The
story
so far.
Twenty-two years on the road. It started with one summer in California, the year I turned fourteen. Below is the long version, told in chapters.
“Travel is the only thing you buy that makes you richer.
Anonymous, scrawled on a wall in Cuzco.
How I've learned to
do this.
Travel slowly.
Two weeks in one country teaches you more than two weeks across four. The visa stamps look the same on paper. They are not the same in your head.
Photograph honestly.
No filter packs, no AI sky replacements, no postcard angles I do not actually believe in. If the colour was not there, it does not get added later.
Write later.
I do not type in transit. The notes go in a real book, longhand, and become essays only after I have slept on them at least twice.
Pay forward.
Tipping well, learning the ten words you need, writing back to the strangers who helped you. None of it is optional.
From the
field notes.
The summer that started everything
San Francisco, California
I was fourteen when an uncle in San Jose convinced my parents to put me on a plane out of Kathmandu. It was the first time I had seen the inside of an airport, the first time I had eaten food on a tray, the first time I had slept above the clouds. We drove the Pacific Coast Highway in a borrowed Camry. I lost my flip-flops in the Pacific somewhere near Half Moon Bay. By the time we got back to San Francisco I had decided, in the way fourteen-year-olds decide things, that travelling was going to be a permanent habit.
First time crossing borders by bus
Kathmandu to Lhasa, overland
Friendship Highway. Two days, three checkpoints, four kinds of weather. The bus broke down twice, both times near a yak. I learned that travelling overland teaches you patience the way travelling by air can never quite manage. Came home with a notebook full of half-finished sentences and the feeling that the rest of Asia was right there, waiting.
South-East Asia, the long loop
Bangkok, Vientiane, Hanoi, Phnom Penh
Three months on a budget that would not cover one weekend in Europe. Sleeper buses with curtains, night markets that felt like film sets, friends made on train platforms and then never seen again. Somewhere between a boat down the Mekong and a temple at sunrise in Bagan, the habit became a calling.
Champagne under the Eiffel Tower
Paris, France
Europe began here, with a friend who had moved to Paris for a master's degree and a bottle of supermarket champagne. I bought the camera I still carry that same week, in a shop in the 11th arrondissement. The next four summers were spent ticking off old towns, night trains, and far too many cathedrals.
Six countries from the deck of one ship
The Caribbean
Panama Canal, Dominica, Barbados, Saint Lucia, Aruba. Six countries in three weeks, three notebooks filled, one over-confident flamingo. I came off that ship convinced cruise travel had been wildly under-rated by people who had never tried it for the small islands.
A long layover that became a love letter
Doha, Qatar
What was supposed to be a fourteen-hour layover stretched into four days. Dhows next to skyscrapers, the Pearl Monument at sunrise, the slow bend of the corniche after sunset. The Gulf, slowly. The lesson was: plan less, walk more, ask the cab driver where he eats lunch.
South America, end to end
Rio to the salt flats
Started at sea level in Rio, ended at four thousand metres on the Bolivian altiplano. Eight weeks. The night the Salar de Uyuni flooded and turned into a mirror is still the single most surreal twelve hours I have spent on this planet.
Above the clouds, on the soil I grew up on
Khumbu, Nepal
A short helicopter from Kathmandu put me at Everest Base Camp before lunch. Twelve minutes on the ice. The thin air remembers everything. So does the soil I grew up on.
Now
140 countries, six continents, still counting
All of Europe, all of the Americas, all of South-East Asia, plus most of the Middle East, East Asia, North Africa, and a working slice of southern Africa. Still on the list: the Stans, and the middle of Africa. The map has gaps. There is a flight to Tashkent waiting in the inbox.
The
kit.
I travel light. One body, two lenses, a notebook that fits in a jacket pocket. Everything below has earned its place by surviving at least three trips.
- 01Camera bodySony A7 IV
- 02Wide lens20mm f/1.8 G
- 03All-rounder24-105 f/4 G
- 04NotebookLeuchtturm1917, A5, dotted
- 05PenLamy Safari, blue ink
- 06Carry-onPeak Design Travel 30L
- 07Layer that earns its keepPatagonia Nano Puff
To be
continued.