and talking to each other 😛

And hopefully (especially for Andy) we get some tasty and affordable draught beer on Barbados!!!

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But we definitely enjoyed Guadeloupe’s many amazing beaches! Even though I got kind of sea sick quite often while trying to swim in the huge and very chaotic waves. We have also never seen an island where there are so many different colours of sandy beaches (nearly like the pic below).

And for sure our best swim was the one with a great rain shower out of nowhere. The sky turned suddenly black and all the people left the beach, running in panic to their cars. We had the whole lagoon on our own with enormous and heavy cold rain drops from above and great warm waves below. What an unforgetable experience and what a fun 🙂

Finally there are also some very sad news about Guadeloupe, too: It was really quite shocking for us to read a local news blog by chance- after staying here already for some weeks – about the up to date contamination of the French West Indies with chlordecone and the problems especially the locals – but also the tourists – have to face. So Guadeloupe and also Martinique are not really the idylic paradise islands one may think at the beginning … 🙁

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https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50144261

…if you watch another couple making “the” perfect photo at the beach for hours?

Yeahh, you get mad

The Zoo de Guadeloupe is beautifully nestled in the rain forest, so you have always a little bit of shade while walking under the huge trees and it also offers a great 20 min walk over suspension bridges in the treeroofs. What a thrill! Don’t ask me how dizzy I felt afterwards …

But for sure best of all: watching the fluffy little racoons 😀

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As long as we have been in the Caribbean we never had any issues with insects (beside the fact that mosquitos are very annoying).

But yesterday a very large spider visited us.

As we didn’t like it in our bed we catched it and guided it out of the house.

Sleep well and sweat dreams

… for everybody, who’s missing them <3

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… at La Perle Beach in Guadeloupe. After a nice beach walk and some great TIGGER bounces in the surf of the sea we enjoy what we can do best: letting go and drift with the waves of life. Just love it 🙂

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We met so many animals during our World Drifting I thought it’s time to give them a post.

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…we started our World Drifter life. Unbelievable that one year is over. We explored so much, visited so many countries, met so many people and animals, got new ideas we never thought about before. One year afterwards we can still say: We regret nothing. It is, without any exceptions, exactly the life we wanted to live. And currently we have no plans to finish this way of living.

Let’s do some recap and summarizing:

We started our journey in southwest Asia:

While we were in this part of the world Thailand was our “home base”. So every time we went to another country we came back to Thailand and stayed a while there. Therefore most spots are in Thailand:

And one of the things we really miss from Thailand is:

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After Asia, we went back to Europe. Two new experiences here:

Our new vehicle DUMBLEBEE

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And being a house and pet sitter in the UK. A huge THANKS to the hosts for their trust and for giving us the opportunity to live part time in the UK.

With Dumblebee we visited a lot of places around UK, mostly stayed overnight in very beautiful places. We will never forget the first night in Belgium (so excited) , the morning waking up at Stonehenge (so magic) and the night with 1 million Midges near Ullapool (so horrible).

Some impressions where we staid with Dumblebee:

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After spending some time with our family and friends in Germany at the beginning of autumn we went into another new adventure, the Caribbean area. Currently we are in Guadeloupe and enjoy not being exposed to European winter temperatures.

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What’s coming next? We have no idea. But we are still excited what life will be presenting us.

Stay curious, we will!

After one year of drifting that’s like the essence for me: every country has its’ pros and cons as well as every kind of living.

There is no real better or even a ‘perfect’ country, it just depends on what’s more important for you. If you prefer a green country, you have to cope with rain, if you want it hot, you will have some insects biting you at night (hopefully nothing worse ^^), if you want to have it cheap, you will have to face lower standards and often some dirt around you. Just to name a few issues.

It’s like with Scotland (one of our favorite countries): so wonderful, when the sun is shining and the heather is blooming in the Highlands, but you have to cope with the midges, some rain and in winter it’s not that funny …. same with Thailand, where you have nice beaches and good food for little money, but you have to cope with the plastic rubbish and dirt and not so funny in the really hot season 😉

When we decided to sell everything and drift through life, we also knew that we quit having an own home, having our family around us and also left the high standards of German living (safety, cleanliness a.s.o.).

This is the price for our freedom, for our different kind of living, for enjoying sunshine and beaches when otherwise we would have cold winter temperatures and cement buildings around.

That also means missing our family until we come back again (we decided to stay max 6 months abroad and even that feels like a really long time sometimes) and this means coping with the standards of the countries we are staying in.

In Guadeloupe this means lovely beaches, a lot of green, but double prices for food and drinks than in Germany. And for me right now, it also means copying with the dentist standards here, as I got a severe infection under one tooth and it has to be extracted next week … in a French speaking country, which means: no real understanding possible for me with my little French knowledge (google translater is of some help). Everything quite different from how I used to know it and I found myself longing for a dentist and nurses I could understand and a more tidy and neat practice surrounding.

But “It is as it is” (one of our favorite quotes … yes, we are getting old now ^^). Everything has its’ pros and cons and you can’t keep the penny and have that piece of cake 😉

Which doesn’t stop me from being so grateful that there are dentists here and that I am fortunate enough to get some antibiotics at the moment and also can afford a professional dentist treatment (how many people worldwide are not that lucky after all!)

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After having had too much Pastis one evening and feeling not really good the other day I decided to quit alcohol for some time and give my liver a regenerating time out. Luckily Andy joined me, even if it wasn’t that easy as Ti Punch is his favorite cocktail on Guadeloupe (green citron, cane sugar and rhum) and a Ti Punch costs as much as a coke or glas of water in a snack bar, about 3 €.

But we did it anyway and managed to stay away from any punches or other alcohol for 2 weeks now. Just drinking water and juices. Quite an interesting experience. But honestly: no dramatic changes … our bodies don’t feel any different now or much healthier (just the sleep had been better: deeper with less waking ups in the night).

Maybe the most important thing has been a more mental one: to know that we can do it, if we want to (not that difficult after all) and to drink a little bit less and more conscious now again.

When you always feel like being on holidays in the Caribbean (and why shouldn’t we feel like this?), you quite easily spend your afternoons or evenings with a nice cocktail in your hand.

So we can really understand now how alcohol problems arise for the people here with everything being quite expensive, but one liter of white Guadeloupe Rhum costing only about 6€. Comparing it with a small bottle of local (not tasty at all) beer that costs about 2€.

I think it’s like with anything else in life: all about a healthy measure – finding the golden middle way that works best for you 😉