Happy 4th Birthday Grantourismo! Here’s What’s Coming Next…

Happy 4th birthday Grantourismo! It’s hard to believe it was way back on New Years Eve in 2009 that we uploaded our first post on Grantourismo. That post was to announce the 12-month grand tour we were about to embark upon, aimed at inspiring you to travel more slowly and sustainably, more hands-on and experientially, and to settle into places to live like locals when you travel.

We’d been dreaming of doing that one-year project for a very long time, a project that would allow us to stay in each place for a month and immerse ourselves in its culture and everyday life.

Our plan was to meet locals in each place, learn to cook the food, learn a few skills, and learn a little of the language. We just didn’t know how to fund the thing.

HomeAwayUK came to the rescue when they approached us and invited us to do a slightly different round-the-world project. We compromised and thanks to that one-year trip Grantourismo was born.

We were spending Christmas with our family in Australia, staying with my uncle and aunt, when we launched the site on New Year’s Eve in 2019 and wrote that first post.

The cats and dogs, the freshly cut flowers from the garden, and the fragrant smells that emanated from the kitchen each day — mouthwatering aromas that Terence was responsible for — made us miss having a home.

When we wrote that post it had been four years since we packed up the apartment in Dubai and put our stuff in storage. Four years that we’d been living out of our suitcases and travelling the world, bouncing all over the Middle East, Europe, North Africa, and Latin America, and driving half way around Australia, on guidebook and magazine assignments.

We spent most of those four years checking in and out of hotels, but whenever we could we rented apartments: a month in Brussels, a couple of months in Amsterdam, two months in Buenos Aires, a few weeks in Krakow, three months on the Mediterranean in Turkey, split between an Ottoman house in the old town of Antalya and our friend’s holiday house in Kas. That was bliss.

It was during those stays in apartments and houses that we conceived the idea for Grantourismo and we began to discuss how we really wanted to travel and what we wanted to focus on as writers and for Terence as a photographer.

We wanted to travel slowly, locally and experientially, essentially more responsibly and sustainably, and we did it, with HomeAway’s help: we launched the site and spent a year on our global grand tour, trying to inspire you to do the same.

Yet after Grantourismo ended in January 2011, it would be another few years of living out of our suitcases before we decided enough’s enough for a while. In the beginning of December we took out a lease on an apartment in Siem Reap, Cambodia, and finally unpacked our bags. We have one-year visas, local phone numbers, and we’re opening bank accounts.

Strangely enough, in December eight years ago we were beginning to pack up our apartment in Dubai. By the end of January we had put almost eight years of possessions collected during our time living in the UAE and on our many travels in storage in Dubai. And now we are becoming expats again. Our most recent post by Terence is about what it means to have a home again.

What does that mean for Grantourismo? We’ll still be travelling, but we’ll concentrate largely on Asia and Australia, and we’ll continue travelling the way we like to travel that we write about here. We’re still full time professional travel and food writers and Terence a photographer so that’s what we do.

We’re busier than we’ve ever been, writing regularly for newspapers and magazines we love, for everything from The Guardian and Feast to Gourmet Traveller and Travel+Leisure Southeast Asia. We’re also doing the bits and pieces we’ve always done for the web. We’ll just be travelling a heck of a lot lighter and focusing our travels on our backyard as much as possible.

Terence has been working behind the scenes on a long overdue re-design of Grantourismo and we’ll be launching that soon. We’ll continue with a lot of our regular series on Grantourismo, but we’re going to ramp up a couple of our series, and introduce some new ones. I

f there’s anything you’d like to see here, please do let us know. A lot of readers contact us via email and Twitter for travel advice, and we email responses, so we’re thinking about how we can better address that need.

Terence has also been developing some Grantourismo products that we are very excited about, and we have a couple of other projects in the pipeline.

So thank you for sticking around and reading us for the last four years. We hope you’ll be with us for the next four.

Happy New Year! We wish you all lots of wonderful travel in 2014! 

Lara and Terence xx

Pictured: a toast during a fun bia hoi tour we did in Hanoi that we wrote about for some magazines. We’ll post about it here soon.