Born and raised in Durban, South African Verne is a writer, editor, and blogger on travel and health. She and Roy met in Durban in 1992, got married four years later, and moved briefly to London in 2000 and then to Singapore a year later. After their 15 or 16 years on that amazing island, Roy retired in May 2016 from a long career in shipping.

For the past 20 years, we’ve had the good fortune to do a fair amount of travelling. Roy’s career has taken him to all five continents, and Verne has taken the opportunity to tag along whenever possible. Likewise, her 12-year career as Executive Editor with Singapore’s gorgeous Expat Living magazine (see www.expatliving.sg for its great website) has taken her as a travel journalist to dozens of enviable destinations, from Mozambique to the Maldives, from Kerala to Kyoto and from New York to New Zealand.

So, instead of settling down and waiting to get old in just one place, they devised a plan that included exploring the waterways of France on their replica Dutch barge, Karanja. And as Verne doesn’t gladly do winter, the idea was to spend the rest of the time between Singapore, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand – and whatever other interesting places beckoned.

When the world went mad in early 2020, we found ourselves locked down in Western Australia… and here we remain, living and travelling happily ever after.