10 Years On The Road: Top 10 Highlights

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 Top 10 Highlights of 10 Years of Travel

For this post I’m going to look at my top 10 highlights that I’ve had whilst travelling the world. In 10 years I’ve been to more countries, seen more things and experienced more stuff than many people do in a lifetime.

I remember emailed my parents after being on the road for 6 months saying the same thing.

This isn’t to brag, but I have done an incredible amount of stuff all over the world over 10 years and picking just 10 highlights (because it’s a nice round number to go with the number of years) was surprisingly tough. I’ve thought it through and these are my highlights:

The kindness of strangers

I have countless examples of people being kind to me all over the world. I couldn’t list all of them from 10 years of travelling the world but there are some that stand out. The girl that bought me KFC in Bengaluru, India then showed me the city that afternoon. The Malaysian guy that let me stay on the floor of his hotel in the Philippines as his work was paying anyway and I didn’t have anywhere to stay. The guy that took me into his home in Papua New Guinea. The family friends that let me stay with them in Australia for weeks on end when I was broke and a long way from home. The Samoans that let us join their church meeting and fed us as one of their own. The guy that lent me money when I had lost my wallet in Nicaragua. The friend that let me borrow her car for the weekend in my time in need in New Zealand.

But that doesn’t even touch the surface of the people that have bought me meals, given me a place to stay, offered me a lift, have shown me their world, or even something as simple as explaining their culture to me and teaching me so much in the process.

They say that the world is a scary place. It is also the friendliest place I’ve been.

No matter where you are in the world, there are good people willing to offer help and support to anyone whether friend, family or stranger.

I only hope I can repay that back at some point in some way.

North Korea

I’m still known by a few people as “that guy that went to North Korea”. And I’m so glad that I did make the trip in 2019.

I was travelling to Japan and South Korea when my eyes caught something further north. I remember a conversation I had had with someone in a hostel in Beijing a few years previously. I pulled out the notes in my phone and got the contact details of a tour company that ran tours to North Korea and booked it.

I didn’t tell anyone for a while for obvious reasons, only letting my brother know a few days before I went.

I then spent 4 days and 3 nights in one of the most closed off countries in the world.

How can I describe North Korea? Strangely normal.

There are people going about their day as you would expect. Births, weddings and funerals happen. People have jobs and families.

The tour is like a school trip, you can go where you are told but nowhere else. You need to meet at a certain time and have boundaries. But it isn’t as strict as many expect. It is one of the most unique places I have been and I would certainly go back.

Riding the Iron Ore train in Mauritania

Travelling through Mauritania was one of the most raw travel experiences I’ve had in recent years.

The desert nation in west Africa if rarely travelled and has limited infrastructure and few people speak English.

I managed to travel around it for a week taking in some incredible sites and riding the infamous iron ore train, something that is no longer strictly allowed to be done.

Taking a train through the Sahara desert, watching the sun set over the second largest monolith in the world, watching camels pass by in the middle of nowhere, watching Bedouin families survive in the harshest of conditions, all whilst rattling along sitting on top of carriages filled with iron ore.

It ticked all the boxes of pure adventure, adrenaline, unique, culture experience, crazy and so much more.

You can read about what happened on the Iron Ore train here.

Watching sport

Many people may not know but I was, and still am, sports mad.

My degree was in sport science and I worked in sport for a few years before embarking on my travels. But that didn’t mean the sport had to end.

My first foray into international sport was my trip to watch the World Athletics Championships in Beijing in 2015. Since then I’ve travelled specifically to or just happened to be in the country to watch:

Road tripping Australia in my van

When I first got to Australia, I stayed with some friends and at the end of their road, a campervan was for sale. Although that particular car was out of my price range, it sparked an idea. A little seed was planted which soon sprouted.

Within a few weeks I had bought my own mini van that had a bed and cupboards in the back of it and set off north from Sydney. I made it to Coffs Harbour to work, to rebuild my savings for travel and then made my way north, all the way up the East Coast of Australia to Cairns.

I then drove back down to Coffs Harbour, then to Sydney and then inland to Parkes, a small town in New South Wales, where the van died on me.

I still managed to road trip with other people in many other parts of Australia, but the time in my own van, where I could pull over and sleep anywhere on the side of the road, was the ultimate in freedom travelling.

Taking a helicopter flight in New Zealand

I got a job working for a helicopter company in New Zealand as part of my working holiday visa there. It was beyond my wildest dreams and I only got the job because I knew someone else there.

On my first day with the company, I took a helicopter flight up onto the glacier where it landed and we got the chance to get out and walk around on the snow before flying back down. Customers would pay hundreds of dollars to do that flight, and I did it for free because I worked there.

Over the course of three years with the company, I took countless helicopter flights, I took a helicopter home from work one day, I did a heli hike onto the glacier, I took a helicopter flight down to Wanaka over the Southern Alps which lasted hours and I took a helicopter onto the glacier so that I could spend a night in a mountain hut.

It’s a shame that I took it for granted at the time towards the end, but I will always remember the excitement of that first flight and all the other incredible flights I took after that.

Flying first class

When I started travelling 10 years ago, I was the ultimate budget backpacker looking to save every penny that I could. Even when I started as a digital nomad, I still travelled on budget airlines and always chose the cheapest flights possible, even if that did mean some horrendous timings and getting to the airport at 4am! Heck, I even had a membership to Wizz Air as I flew with them a few times in the early days of being a digital nomad.

