On Travel
I grew up in a pretty standard working class family. My father was a glazier while my mother looked after me and my two brothers. We lived in a nice, 3 bedroom council house, on a friendly estate. My parents worked hard to give me access to things they didn’t have as children. That meant a home full of books, weekend trips to museums, and regular holidays.
Summers were spent in the U.K. Mostly in the West Country, but occasionally we’d venture further afield; to Wales, The Lake District, and the Yorkshire Dales. I relished our family trips and felt super lucky, as few of my Friends had seen as much of the country as me.
I had one friend who’d been on holiday outside the UK. He’d had a two week trip to California and I loved hearing his stories from the land of CHiPs and Beverly Hills Cop. The huge meals, the gigantic freeways; it all sounded so exotic. However his dad had an office job and they owned their own house, so overseas travel clearly wasn’t on the horizon for me. Yet one can dream, and dream I did.
Being a child in the 80s, I grew up on a diet of James Bond and Indiana Jones. Watching these heroic figures hop from exotic country to exotic country with seeming ease. I dreamed that one day I’d be able to visit places like Hong Kong or Shanghai, but how was a kid from a council estate going to make that happen? I reasoned that the only way somebody like me would get to travel was if I ferried other people there, so I set out to become an airline pilot.
I went to Manchester University to Study Aeronautical Engineering but quickly realised that being a pilot wasn’t for me. At the time, the majority of airline pilots were ex RAF, and doing 20 years military service didn’t really appeal. British Airways took on a small number of graduate trainees, but competition was stiff, and they seemed to favour applicants from specific backgrounds. The only other option was to pay your way through training, and that wouldn’t have been possible for somebody from my background.
Fortunately I was starting to go off the idea anyway. There’s an old adage that being an airline pilot was ninety nine percent bordom, punctuated by one percent sheer terror. I also had a friend whose dad was an airline pilot and she talked openly about his drinking problems and tendency to have affairs with the cabin crew—something of an occupational hazard I later found out. Neither of these things sounded like a lot of fun.
Around the same time I met a couple of people who’d been on a gap year before University. Being one of only a handful of kids at my schools to go on to University, I hadn’t realised this was something you could even do. Hearing their stories about trips along the Mekong River and full moon parties in Thailand sparked my sense of adventure. So once University was over, I saved up some money doing low paid jobs, and went off travelling.
Looking back it’s amazing how much your environment and the people around you fix your perception of what’s possible.
That first 6-months travelling around South East Asia really opened my eyes to the wonders of the world, and the possibilities that existed. I loved experiencing different cultures and seeing how others lived. I also met people from a variety of backgrounds, opening my eyes to a range of career options I never thought possible. I was hooked.
6 months turned into a year, then two, then three. I learnt to dive in the Indian Andaman Islands, did my Dive Master on Koh Tao, and became a Dive Instructor in Phuket. I led dive expeditions on the remote islands of Indonesia, ran a dive school on Koh Phi Phi, and did a stint as a dive guide on the Great Barrier Reef. This helped fill my coffers, working the high seasons and then using the money to travel the rest of the year. It was on one such trip to Singapore that I discovered Web Design was a thing.
Arriving at the hostel late one evening, there were only two other people still awake. A British guy and a French dude in lycra who I later learned had just cycled to Singapore from Paris. We got chatting over beer and the British guy said that he was a Web Designer. At the time I didn’t know you could actually create web pages, let alone make a living from it. The British guy explained that it was super easy. All you needed to do was learn this thing called HTML and you could make tonnes of money in London. This was in the hight of the first dot on bubble, allowing my newfound friend to work for 6-months and travel the rest.
As somebody who’d always had an affinity for computers—I was the first person in my school with a ZX81 and would regularly spend my lunchtimes playing snake on the BBC
micro while everybody else played footie outside. So I set about learning web design from sites like Ask Dr Web, using cracked copies of Dreamweaver and Photoshop from coverdisks of tech magazines. The rest, you could say, is history.
Somehow I’ve managed to build a career that involves a fair amount of travel. Last year I visited Singapore, Wellington, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Chicago, Berlin, Amsterdam, Norway, Stockholm and New York for work. I’ve also visited Rome, LA, Palm Springs, Vegas, and The Maldives for pleasure. All in all I’ve had a spectacular year or travel!
This year is also shaping up to be a fun year. I have work trips to Copenhagen, Seattle, Seoul and Japan arranged for the spring. I have a couple of potential speaking engagements in India and South Africa which I’m waiting to confirm, and am tentatively planning a holiday to Ibiza, a road tip in the US, and a long weekend in Marrakesh in the second half of the year.
While I’m not a millennial, I think I have millennial sensibilities—possibly a product of growing up on the Web. For instance I’ve never been a huge fan of acquiring stuff. My movies are through Netflix, my music through Spotify and my transport (when not walking or using public transport) is through City Car Club. As such, the bulk of my disposable income is spent on renting services and buying memories, be they food, travel or live entertainment. So yes, I’m somebody who would rather have a nice brunch of avocado on toast on the weekend, then save up for a 65 inch OLED flat panel TV or statement car (I should add that this isn’t to dismiss anybody who does want to spend their money on physical possessions, it’s just not how I’m wired).
I feel incredibly privileged by all the travel I’m able to do, and can’t imagine what 12 year old me would think of the life I’ve somehow made for myself. However I’d like to think it’s everything he dreamed it would be, and more.