About

Travel to foreign lands proffers the chance of new adventures and experiences which can transform how you view yourself and the world. My travelling journey began over twenty five years ago with a humble trip to Italy. Since then, I've travelled to one hundred fascinating countries covering five continents - and counting. Through my photography and writing I try to capture a sense of the unforgettable places I have been: from Albania to Azerbaijan, Cambodia to Cuba, Samoa to Swaziland and Tajikistan to Tonga. People no longer ask how I am, only where I'm headed next. Follow my adventures.

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Where I've been

Where I am now

Where I'd like to go

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.

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.

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.

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, and snorkelled the Great Barrier Reef in tropical far north 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.

Q: So, what are your travel plans?
A: Over the last eighteen months, I've embarked on a new solo traveller phase, journeying to Sri Lanka, Samoa, Solomon Islands and Tonga. My recent trip to Tunisia at the end of 2025 finally brought me to my 100th country. For 2026 I'm setting my sights on making it to my sixth continent.

Q: What's your favourite country?
A: I get asked this question the most and can never answer it succinctly. 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. Then again, I suppose that's the way it should be, shouldn't it?

Q: How can you afford to travel so much? Do you have a rich benefactor?
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 class.

Q: Is it your plan to visit every country in the world?
A: Who wouldn't! Despite what the counters on my site may suggest, I'm not on a purely numerical quest here. There are countries I'd love to travel to, and others that I am not bothered about. Admittedly, though, I am looking forward to the moment when I can claim to have visited 101 countries and that moment is fast approaching. I am also looking forward to making it to my sixth continent, South America, soon.

This site brings together my love of travel, photography and writing. It contains no advertising or sponsored content because it is, quite simply, about chronicling where I have been.

My Travel Chronicles are the leading pages of the site. They avoid the reductionist format of many travel sites which turn travel writing into listicles and top tens. Instead, I've opted for a detailed written piece supported by carefully curated photographs. This helps to capture a more comprehensive sense of place. Countries visited more than once have been given their own menu page and journeys which have involved more than one country have been kept together on the same page to preserve a sense of the journey undertaken in its entirety.

My Diaries bring together three awesome strands of my travel life. The Adventure Travel Diary compiles those adventurous experiences in foreign lands which have well and truly taken me out of my comfort zone, The Australia Diary chronicles defining moments in my new life Down Under and The World Wonders Diary captures my ongoing quest to photograph the undisputed landmarks in global travel.

All photographic, visual and written content is original to this site and created by me. It is copyright protected. Read my Terms & Conditions.

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"Arriving, miraculously, back in Marrakesh safe and sound after our trip out to the High Atlas Mountains the next task was to find our second riad in Marrakesh. The telephone system was not working and so the only way to get to our accommodation was to find our own way there. It was in an area far worse than the last one in which we had stayed. There were people weaving fabrics in their ground floor box rooms, hooded men grouped on corners surveying us suspiciously as, all the time, motorbikes zoomed along and donkey carts pushed lazily past us. It was grim and unnerving but a slice of authentic Moroccan life as anyone can hope to witness. In a last-ditch attempt to get to our riad, we hired a taxi for the benefit of buying some local geographical knowledge. However, the car could only take us so far and came to a grinding halt when the alleyway became too narrow to drive down. The driver enlisted the help of three local children who took over the navigation and who then demanded payment for their services. They were paid with a £1 coin - completely useless in Morocco, of course, but I think they were pleased to get a coin from a foreign land which, I mused at the time, they will probably never get to visit themselves. With that, the door opened and the riad's owner beckoned us in. Once again, a beautiful little world of colour, arranged around a small interior courtyard, greeted us. I never ceased to be amazed at how the Moroccans manage to create such exquisite, miniature paradises comprised of pottery, mosaics, fountains and colourful cushions mere meters away from slum-like poverty and deprivation. Stepping into a riad is like stepping into a magical little world of beautiful things. Riads really are something special."

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"Russia is a land of beguiling gold-domed churches, of soaring Stalin Palaces, of palatial underground Metro systems, of bitterly cold winters and of untrammelled toxic machismo. It is also a land infamous for its villainous dictators, its intractable corruption, its Machiavellian-style realpolitik. This land, the largest country in the world with eleven time zones and covering 11% of the global land mass, is arguably one of the most iconic on the planet. Russia has an allure all of her own, a compelling and enchanting mix of the dramatic and of the dangerous. There is something of the dark about Russia. The Cold War may officially be over, but its legacy persists in the Russian psyche. It runs deep. Indeed, it is this Soviet hangover which will ultimately shape your experience of this most enigmatic and most misunderstood of countries. Russia is a thrilling place in which to be a traveller. It is thrilling because a visit to Russia is a visit to the Other; a different mindset and different aesthetic exist here. In travelling to Russia you enter a new world, one which you have to work hard at understanding. In parts it is mesmeric, in parts it is positively impenetrable. What is a Briton to make of Russians' steely and inscrutable faces? What is a Briton to make of Moscow's gigantic palaces built on such an absurd scale? What is a Briton to make of the country's bizarre cosmic architecture which manifests itself in geometric patterns straight out of Science Fiction?"

