About

My Travel Map

Where I am now

Where I've been

Where I'd like to go

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"People don't take trips, trips take people... Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased. I remember a man in Salinas who in his middle years travelled to Honolulu and back, and that journey continued for the rest of his life. We could watch him in his rocking chair on his front porch, his eyes squinted, half-closed, endlessly travelling to Honolulu."
~ John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley

This site, then, is my way of endlessly travelling to my Honolulu - my way of reliving and treasuring my journeys and experiences long after my movement in time and space has ended. This has grown from a relatively juvenile website to a more sophisticated labour of love which has slowly and painstakingly evolved over the course of nearly two decades. Only now am I somewhere close to feeling satisfied with its structure, design and voice.

For almost as long as I can remember, I have associated movement through time and space with success and achievement; I could only understand staying in one place as evidence of personal stagnation - a failure of adventure. I relocated multiple times all over England - the Midlands, Yorkshire, North East and North West - zigzagging the country and delighting in the differences in culture, language and accent I found there. Like a cuckoo-cum-chameleon, I almost came dangerously close to fitting in and staying - until I got restless again. Ultimately and unsurprisingly, such restlessness would culminate in my emigration to the other side of the world - my biggest relocation of all: Australia! Kerouac best captures this kind of restlessness and nervous energy about travelling to new places in this memorable exchange in his iconic Beat Generation novel:

"'Sal, we gotta go and never stop going 'till we get there.'
'Where we going, man?'
'I don't know but we gotta go.'"
~ Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Indonesia

Iceland

Australia

Bosnia Herzegovina

Arguably it's only when you've seen the globe's most famous sights that you can truly say that you've travelled the world. I'm lucky enough to have photographed some of the world's most iconic, among them the Statue of Liberty in the USA, St Basil's Cathedral and the Kremlin in Russia, the Taj Mahal in India, the Lost City of Petra in Jordan, Niagara Falls in Canada, the ancient Pyramids at Giza in Egypt, the Great Wall of China, the Blue Mosque in Turkey, the sparkling golds of the Shwedagon Pagoda in Burma, the azure mosaics of the Registan Ensemble in Uzbekistan, the iconic Dome of the Rock in Israel, the moody peaks of Milford Sound in New Zealand, Table Mountain in South Africa, the Kyoto Golden Temple in Japan, and the smiling faces of Bayon at Angkor Thom and Angkor Wat Temple complex in Cambodia.

I have also embarked on awesome multiple-country adventures. Some of my longer journeys include the epic European Inter-railing trip which covered twelve countries across north, east and southern Europe; my incredible independent journey through seven countries of the Western Balkans by bus; my unforgettable odyssey along the Silk Road in Central Asia including Kasakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan; my triple country trip around Southern Africa, which included South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland, my adventure around mainland Southeast Asia, taking in Thailand, Cambodia and Laos and, perhaps most unconventionally of all, my Long Way East journey across the globe through Belarus, Azerbaijan and China.

New Zealand

Jordan

Liechtenstein

Azerbaijan

Travel is about sights but also about experiences. I have camped overnight in the desert in Jordan; ridden an elephant on safari in India; climbed and abseiled down a glacier in Iceland; white-water rafted through Bosnia & Herzegovina and Montenegro; floated in the salty waters of the Dead Sea in the Palestinian-controlled West Bank; got up close and personal with rescued orang-utans in a Borneo rainforest; been an English as a Foreign Language teacher to teenagers in Spain; been on an African game drive in search of the Big Five beasts in South Africa, eaten lunch with nomads on the top of a mountain in Armenia and clambered over active mud volcanoes in Azerbaijan.

I've also slept overnight in a yurt on top of a mountain plateau 3016m above sea level in Kyrgyzstan; showered in the cascades of a waterfall in Laos and in Cuba; been dolphin watching in the Arabian Gulf; climbed the Sydney Harbour Bridge in Australia on my birthday; camel trekked through a desert in southern Jordan, drifted high above the ancient pagoda plain of Bagan, Burma, in a hot air balloon at daybreak on New Year's Eve; filmed incredible underwater creatures while snorkelling through a coral reef in Fiji, walked several kilometres of the Great Wall of China on a cold winter's morning, swum with sea turtles in the Philippines, hiked a mafia-controlled active volcano in the dark in Indonesia, hiked across a Polynesian island from north to south in the Cook Islands and swum in the inky waters of an otherworldly underground cave in Tonga.

