I Took My 81-Year-Old Grandmother Around The World On Her Dream Vacation

Here’s what I learned about the only investment that matters.

Photo by author | Edited on FaceApp

She turned to me somewhere over the Indian Ocean and asked when we were taking off.

We’d been in the air for ten minutes.

The Emirates A380 — the largest passenger jet in commercial aviation — had lifted off so quietly, so smoothly, that Ouma Sophie, 81 years old, had felt nothing.

Photo by author | Edited on FaceApp

She was sitting by the isle. Hands folded. Waiting. I pointed down at the lights of Johannesburg, now tiny, already far behind us.

She looked out the window.

Then at me.

Then out the window again.

“Oh,” she said.

That was how it started.

Why we did it

My uncle died during the pandemic.

I won’t dress that up. He was there and then he wasn’t — and somewhere in the months that followed, sitting with the weight of that, my family arrived at a quiet, urgent conclusion.

We were done waiting.

Ouma Sophie had spent 81 years in South Africa. Never left. Not once. She’d raised children, buried a husband, built a life — and every single morning, without exception, she did her hair and put on her makeup. Even if she wasn’t going anywhere. Even if no one was coming over. Because that’s who she is. A woman with standards. A woman who looked like an actress and knew it.

But she’d never seen the Strait of Hormuz. Never felt 48-degree heat in Muscat and loved it. Never had strangers at a Kuala Lumpur temple stop to ask if her chicken was a pet.

(There was a chicken. It wasn’t her pet. She let them believe it was.)

We decided to give her the world. Not as a gift. As a refusal. A refusal to let one day become never.

This was Trip 1 of 3.

The trip

Twelve countries. One wheelchair. One woman seeing everything for the first time at 81.

Granny enjoying a cup of much needed coffee in Dubai Airport Marhaba lounge | Photo by author | Edited on FaceApp

It started — after the A380 moment — with a bag disaster. Emirates left her luggage in Dubai. Three days in Istanbul without her things. No walking frame. And you know what she was most worried about?

Her makeup.

Because Ouma Sophie doesn’t face the world without doing her face first. That’s not vanity. That’s armor. That’s identity. Istanbul was freezing, she was in yesterday’s clothes, and she was worried about her foundation.

Don’t worry Ouma, I got you with FaceApp!

Photo by author | Edited on FaceApp

We pushed her through cobblestone streets in the cold. The locals were warm. Restaurants brought out tea without being asked. Shop owners pressed small gifts into her hands trying to get us to come eat. She loved every second of it.

Photo by author | Edited on FaceApp

Then the cruise. Persian Gulf. We passed the Strait of Hormuz. She sat on the deck and didn’t fully know where she was, and somehow that made it more magical.

Photo by author | Edited on FaceApp

My granny and I! :) | Photo by author | Edited on FaceApp

Photo by author | Edited on FaceApp

Photo by author | Edited on FaceApp

Muscat was 48 degrees Celsius. I nearly passed out on the street.

Ouma thrived.

“This,” she announced, “is the perfect climate.” She wanted to stay.

Photo by author | Edited on FaceApp

Kuala Lumpur: She discovered durian. The smell hit her and that was the end of that. She found a temple with a chicken. Strangers kept stopping to pet it, assuming it belonged to her. She did not correct them. She was delighted.

Photo by author | Edited on FaceApp

Ho Chi Minh City: Our accommodation cancelled last minute. Travel insurance stepped in and delivered us to the Vinpearl by Marriott at Landmark 81 — one of the tallest buildings in Vietnam, with a team that welcomed us to the lobby like we were someone important. We spent Christmas there.

Da Nang: She loved it in a way that felt effortless. She got her nails done. She sat in the sun. She was at peace.

Photo by author | Edited on FaceApp

Seoul: -7 degrees Celsius. She hated the cold. But she found a shop selling Russian-style fur beanies, fell completely in love, and made friends with the vendor who gave her gifts. She wore that beanie every single day for the rest of the trip.

Photo by author | Edited on FaceApp

Boracay: she sipped on a cocktail at the resort. Because of course she did.

Photo by author | Edited on FaceApp

Bali: everyone else got Bali belly.

Not Ouma.

Iron lady.

And then Singapore.

The problem with 4,000 photos

Somewhere between Istanbul and the Philippines, I had taken approximately 4,000 photos.

Photo by author | Edited on FaceApp

This sounds like a lot because it is. But here’s what you need to understand about traveling with Ouma Sophie: she will accept exactly zero photos of herself where she does not look immaculate. If she can see her wrinkles, she gets sad. She gets frustrated. The photo is dismissed.

Gone.

Which is hard to argue with when you understand who she is. This is a woman who does her hair and makeup every morning without fail — not because anyone’s watching, but because she has never once lowered her standards. She expected the photos to meet the same bar.

They didn’t.

The lighting was always wrong. The angle was off. The equatorial afternoon sun was harsh and unforgiving. A woman who looked like an actress was coming out looking like anything but.

So I was editing in Photoshop.

Ten minutes per photo. Layer by layer.

I lasted 30 photos before I was done.

If you’re doing the math: 4,000 photos at 10 minutes each is 666 hours. I calculated that exactly once and then stopped thinking about it.

I was skeptical

I’ll be honest about this, because I’ve written about AI image editors before and I know exactly what the bad ones do.

They erase everything.

