“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
Henry David Thoreau
One of Bilston's many statues.
Travel has become my passion. I am, as my friends will tell you, never happier than when I’m high on a mountain top on the other side of the world using a hole in the ground as a latrine. My life is divided in roughly equal parts into planning trips, making trips and showing people the photographs, but this love I have of being on the move sneaked up on me slowly while I wasn't looking. There was a time when I hadn't travelled around the world, when I hadn't even travelled outside the British Isles, when the farthest I had been was a childhood holiday on Jersey. There is a story that my father tells about my childhood. I can't verify the accuracy of it. I don't even recall it but it certainly sounds plausible, it certainly sounds like the me that I remember.
The old house
We used to live in quite a large house, or more precisely in half of quite a large house. At some stage in its history it had been split into two dwellings by the simple method of building a wall down the middle. Our half of it opened onto a cul-de-sac that ran along the side of the house and led to a narrow pedestrian path that in turn led to another road. I was about four or five years old when my parents bought me a bicycle. Once I had reached the stage of bravery where I was prepared to leave the confines of my own garden I would ride the bike up to the closed end of the cul-de-sac and along the path where I would dismount and peer out into the other road. I would stay there until I saw anyone coming and then remount and ride back to my home as if the devil himself were an inch behind my wheels.
Looking back at the last dozen years it's hard to believe that I'm the same person. In that time I've lost count of the places I've been and the miles that I’ve covered. I could sit down with an atlas and work it out but the details aren't important. The important thing is to have done it at all, to have seen so many things and made so many friends (and of course the occasional enemy). Even more important is the ever escalating scale and ambition of my trips.
The child on the bike looking out at a world filled with strangers was in me for a long time. I grew up as confirmed a stay-at-home as ever lived. I rarely went anywhere. Even when I went to University it was to Birmingham, a mere thirty minutes by train from my own front door. Until I was thirty, apart from that single holiday on Jersey, I hadn't been anywhere and I hadn't really felt that I had missed anything because of it.
Then everything changed.
I had started to take an interest in American Football and a friend proposed a trip to Florida to see the game played properly. The result was a disaster. It would make a pretty good comic novel in itself if only I could ever persuade anyone to believe it. The details are complicated and would take too long to tell but they included non-existent tickets, stolen luggage, lost passports, an officious Miami hotel manager who threatened to have me thrown into prison if I was one cent under on my bill and - I'm not making this up - part of the aeroplane falling off.
Obviously it all worked out in the end and with hindsight it had all been a perverse kind of fun. When I got home, almost before I’d taken my coat off, I set about planning my next trip.
So I went to China. Then I went to Austria and Italy. I went to Malawi and Zambia. And Thailand and Laos and Peru and the Philippines. I started with two weeks once a year, then it was two weeks twice a year and then four weeks twice a year. Travel is an addictive drug. You need a bigger and better high every time to satisfy the craving. Eventually you reach the point where the amount of holiday that you can take from your job just isn't enough and something has to give. In my case what gave was the job. True you can do your travelling in two week bursts and still manage to go anywhere from Norway to Nigeria but the idea of just quitting and doing it full time is very seductive. I was over forty, had spent more than half my life working in the computer industry at a job that paid well but which I had come to find dull and unrewarding. My my savings, while not massive, were sitting in a bank doing nothing. So, taken with the idea that I could just walk out of the office one day and leave the country, that's just what I did. Put like that it sounds so simple and of course it's misleading. There are all kinds of things that you have to deal with before you can fly away - from what you will do with your house while you are gone to what to tell the tax man. It takes a little time but none of it is really very difficult. The only difficult thing is making the decision to go.
It all sounds very adventurous but it isn't really. There is a well-kept secret about travel that you won't find out by reading Bill Bryson or Michael Palin or any of the authors that you find on the travel shelves. If you look at those books they all seem to be written either by professional travel journalists or by people who are clearly raving mad - the kind of people who think that going across the Sahara on a skateboard would be a pretty good wheeze. They give the impression that to travel you have to be paid or bonkers or possibly both. The big secret is that it isn't true. Travelling is easy. Anyone can do it. You don't need to go solo backpacking in exotic third world locations or restrict yourself to a week in Majorca once a year. You can see just about any part of the world that you want to and without any great difficulty being involved. You can spend months or even years at a stretch doing it. It's called overlanding and a quick look through one of the travel magazines will give you the names and addresses of dozens of companies that specialise in it. Dragoman, Exodus, Toucan to mention just a few that I ran into in South America. It's an impressive list and they all work in much the same way. You travel around your chosen countries on a truck with a group of people who are strangers when you start but whom you will come to know well, perhaps better than you wanted to know them. Along the way some people will depart and others will arrive - no two people are ever making exactly the same journey - but the essence of it will remain unaltered. The organisation of camp site or hotel bookings and transport from place to place will be done for you. It takes some of the flexibility away but it makes everything much easier than you could possibly imagine.
I sat down at home with the brochures, worked out an itinerary that would take nine months and take me from New York to Los Angeles, then from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego and back to Rio de Janeiro and I went and booked it.
In the end, it was that easy.
