10 Years On The Road: The Long Story

9th June 2015.

I left my home in the UK to go travelling for a few months.

10 years later I’m still travelling and have never gone back to live in the UK.

This post is part of a series recounting what’s happened, what’s changed and what’s stayed the same during those 10 years.

The Long Story

I’ve always wanted to travel.

It started properly in Australia as a 14 year old visiting friends and family. I heard stories of them backpacking and experiencing what seemed like exotic places to those teenage ears. When I returned to England, I watched TV shows by Micheal Palin, Bruce Parry and Ray Mears heading off to places all over the world.

I formed a route and a list of places I wanted to go whilst still in my teens.

During university, I spent a summer working as a SCUBA diver in Malaysia. My first proper trip. Staying in a hostel for the first time. Travelling with a backpack on buses, boats and with locals in their cars. It was just a taste, but I knew I wanted more.

I had the travel bug and I was hooked.

Life got in the way with university and career plans, but then I saved up enough from working three jobs to book a flight.

To Mumbai.

On 9th June 2015.

Where I’ve been so far…

The first hurdle

I got to the airport and almost wasn’t allowed on my first flight as I didn’t have a ticket leaving India, the first country I was visiting. All my months of planning were almost scuppered and I hadn’t left the UK yet. I hastily booked a flight and was allowed to board.

I landed in Mumbai after an overnight flight, tired, jet-lagged and with a hell of a culture shock. I remember being in a tuk tuk from the airport, driving down a motorway with three lanes marked in white paint on the road, but with eight lanes of traffic somehow moving through the Indian heat.

I spent 6 weeks in India in total, travelling from Mumbai, up to Aurangabad, Jalgaon, Delhi and into the Himalayas where I joined a tour with three others exploring majestic peaks for a fortnight. It was my first real taste of getting off the beaten track and I loved it.

The buddhist culture was a stark contrast to the Hinduism in the rest of India.

I loved my time exploring the remote Himalayan region, but despite seeing incredible landmarks like the Golden Temple in Amritsar and the Taj Mahal, I didn’t really enjoy my time in India which still seems to shock people to this day.

From India, I headed to Myanmar, a lesser travelled country that was just opening up to tourism and backpacking when I visited in 2015. Unfortunately, this has now reversed its course. I cut my stay short as I got caught up in the monsoon that hit the region so went to Bangkok to let off steam. Staying for two weeks near Koh San Road, the infamous party area of South East Asia was fantastic for younger Dan but by the end, I couldn’t wait to leave.

I took a flight to Beijing to see the World Athletic Championships and my love of sport and travelling married up for the first time. I spent a month travelling through China in a line down the middle of the country to Xian, Chengdu, Kunming and finished up with Tiger Leaping Gorge before heading into Laos.

Laos reminded me that I was back on the backpacker trail and I was suddenly in dorms filled with western tourists and taking convenient shuttle buses from hostel to hostel.

This style of travel continued through Laos, into Vietnam, across Cambodia and back into southern Thailand visiting some of the more touristy islands.

I left Koh Phi Phi, a party island where my room mates would be getting in at 6am as I was getting up to go SCUBA diving, I realised that what I was doing wasn’t for me.

I travel to see new cultures and beautiful sights, not just to party with other westerners and get on private tourist shuttles.

On the boat leaving the island, someone came up to me to sell me a ticket to my next destination:

“Where are you going?” He asked.

“I don’t know, just south,” I replied.

“Well I need to sell you a ticket to somewhere”

“Ok then, to the nearest bus station”

I’m still not convinced he needed to sell me an onward ticket but there we go.

I got a taxi to the bus station, then a local bus to Hat Yai with plans to get a train into Malaysia. I missed the connection so had to spend a night in Hat Yai, a small border city in the south of Thailand, way off the tourist trail.

I stayed in a small guesthouse with a local owner and a Spanish girl talking about everything under the sun and was a blessing after previous months of normal backpacker chat.

