I have been travelling for as long as I can remember. My first memories of a desire to travel was reading Herge’s Adventures of TinTin. Darkest Peru seemed like an ideal adventure playground for a young boy explorer.
I contracted more than malaria when I moved with my parents to Ibadan in West Nigeria. It was there, travelling with my father up country to remote areas, that I was bitten by the wanderlust bug. Adventure travel is an area I have always loved.
I flew home on furlough and later to boarding school on my own. In those days there were few flights from Lagos and if you didn’t fly BOAC you usually had a stopover in Europe. I had already visited Rome and Amsterdam with my parents using “Europe on $5 a day” so when I flew home on my own I decided to spent two days in Geneva. A year later I flew home to boarding school and, feeling very brave, decided to visit Cold War Berlin (More on that visit in a later post).
University, a job as a teacher and a young family followed before I took up serious travelling again – to France this time with a caravan. I wrote an illustrated article about our first trip which was published in Caravan Magazine and haven’t looked back since.