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"I based myself in Colombo's coastal district of Kollupitiya. It was as good a base as any from which to explore the capital. Unrelenting heat in the low 30s, exacerbated by high humidity, meant that although a walkable city by distance, I had no option but to explore the city using its characterful tuk-tuks; exploring the city on foot was not an option in a place where the "feels like" temperature was 40 or 41 degrees daily. In practice this meant a foray out to two or three sights by tuk-tuk, picking up Wi-Fi spots along the way, before returning to the air-conditioned comfort of the hotel by mid-afternoon. I used tuk-tuks throughout my stay not only because they were cheap but also because they were authentic. There's something about the rudimentary nature of their construction, the jolting and bouncing on the broken seat with no belt or doors, the fractured windscreen, the headache-inducing petrol fumes and the kitsch interiors of fluffy dashboards or murals of forests on the canopy which capture something of the spirit of travel and appeals to my inner child. Clambering into a tuk-tuk I become boy again. In my mind's eye I'm on that rattler of a roller coaster at the fairground - an experience where fun meets danger. A regular taxi with windows and doors is transport, but a tuk-tuk is an adventure! You can see, smell, hear and feel the place you're zooming through, unfiltered and uncompromising. In a tuk-tuk you become part of the place itself, albeit for a short time, but you become part of the city. You're now in its bloodstream. You tasted it, smelt it, breathed it deep into your lungs. You were here - and you did it by tuk-tuk!"

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"The Solomon Islands, a South Pacific nation of nearly two hundred islands and equidistant between Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea, may sound innocuous enough. Perhaps the mere mention of the Solomon Islands fails to conjure up in the mind anything whatsoever. Your mind is perhaps left in a liminal predicament searching for a hook upon which to hang a fragment of knowledge - a landmark, event or symbol. It is fair to say that the Solomon Islands are mysterious, enigmatic and something of a traveller blind spot. Indeed, a trip to the Solomons, whether you travel around the islands or just stay in the capital Honiara as I did, is a journey to one of the least-visited countries in the world. As if to underscore this fact, the flight I took from Brisbane in Australia to Honiara, the Solomon Islander capital, was less than half full. In an age of hyper-tourism, the Solomon Islands offers the increasingly rare and tantalising chance to wander around a country and feel like you're the only traveller there - chances are you probably will be. A trip here is an opportunity to feel adventurous and intrepid by heading to a country seemingly condemned to fall between the Oceanic cracks of its more famous Pacific neighbours such as Fiji, Tonga - even Samoa. I have seen some of the world's most famous landmarks - from the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt to the Great Wall of China, from the Taj Mahal in India to Saint Basil's Cathedral in Russia - but, as I evolve as a traveller, I am increasingly of the view that a country doesn't have to have internationally renowned sights to be a meaningful destination. Nowadays, I delight in simply just being in a new place surrounded by its noise, its smells, its culture and its unfamiliar faces."

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From World Wonders to Odyssean Adventures

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Wild Outdoor Experiences in Foreign Lands

death masks, dictatorships & ufos

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kangaroos, koalas & opera houses

A New Life Down Under

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about agmtraveller.com

A Brief Guide to the Site

travel anthologies

Nine Themed Collections

My Travels to 'Countries' with Contentious Inverted Commas

My Chronicles of Adventures Through Multiple Lands

My Quest to Photograph the Wonders of World Travel

My Journeys to Some of the World's Most Enchanting Isles

My Wild Outdoor Experiences in Foreign Lands

My Journeys to Places Where Most Choose Not to Head

Those Times When I Decided to Set Sail on My Own

postcards from afar

Four Travel Chronicle Extracts

morocco

An African-Arabian Adventure in Marrakesh & Ouzoud

Russia

An Adventure into the Urban Heart of Red Mother Russia

sri lanka

A Spiritual Journey into Buddhism in the Sri Lankan Capital

solomon islands

Travelling Solo to One of the Least-Visited Countries in the World

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