I grew up in Oxfordshire, England. From 1995 - 1997 (age 11 - 13) my father worked in Oman and I spent around 8 months there visiting him. Until 1970 the country had been ruled by a Sultan who banned anything modern or Western from roads to electricity to medecine to spectacles. By the time I got there most of it was only accessible by terrible dirt tracks and we spent much of our free time exploring the rugged interior by 4WD, on foot and even by camel. Experiences such as being invited into a one-room mud hut in an isolated mountain village and visiting a Bedouin camel market on the edge of the desert left an indelible impression on me and a thirst for more exotica.

My time in Oman also made me aware of how quickly globalisation is making the world smaller, less varied and less wild. By age 13, villages I had visited aged 11 had telegraph poles running to them, one quaint fishing community had sprouted a giant stone harbour and the dirt track that had served as the main coast road had a new tarmac highway under construction next to it. They were all changes for the better but they gave me the idea that in my lifetime there would be no more opportunities to explore or meet people who lived in a radically different way from me.

I spent the next eight years reading everything I could about tribal people who lived in the deserts, mountains and jungles of the world. In 2005, after living in Argentina for five months, I was finally granted the opportunity to realise my dream by visiting a remote tribe in the Javari Basin of the Amazon Rainforest on the border between Peru in Brazil. After that I was hooked. In 2006 I visited nomads living in the remotest part of the Moroccan Atlas mountains. In 2007 I spent a month traveling independently in West Papua on the island of New Guinea then a week on Siberut, one of Indonesia's Mentawai Islands. My aim has been, wherever possible, to learn some lingua franca before I visit tribal groups so that I can visit them without a guide and can communicate directly with them myself. My style of travel on all of these trips could best be described as neither sight-seeing, backpacking or exploring but more just trying to understand different ways of thinking and viewing life and the world.

In Autumn 2007 I moved to Russia and began teaching English. Working crazy hours for good pay I was able to save up enough money after 9 months to travel for a year. The beginning of that year is where this blog begins. After that year of traveling I returned to Russia, where I am now, to do the same thing again.

Upcoming trips include:

Ukraine for a weekend, sometime before Christmas

Far Eastern Siberia (Krasnoyarsk - Severobaikalsk - Komsomolsk-Na-Amure - Khabarovsk), December 31st - January 10th

Plenty of visits to random towns and villages fairly near Moscow at weekends

4 or 5 months in India and Nepal, May - September 2010

I'm then going to return to Russia and teach for 18 months before setting off on a huge Africa trip, taking in some (or hopefully all!) of the following: Ghana, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Central African Republic, DRC, Madagascar, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia.

The top map shows countries I've visited while the map below shows countries I've written about, ie all those I've visited since July 2008

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