What Drove me to this?
So, it all began when I made the questionable decision of choosing Geology as a degree (I know, this is already about as tragic as an origin story can get). However, quickly realising that I lacked the enthusiasm for dedicating every waking moment of my life towards categorising minerals, I decided I wasn’t cut out for a life as a rock licker. Instead, I sought a rock-free refuge in the mercurial cesspool of the internet, the Wild West of the modern day. In the virtual world, I didn’t have to contend with my terrible rock-based life decisions and instead I could focus on what I love. Travel.
Now, I’m aware that blogs about every person and their spiritually transcendental gap year are ten a penny on the internet, but here I am anyway, typing my way slowly into a chronic need for validation. So keep reading. Please?
Another Travel Blog?
This is not the type of blog with titles that say “Top ten things to do in (insert city/country)” and it doesn’t have lots of recommendations for hostels or up to date exchange rates. Honestly, when I imagine writing unpretentious, helpful information it sets off a chain reaction in my brain and the outcome is a feeling of trepidation. A fear I think is perhaps analogous to the shaky first cut of self-amputation, or even worse, the realisation that it’s time I learnt how banks work (no thanks). So, instead, you have this. A website full to the brim with travel anecdotes and largely unwelcome opinions on everything from Chilli Heatwave Doritos to imperialism.
On these often extremely uncomfortable country-wide journeys, things regularly go wrong and I complain about almost every facet of human existence. However, there are also moments where I share my genuine unbridled fascination with this world, from its vast landscapes and swollen cities, to the people you meet along the way. When you’re sharing lunch with Armenian shepherds, hitchhiking with your adopted Saudi uncle or exchanging smiles with Tajik ladies in the crisp isle of a small supermarket, the fibres of kindness that once brought disparate waring tribes to peace, once again cinch, bind and unite. Those fibres know no boundary, frontier or nationality, they nourish you through the times when you miss a bus, shiver through a rainstorm or miss a loved one. They restore a lost faith in those other bipedal apes that rose from the primordial slime to inhabit almost every corner of this flat disc we call Earth. A faith that if a step is taken into the unknown, there’s likely to be someone to lighten the load when the road gets bumpy.
While all of that is completely true, it would be an oversight, and perhaps even a barefaced lie, to talk about my reasons to travel without mentioning food. My family’s relationship with food has always been one of gluttonous obsession. Social occasions, holidays, watching TV or walking the dog, that was (and still is) just improvised nonsense fleshing out the spare hours of a very solid, and hotly-anticipated, food timetable. My childhood was spent happily refusing the chicken-nugget-filled children’s menu and instead rising to savour the “what is this freak show” glances from adults when the small child at their table asked for extra capers with his lemon sole. Now as a begrudging adult, not much has changed. Travel has been a window into new foods and cultures, two things that are so interwoven as to be inseparable. The more you eat local food, the more markets you visit and the more you talk about food with the people, the more you start peeling back layer on layer of their history and traditions.
So, really the main idea behind this blog is to share what I love with anyone that will read it, hopefully inspiring someone to dip their toe into a world of adventure one day. If you give a post or two a go and enjoy them then that’s great. Subscribing for free updates when I next post should be right up your street. If you read a post, get halfway through and think to yourself, “I came on here for hotel recommendations and instead got a story about a man trying to fight a tree,” or perhaps most hurtful of all, “He should go back to being a miserable geologist where the highlight of his year would be seeing a particularly nice basalt,” then, I’m sad to see you go. You can continue with your day.
What’s coming up soon?
More nights like this.
But in lieu of nights as resplendent in my memory as that one, I plan to have as little of a plan for as long as possible. This PGCE dystopia will be my home for the foreseeable future, but I’ve always been a lousy oracle, so the foreseeable future currently stretches with great difficulty to tomorrow morning. Evading every career shaped snag, kicking down every property ladder’s casual lean into my peripheral vision and stoking my fires of disinterest with every morsel of unwarranted life advice, I plan to live my life my way. So, while I continue my life of naivety in the face of adulthood and uncertainty in the face of crucial life choices, I have only one certainty to share with you. One in escapable fact we can all cling to:
Salisbury Cathedral is the best cathedral in the world.