Author: valeriepoore

This is the third book about the author’s life in South Africa. In Highveld Ways, Valerie and her daughters join her husband in Johannesburg and begin a decade of life in and around the city. During the years that follow her arrival in 1989, Valerie explores the Highveld area on which Johannesburg is built and despite her rural leanings, she learns to love South Africa’s biggest, baddest city and … and its environs. The family move house five times and each new home brings its own memories and adventures, including trips to Namibia, Zimbabwe and other parts of South Africa.…

A travelogue about a dream come true. After seven years of owning their barge, Hennie-Ha, seven years involving catastrophe and crisis, Val and her partner finally go ‘faring’ to France for the first time. This travelogue is about the places they visit and the people they meet along the canals on their route from the Netherlands, through Belgium and into northern France. It tells a gentle story … story about how they experience their life on board during the four weeks they spend cruising. Written as a journal, the reader joins them on their travels through rain and shine and…

Harbour Ways is the sequel to Watery Ways, Valerie Poore’s first memoir about living on a barge in Rotterdam’s Oude Haven in the Netherlands. This second book tells of the first two years that she owned her own barge, the Vereeniging, and how she converts it from an empty hull into a home. Told with with Valerie’s usual tongue-in-cheek humour, Harbour Ways can be read as a stand alone memoir or … or as the follow on to Watery Ways.more

In this account of her first year of living on a barge in Rotterdam’s Oude Haven, Valerie Poore’s overriding impression is that “one of the first things you learn about living on a barge is that an awful lot of stuff is going to end up in the water”.The year in question is 2001, and at forty something, the author takes the plunge to exchange her life in the corporate fast lane of Johannesburg, … Johannesburg, for life on a historic Dutch barge. Every month brings new challenges, obstacles and experiences. She meets a whole world of fascinating people, not…

This is the sequel to African Ways. It tells what happened next in Valerie Poore’s life in South Africa’s rural Kwa-Zulu Natal in the 1980s. More bittersweet than the first book, Val and her family move down the mountain from the farm where they spent the three happy years described in African Ways. In this second book, life changes dramatically for the author and her small daughters, but the … anecdotes she shares are still filled with colour, humour and everything that she loves about Africa and its people.more

This is the story of a young woman’s first encounters with rural South Africa. Coming from the all-mod-cons society of Britain at the beginning of the 1980’s, the author is literally transplanted to a farm in the foothills of the Drakensberg mountains in what is now Kwazulu Natal.Once there, she finds her feet in the ways of Africawith the help of a charming, elderly Dutch couple, an appealing … an appealing but wily African farm hand, his practical and motherly daughter and a wise and fascinating neighbour who has a fund of local knowledge.These are tales of a different kind…