Learning To Travel Again

Ever since I started travelling in my late teens, almost thirty years ago, I have urged others to travel as much as they could. For years, I told people to stop making excuses, to seize the opportunity, not to wait for the perfect time, the perfect plan or the perfect person to come along, because those things never will. For over two and a half decades, I lived by that belief.

I travelled the world. I trekked across deserts and through jungles, hiked over volcanoes and climbed mountains. I hopped on those planes at a moment’s notice and barely a plan, took risks, made mistakes, found some amazing stories and built a life around the simple, stubborn conviction that travelling the world was not something to be postponed.

I did it because I loved it. But I also did it because I knew, from hard-earned experience, what regret sounds like at the end.

As a former nurse, I know all too well what it is like to hear people talk about the things they wish they had done when there is no time left to do them. The journeys they postponed. The chances they did not take. The lives they had meant to live one day, when work was quieter, money was easier, responsibilities were lighter or permission somehow arrived.

I was determined that would never be me. I knew how quickly those imagined tomorrows can disappear.

And then mine nearly did.

There was no warning. No slow build-up. No neat narrative arc. No time to make amends, rewrite choices or change what could have been. Suddenly, all those words I had spent years offering to other people were no longer advice. They were a reckoning.

Those words became the feather against which my life was weighed in the Hall of Ma’at, with Thoth waiting to record the verdict.

Had I lived by those words?

Had I done the thing I had spent my life telling others to do?

And the truth is, I had.

Not perfectly. Not sensibly. Not always in ways other people understood. But I had lived. I had travelled. I had chosen that flight, that unknown adventure, that uncertain path and the wide-open world often enough that, when the edge came closer than it ever should have, regret was not what I found waiting there.

What I found instead was not peace, exactly. It was not some soft acceptance that I had done enough, seen enough or lived enough to quietly let go. It was something sharper than that. Stranger. More urgent. I found the knowledge that I had lived the life I had always told other people to choose, but I was not finished with it. I had no great pile of regrets waiting for me, no unbearable weight of all the things I had put off for a tomorrow that never came. But I did have something else.

I had a hunger.

I wanted more.

I wanted more mornings waking up in unfamiliar cities. More wrong turns. More crowded train stations and chaotic airports. More conversations with strangers, more ridiculous stories and moments that belonged to no one but me. More time. More world.

I wanted more life.

And I got it.

But I did not get my old life back.

That was the part I was not prepared for. I had imagined, in the way people do when they are desperate to get through something, that recovery would be a doorway. That one day I would step through it and find myself waiting on the other side, backpack ready, passport in hand, body willing, world open. I thought getting back to travel would simply mean becoming strong enough to return to the person I had been.

Life is not a 1980s training montage. You cannot just throw on the Rocky soundtrack, carry a log through some snow and beat the bad guy before the credits roll.

After a long period of recovery, getting back out into the world has not been that easy. It is not as simple as booking a flight, throwing my old bergen on my back and carrying on where I left off. I am not going to go into the details of what happened here. Not yet, and maybe not ever in full.

But I will say this.

It changed me.

It changed my body. It changed what I can do. It changed how far I can push myself. It changed the way I think about energy, time, health, risk, strength and independence. It changed the way I move through the world.

And it changed the way I travel too.

That has been difficult to accept. Of course it has. For a long time, I measured myself against the harder edges of travel: the mountains climbed, the jungles crossed, the deserts endured, the long journeys taken with little more than stubbornness, curiosity and my old lucky bergen thrown over my shoulder. I loved that version of travel, and I loved the version of myself who could move through the world that way.

I am not done with that version of myself. Not entirely. Not yet.

But I have had to accept that, for now at least, travel has to look different. Slower. More deliberate. Less about how far I can push and more about how deeply I can see. Less about conquering distance and more about being present in the place I happen to be in. And that is okay.

But somewhere in that shift, something unexpected happened.

I started remembering what travel felt like before it became work.

