Here we go again. My view of the quite majestic Volcano Chimborazo (furthest point from the centre of the earth, and closest to the stars), disappears from my bus window seat view as we dip into a valley and are engulfed yet again in the white mist. The sky too is gone. Only the very …
And breathe… Wow, that was intense. As desperate as I always am to arrive at each new destination with zero expectations and a blank canvas onto which to paint my new adventures, sometimes it simply isn’t possible. When backpacker gossip and itinerary discussions with proud locals repeatedly combine to highlight one specific locality, the hype …
“Bothrops atrox, or Talla X in Spanish: a highly venomous snake with a bite that will kill a man within two hours if no antivenom is available. We found it and killed it just outside the camp last night.“ In other words, a mere fifteen metres from the bed in which I was peacefully dreaming …
I have a very peculiar code of appreciation for the places that I visit. It is of course highly pretentious, to the surprise of absolutely no one reading this. I engage emotionally and intensely with everywhere that I go, often very quickly and always in the most judgemental manner possible. I do not want to …
1,326 days is a very long time, so painfully long that I actually winced as I calculated it. Until I arrived in Panama yesterday, I had not visited a new country since setting foot on Senegalese soil on 10th June 2017. After three weeks in the UAE and Brazil, I can finally nudge my country …
STREET ART – ARCHITECTURE – CRAFT BEER – PEOPLE In no order of importance, these are the four criteria by which I evaluate the urban exploration ranking of any given city that invites me to visit. It is no surprise that New York, Melbourne, Cape Town, and Tokyo are my all time favourite urban playgrounds, …
It is all about the timing. It always has been, with me. As my fingers hovered above the mousepad button in my hotel room in Dubai, I could almost sense that moment of scientific discovery in a faraway laboratory. That exact moment when the researcher pulled his head back from the microscope, petri dish awash …
Whilst this most unexpected of first travel destinations may have provided aesthetic and cultural stimulation beyond my wildest imaginations, Dubai will only ever live in my mind as irrefutable proof that people make places, and that putting in even the tiniest of social effort will offer the greatest human reward. In contacting Aga, an ancient …
So far, so very good. Given the somewhat hurried nature of my departure to a destination more or less imposed on me, my first fortnight on what has now imaginatively been christened The Big Trip has been a nothing short of a resounding success. And this despite needing to extend my stay by an additional …
The plan had been a simple one. A one-way flight to Miami at the beginning of January, where I would spend a week or so marvelling at Art Deco architecture and exploring one of the world’s leading street art scenes. Perhaps a couple of weeks making my way down US Route 1 all the way …