I was never supposed to go trekking in the Himalayas, you see. With a minuscule piece of hand luggage to last the entire trip, and clothing apparel tailored to the islands and beaches of Southeast Asia and the deserts of Rajasthan, it simply couldn’t work. The plan was to get to subtropical Kathmandu overland by …
I want to visit every country in the world, it is as simple as that. I cannot remember the exact moment that I decided I would aim for and achieve my own global conquest, in a geographical sense; I merely became aware one day that this is something I would do. The rapid and clear …
“Do you have any long trousers? We are going to my private members’ club this evening, but there is a dress code and they do not allow shorts.” I don’t know what exactly I was expecting from my week-long sojourn in Bangladesh, but it didn’t involve boujee nightclubs, and certainly not during Ramadan. It was …
Well, where to begin? Picking a mere 9 photos is a genuinely tricky task, because Japan delivered it all on this visit, truly. From global award-winning digital art installations to budget Michelin starred meals, via lifetime running achievements and official world records, fantastic human encounters, and even an early blossoming of the famed sakura: Tokyo …
Hello. It’s been a while. So long, in fact, that I am struggling to even rationalise how much has happened since my last blog post, nearly two years ago. In chronological order since those long forgotten musings: I became events manager at a backpacker hostel in Peru’s Sacred Valley; fell in love very much at …
Sand, sand, sand… Sand as far as the eye can see, and beyond. Whatever scenery I was expecting from my first week in Peru, 500m high dunes, desert oases, and hundreds of kilometres of arid coastline was not it. And if the landscape has changed dramatically from Ecuador, so too has the pace of travel. …
Bogotá never stood a chance. With all the Colombian marvels that had preceded it over the previous two months, the city that not a single person had anything positive to say about was always going to struggle to live up to the rest of the country’s experiences. Infamous for its terrible weather, horrendous traffic, and …
Dubai was open for business, to all intents and purposes. Malls, restaurants, bars and museums were all operating fully, though with reduced capacity, and the metro was uncomfortably crowded at all times. São Paulo felt like a city that knew harsher restrictions were coming (they just have) and decided to double down in a last …
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 …