For a long time, sixteen years of this site in fact, travel has been my job as well as my passion. That has been an enormous privilege, and I have never taken it for granted. This job has allowed me to build a life around something I genuinely love. It has taken me across the world, introduced me to extraordinary people and given me a platform to make a positive difference in the world.

But when something you love becomes your work, it changes shape.

You do not always notice it happening at first. It is slow. Pervasive. A place is no longer just a place. It becomes a potential article, a photograph, a new campaign or a line in a notebook, a thing to capture before it disappears. You are still there, still experiencing it, still loving it in many ways, but part of your mind is always slightly elsewhere, turning the moment into something else.

Somewhere along the way, without meaning to, I stopped just travelling.

I was still seeing the world, but I was also measuring it. Analysing it. Seeing it through the lens of a camera. I was constantly thinking about what would be useful, what would be helpful, what search engines wanted or what story I could tell when I got home. I became very good at travelling professionally, but as I did so I think I slowly forgot how to travel purely for the sake of it.

And then that choice was taken out of my hands.

My world became smaller. My body forced me to slow down. I had no choice but to step away from the noise of online life.

But at the same time, I found myself missing travel in a way I had not felt for decades.

Not the work of it. Not the content. Not the pressure to be everywhere, see everything, photograph everything or turn every experience into proof that I had been there.

I missed the feeling of walking through a city with no real plan. I missed sitting in a small family-run café and watching life happen around me, or chatting to a complete stranger for no other reason than an interesting conversation. I missed taking a wrong turn and getting lost just because it looked interesting. I missed the discovery of a new culture, the thrill of trying, and often failing at, a new language. Most of all I missed the quiet confidence that comes from figuring things out as you go, and the ordinary magic of being somewhere else.

It was the smaller journeys that brought that feeling back first. Not the kind of journeys I used to measure myself against, but the simple, almost ordinary act of walking through a city with no great objective. In Seville, it was in the homely feel of small tabernas in Triana, and seeing an impromptu flamenco long after midnight. Not a show for tourists, just a handful of locals and families, oblivious to my presence, keeping a tradition alive in the same easy, unselfconscious way they had for years. In Greece, it was sitting with a strong coffee in a waterfront café, stroking a stray cat and listening to three old men at the next table laughing at jokes I could not understand but somehow still recognised.

There was no grand adventure in any of it. No summit with spectacular views, no jungle trail, no dramatic story to bring home. Just those strange little moments that make travel feel like travel before you try to turn it into anything else. And somehow, in those quieter European cities, moving slowly through places I did not need to conquer or explain, I felt something I had not felt in a long time.

I felt like a traveller again.

Not a writer gathering material. Not a creator chasing content. Not the person I used to be trying to prove he was still there.

Just a traveller.

That has been the surprising gift of it. Not a grand revelation, not a dramatic rebirth, but the slow return of something I thought I had lost beneath the work of travel. The simple pleasure of wandering without an agenda. Sitting without checking the time. Looking without composing a frame. Just letting a place exist around me without asking what I can turn it into.

For the first time in a long time, travel feels less like something I am chasing and more like something I am allowing myself to feel again.

And in those slower journeys, in those ordinary moments that no one else will ever see, I have started to remember what travel meant to me before it became my job. Not escape. Not achievement. Not even adventure, exactly.

Just the feeling of being fully here, while I still can.

So I am learning to travel again. Not in the same way I used to. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

And that has been unexpectedly healing.

Stepping back from the online world has helped me reconnect with the real one. It has reminded me that travel does not have to be extreme to be meaningful. It does not have to be far-flung, difficult, dramatic or impressive. It does not have to prove anything to anyone. Sometimes it is just about being in a new place and really taking the time to see it.

It is a return to the reason I started travelling before I ever wrote about it. Before social media became part of the job. Before every journey had a purpose beyond the journey itself. Before I learned to see the world through headlines, search terms, camera lenses and content plans.

I am not the traveller I used to be. I do not know if I ever will be, and I am not sure that is the point anymore. As I recover and relearn my new limits, I am learning a different way to move through the world. A slower way. A more patient way. Maybe even a better way.

And honestly, it feels good to be finding my way back.