Expatorama

Are you a badass expat? Take this quick quiz to find out.

July 3, 2017Expatorama3 Comments

Do you think you’re a hardcore badass full-fat expat? Let’s find out.

A few days ago I shared a link to a recent Business Insider article entitled ‘The 19 countries with the worst quality of life in the world for expats.’ I soon had friends and readers telling me how many years they’d spent in which country and realised we could turn these rankings into a quick and easy way to work out your ‘Badass Expat’ score.

I’ve allocated points to each location, the tougher the location the more points you get. You then multiply the points for each location by the number of years you lived there, tally them up and bingo, you have your Badass Expat score.

My current score is 111.

What’s yours?

Worst Country for Expats as ranked by Business Insider	Ranking	Points Earned Per Assignment Year	Number of Years in Country	Totals
China	19	1
Philipines	18	2
Uganda	17	3
South Africa	16	4	4	16
Ukraine	15	5
Ireland	14	6
Qatar	13	7
Peru	12	8
Kazakhstan	11	9
Indonesia	10	10
Kenya	9	11
India	8	12
Tanzania	7	13
Brazil	6	14
Saudi Arabia	5	15
Egypt	4	16
Kuwait	3	17
Mozambique	2	18
Nigeria	1	19	5	95
Badass Expat Score				111

What’s the most challenging thing you had to do to earn your badass expat stripes? Did you deal with constant power and water cuts? Police check points? Wildlife? Weather? Culture? Language? Traffic? Lacklustre supermarket offerings? Crime?

Do you think any of the countries on this list shouldn’t be on it? Which country is NOT on this list, but should be?

The One in a Million Expat Partner

June 4, 2017ExpatoramaLeave a comment

It takes a one in a million kind of spouse to follow their partner here.

It takes a special person to follow their partner to the armpit, ars*ehole or ends of the earth. A very special person indeed. One in a million in fact.

One of my favourite expat quotes EVER was coined when a British couple moved to the small island of Okinawa, Japan. At the time (aside from a formidable US presence on military airbases, which was a self contained community with their own on-base shops and cinemas and social life), the sum total of the expat population was around 10 people and most of them had Japanese spouses and were there on a fairly permanent basis.

It’s almost certain that the British couple were the only non-military expat couple on the island. Okinawa’s population at the time was around the 1 million mark and thus quipped the wife to the husband whose job had taken them to this tiny isolated dot in the Pacific Ocean:

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Expat Life Through Rose Tinted Glasses

April 23, 2017ExpatoramaLeave a comment

rose tinted wine glasses

Rose tinted glasses soften and morph reality. When it comes to expat life, from the outside our life may look perfect, but expectation and reality rarely tally.

I didn’t have actual rose tinted glass or lenses to use in my photographs, so in true expat style improvised with rosé filled ones.

Yes, a certain amount of rosé was consumed during the staging of the photos for this post.

Yes, it might have been even more fun to use actual human friends and share the wine, but it was tricky enough seeing tiny Lego people through a wine glass, so there we go.

This is what people back home often think expat life is like all the time.

Big house, flash car and time and money to fritter.

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The Panorama Route – A Photographer’s Sweetshop

April 2, 2017Expatorama2 Comments

Stunning views almost everywhere you look – Mpumalanga’s Panorama Route

Have you heard of Mpumalanga’s Panorama Route? It’s a South African gem, less polished than Cape Town with its sapphire waters and its neighbouring wine lands with their citrine and ruby wines, less well known than the emerald green Garden route, less of a rough diamond than Johannesburg, but a gem nevertheless. It’s an area often sidelined as an overnight staging post for a trip to the almighty Kruger Game Reserve, but it’s absolutely worth a visit in its own right. Here’s why… Continue reading →

The Iceberg of Cacti

February 26, 2017ExpatoramaLeave a comment

Icebergs, people, cacti….you can’t always see the full picture, maybe because your perspective is skewed or obscured. Sometimes you have to go the extra mile and dig a little deeper (in this case inside my wheelie bin) to get the full story.

These large cactus ears popped out from behind our chimney over the Christmas break. I thought they looked about the size of a human head each.

I let our landlord know and a man with a ladder duly appeared to remove them.

I meant to ask him to let me see the cactus before disposing of it, but it had already gone in the wheelie bin by the time I’d walked the dog. I smiled and pretended that was exactly the answer I had wanted to hear. It wasn’t though, I am inquisitive by nature and really wanted to see the cactus and confirm whether my human head estimate was accurate.

