The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
I took my kids out of school for two years on the adventure of a lifetime
Despite a cancer scare and a major earthquake, travelling the world with four children under the age of 13 made us all stronger, happier and smarter, says Sarah Willingham
Ihave always been naturally nomadic, and if I didn’t have to live in a fixed place, I’d spend a lot of time roaming. Travel is something I have a physical need to do.
It has always been important to me, and I spent much of my 20s in my first two jobs working in the international departments of Planet Hollywood and Pizza Express, travelling extensively.
Then, as my business career took off and I had four children – and took very little maternity leave – opportunities for real, exploratory travel, and not just holidays, got smaller and smaller. I realised that the window of opportunity to really travel was diminishing rapidly.
Before too long, my oldest child’s teenage hormones would kick in and GCSE syllabuses would anchor us to the UK. But with my children between the ages of five and 10 I realised we had arrived at a sweet spot. The kids would be fine to leave their friends for a year. Twelve months out of formal education wouldn’t be damagingly detrimental, so the time was now.
My husband Michael and I decided we were going to take the kids, Minnie, Monti, Nelly and Marly, out of school to travel the world for a year. But then Dragons’ Den arrived. I decided that filming a single series wouldn’t work as I’d need two series to establish myself as a dragon, so we delayed our plans for another year and by the summer of 2016 had downsized our businesses, rented out our home and were ready to travel.
I wanted only one thing from our trip: to bottle time. If I had one superpower, it would be to press pause all around me, to take it all in rather than live life in a blur. I wanted to punctuate our lives with something amazing that we would all remember forever – and that is exactly what happened, although things didn’t go exactly to plan.
As a lifelong adrenaline junkie, I was away for six months before that constant buzz – the energy I was so used to in my day-to-day working life – finally dissipated, and that was when I finally started to live. I slowed down, I began to breath deeper and I forged a remarkable new relationship with nature.
We flew into Vancouver and spent some time in British Columbia, followed by Seattle, then travelled all the way down America’s west coast to San Diego – and that’s when we almost had to abandon everything.
In Los Angeles, nine weeks into our trip, Michael got really ill and was diagnosed with advanced colon cancer. We were told it had spread into his lymphs and he quickly decided he wanted to have treatment in the UK.
So back we went. Then, just a week before the children were due to return to their British schools (and a week before Michael’s chemotherapy was planned to begin), another cancer specialist did some more tests and discovered that Michael had diverticulitis – not colon cancer. He still had to have a foot of rotten, infected, inflamed colon removed, but he didn’t have cancer.
Within a fortnight I felt like I’d had my life taken away from me, then given back – and I didn’t want to waste a single moment of it. We convalesced in France for six weeks, then in December 2016 resumed the trip, flying into Santiago in Chile just before Christmas, where we experienced a 7.9 Richter scale earthquake.
We then spent six amazing weeks exploring Patagonia, seeing emperor penguins before flying over to Byron Bay in Australia – super chilled, super hippy, super relaxed and now our collective favourite place in the world.
We particularly loved a place called Wategos, which is the most easterly point of Australia just east of Byron Bay. It’s a very spiritual place and I had a physical reaction when I was there; just an instant sense of beautiful calm. The kids loved it, too. They joined a local school for three months, and we all learnt Muay Thai (Thai boxing).
From there we headed north into Southeast Asia, stopping off in Thailand and Singapore, seeing orangutans in Borneo and helping a social enterprise in El Nido in the Philippines, where we showered in the rain and slept on tatami mats under mosquito nets every night.
The impact on us all was profound. Aesthetically, the Philippines are beautiful and the people are incredibly warm, but it was moving for the children to encounter families who were living on a dollar a day.
While we were there, Michael and I realised that we actually didn’t want to go back to the UK after all, and started Googling international schools, trying to work out how we could extend our adventure.
We eventually settled on Switzerland, enrolled the children at a gorgeous chalet school in the mountains near Geneva, and fell in love with it. The mountains really got into my soul – all of our souls, actually.
The strongest emotional connection for me in Switzerland came in Villars, where I walked between these two enormous mountains. It gave me this incredible perspective when I thought: “These things have been here for millions and millions of years. What have they seen? What have they heard? What have they witnessed? And who the hell am I to just walk through the middle?” It really made me realise how insignificant I am in the great scheme of things.
We ended up staying there for two years, until Minnie was 13 and high school beckoned – but by then, we were all irrevocably altered. I’d been privileged to see the world through my children’s eyes and the innocence of that was so rewarding and surprising.
It helped me to develop an inner calm – which I still have, and don’t think
I’d ever have gained without that trip.
I am now instinctively aware of when I’m imbalanced, and I have learnt to recalibrate myself very quickly, which I couldn’t have done before.
I’m also a lot more reflective. I take more time for things. I try not to react quickly to things, aware that I am a better version of myself if I take a breath first. Adrenaline gives you a lot of energy and makes you feel invincible, but it is very unbalancing – so
now I try to connect with nature to rebalance myself and I seek out mountains whenever I can.
Looking back at the trip now, it was everything I hoped for and so much more. In so many ways, it feels as though we really did somehow manage to bottle time – with that unique bonding experience of sharing a journey, making all those decisions together, and sharing all that joy and frustration and fear and happiness.
I have always very much believed in that famous Mark Twain saying, “It’s better to regret the things in life that you did rather than the ones you didn’t” – and now, I believe it more than ever.
Within a fortnight
I felt like I’d had my life taken away from me, then given back