I made it to Malaysia and was back in love with the place I had been to 5 years before. A language I could speak and a culture that I understood. I toured Penang, the Cameron Highlands and stayed in one of my hidden gems, Pulau Pangkor.

I took a side trip to the Philippines with mixed results, loving Siquijor and Apo Island but was left disappointed by Boracay and Cebu before visiting the city state of Singapore for the first time as a stop off before heading to Australia.

The long chapter

I landed in Australia just before Christmas with a year long working holiday visa in my hand which allowed me to stay in the country for an entire year.

I stayed with friends for a few weeks then in a hostel over Christmas and new year where I met up with school friends to spend Christmas Day on Bondi Beach and New Years Eve watching the fireworks over the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

My first bucket list item was ticked off.

I bought a van that had a bed and shelves in the back and in early 2016, I made my way north up the east coast of Australia.

I stopped in Coffs Harbour to find work as I had heard that the blueberry picking season was starting and it was a good opportunity to earn some cash. Within 24 hours of finding a hostel, I got my first pay in more than 6 months with $100 cash in hand.

My visa in Australia was for one year, but if I undertook 3 months of agricultural work, I could extend it for another year on top. Cash in hand work doesn’t count so I found more legitimate work on another farm picking zucchini’s (courgettes).

The work was tough but over time I came to enjoy the physicality of working on a farm and working with a good crew around me to lift those spirits.

The 5.30am starts meant we were finished by 3pm and that meant there was time for surfing in the afternoon down at Park Beach, going to the gym, or socialising in the hostel. I was living the Australian Dream.

After 5 months of working and saving up the funds, I moved on again. I lived with family friends in Brisbane for 2 months working on a carnival and taking part in a medical trial to earn some more more cash before taking my minivan up the east coast of Australia on the traditional backpacking route I had first heard of many years before.

I stopped in Noosa, Fraser Island, Agnes Water, Airline Beach, Cape Hillsborough and finally Cairns making the journey up through Queensland over the course of a few weeks, sometimes sleeping in my van, sometimes staying in hostels.

I hit another item on my Australian bucket list of diving the Great Barrier Reef. I actually dived it twice, once in the Whitsundays which was disappointing, and once again in Cairns. The experience of diving after a two hour boat ride away from the city on pristine reefs was incredible.

Once I got to Cairns, I needed to find work again. My funds were running low and, although I received some tax back, it wouldn’t sustain me for long. I had always fancied working in the outback but didn’t know what to look for.

In the end, I decided to drive back down the coast, over 2000 miles from Cairns to Coffs Harbour, to meet back up with my girlfriend, after I had solo travelled for a stint. I got a job on a farm again for a few weeks, before taking my then girlfriend to her farm job in the middle of New South Wales.

It was on this trip that was one of my lowest points of my travels. I broke up with my girlfriend on the trip, a kangaroo decided to jump in front of my van and damage a lot of it and a day or so later my van wouldn’t start at all.

I was homeless, carless, jobless and now alone.

I haven’t sulked that much whilst travelling, but in this moment, I was on the side of the road, with steam coming out of my engine in the middle of nowhere like a car breakdown advert, having a bit of a sulk.

I pulled out my phone, went on Gumtree to search for jobs and applied for one that was about 10km away. The stars were aligning as I got a call back a few hours later and started my job in a bar not long after.

The country pub

I had never heard of Parkes in New South Wales before I had gone to Australia and I doubt many people would have. It’s a small mining town about 6 hours west of Sydney. The nearest towns are between 45 minutes and an hour north, south, east and west of it.

I worked in the Cambridge hotel, a local country pub serving schooners of cold beer during the day, having Thai food and Aussie pub meals in the evening and having a DJ and half the towns population of 18-25 year olds visiting on Friday and Saturday nights.

It was unlike anywhere I had ever worked before. But I loved it.

I was told early on that I was a good worker “because I could count” so they obviously had low expectations.

I spent 6 months working behind that bar in Parkes, serving more cowboys than I could count. I stuck around through Christmas and New Year, through the yearly Elvis festival (where 10,000 Elvis fans descend upon the town. Yes, really!) and through to the annual races.

