In October 1998, Johan van der Keuken called his radiologist at the Academic Hospital in Utrecht from Paris and heard that he only had a few years to live. Prostate cancer had taken hold in his body. Van der Keuken had traveled the world for years with his wife Noshka van der Lely. Together they decided to spend the rest of their precious time together looking and listening. On Christmas they set off for Bhutan. They decided to take along a small digital camera, as well as a film camera. Van der Keuken regarded the film they were embarking on as a chronicle of his personal view of the world, made all the more urgent by his own mortality. Things take a turn for the better when he finds a new medicine in the U.S. that increases his chances for survival. Living against all odds turns The Long Holiday into a vital film, an ode to life on earth.