The Evolution of Wanderlust

I am approaching my 37th year on this earth and with age comes reflection. Since leaving university I have managed to travel to 49 countries and I am on the verge of hitting 50 before I reach the age of 38 which is when I am expecting to further decline and become an old man in need of assistance when doing everyday things like crossing the road.

During my traveling days, I experienced enough to fill an entire lifetime. I crossed the Sahara Desert on a camel and gazed upon the Pyramids of Giza, I hiked through jungles in search of black rhinos and leopards, and I spent two months exploring the ancient lands of India. This is but a small taste of what I have done and if you have followed my blogs you will understand that traveling isn’t always straightforward and I have a certain knack for creating stress for myself due to my lack of organisation.

Despite this, the stories that I do have to tell will stay with me for all eternity (unless I develop memory loss) and that is the first answer to the age-old question – why turn your back on the prospect of a career, car, house, mortgage, bills and screaming children? Why explore vast wilderness regions like the Australian Outback, or hike in the Himalayas when you could tap away in an office for eight hours before going home, watching TV and then returning the next day to tap away for another eight hours.

Simply put, the thought of working from the moment I left university until the day I retired, sounded absolutely horrific. Obviously, circumstances dictate that some people have to do that and there are others who prefer stability. In my mind, however, there was an entire world to explore and I had been fascinated with travel since I was a kid. Even traveling down to Devon for a caravan holiday was the most exciting thing in the world at that time. I marvelled at the different accents and languages that I heard and all I wanted to do was explore. If I wasn’t throwing apples off people’s tents with my brother, I was in the forest finding hidden paths. On one occasion my need to explore was so strong that I managed to get myself lost at the age of 3 or 4 on a campsite in Scotland. My sense of direction has always been questionable and when I started walking across fields with cattle in them, I had a feeling I had taken a wrong turn, but I enjoyed it all the same until I started crying because I couldn’t get back.

This need for adventure was like an addiction and school was like a prison. I couldn’t stand it and I really don’t understand any adult who wishes that they could go back. Why would anyone want to go back to a time when they were not allowed to make any decisions and were forced to sit in a grimy, grey building, listening to people drone on. I am glad that I got an education because it enables me to write and enjoy the things I see when I do travel, but I would never go back to school in a million years.

The thing that annoyed me the most about school is that the teachers tried to convince students that every single exam was the most important thing that they could ever do in their lives and that if they failed then their existence was no longer worth it. I remember receiving this speech during my SATs in primary school and in the end, it made absolutely no difference to my life at secondary school or in general. People can still exist without being particularly academic, look at what John Lennon and Bob Dylan have achieved, yet we are still socialised into believing that we won’t amount to anything unless we go to university. I fell into that trap, but during university, my eyes opened and I couldn’t wait for it to end, an entire world existed outside of these educational jails and my time had come.

Following university, I left England and travelled to South Korea where I would teach English. My aim was to clear any debt and save money to travel whilst also exploring a fascinating country. I had chosen a teaching role in a remote province and given that I had only ever been to Spain, France, and Greece; South Korea was totally out of my comfort zone. I wanted to experience different cultures and visiting Korea was taking this to the extreme.

I quickly realised this during my first meal with Korean natives when they talked with their mouths open, spat food at me and then burped in satisfaction. They also looked at me with scorn when I poured myself a glass of water as it is customary to pour for the person to your right. The cultural differences were extreme and it took me a while to adapt. I would turn up to school and the teachers would approach me and physically pull my trousers up because they were to low. They would also tell me off for having a beard and comment on my big nose. It was a very surreal experience, particularly for a 22-year-old, but once I adapted, I felt more comfortable. Teaching in Korea also allowed me to visit China and Japan and it was after my trip to Kyoto where I realised that wanderlust had truly set in and there was no going back. Travel would be with me for the rest of my life.

I had gone to Japan to escape my intense teaching life in Korea. I was living in a small, rural town and there was literally no escape. I felt like a celebrity as everywhere I went there were students shouting there favourite English phrases or ‘teacher Michael’. I was even approached in restaurants and eventually it started to irritate me. I took the ferry from Busan in southern Korea to Fukuoka, Japan, and then made my way to Kyoto.

What unfolded during this time was absolutely magical. The city had such a relaxed vibe, with most people traveling on bikes. Normal everyday streets would suddenly open out and reveal ancient Buddhist temples. I saw numerous Geisha with their unmistakable painted faces traveling by an old fashioned rickshaw which was pulled along by a traditionally dressed man. The history and tradition were well and truly alive around every corner. Vibrant street food restaurants offering exotic, oriental aromas and locals still walking around in the Kimono. My room in the hotel had a bed on the floor and a sliding door made from bamboo. During one of my days of exploration, the heavens suddenly opened and a monsoon struck. I took refuge in a nearby temple and all the doors were opened so I could watch the rain. The sweet aroma of incense and the gentle chanting from some Buddhist monks in the background made this one of my most memorable and special moments. If it wasn’t for the fact that I would need to win the lottery to spend more than a week in Japan, I would return tomorrow. My thirst for travel experiences had grown to a ridiculous level and I left Korea shortly afterwards and began my first real backpacking journey in South East Asia. Landing into the madness of Bangkok, Thailand was an experience in itself, and for the first time, I felt that sense of freedom. So many paths lay before me and myr only decision was to decide which one to take.

