A Little Bit About Us - And Pepper, The Cat

Like most writers and photographers specialising in travel and food, my husband Terence and I lost all our work, clients, projects, and income in March 2020 when the world shut down. We'd been based in Cambodia, using it as a launching pad for travel in Southeast Asia, the focus of our writing for a decade. We wrote for some of the world's best food and travel magazines, newspapers and websites (from The Guardian and CNN to Delicious and Gourmet Traveller) and our own decade-old travel site Grantourismo. We also did some consulting, occasionally hosted culinary tours and writing and photography retreats, and I crafted bespoke travel itineraries. When the pandemic hit, that income stopped. The restaurants we consulted to closed. Nobody was going anywhere, so there were no tours to host or itineraries to create. Publishers cut freelance budgets. Travel magazines and travel sections in newspapers were in trouble as nobody could travel. The income from Grantourismo, which came from commissions from tour and hotel bookings, and projects with tourism boards, dried up. Travel and food writers and photographers do not make much money. We do it for the love of it, so we didn't have savings to get us through hard times. We stayed in Cambodia when most expats went home, not only to complete the Cambodia culinary history and cookbook we'd been working on since 2013, but also because it was impossible to pack up a 23-year-life abroad in a few days, including arranging to get our 8-year-old cat Pepper home, and we weren't leaving without her, not to mention the fact that we simply didn't have the money to leave. We moved to a cheaper apartment, hunkered down, and began to cook. A page on another fundraising site to support our book provided our only regular income. We have relied on that to survive and to continue to work on the book and Grantourismo, which have kept us focused and sane through the darkest times. Not everyone can afford to or wants to become a regular supporter... some people just want to buy us a coffee. Or buy Pepper a tin of cat food. It's for those people that I've started this page. Hopefully, when the pandemic is over and we're back on our feet, we can buy you a coffee.