"Trust me. It's Paradise. This is where the hungry come to feed. For mine is a generation that circles the globe in search of something we haven't tried before. So never refuse an invitation, never resist the unfamiliar, never fail to be polite, and never outstay your welcome. Just keep your mind open and suck in the experience and if it hurts, you know what... it's probably worth it. You hope, and you dream but you never believe that something is going to happen for you, not like it does in the movies and when it actually does you expect it to feel different more visceral, more real, I was waiting for it to hit me." "I still believe in paradise, but now at least I know it's not some place you can look for ‘cause it's not where you go, it's how you feel for a moment in your life and if you find that moment it lasts forever." (1)


Travel is not just about having a look around, ticking a country off a list and moving on. It is about experience, your personal experience and the way in which you interact, identify or experience difficulties with a new culture. It is about experiencing what has created this new culture – the people, the history, the religious affiliations, the politics and a myriad of other influences. Combined with the climate and geographical factors it makes each country diverse and distinctive.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.."(2)

The travelogues on this site start life as emails distributed to my mailing list.  The problem with these logs is that they are spontaneous and fairly un-edited.  Sometimes, for various reasons, the entry here may be edited in order to preserve clarity and also to remove more personal details that would be of little or no interest to visitors to the site that do not know me, or the other people involved personally.

No matter how many times one travels, and how many times one returns from a trip, a dose of the post-trip blues always follows.  It helps to be able to read past travelogues, leaf through old notebooks and diaries and flick through bulging photo albums (the one advantage of not having a digital camera?) 

Of course comparisons and contrasts are an inevitable part of any new experience, this is part of the fun and the learning curve. I often find myself describing a place as a having similarities with two or three others.

There is a famous quote, although I am not sure who to reference it to that goes along the lines of "it’s not the destination, it’s the getting there". This is 100% true. If not, why take that 50 hour bus ride through Patagonia? Why spend 30 hours on an Indian train? Often (and especially in India) the mode of transport is in itself a moving city and one meets as many people and experiences as much as one would in any town or city along the way.

The actual experience comes from how you interact with the places and people. Sometimes a bad experience can skew an opinion. This could be an unpleasant experience or perhaps a bout of illness or other problem unconnected with the location. Sometimes a hundred bad experiences can make up a memorable trip. Often a report can seem biased simply because it is coloured by the mood of the observer when it was recorded which may be different to the mood during the trip. In short, it can be difficult to be objective about a personal experience.

The pages in this section comprise of the reports sent whilst on the road. They are grouped under geographical area. Where a trip crosses two areas the logs will be in separate sections with links to the next/previous log.  I hope you enjoy them and any feedback would be most welcome.



(1) – Lyrics from Beached by Orbital (2001)

(2) Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)