It was a hell of an experience for this London city boy to live out in the middle of nowhere in what is a totally different culture. The slang, the way of life, the distance between everything, all of it was foreign to me.

After saving up some funds after a lot of overtime in the many months in the pub, I ended up going to Melbourne to continue my travels. Fortunately, I arrived in time for the F1, the comedy festival and a food festival in the city.

Melbourne is one of those cities where there is always something going on. I loved the city and it is a place I could easily live in.

I made friends with some backpackers through Facebook and decided to road trip with them from Melbourne to Adelaide and up through the centre of Australia.

By the time I had reached Adelaide, I had had enough of the guys I was travelling with. I didn’t click with them and they argued between themselves. Sometimes you have to cut your losses and start again. I met some new people with a similar plan. We got as far as the Flinders Range in South Australia before he decided to drive his car into a river, flooding the engine and ruining our plans.

A long bus journey back to Adelaide made me think that I would never get to see the Northern Territories. But in my hostel one morning, I was looking at flights and a cheap one was available a few hours later. I hopped on a bus to the airport, landed in Alice Springs and had a tour booked to Uluru the next day.

Uluru, or Ayers Rock as it was formerly called, was the final destination on my Australia bucket list. Watching it change colour during sunrise and sunset was a surreal experience. It was a typical part of Australia and the final thing I really wanted to see in the country.

Another long road trip up to Darwin, via Kakadu and Lichfield National Parks then a cross country flight to Brisbane for something silly.

Off the beaten track (off any track)

Against friends wishes, I flew from Brisbane to Papua New Guinea.

Not many 26 year old backpackers go to Papua New Guinea but I like to be the exception and this was the first time I truly went somewhere this untraveled.

I’ve written pretty extensively about my experience in Papua New Guinea so will only touch on it here.

With my trusty Lonely Planet guide by my side, I spent 10 days in the country hiking up volcanoes in Rabaul, SCUBA diving Japanese WW2 wrecks, taking a boat to New Ireland province, staying with a local family and exploring caves in a local village.

It was an incredible experience.

As the Lonely Planet guide was for “Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands“, I made a quick detour to a country where only 137 British people had visited the year before. I bumped into a Brit whilst in the National Museum of the Solomon Islands and spent the rest of my few days there SCUBA diving the Iron Bottom Sound, the site of one of the most fierce air and naval battles in the Pacific in World War 2.

I flew back to Brisbane, then back to Parkes to work at the bar a bit more before flying back to London to surprise my parents having not seen them in 2 years.

After the UK, I returned to Perth in Australia and got a job folding bed sheets in a recycling plant and then in another country pub in Merriden. But this time, I didn’t get along with the owner, the pay was poor, there was nothing to do in the town and I didn’t meet anyone to pass the time. It is one of the few jobs I’ve ever had where I actively hated my experience there. I left after just a month of working there.

I took the opportunity to join the WhyNotBus on one of their first ever trips heading up the west coast of Australia. Travelling up the coast in a converted school bus, setting our tents every night and exploring the vast but beautiful Western Australia is an experience I’ll never forget and I’ve made lifelong friends from that trip.

The land of the long white cloud

After my two year working holiday visa in Australia came to an end, I didn’t want to go home.

So I did the only sensible thing and got another working holiday visa for New Zealand.

A friend I had met in Western Australia had offered me a job working with helicopters in a small place called Franz Josef on the West Coast of the South Island. I had never heard of that place before but I jumped at it. When else would I get to work with helicopters flying over glaciers?

From what started as a short term role as a junior loader, taking bookings and then taking customers to the helicopter for their flight, I worked my way up as a flight follower, being on the radios to the helicopters as they flew, and then to a team leader, managing the day to day operations of the helicopter base.

For the first time in my life, I felt like I was on a career ladder, doing something that I enjoyed and that had a progression to it. Almost every other job I had had up until that point had been something short term where the main goal was to get some money so that I could travel again.

