Travel

Many travel writers will tell you they were born to travel. For me, the ‘bug’ evolved over the course of typical Mud festivalstudent trip to Thailand, prior to the final year of my degree. Since then there’s rarely been a day in which I didn’t daydream about another amazing journey: a boat trip down the Ganges followed by a book describing life in the riverside villages, or a month long walk to a four-hut town in Siberia, living off the land. Most of them, of course, will never happen, but I’ve learnt that travel is also a state of mind. In living and working abroad I’ve come to accept and enjoy the varied and vibrant cultures on offer around the world, and also to appreciate the beauty of my own varied up bringing.

The exotic is always a draw, but it’s the places closest to my heart that I like to write about the most. Time ‘on the road’ quickly teaches the traveler that an ‘ordinary’ experience in one persons eyes is magical in the eyes of another. My time in Seoul (South Korea) is especially precious to me, and is where I finally ‘came out’ with a lifelong desire to write, and produced my first writing for public consumption. It’s also the place I like to scribble about the most, alongside India, whose sites and smells never fail to shock and astound me. London and Dublin, cities I’ve spent sufficient time in to see them as very ordinary, however, are equally evocative material to others, and also feature heavily in my portfolio.

They say that any normal life provides the experiences necessary to write 1000 novels. Equally, every day on the road – or day near home, when used well – holds dozens of articles. Life is just too short to put every pothole, leach, crumbling hotel room and night sleeping under the stars into the literary form they warrant, but that won’t stop me trying.

Countries I’ve traveled in (an ever expanding list – countries in red I’ve also lived in): Austria, Belgium, Bosnia, Cambodia, China, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, El Salvador, France, Germany, Gibraltar, Greece, Holland, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Nepal, North Korea, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Tanzania, Thailand, Turkey, UK, USA, Vatican City.

Due to copyright issues, only a small sample of my travel articles can be displayed on this site. These can be accessed via the links below. If you are an editor and require further writing samples, please feel free to request them through my contact page.

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