We’ve been in Maui for 8 years and we’re loving it. Before this, we were teaching scuba diving in South East Asia, living on islands and traveling through Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Borneo, Thailand, Java, and more!

So a few facts, let’s see… we prefer the Christmas Cactus to the annual fir tree…

We are both PADI Instructors, we’ve taught everything from Wreck Diving to Underwater Photography, and met an incredible number of wonderful, interesting people from around the world. Many of them have been our students, and many of them are still worldwide friends.

We lived in places where we, as light skinned English speakers, were the tiniest minority. Where we had to learn the language to get by. Where the food, the language, the religion, even the transportation was foreign to us. Like this lovely taxi in Palau Weh, Java. Sidecar suitcases, anyone?

During our year in Asia, we dove with some pretty crazy critters and had even stranger neighbors. My personal favorite was the monitor lizard in Borneo, and yet the Bali monkeys are a close second.

We dove with creatures that dwarfed us like whale sharks, manta rays, bamboo sharks and mola mola sunfish. As well as an abundance of tiny, unique hard-to spot things like hairy crabs, mandarin fish, 1001 different nudibranchs, and the illusive ornate ghost pipefish.

We’ve rode elephants, explored temples, participated in cultural festivals and tried more new things than most people do in a lifetime. It’s been illuminating, humbling, inspiring and absolutely awesome.

All in all, it’s been an amazing journey. Our love for the ocean has been with us the whole way, and has brought us to Maui, a very comfortable island in retrospect to the others we’ve lived on. And thank goodness, they have cactus to decorate around Christmas, so we’ve decided to stay!