I waited for him to leave and the minute his car turned out of sight I was rummaging in the bin and ended up tipping the contents all over the driveway to see what I could see.

The cactus was far more aggressive and extensive than I had imagined. Continue reading →

Ponte Tower – A Tale of Glamour, Garbage and Gritty Regeneration

February 19, 2017February 23, 2017Expatorama10 Comments

Johannesburg’s Ponte Tower is infamous, notorious and really really interesting. It embodies the former decadence, ensuing decay and current regeneration of the City of Gold. It’s a brutalist, concrete hollow cylinder of a building in the city’s Central Business District (CBD). The tallest residential building in Africa, it rises 55 stories tall and along with the Telkom tower is an instantly recognisable feature of Joburg CBD’s skyline.

Glamour: Ponte started life in the mid 1970’s as luxury real estate dubbed the ‘Vegas of Africa’, where the plushest apartments spanned three floors and had built in jacuzzis. To see a smattering of photos from those bygone I only found this one article: Buildings are Geological Agents. There are only a couple of images and you have to scroll most of the way down through the post.

Garbage: When decay set in and the original hipster residents moved out, the empty buildings were broken into and hijacked. Ponte became a complete no-go zone. It was an overcrowded den of iniquity with a direly severe rubbish problem in the 90’s. There was no running water, no electricity and when the rubbish collections stopped, residents would lob their waste into the central void. Unfortunately, there it stayed until it rose a festering 14 stories high (or 2 or 3 or 5 – I’ve read different things and I’m not sure which is factually correct, but 14 is the number given by our guide on the day). Ponte was a slum in the sky.

Gritty Regeneration: In recent years, Ponte has changed again. The illegal tenants evicted, the rubbish has gone and the building has been refurbished to a good standard and is now home to a mixture of families, students, working and middle class residents. It is possible to tour both the inside (marvelling at the views from the top) and the eerie core with a circle of sky high above. Continue reading →

Discover Johannesburg’s Top Hikes

February 5, 2017ExpatoramaLeave a comment

hedianga-2 — Hedianga Hike 15km – “We love hiking with dogs.” Photo Credit: Becci Monge

For a city as gritty as Johannesburg, you might be surprised to find out just how many fab hiking spots there are in and around it. My friend, American expat Becci Monge has kindly written a guest post with her top local hiking picks.

Becci got hooked on hiking last year when she decided (and by the way successfully succeeded – enormous kudos to you Becci and the rest of the Jo’burg based She-Trek team) to summit Mount Kilimanjaro. In preparation for Kili, the She-Trekkers explored (and continue to explore) the best hiking spots on offer in our local area.

Over to Becci: Continue reading →

Epic Namibia – Go. See. Do. Be.

January 22, 2017Expatorama11 Comments

Namib Rand Nature Reserve and Nice Sticky Finger Print on the Lens.

Epic is the only word to describe the vast, untouched and immensely photogenic Namibian landscape. The open space and the scale of the diverse scenery is mind boggling .

Would I want to live somewhere so remote? Not on your Nellie. Would I visit again? In a heartbeat.

There is more, so much more to write about Namibia, but here’s a quick summary of our highlights:

Continue reading →

Hair Raising and Hair Razing Experiences Abroad

January 15, 2017Expatorama8 Comments

You know it’s a disaster when you’d rather wear a paper bag over your head.

Getting a hair cut should be a fairly simple procedure and yet I have found it to be one of the lesser known, but very real challenges of expat life. Plenty of expat blogs cover all the obvious, big ticket hurdles to being a successful and happy expat: emotional resilliance, repatriation, culture shock, depression, leaving well etc. But there are plenty of lesser known hurdles we face as we ricochet around the globe and getting a decent haircut is firmly on that list.

Whether I’ve asked for ‘a trim’ or ‘the same but shorter’ or shown a picture from a magazine or a photograph of my own hair I seem to have had more than my fair share of awful expat haircuts than I care to mention. Here are a few of my lowlights…. Continue reading →

Scorpion on the Line

January 8, 2017Expatorama5 Comments

This is a passenger announcement. Regular blog services are running late. Normal service has been severely disrupted by The Christmas Holidays…and a scorpion on the line.

Regular service will resume shortly.

In the meantime, just incase you missed them the first time around, the most popular 5 posts on Expatorama in 2016 were:

The scorpion has now thankfully left the building and I’m busy working on some brand new posts for 2017.