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Our Naturale Tour ran from 12/7/23 - 2/7/25. Here’s the complete itinerary. We visited 14 countries from the South America to South and Southeast Asia often spending a month at a time in one country or even in one place. Our goal was to spend about a month every quarter enjoying naturism (au naturale), a clothing-optional lifestyle we’ve come to love. As full-time nomadic travelers this tour was an opportunity to fine-tune where we wanted to spend extended periods and where we were very happy to be short-term tourists. We blogged along the way. See our blog entries below or choose a specific country from the page navigation to see our hotels and activities. …

  • KickAss Kuala Lumpur

  • Dog Days of Summer — Bali Style

  • Ten Minutes to Spare and Ten Hours to Go on Java

  • Two Naked Weeks in Bali

  • Back to Japan — Focus on the "BACK"!

  • Goodbye America — Hello Asia

  • Wrapping Up Brazil With Lunch in Paraguay

  • We’ve Been Activated (By The Great Pyramid)

  • The Quiet After the Storms In Buenos Aires

  • Announcing the Naturale Tour 2024

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Naturale Tour Itinerary By Day

KickAss Kuala Lumpur

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On our first visit to Kuala Lumpur in 2022 we stayed in a disappointing Airbnb in the wrong part of town for first-time visitors. It didn’t help us connect with this thriving, ordered metropolis of nine million people and it didn’t prompt a return visit to try again until now. During our relaxing two week visit in September/October 2024 we stayed in a great Airbnb in a more suitable neighborhood with better access to what the city has to offer! We finally connected with this beautiful big city and really fell in love with it, rivaling our enchancement with nearby Bangkok and Singapore.

We love visiting big cities throughout the world but can sometimes get exhausted from heavy traffic, intense crowding and simply getting from point to point. We’ve been pleasantly surprised how mellow we feel as we’ve toured around Kuala Lumpur.

Full disclosure: day temperatures of 91F (33C) are common but October humidity seemed much lower than high-season Bangkok, Thailand to the north. We got warm and mildly sweaty (but only ocassionally really hot) on outside walks over 20-30 minutes but perfectly engineered indoor environments are part of the fabric of the city and are never far away where we cooled down and got distracted by discovering something new. Hyper urban wonders abound, with generally universal cashless transactions in all stores including street food vendors. We hardly used any currency!

Here’s a short list of what we love best…

  • Cultural diversity with Malay, Chinese, Indian and various east/west international expat communities in a uniquely dominant muslim population (Islam followers account for 46% of inhabitants, followed by Buddhism 36%, Hinduism 9%, Christianity 6%, Daoism 1% and other religions 2%). We never heard the five times daily call to prayer — something we really enjoy when visiting India, Indonesia and elsewhere.

  • Incredible street food and creative restaurant options galore. Our top restuarant stops included YaHala Restaurant - Chulan, Poblano, Seeds Origin Healthy Food Cafe, Ciccio Bar Pizzeria, La Chica Mexican Grill Changkat, 1212 Restaurant (Indian / Pakistani).

  • Unique tourist attractions are plentiful, easy to find and access. Our list included KL Tower, Petronas towers, Islamic Arts Museum, National Museum of Malaysia, Botanical Garden, and Batu Caves,.

  • Public transportation options are plentiful, pristine and afforable. And easy to use for visitors.

  • Shopping centers are everywhere. You can find anything and everything while people watching in pleasant air-conditioned interiors. We also enjoyed reasonably priced services for manicure/pedicure, body massage, facials, routine medical testing, etc.

  • It’s affordable — perhaps the most affordable big city in the world. Ride across town for one or two dollars. Have a great meal for two people for $20 (with plentiful options to spend less), or splurge in a fancy place for $40-50. Stay in a nice hotel or apartment for $50-70 (also with options to spend less).

See our Malaysia 2024 page for more details about our time in Kuala Lumpur.

Dog Days of Summer — Bali Style

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In April 2024 we discovered the northern coast of Bali and liked it so much we returned to spend the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer here! We returned to our two favorite naturist resorts, Bali au Naturale and Bali Natur, with plans to try three other hotels before we leave this little stretch of paradise! We easily extended our initial 30-day visas online to stay a total of two lazy months.

Few Bali-bound tourists make their way up north, just 10% of all on-island arrivals, resulting in a super casual destination for those attracted to the road less traveled. Sounds good to us!

In pursuit of our new hobby, relishing the night sky at our 8 degrees S latitude location, we’re discovering some stellar southern hemisphere constellations using the app Stellarium (click images below for a bigger picture). It’s just in time for our celebration of the annual August 8th Lions Gate! All Shift Happily Now.

