Ever felt like chucking it all and moving to the jungle? Award-winning journalist David Haldane and his Filipino wife, Ivy, met on an international dating site. Ten years later, frustrated by the mounting costs of life in the US, they made the bold decision to move to the remote Philippine island of Mindanao, where Ivy grew up.

This book tells the story of that great adventure including its travails, triumphs, and tragedies as they slowly build their dream house overlooking the sea, try to bridge the huge cultural gaps, navigate the advent of COVID in a foreign land, and give birth to a child during one of the world's longest and strictest lock downs.

Originally chronicled in a weekly column for Mindanao's leading newspaper, the story recounts the surprising, challenging, disappointing, satisfying, spiritual, sometimes frightening, often hilarious, and always instructive experience of adapting to life in a strange—and in many ways primitive—new country.

Required reading for anyone contemplating such a move, or Filipinos wondering what would inspire a foreigner's abiding love affair with their homeland.