After a few days in Bangkok, I booked a night train (which was a novelty in itself) and made my way to Chiang Mai in the far north of the country. I spent three days trekking in the jungle, getting attacked by leaches and eating maggots with butter, before getting onto a tiny bus and heading even further north towards a small village called ‘Pai’. At that time Pai, was like some form of hippy commune with a number of local arts and craft shops and Bob Marley sounding from every restaurant.

Unfortunately, such places seemingly attract posh folk who decide that having dreadlocks and wearing Indian style trousers suddenly makes them hippy and ardent travellers. These same folks would then get wound up if there was no internet café or British food on a restaurant menu, and would constantly compare everything to England. Pai was the setting of my first calamity, a word which became a theme of my adventures. I rented a scooter despite only having a provisional licence and although it gave me immense freedom and I was able to zoom along country roads and visit spectacular waterfalls, I managed a to fall off whilst going through a puddle. Instead of braking I panicked and pressed down the accelerator and was heading towards a tree. I had no choice to pull the bike over and scraped my knee down the gravel.  I ended up at the doctors in a bed next to some random, whilst they used tweezers to get little stones out of the cuts.

Some very stressful days followed, particularly as I had a flight booked to Cambodia and I needed to keep returning to get it redressed, but as I am basically hard as nails I got through it. I made the flight and on arriving into Phnom Penh, Cambodia it felt as though I was well and truly off the beaten track. In those days Cambodia was just beginning to attract backpackers and the infrastructure was remarkably different to Thailand. The roads were potholed, traffic was driving on the wrong side of the road, oblivious to oncoming cars, and half the buildings were falling apart. Despite this, Cambodia was perhaps one of my favourite destinations in South East Asia. The people were friendly and curious, and visiting the temple complex of Angkor Wat was like entering a time machine and travelling through history. I could literally have spent days wandering through the crumbling structures which have stood since the early 12^th Century.

After a few weeks in Cambodia, I would make for Ho Chi Minh city in Vietnam. A comedy of errors seemed to hinder my time in Vietnam which began with a visa scam, where I paid for a fast-track one-month visa but was only given two weeks. No amount of arguing and fist waving could change that fact and thus I had no choice but to alter my plans.

I spent a few days in Ho Chi Minh city before taking a motorbike tour through the central highlands. In hindsight, accepting the offer of a motorbike tour with two strange fellows doesn’t seem safe but I had an amazing adventure and got to see some truly stunning scenery and experience some food which was simply off the scale. I visited local farms and got drunk with a guy from one of the hill tribes as he kept giving me a shot of a local spirit.

Calamity struck again when I was leaving Vietnam for Laos. I had booked a night bus and was sitting minding my own business when I was suddenly approached by a young Vietnamese fellow. He prodded my arm aggressively and told me I had to get off the bus. It was about 1am and I had literally no idea where I was. He began to irritate me and I argued that I had paid for this bus and wasn’t moving. More men arrived and eventually I had no choice but to gather my belongings and get off. Obviously I could have taken them all on, but I didn’t want to get arrested.

After getting off the bus, another random fellow approached me on a bike and asked me to stay at his guesthouse. I was in a nameless town and there were no other options, I felt uneasy at the idea of following a strange man and when he began to lead me through dark back alleys, I wondered what on earth was happening. I ended up pulling into a residential house and the fellow was basically charging me to stay at his own home. He even moved out of his room and he and his daughter slept on the floor.

It was very surreal, I went to use the toilet and he was standing with the door open, having a shower in tighty whiteys, waving at me. I had basically been scammed and the next day I had to organise a minibus to the Laos border. I ended up literally walking over the border into another country, which appeared very remote but was surrounded by stunning mountains and farmland. It was another calamitous experience but also another story to cherish.

I would love to regale you with tales of my experiences but this would take me an age of this earth to do and some of you may have read some of my blogs. I continued to travel and refused to succumb to the ramblings of my peers who questioned me. Two years were spent in Australia and I also had a mini around the world tour which began in India, and led me towards New Zealand. I then flew to California and spent seven weeks in the USA, almost going deaf due to excessively loud talking from locals.

I returned to the UK and now I am settled with my wife Emily and the most amazing dog which I couldn’t do without. Little Bentley boy.

I have managed to visit North Africa, Scandinavia and many European cities, including a tour of the Baltics during this time, and I have realised that because of the traveling I have done whilst in my twenties, I am now happy to do smaller trips with Emily and return to a settled environment and an excited and happy dog.

Wanderlust will always be there and I will continue to travel and do the things I want to do rather than what people expect me to do. We genuinely only live once and eventually, I would like to do that independently rather than answer to others. In my mind traveling seems like the most logical thing on the planet, particularly when you are still young and unsure of exactly what you want to do. People who do know what they want to do for the rest of their lives at such a young age are weird. The world is huge, wonderous and special and I would prefer to tell any potential grandkids about my adventures in New Zealand rather than stories of how many sales were made in the office.