Archives: Guide

“And when were you born?” the wizened gentleman asked Anna and I in a bar one night in Thailand. He opened the astrological oracle he always lifted from place to place.

I stood in the Bangkok airport with no plane ticket, no plan, and no personal belongings aside from the care package from my Mom that I picked up at the post office that morning.

I’d call it a road, but it resembled a wide path: a dusty, grey path which was approximately 5 metres in width and had 2 lanes. Cars, trucks and even motorcycles were racing down, overtaking each other as if tomorrow...

I was in Luang Prabang, Laos. The loudest noise I heard was birds chirping and stress seemed far away as I sat on a bean bag and sipped my mango smoothie.

It was the event that would solidify my love for travel. It was also the most intense moment of my entire life.

It was 2am and here I was sitting in McDonald’s in one of the most energetic cities in the world, New York City. My friends who I was spending the weekend with are what you’d call indecisive.

My worst journey didn’t seem so at the time… I have been a disaster response worker since 1998, and in 2005 I was deployed to Louisiana...

I was working in Nairobi and my wife with our three children aged 15, 13 and 10 had iust arrived for Christmas. We were booked to stay at Watamu on the coast, 400 miles from Nairobi if we travelled via Mombasa...

February 2000 - Five months into our Indian odyssey my girlfriend and I walked off the Khajuraho- Varanasi train with … the clothes we'd slept in, a little money, passports, 2 sleeping bags.

Had I bothered to think about it logically, when I first heard that foreigners were not allowed to buy fourth class seats on trains in China, I would have realized there was probably a very good reason.