But then I discovered credit card points and how to get points and perks with being savvy. It has allowed me to purchase some business class flights with points, which has then changed my perspective on flying altogether. I will now pay for the flight I want instead of always going for the cheapest option (within reason!).

After saving up all of those points, I managed to book myself a first class ticket from Mexico back to London, something I couldn’t have ever imagined doing a couple of years previously. Could I afford the USD$6000 that it should have cost me? Not at all.

But it didn’t cost me anywhere near that much.

Was it as good as I expected? It was a million times better than I expected and it was the one time I wish that the flight would never end and we could go around a few more times.

You can read about my first class flight here.

Diving the Great Barrier Reef

Since first SCUBA diving in my mid teens, to getting my Divemaster certification in 2010, diving in the Great Barrier Reef had been a bucket list dream of mine.

Whilst I was travelling the East Coast of Australia, I managed to make that happen. Twice!

The first time was when I was in the Whitsundays. It was a shallow dive but unfortunately much of the coral was white and the sea life was good, but not what I was expecting. The Great Barrier Reef had a reputation to uphold!

But further north, when I reached Cairns, I booked a trip that sailed out for 2 hours to some of the outer reefs.

The diving there was spectacular with clear blue water, reef sharks, colourful coral and everything I had dreamed of the Great Barrier Reef being.

With coral reefs changing all over the world, I would love to go back and see if it is still as good as I remember, but by going back, I may be part of the problem.

Being the first white man in the caves in Papua New Guinea

There are some moments in travel that are purely unique. Something that is totally unexpected. An experience you can’t get with any tour, no matter what you book.

I’ve written about how I met Francis on a bus in Papua New Guinea and ended up staying with him for nearly a week.

But it was when I visited some of his relatives in a remote village that it really struck me as something incredible. The bus pulled over on the side of the road and we had to hike through the jungle for a while until we came to a clearing with houses and shelters made from the rainforest. One of the boys led the men to a new cave they had recently found that had fresh water in it, something that these guys had to search for regularly as there were no taps or running water in the village.

After crawling into the caves with torchlight held by the local kids, I reached the fresh cool water and jumped in. That in itself is amazing, but when one of the villagers explained to Francis that not many people had been in here and I was the first white man, it really blew my mind.

I wasn’t just travelling any more, I felt like an explorer, doing something that had literally never been done before.

Phuket Vegetarian Festival

I knew nothing about the Phuket Vegetarian Festival when my company booked us all flights to go to a company retreat on the Thai island of Phuket. But somebody else at the company had heard of it so we stuck around and saw one of the most incredible festivities I have ever witnessed.

The festival starts with vegetarian food stalls being set up all over the island and everyone wearing white as a sign of purity. As the week went on, a procession would go through town with devotees throwing firecrackers at the feet of pilgrims. They walked on in a trance like state, oblivious to the pain.

At the end of the week, at 6am on a Sunday morning, pilgrims visited a shrine and had pierced themselves with skewers, swords and a whole lot more as a sign of their devotion.

Read the entire post on the Phuket Vegetarian Festival and check out the photos for one of the most extreme things I have ever seen.

What else?

There are genuinely so many incredible experiences I’ve had around the world over the last 10 years that I could probably list 100 things that have been amazing.

Doing a lot of hiking in New Zealand took me far off into nature and something I loved. Seeing incredible world famous structures like the Pyramids of Giza, the Great Wall of China and the Taj Mahal have to be up there. Seeing sunrise over Uluru was a moment I will never forget. Sliding down a volcano in Nicaragua is something I never thought I’d say. Staying in a cabin in the woods in Estonia for a month in winter experiencing temperatures as low as -17. Seeing a nuclear weapons base in Ukraine (before the war) and pushing a button that could have ended the world if pushed 30 years previously. Unexpectedly falling in love with Malaysia more and more every time I go back. Or even something as simple as visiting the same riverside bar in Timisoara and having a gin and tonic in the evening sunshine day after day.

Any bad things?

There are also a bunch of negatives that I wish didn’t happen but I call it character building that they did.

Being recently broken up with, recently jobless and sitting on the side of the road as your van breaks down on you in Australia. Losing my job in New Zealand and having to move back to London during Covid. Accidentally taking a picture of a military building and having the army go through my possessions in the Middle East. Losing my wallet in Nicaragua and then using my emergency cash to get home. Getting severely ill whilst travelling in South East Asia and losing a lot of weight. My friend driving his car into a river in Australia and having to climb out the windows to get out.

And the scariest moment was getting detained by the religious police in Iraq.

You’ll have to buy me a beer if you want that story.

What’s next?

Without getting too philosophical, nobody knows what’s going to happen next.

If you had asked me 10 years ago, before I got on my first flight to leave the country, what I would get up to over the next 6 months, I could not have even dreamed of telling you.

Expand that to 10 years and younger Dan would have laughed at the ridiculousness.

I’d like to continue working remotely so I can see more of the world. I’d like the visit the seventh continent and see some penguins. I’d like to continue watching sport around the world. I’d like to become close to fluent in another language. I’d like to continue doing at least one silly thing per year, which normally means travelling to an off the beaten path or “dangerous” destination.

And I’d like to experience more things that I couldn’t actually imagine of right now.

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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.