About Iain
Hi, my name is Iain Forbes Beat. Born on the exotic island of Mauritius, I grew up in and around the equally exotic locales of Dundee and Tayport, North East Fife in Scotland ;o)
I always wanted to go travelling, and had my first foreign adventure ‘euro-railing’ with my brother in the mid-1980s. However, after school I lapsed into the norm, and started working in the National Health Service as a statistician. Here, I stayed for around 12 years, working in Fife, Dundee and London.
Having met Marie in 2000, and journeying between London and Edinburgh for 2 years to keep seeing each other, we finally managed to escape our lives of gainful employment to go travelling around the world. And, we have spent much of the past eight years continuing to visit new countries around the globe.
Outside of conventional employment, I have since had short experiences of English teaching, gardening, landscaping, pool cleaning, olive picking, and more substantial periods of house and pet sitting.
I love my sport, be it taking part or (more commonly) watching it – with a particular fondness for golf and football (Tayport Juniors, Dundee United and Scotland are my teams). My other interests include digital photography, all things internet and of course travelling!!!
About Marie
My name is Marie Jean Wilson and I was born in Edinburgh in 1956. An only child, I left school at 15 and joined the large insurance company where I worked for 30 years.
Although I loved travel and holidays I had never been away from home for longer than three weeks before I took my first long term trip with Iain in 2002. Since then we have managed to maintain our nomadic lifestyle and we now house and pet-sit on a regular basis from our current base in Crete.
I never returned to work in finance but in between travels I have worked for the Scottish SPCA.
About us
We met in 2000 on a football trip in Zagreb, Croatia. Iain lived in London, Marie lived in Edinburgh. For two years we conducted a long distance relationship. Then, fed up with our jobs, with being far apart and with the constant commuting, we threw caution to the wind and our clothes into rucksacks and embarked on our first Round the World trip through South Africa, Mauritius, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and the USA.
Eight years later we are still on the road combining short periods at home in Scotland with travel and house-sitting from our current base in Crete. Since that first trip we have travelled extensively through India, SE Asia, China, Central and South America.
The Constant Traveller 