Ten Minutes to Spare and Ten Hours to Go

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We had just ten minutes to spare to catch the bus for our all day ride across east Java. We had to seriously hustle. Rich trusted the journey. Paul sweat bullets. This wasn’t the plan!

We said goodbye to Bali yesterday from the northwestern ferry terminal port of Gilimanuk. Leaving the hotel at 9:15 am for our 30 minute drive to the port we projected confidence we would make it, first with the one-hourish crossing to Java island — it’s really only 30 minutes but the ferry waits just as long for a berth at the Ketapang port. From there, we still had a 30 minute taxi to the bus terminal in order to make our noon departure bound for Surabaya, Indonesia’s second largest city and some 300 kilometers (185 miles) to the west on java island.

And bless the cheerful young angelic man on the ferry who offered, in exchange for 50,000 Indonesian rupiah (about US$3), to porter our medium-sized roller luggage bag off the ferry, through the bustling crowd to the exit. He really was an angel, worth far more including our immense gratitude. We would have missed the bus without his hustle and knowledge of how to maneuver through the chaos to get us to the taxi stand!

Below is a short video from the tuk tuk taxi we secured at the port exit. What a wonderful culture shock from our staid, naked seclusion time on Bali just a day before!

Two Naked Weeks in Bali

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Time to warm up and ‘drop trou(sers)’ — shed our clothes. But first we had to get here.

We survived Scoot Airlines from Osaka, Japan to Bali, Indonesia (with a surprisingly fun and restful 20 hour layover in one of our favorites — Singapore). But we’ve decided no more budget airlines on any flights over four hours! Osaka to Singapore was six and a half hours packed like sardines. We paid for just adequate extra legroom but the inadequate width of the seat, and wall-to-wall blessed humanity, was a challenge. Thankfully, the Singapore to Bali leg was mostly empty in the ‘extra legroom’ section! For that second less than three hour leg we felt like jetsetters. And we somehow paid less than $300 each, including 50kg luggage, extra seats, priority boarding and four meals for the entire trip. Not bad! If only we weren’t such big people!

We’ll be in Indonesia the full 30 days permitted per our e-visa. The first two weeks on Bali we’ll enjoy three naked (clothing-optional) spots. This is our Naturale Tour, after all. The first one is a small gay men’s guesthouse for three nights in the big city of Denpasar/Seminyak/Kuta (can’t tell where one ends and the others begin!). We’ll find a good massage and great restaurants. Paul’s got a chiropractor’s appointment already. Whoohoo! Our second spot is a week at a gay-owned, straight-friendly resort in a northern coastal resort area. And lastly, we’ll enjoy complete seclusion at a small, woman-owned naturist countryside retreat with sweeping hillside views to the ocean. Drop trou!

Naturale Tour Itinerary By Day

Back to Japan — Focus on the "BACK"!

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Ouch! Paul hurt his back. In Tokyo. On the subway. Schlepping luggage. We know better!

Wednesday, March 27, 2024 — a date (of the injury) that, for us, will live in infamy!

We arrived Tokyo’s Haneda airport on a red-eye from LAX at 5:30 am all set to take the super convenient one hour bus to Shinjuku station and then into a cab for a quick ride to our hotel in the area. We’re traveling lighter and smarter than our recent South America stint. We thought we had it all figured out. [Spoiler alert: we didn’t!]

The first bus of the day from Haneda is not until 7:30 am. We didn’t want to wait. So we jumped on the subway with three roller bags. We did just fine all the way to Shinjuku station. The Japanese train system is sleek and fabulous and only a little challenging around the edges, but surmountable. We love a challenge!

Our heads were inexplicably hell-bent on continuing on the subway (by changing lines and finding a somewhat obscure platform), instead of taking the taxi the final leg as originally planned on the bus transfer. Big mistake.

Long story short, for the next two weeks Paul struggled with a gnarly, agonizing backache. But one chiropractor and two visits to a phyical therapist later — plus two weeks of grinning and bearing it — and (only then) his pain level fell below the tear-jerking stage.

We missed three days-worth of our tourist plans in Tokyo. So now we are talking about a make-up assignment and coming back next spring 2025 — for the Sakura cherry blossom season, of course — and taking an apartment in a more central Tokyo location (if we can find one to afford!) and trying again.

Big lesson: never do that again! Live and learn! Next time…take the taxi.

It wasn’t all backache!
Visit our Japan 2024 page to see where we went and what we did.

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Goodbye America — Hello Asia

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We’ve got a great “little!?” 130 sqm (1,400 sq. ft.) Airbnb apartment in the Providencia neighborhood of Santiago, Chile for the next couple days. Just a few days remain on our current South America travels!