Scotland

Japan

Myanmar

Australia

I derive great satisfaction from having been to some of the less frequented places out there; some elicit complete bafflement or just concern from the people that I tell. These are the kind of places most of my fellow countrymen would choose not to visit. I have a taste for the unusual and an inherent distaste for tourist honey traps. I've visited communist countries, absolute monarchies, emirates, unrecognised breakaway states, sultanates, police states, hereditary dictatorships, full-blown military dictatorships, authoritarian regimes and some of the youngest countries on the planet.

Some of my more unconventional travel experiences have seen me technically stepping foot into North Korea through the infamous blue Armistice meeting room in the Demilitarised Zone whilst under the care of the United Nations; illegally entering an abandoned communist headquarters in the shape of a giant flying saucer 1441m up in the Central Balkan Mountains in Bulgaria; beholding Joseph Stalin's eerie death mask in his hometown of Gori in eastern Georgia; spending New Year in the capital city of the last dictatorship left in Europe in Belarus, as well as travelling to a country which doesn't even exist - the renegade breakaway state of Transnistria bordering Moldova.

As I attest often on this site, I try to seek out deep and meaningful experiences when travelling. I've walked through the stained torture chambers and beheld stacked human skulls in Cambodia's infamous Killing Fields on New Year's Day; wandered among the watchtowers, barbed wire and gloomy red brick buildings of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in central Poland; and clambered through the dimly lit wartime survival tunnels running under Sarajevo, dug by the army during the Balkans Conflict of the 1990s, in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

South Africa

Malaysian Borneo

Philippines

Eswatini

With the prospect of the next few decades stretching out before me like an uninspiring concrete pavement and the words "more of the same" chalked tauntingly in large banal letters, I felt it was time to re-evaluate my life. It was now or never. So in 2016, and after a gruelling bureaucratic process, I packed up my whole world and moved from a rain-soaked part of England to the giant sunburnt country in the bottom right-hand corner of the globe: Australia.

Since emigrating I've travelled around a not-insignificant slice of Regional and Outback Australia, having now been to all eight Australian States and Territories. I've snapped an obligatory selfie with the smiling Quokka on Rottnest Island in Western Australia, climbed Cradle Mountain in northern Tasmania on Christmas Day, been whale watching out in the Pacific, appeared three times (briefly) on Australian television, been kayaking under Sydney Harbour's iconic bridge at sunrise, beheld the magical Uluru at dusk in the Northern Territory, sand-boarded down giant dunes on Kangaroo Island in South Australia, snorkelled the Great Barrier Reef in tropical far north Queensland and spotted three koalas in the wild in southeast Queensland. I've also developed a new-found love for hiking and the outdoors, having conquered six of Australia's toughest mountains, including the wonderful Warrumbungles (NSW), the strenuous Rawnsley Bluff (SA), the awesome Didthul Mountain (NSW), the iconic Cradle Mountain (TAS), the challenging Mount Sorrow (QLD) and the highest of them all: Mount Kosciusko (NSW).

In 2020 I embarked upon the metaphorical journey of Australian citizenship and in 2021 became a citizen of Australia. I'm now officially British-Australian - although I'll always be an Englishman at heart.

Türkiye

Laos

Samoa

Cambodia

Q: So, what are your travel plans?
A: My recent trip to Timor-Leste was not only my 101st but also meant that I have now travelled to all eleven countries making up Southeast Asia. Palau will be my 102nd and the first time I'll have been to Micronesia in Oceania, not long followed by my second Overseas Territory of France in the Pacific, with a solo journey to French Polynesia. Check out my Latest & Coming Soon page for a full run down of places I'm going and places I have just been.

Q: What has been your favourite country?
A: I get asked this question the most and struggle to choose; I start off with three or four in the hope of narrowing it down from there but then end up with a longer list. The truth is, I've found something to like and love in nearly every country I've been to. I suppose that's the way it should be, shouldn't it? I was smitten with the friendliness of Samoa, the positive curiosity of the Burmese in Myanmar and the colour and energy of India. Tonga was pretty awesome too. Oh, and I loved hiking in the Cook Islands, and... See what I mean?

Q: How can you afford to travel so much?
A: I spend far less time travelling than others might. Whilst some stay for two weeks, I'll stay for just one. This helps to keep my costs down. My accommodation is mid-range, I organise my trips independently from scratch and only hire a tour guide when absolutely necessary. I also travel off-season quite frequently when everything from flights to accommodation is less expensive. I only ever fly economy and, in more expensive countries, cook my own meals.

Q: Is it your plan to visit every country in the world?
A: Despite what the counters on my site may suggest, I'm not on a purely numerical quest. There are countries I'd love to travel to and others that I'm less interested in. Admittedly, though, I am looking forward to the moment when I step foot on my sixth continent, South America, soon, with a double country adventure to Chile and Brazil.