Sunflower Journey was inspired by a need to reassess our lives. Increasingly demanding corporate jobs left us with little work/life balance and a lack of appreciation for each other, friends, family, and for the real value of money.
It was time to get back to basics and simplify our lives away from the corporate world. By ridding ourselves of life’s luxuries, we learnt to appreciate the basics and be richer in ourselves as a result.
Our physical journey was a soul journey for ourselves, to take time to teach each other to learn from, and respect the world around us. To see, hear and taste a world different to the one we had known.
We spent several months road-schooling 2 young boys, teaching them in our own way, as best we could in Cambodia, and travelling across the country and to Laos and Vietnam. We subsequently moved to Malaysia, and continued to explore the countries near and around us.
We returned to the UK in 2015, and have since had moments of trying to capture the essence of Sunflower Journey through UK and European adventures.
In April 2020, we find ourselves in a new form of Sunflower Journey, one marked by the loss of someone we were so passionate about, and coinciding with Covid-19 lockdown.
This is our journey.
OUR TRAVELS
We had been living as a family in New Zealand for 4 years but always knew it would be for a finite period of time. We were keen to return to the UK, but still harboured a deep desire to first discover a little of the world between.
We arrived back in the UK for a month before heading to Battambang, Cambodia on a 2-month volunteer project with Inspire Volunteering in May 2014. We had a plan to be living in Penang, Malaysia by the end of 2104, but nothing in-between.
For the first time in our lives we had wanted the opportunity to take it as it comes, to follow an unfolding itinerary as we learn about places, about ourselves, opportunities and about our children.
Where are we now?
At the end of our volunteer project in 2014 we headed north for travel through Laos before returning to Battambang to continue work as volunteers, this time for the NGO, See Beyond Borders. Later in 2014 we moved to Penang Malaysia and finally back to the UK later in 2015.
Here we are building a life, a home and community back in Bath, UK. Our essence of Sunflower Journey continues, but in a new form where routines of life and work are occasionally interrupted by fun and craziness.