After starting in the Spring of 2023 when we set foot on this southern continent for the first time ever we’ve managed to visit seven countries and learned so much about our southern neighbors.

Visiting the places are great. Meeting the people is better. We collected a handful of both from visits such as seeing the memorable street murals of Bogota, to the Larco museum in Lima, and Chile’s remote Easter Island. And from the glorious thermal hot springs of Papallacta, Ecuador to the pristine wind-swept beaches of Punta del Este, Uruguay. And don’t even get us started about Brazil. Hint: the party does not end on Fat Tuesday.

Bless each and every one of our new South American friends — Vo, Carina, Alexi, Jesus, Fabian, Ivan, Cristofer, Cami and all the rest. Without getting to know you and sharing our stories we would be far less fulfilled and informed.

So, goodbye South America. But we still need to…go to Rio, Medellin and Patagonia! And if we someday return to Buenos Aires we’ll walk as slowly as possible down the broad, leafy streets well after sunset and settle into *any* seat in a perfectly lit, well-trafficed sidewalk restaurant to nibble on good Italian-inspired cuisine and sip Argentian wine, including Sposato Family Vineyards. If we do, we’ll double our stay to two months next time!

So we are soon off to the United States for six long nights to talk to the Internal Revenue Service, bounce Grandson Archie on our knees and love on just a few friends and family.

And soon we take the big Pacific puddle jump to Asia. It’s been two years! We’ve missed it. Let’s go: Naoshima, Seminyak, Surabaya, Dambulla, Kuala Lumpur, Chiang Mai, Chennai and Hanoi. Come along!

Check out our hotel choices, past and future, and pics of some of our activities for…

Ecuador - Colombia - Peru - Argentina - Uruguay - Brazil - Chile

Japan - Indonesia - Sri Lanka - India - Malaysia - Thailand - Vietnam


Naturale Tour Itinerary By Day

Having indian food on the street in santiago, chile with our Venezuelan friend jesus we met in peru

Wrapping Up Brazil With Lunch in Paraguay

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Iguazu Falls wow! Stopping here was the cherry on top of a wonderful three week visit to Brazil.

We planned just four Brazilian destinations throughout the country on our first-time visit, starting in Florianopolis, Santa Catarina in the south and sandwiching in a terrific four-star hotel stay in Sao Paulo for a long carnival weekend, museum visits, finding great food and getting a mani/pedi. Next, we flew north to Salvador, Bahia, a culturally important center of Afro-Brazilian history with a sweet historical core teaching us all about Portugeuse colonialization and an intriguing modern Brazilian culture. [Note: the men (and women) are so welcoming — and gorgeous, outside and in!]

Only then came our day in the sun — actually two days — at Iguazu Falls. There we found a three country border region with two rivers and a world-class waterfall system drawing international tourists year-round. We were smart to stay three nights living it up with great restaurant choices on the Brazil side, then two chill nights at a rural lodge relaxing on the edge of the Parana River in Argentina, just over the border. That left just enough time to find the third nearby border crossing and visit Paraguay, have lunch and walk through a big Chinese import, duty-free mall.

Both the Brazil and Argentina sides have very nice national waterfall parks. We spent a day at each park comparing amazing vistas including Devil’s Throat waterfall. Damage from a recent episode of big water has closed a portion of the Argentina park. We took a boat ride INTO one of the waterfalls at the peak of the afternoon heat — a total blessing and baptism. A parting gift. Thanks Brazil!

We were lucky to meet a young man at the airport who was our driver full of recommendations during our visit. His name and number, on our unequivocal recommendation, is Lucas Matheus +55 45 9152-5644 (WhatsApp).

Now, onward to the wine harvest festival in Mendoza, including our Sposato Family Vineyards tasting later this week! Before long, Easter Island, Santiago and undoubtedly more good wine in Chile!

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We've Been Activated (By the Great Pyramid)

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We’ve now got less than a week remaining in our month-long stay on the beach in Uruguay. After our recent death cleaning, our month in Buenos Aires, and our vigorous 2023 travel which included first time visits to Peru, Egypt, Turkey and other impactful, fun places [like Ecuador and Italy], we’ve welcomed the chance to just hideout this month. And cook. And read. And study. In the sun.

Uruguay has less than 3.5 million people and very few of them are at our Playa Chihuahua, just west of Punta del Este. We’re on the beach, surrounded by trees, with lots of birds. We’re both awake with the South American summer sun at 6 (or 7) am and we’re lights out by 10 pm. It’s been a January to remember.