That plastic, over-smoothed, uncanny AI skin — the face that looks like someone replaced a face with a rendering of a face. That was my expectation when I opened FaceApp.

The results were not that.

30 seconds. Skin retouching that looked like better lighting, not surgery. The wrinkles weren’t deleted — they were softened. The way a good photographer handles them in post. The app understood, somehow, that the goal wasn’t to make Ouma look young. The goal was to make her look like herself on her best day.

I ran 10 photos in a batch. Same consistent feel across all of them — same warmth, same skin tone, no need to adjust each one individually.

The one thing that didn’t work too well in my view was the makeup filters. They pushed too hard. Ouma is refined, precise, specific about her aesthetic. The makeup tools overshot it by a mile. I skipped them entirely and stayed with the retouching and lighting controls, which did exactly what I needed and nothing it didn’t.

The photo at Changi

Singapore was the last stop before home.

We went to Jewel Changi Airport — the building with the Rain Vortex, a waterfall that drops seven stories through the center of a glass dome. The tallest indoor waterfall on the planet, inside an airport.

Ouma Sophie looked up at it and went quiet.

Not tired. Not confused. Quiet in the way people go quiet when something is more beautiful than they were ready for.

I took the photo. The light from the waterfall was hitting her face from above — stunning in person, but a little harsh in the original shot. I opened FaceApp.

Photo by author | Edited on FaceApp

Thirty seconds.

She approved it for the family album.

I am now her personal photo editor.

What I know now

These aren’t just travel photos.

I know that now in a way I didn’t when I booked the flights. You book the flights for the experience. You take the photos because you’re there. You don’t fully understand what you’re actually doing until later — until you’re looking at the photo of her in Seoul with the beanie, or the one in Muscat where she looks like she’s finally found the right climate, or the one at Changi, looking up at falling water like she’s never seen anything so absurd and so beautiful in her life.

My uncle is gone. One day Ouma will be gone too. And when that happens — not soon, I hope, because she survived Bali belly when the rest of us didn’t — what I’ll have left is the photos.

This is the only investment I’ve made that I have never, not once, questioned.

Memories don’t depreciate. They compound.

This was Trip 1. Europe came after. Then the Americas. I’ll write about those separately.

But for now, I want to say this simply:

If you have someone in your life you’ve been meaning to take somewhere — book it. Push the wheelchair through the cobblestone streets. Let them discover they thrive in 48-degree heat. Let them befriend the temple chicken. Let them not feel the plane take off.

You will not regret the photos.

The Honest Breakdown: FaceApp for High-Volume Travel Portrait Photography

If you’re taking a lot of portraits on a family trip — especially with subjects who have strong opinions about how they look — here’s what I actually found.

What Does FaceApp Do Well?

FaceApp is an AI photo editing app with over 480 million downloads worldwide. For portrait-heavy travel photography, the standout tools are:

• Natural skin retouching — softens without erasing. Wrinkles reduced, character preserved.
• Lighting adjustments — fixes harsh equatorial sun, dim indoor lighting, the dramatic glow of a waterfall hitting a face from below
• Batch editing — 10 photos at once with consistent, matched results
• Background adjustments — when the setting wasn’t cooperating

What Are the Limitations?

The makeup filters run heavy. If your subject has a precise, refined aesthetic — specific about exactly how much they wear and in what way — the makeup tools may overshoot it. For Ouma, they did. I turned them off.

FaceApp is also not the tool for complex compositing, full RAW processing, or heavy artistic manipulation. For portrait retouching at volume, it’s excellent. For precision studio work, reach for something else.

Who Is FaceApp Actually For?

It’s for people who take a lot of portrait photos with subjects who care how they look — and who don’t have 666 hours to spend in Photoshop.

It’s not for professional photographers who need granular RAW control, or anyone with very precise, subtle makeup requirements.

FaceApp vs. Manual Photoshop Editing

Table of comparison by the author

Frequently Asked Questions

Does FaceApp make portraits look fake? Not in my experience. The retouching is calibrated toward realism — it looks like better lighting, not digital surgery. That was the deciding factor for me.

Is FaceApp safe to use with family photos? FaceApp processes images on-device where possible, which means your family’s photos stay off third-party servers. For photos this irreplaceable, that mattered.

Can FaceApp edit photos with multiple people in them? Yes. It detects and edits multiple faces within a single image.

Does FaceApp work for photos of elderly subjects? This was specifically what I needed it for. The skin retouching handles mature skin well — it softens rather than smooths everything into oblivion. The results looked like Ouma on her best day, which is exactly what she demanded.

When is FaceApp not the right tool? Skip it if you need heavy artistic retouching, full RAW control, or extremely precise, subtle makeup adjustments. The makeup filters have a tendency to push harder than some subjects will appreciate.

The Only Investment That Never Loses Value

My grandmother spent 81 years in South Africa without ever leaving.

My uncle didn’t get to see any of this.

One day has a way of becoming never — faster than you think, with less warning than you deserve.

The best investment I’ve ever made cost me flights, hotels, and a wheelchair pushed through cobblestone streets in Istanbul. The return was a woman who discovered she was built for 48-degree heat. Who befriended a vendor in Seoul who gave her gifts. Who looked up at a waterfall in Singapore and went completely, beautifully quiet.

Don’t wait for the right time. There isn’t one.

Take the trip. Edit the photos. Keep the memories.

That’s the only investment that never loses value.

This article is written in partnership with FaceApp. Every story in it is real.