Tales

A 2020 covid lockdown labour of love, was writing a collection of short stories of my travel tales. In the book I recount my most memorable travel adventures across some of the most beautiful, dangerous and remote regions of the world. More often enough on foot.

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I had been told by multiple work colleagues before embarking on my eight week backpacking trip across South America in 2017, that I probably wouldn't make it home alive. Not because I decided to go without an itinerary or any accommodation booked but just that they so feared for my safety that in fact, one of my managers even asked whether I'd thought about tatooing my feet so that if my leg was chopped off in a run in with a Bolivian drug cartel at least it would be identifiable if it was washed up ashore. 

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I laughed it off and told him that's ridiculous; Bolivia is landlocked. Plus what is travel without a little bit of danger? In fact I don't think any of my trips across Asia, Africa, Australasia, Europe and South America have been without it. Not too much, just enough that it keeps you on your toes and you come out the other side laughing and or stunned at what just happened but realising how strong capable and resourceful you are to handle just what adventures, travel throws at you.

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Through writing these short stories in retrospect there could have been multiple times when the possibility of losing a limb or my belongings could very much have been a reality. My body could easily have ended up lying somewhere in a place that not even I could have told you how I even ended up there, The number of times I have had to blindly trust strangers, either be it when hitchhiking in Tanzania, seeking directions lost in the dark streets of Hanoi, Vietnam at 3:00am, taking up an invitation to visit someones home in Morocco or just having to put my faith in a rando person and believe what they are telling you is true because you really have no other option. 

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Yet here I am, alive, with all limbs and digits still attached just with a few more scars across my body acting as permanent reminders of the crazy adventures I have found myself on.

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I have always viewed travel as an adventure, not a holiday. A holiday to me is some place you go to relax, far removed from the overnight bus rides or an eight hundred kilometer thru-hike across a country. Holidays don't allow for the randomness of making it up as you go along. Travel to me, is where you learn, learn to adapt, learn how to be resilient and daring and more importantly it's where the real stories are made. Leaving me on multiple times to wonder in disbelief, 'what on earth?'
 

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