After last years visits to Teotihuacan in Mexico, Machu Picchu in Peru, Gobekli Tepe in Turkey and Egypt’s Great Pyramid, we’ve needed more time to reflect and integrate. And coming up on our travel itinerary are visits to two more terrestrial power spots — Chile’s Easter Island (Rapa Nui) in March to see the famous stone statues of human figures called moai and then in May to explore Indonesia’s mysterious and controversial Gunung Padang to see the ruins of a purported 27,000 year old man-made pyramid.

We’ve been activated by visiting these quite mysterious places. We’re activated, still curious and still integrating!

All this mystery, ignited in India, has us absorbing a lot of (Egyptian and Indian) ancient spiritual sciences and esoterica. Here’s our list of thought leaders who have our attention right now… Vedanta Society of New York, USA — Robert Edward Grant, USA — Dr. Ibrahim Karim, Egypt — Dr. Robert J. Gilbert, USA — Dr. Robert Schock, USA — Matias DeStefano, Argentina — Dr. Zac Bush, USA — Rudolf Steiner, Austria — Rupert Sheldrake, UK — Pam Gregory, UK — Rory Duff, UK — Graham Hancock, UK — Freddy Silva, UK — Dr. Jude Currivan, UK — Brian Muraresku, USA — Dr. John Churchill, UK.

Now we're about to embark on a seven-country swing beginning soon in southern Brasil, for Carnival, and ending on the eastern shore of Sri Lanka about mid-May. We’ll make four stops in Brazil, two more in Argentina, two in Chile, two in the USA, seven in Japan (over three weeks), an overnight in Singapore, and eight stops in Indonesia just prior to arriving Sri Lanka May 20th.

With and in gratitude. Vamos!

See our current daily itinerary.

Still dreaming of Egypt…

The Quiet After the Storms

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Happy Holidays from Buenos Aires, Argentina!

A few nights ago we were awakened about 3 am by a violent thunder and lightning storm and a driving rain. Our month-long rental is a ninth floor apartment in the beautiful Recoleta neighborhood of this beautiful Argentinian city. We’ve got an outdoor patio with sweeping views but during this wicked storm the furniture almost blew away in the unusually strong wind. Nine floors from terra firma was too many!

The bad weather didn’t last too long and thankfully led to a glorious sunrise. But this wasn’t our only recent stormy aftermath!

We arrived in Buenos Aires the 8th of December but the previous two weeks found us at home in Portland, Oregon USA working long hours around our house engaged in what some describe as a Swedish death cleaning. After 14 years in our townhouse we were waist deep in too much stuff we’d accumulated over the years. And the time had come to clean up and clean out in preparation for our family to move in while we continue to travel. Only after this stormy death cleaning activity could we get back out on the road where we want to be, exploring the world, digging deep for divine clarity within ourselves and enjoying our retirement.

And we survived this other storm to tell you all about it in our most recent video podcast that we recorded with our friend Nancy Ward.

This winter’s travels find us enjoying Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil and Chile.

Announcing the Naturale Tour 2024

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After our Peru visit we’re heading home to Portland, Oregon USA for the month of November. We’re declaring the Discover Tour over and complete. It was a resounding success exceeding our expectations! The only regret is we have cancelled our plans to visit Bolivia and northern Chile/Argentina. Hopefully, a future time will present itself for us to reconsider these wonderful destinations from the desert of Antofagasta, Chile to Iguazu Falls, Brazil. We need to go home, winterize the house and attend to some other pressing business. We hate it when actual real life gets in the way of our full-time vacation.

Every ending portends a new beginning, right?

Announcing our au Naturale tour beginning late this year and continuing into 2024! We leave for a month in Buenos Aires, Argentina at the beginning of December and will bask in the region’s summer weather through mid-March 2024, including a first time visit to Brazil. Just before we leave we take a jaunt from Santiago, Chile to visit Easter Island. Can’t wait! We then plan to spend about three weeks in Japan including another attempt to make some sense of tantalizing Tokyo before heading south (on the bullet train, of course) to the bucolic art scene of Naoshima Island and some sights around Kobe and Osaka. From there we leave for Bali, Indonesia. By mid-May we plan to leave from the island of Java (after exploring Yogyakarta, Borobudur Temple and the mysterious ruins of Gunung Padang), making our towards Sri Lanka and India before returning to Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and back to Thailand to celebrate the end of year 2024 holidays.

The goal of our new tour is to spend at least one month every quarter au naturale — naked — somewhere. For starters, we’ll spend the month of February at Chihuahua naturist beach near Punta del Este, Uruguay followed by a quick scantily clad week in Florianópolis, Brazil to celebrate Carnival. And then in May we plan to strip down on the northern naturist beach in Bali. And perhaps some time in southern Portugal, or the Grand Canaries, before going home to the naturist beaches in our backyard on the Colombia River in Oregon, USA for August. Get ready! We are.

See the current Naturale itinerary.