The wheels were fully in motion and our mindset was right, but the burning question that was undecided was  where the hell were we going to go first? When the trip was first discussed, the idea was to start in Columbia in South America.  Everyone thinks of the series ‘Narcos’ and Señor Escobar when Columbia is mentioned, but nowadays it is a very popular destination for families. There was also a very good chance for me to get some football coaching work there with an NPO. My Spanish is passable on a ‘getting around, ordering food’ tourist level, and I was quite prepared to immerse myself in a Spanish course before going; but having to converse on behalf of  all of us wasn’t going to work. Becky and I decided that starting off in Latin America would probably be a baptism of fire.

We needed a more gentle landing, especially for the kids. Bali as a first stop was mooted, but Becky wanted to go somewhere that was new to both of us, and I had travelled quite extensively in Indonesia back in 1997 after graduation from University. During those travels I had worked as a volunteer at an orang utan rehabilitation centre in the Gunug Leuser national park in Sumatra. Rico and Tiana had always loved my stories of my time there; scary encounters with semi wild orang-utans, helping orangs  that were kept as pets to regain their primate instincts and integrate into the jungle again; there were lots of stories. I’d always promised them that one day we would take them to see orang utans in their natural habitat. That being the case, there was only one other place in the world where we could see them and neither of us had been there before: Borneo.

It seemed like the perfect place. Nature at it’s rawest. Rainforest, national parks, primates, unspoilt beaches, marine life.  It actually felt like a huge relief that we had finally decided our first destination and now there was a tingling of excitement underlying the trepidation.