It was also a point where it felt like I was “living” in New Zealand and not just travelling around. Even after spending two years in Australia, it was never a home as I never felt I lived there, but was always just passing through.

As the tourism work was seasonal, I was fortunate enough to take some long holidays in the low season. My first year took me around the Pacific Islands, first to Samoa which I immediately fell in love with, Fiji, Vanuatu and then a workaway experience in New Caledonia where I helped this very strange guy build a wall in his garden as part of a permaculture project he was creating in his garden. It was a good experience and I got to do some amazing things, but I wouldn’t jump back into it.

My second long holiday was to see the 2019 Rugby World Cup in Japan. I didn’t want to go all that way just to visit one country, so I scrolled across Google Maps until I realised I could go to South Korea as well.

And then I scrolled a bit further north.

My mind raced back to when I was staying in a hostel in Beijing many years before. A guy I met had just returned from North Korea and he gave me the details of a tour company. I looked them up and booked a 4 day, 3 night tour from Beijing to Pyongyang and around to the south of the country as well.

Even to this day, I’m still known amongst some friends as “that guy that went to North Korea” but to be honest, it was a strangely normal experience. I saw everything that I was expecting but it was like a school trip where you have to stay within certain confines and meet back as a group at certain times.

You can read more about it here.

After North Korea, I returned, via China, to South Korea. I loved my time in Seoul and it became one of my favourite cities. Japan was incredible as well, watching England play rugby and travelling around the country by plane and bullet train.

I stayed in New Zealand for three years, first on my working holiday visa and then on work visas, until Covid happened and then I lost my job in tourism as the country went into a strict lockdown with closed borders and no tourists being allowed to enter.

At the end of 2020, I moved back home to the UK to do the “proper thing” and get the city job and rent somewhere in London. I didn’t last long.

Digital nomadism

I started working for my Dad in construction whilst looking for a job and at the same time, doing an SEO course and starting this blog.

In July 2021 I started at my current company as an Apprentice Content Manager and have worked my way up to Senior Content Manager over the following years. The nature of the work means that at out peak, we had 53 employees working from 29 different countries. It also allows me to work from anywhere in the world and I have taken full advantage of that and to date I’ve worked in 38 different countries.

My first trip was to Ukraine. A friend wanted to visit Chernobyl and we planned to go together. I booked my flight but he couldn’t make it for another couple of months. I spent two weeks in Kiev, my first taste of a former communist country and really enjoyed my time there. I then flew to Tbilisi to spend a few weeks in Georgia, including heading up to Kazbegi to hike the mountains close to the Russian border.

I remember messaging my parents as I was waiting in a bus station on a small mashrutka minibus in Tbilisi as the rain started to fall and realised how happy made me in a very strange sort of way. I hadn’t done “proper” travelling like that in a very long time since before the pandemic.

I criss crossed Europe again, heading to Krakow to meet my mate, visit Auschwitz, then cross the border into Ukraine to see Lviv, Kiev, Chernobyl and then road trip south through the country to Odessa, unfortunately all names you now hear on the news for the wrong reasons.

A train to the least visited country in Europe and a few days exploring Moldova and Transnistria followed which started my quest to visit lesser visited regions and countries of the world. Transnistria was my first unrecognised state and talking to the people there, where they still live in a Soviet style way with Lenin statues on street corners and the hammer and sickle on many buildings.

After a few months of pretty intense travel, combined with working 40 hours per week, I spent 5 weeks in Istanbul to chill out and stay in one place for a considerable time. I really enjoyed the city, having my local kebab man, a gym under my apartment building and wandering the ancient city streets never knowing what would be around the corner. It’s a place I can’t wait to return to.

I flew to Cairo to spend my birthday waking up with a view of the Pyramids then head south to Luxor for more Egyptian temples.

