Ben Fuery & Lucy Pinnell

ベン・フュエリ ー と ルーシー・ピネル

Welcome. If you’ve landed on this page, odds are you’ve just been watching us and our van exploring the hidden hot springs of Europe on TV and wanted to know more.

First, let us introduce ourselves: we’re Lucy and Ben, a couple of adventurers who’ve spent the past five years travelling around 28 countries in Europe in our van. Lucy writes, Ben creates videos, and we both take photographs. We have a shared passion for documentary photography, travel, and of course, hot springs.

So how did two young British explorers and bloggers in their camper van come to be on Japanese TV?

Well, it all began around four years ago in Italy…

In 2015 we graduated our photography course at university, worked all summer to save up, and bought a van. We spent the winter converting it into a home and the next year we left England behind for Europe. We spent eight months travelling around Western Europe, climbing mountains, hiking to remote beaches, and generally having a good time.

We arrived in Italy during a cold winter and spent nights camping in as low as -10ºC, so when a hot spring hidden in Tuscany’s rolling hills cropped up on our radar we knew we had to go there and try it.

That hot spring was Saturnia, a beautiful waterfall of thermal water cascading down around an old mill which we spent every day soaking in for a whole week. And that was it- we were hooked.

On our second journey around Europe hot springs became a waymarker which we planned our routes around. We visited a dozen hot springs across the eighteen countries we explored that year, each one further kindling our passion and urging us to discover more.

Some were easy to find; others required hours of research, some were found by chance by talking to locals or following random road signs. Their main appeal for us was being able to bathe in hot water after many days or weeks on the road, soothing our aching backs, cleansing our skin and easing our busy minds. Without a heater in our van, often hot springs were our only source of warmth, and we would camp near them for days or weeks on end, bathing up to five times a day.

By 2020 our passion for hot springs had turned into an obsession.

We spent hours researching geothermal areas of the countries we visited, sometimes hunting down coordinates or taking a leap of blind faith in following a single photograph of a pool we’d seen online. We began documenting them, taking photos, making YouTube videos, measuring the temperature and creating a record of places to bathe the likes of which we’d never before seen online.

See: Europe’s Best Natural Hot Springs article.

We visited a further thirteen thermal springs across twelve countries before the coronavirus pandemic took hold of Europe and we rushed back to the UK before the borders closed.

After all the adventures, our van was in bad shape, and truthfully we never thought it would drive again, until one day in December we received an email.

This email asked if we wanted to be part of a TV programme about hot springs in Europe. The producer had found us through our blog and could see our passion and knowledge of hot springs. Initially we said yes, thinking he meant as researchers, but it soon transpired he wanted us to feature, present and film as part of the programme too. There was a lot of back and forth after that, hours of research, months of planning.

We couldn’t quite believe it was real until we got the green light; the programme had been approved for production, and we had one month to get our rusty van back on the road and ready for one last roadtrip.

You know what happens next, but if you haven’t watched the programme yet, or you just want to know more, you can read our blog posts on the subject, or watch this video which explains it all. While you’re on YouTube you can watch our travel series, or go and check out our photographs and stories on Instagram and Facebook.

And if you want to read the article where it all began, you can do that by clicking this link here: Europe’s Best Natural Hot Springs.

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