I returned home for Christmas then spent the next few months crossing continents and returning to the UK for various weddings that had been pushed back because of the pandemic. It started with cricket in Barbados, football in the United Arab Emirates, a stint in Oman and Bahrain. It continued with some weeks in Albania, a country that I fell in love with right away, then down to Africa for some time in Morocco and a trip to Mauritania to ride on top of the Iron Ore Train, one of the craziest experiences I’ve done.

I spent late summer in Bansko, one of the few places I have been that I would consider a digital nomad hub, a place that has a number of coworking spaces and accommodation options for digital nomads to meet, socialise and network together. I enjoyed it there and it was great to meet other likeminded people, however I do much prefer travelling to off the beaten path destinations.

I took a 16 hour overnight bus from Bulgaria to Croatia to watch another football match and then fell in love with a small city in Romania called Timisoara, a place I had never heard of but was like a fairytale.

Back down under

I hit my fifth continent of the year with a trip to Australia to see more cricket, as a I returned to Sydney for the first time in 5 years, it strangely felt like a second home. I saw cricket matches in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne and caught up with friends in each city I visited.

I hopped “across the ditch” to New Zealand and roadtripped the North Island for the first time, again staying with friends I had made during my three years of living there. For all my love of New Zealand, after travelling extensive to so many countries in a short space of time, it suddenly felt very far away.

I was sitting in Christchurch, one of my favourite cities and realised just how far away I was (and how expensive flights were) from going to another place. It made me appreciate my time I had when living there, but also made me question whether I would ever want to move back there permanently, something which had been an idea of mine in previous years.

I ended the year in Malaysia, probably my favourite country, and one I’ve been to a number of times. I stayed in Penang then Langkawi, for a month each, eating all the food, enjoying all the beaches and meeting all the people that made that trip special.

A month in Taiwan followed before I returned to Malaysia and Kuching in Sarawak that I used as a base to explore the rainforests and nature of one of the most amazing states in the country. Just a short journey away from the city I managed to visit national parks and see proboscis monkeys and orang utans which were truly incredible experiences. I took a flight into the heart of Borneo and spent a few days exploring Mulu national park with caves so big and famous, they feature on a David Attenborough documentary.

For the first time in my travels, my parents came a joined me for a stint in Malaysia. They knew it was my favourite country and they had never been to Asia before so they took the leap. I acted as tour guide and booked their trip to Kuala Lumpur, Malaca, Singapore, Penang and Langkawi. We explored ancient temples, hidden gems, historic forts, modern cities and relaxed on the beaches of Langkawi. We also ate all the street food mixed in with a couple of western meals to cater to their palate. For people that don’t normally travel to multiple destinations on a holiday and to a region they hadn’t been to before, where squat toilets and wet markets became their new normal, I’m proud of how they came out and travelled in an adventurous way.

I spent a month each in Copenhagen and Bansko again before being flown out by my company to Phuket in Thailand to meet my colleagues I had only ever seen on Zoom in person for the first time. It was a great experience, not only meeting them and the camaraderie we gained from working in person, but also exploring Phuket, visiting the old town, the elephant sanctuaries and the Phuket Vegetarian Festival which is one of the most incredible things I have seen.

I then undertook one of my first speaking engagements at Langkawi Nomadcon and went to a few other conferences at this time. It is something I definitely want to do more of in future.

From South East Asia, I went to do my silly thing of the year. I flew from Phuket to Baghdad to start my two week trip around Iraq. I actually went to a coworking space for a few days of it and was amazed to see younger, modern Iraqis working in the tech field in these coworking spaces, hopefully making their country better in the future. I’m probably one of a small number of people that has been a digital nomad in Iraq.

I spent 9 days travelling around the country, one that had been in the news for all the wrong reasons during my lifetime, from Baghdad, Babylon, Karbala and up to Mosul, Sulemaniyah and Erbil. Each city had something different, from feeling like bustling cities, to some that have only just defeated ISIS a few years previously, to one city where there were bars selling alcohol to myself and locals alike.

Whatever I thought of Iraq before I went, I left with totally different impressions of it. And that is the main reason that I travel, to challenge my perceptions.

Short trips to Kuwait and Qatar followed and then I joined a friend in Tallinn over winter. For someone that loves warm weather, going to the capital of Estonia in January where I faced temperatures of -17 degrees wasn’t on my to do list, but I loved the experience. It really pushed me out of my comfort zone and forced me to wear all of the clothes that I own!

I followed a month in the city with a month in the cabin in the woods in Saaremaa, an island off Estonia that I will admit that I had never heard of before visiting. I thought my geography knowledge was pretty good, but some places still surprise me.

The isolation was beautiful, snow falling on the roof of the shed that contained the firewood I would have to collect to light to fire to stay warm that night. A sauna, outside in its own hut, a must have in that part of the world. A 20 minute drive over icy, snowy roads to go to the shops. All of it foreign to me, but I enjoyed it all for the short period.

A brief road trip through Estonia followed, then a few days in Riga, the capital of Latvia, before I went to what I thought would be an up and coming destination which I have since been proved right.

Ohrid, the lakeside town in North Macedonia, was a beautiful town with mountains surrounding the lake, the old town perched on a cliffside and the famous St John Kaneo church sitting on an outcrop. Its a stunning destination that has attracted Yugoslavian tourists (and travellers from former Yugoslav states) for many years, but I think it will boom as a destination attracting digital nomads and Western European tourists in the years to come.

I returned to Albania, a country I have already declared my love for but seeing a different part of it in Vlora and Berat before spending a month travelling around the Caribbean to watch yet another Cricket World Cup whilst continuing to work remotely.

Hablo español?

With all my travels to this point, I had seen so much of the world.

But there was a big region that I had yet to even touch foot in.

Latin America.

After the Cricket World Cup, I took a flight to Panama to start what I expected to be, a year or so journey seeing Central and South America for the first time.

Despite taking Spanish lessons in Panama City and exploring all over the country, I never quite enjoyed the place. This feeling remained as I went up through Costa Rica and into Nicaragua. I was there to tick off places I hadn’t been rather than going because I really wanted to be there.

After a backpacker bar crawl in Leon, Nicaragua, I lost my wallet which left me in a strange town on the far side of the world without my ID, credit cards and down some money.

Luckily I had some emergency cash and an extra wallet with some extra credit cards I could use. With no cash and not enjoying the region, I flew to Mexico City and then to South East Asia again via London to go back to somewhere I knew I would enjoy.

Life is too short to be somewhere I don’t want to be, especially when I have the freedom to be anywhere in the world. I would love to go back to Central America to travel it slowly, but living there as a digital nomad wasn’t for me.

I’d been meaning to slow down my travels for a while, and this gave me the opportunity to really do that. I returned to Langkawi in Malaysia, I place I enjoyed the first time I went there, and spent 6 months in a basic apartment, relaxing on the beach, joining a gym and living a very affordable lifestyle meaning I could save some money during my stay.

I still took a weekend trip to Hong Kong for my birthday and spent some time in Hoi An as a bit of a break between my long stay.

But other than that, it was so nice to spend my weekends relaxing on a beach, updating this blog or maybe just doing nothing instead of the constant planning and exploring that full time travel normally contains.

I flew from Langkawi to Wroclaw to watch Chelsea win another European trophy and after all this talk of travelling and never being home, I am actually sitting in London as I celebrate my 10 year anniversary where I will be for about a month, the longest I have stayed in the UK since the pandemic.

What’s next?

After 10 years of travel, many people think I have seen it all.

But there is so much more to see and do around the world. Experiences to be had. People to meet. Countries to visit.

Whilst I have a remote job, I still plan to continue my travels, wherever that will take me. Whether that lasts forever or just another few years, who knows.

There is plenty more of the world to see and I aim to see as much as I can.

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Dan

Dan is an avid traveller from London. His first big adventure was in 2010 living in Malaysia for 3 months. He has been on the road almost constantly since 2015 travelling to destinations that aren’t on the mainstream tourist trail and working full time and travelling since 2021.