I am one half of a well-travelled couple who, since drawing back from full time work, have continued to travel to many parts of the world. We are ‘slow’ travellers, taking our time and allowing ourselves to absorb a little of the atmosphere, the character of a place as well as its cultural and historic offerings. As we move through our sixties, in our travels we also need to take account of certain constraints on our mobility.
The writings in this blog take a measured, partial and discursive view of those travels, sharing places we have enjoyed. They also seek to share thoughts about the physical limitations we have to manage and information on how we deal with them. There are many excellent websites for disabled people and people with impairments which mean they cannot travel without mobility aids but there are also many who, like us, have what I call mobility constraints. This means we have to think about issues of distance to be covered and ease of access because of limitations on our ability to stand, walk and climb. For more detail about how this will be approached in pieces about individual travel destinations see the section on Mobility Constraints.
The travels are also a catalyst for my photography. So part of this website is devoted to photographic essays that emerge from those travels.
Our Background
I am a reasonably active white British (my own choice of ethnic designation) male just entering my seventies. I do not think of myself as an adventurer nor as an adrenaline junkie and you will find little of that ilk here. I am one half of a couple calling London our home. We have travelled the world since we came together in the 1990s, with both of us having become bewitched with travel long before that.
I have embraced the experiences that can be found in travel since, as an eight-year old, my father packed me, my mother and my three brothers into a caravan and set us off on his three-month working sabbatical around Scandinavia. My partner was smitten when, on the cusp of her twenties, she spent four years after leaving college on a government posting in Delhi and embraced the wonders of the extraordinary, exasperating Indian sub-continent.
It was India that brought us together and it is one of the few places, outside some great cities, to which we always try to find time to return.
Besides travel my main interest is photography. Ever since I was given a Brownie box camera at age ten, I have owned a camera. It is always the first item I cater for in my holiday packing. Although the camera I use has changed with the times, until a few years back it was primarily used for snapshots. Then, with an inspiring group of others a third of my age, I began a full-time degree in photography. It was a stimulating experience in so many ways. My awareness of the breadth of photography was transformed (I cannot claim the same for my own photographic outcomes). I remain, at heart, a photographer who documents what he sees. In that context, the camera records only that which the photographer chooses to put in its frame. And what many seem to forget, it only records that. So this blog will mix imagery and words because only together can they explain what lies beyond that which the camera sees and that which the writer seeks to explain.
Our Type of Travel
So we like ‘slow’ travel. What does that mean to us?
It states the obvious to say that we like to take our time, within the constraints of economics and other calls on our time. We like to spend a little more time feeling our way into a place, a city, a region. We can take as much pleasure from a morning sat in a street corner café watching the world unfold and go about its business as from being overwhelmed by being in a sublime landscape or by uplifting art or architecture. We are not nomads; we enjoy our creature comforts – in hotels, in food, in transport. Mobility and age are only part of the reason. We derive engagement and our adventure from culture, food, photography, reading, writing and watching some sports. We visit locations that foreground both the urban environment and the natural world. In the evenings we now prefer a relaxing bar, an open terrace or a peaceful restaurant to ‘buzzy’ nightlife.
It is important to understand that we enjoy our own company, so we tend not to join organised tours nor do we need socially-centred places or events.
Where have we been?
Quite a lot of the world, I suppose. We have been lucky enough to have visited all five of the globe’s continental landmasses, but a list of each and every destination would be unbearably tedious. Some examples of our longer trips will give a flavour:
- a three-month sabbatical spent circling round some of the countries of South America;
- on a second sabbatical, a circling of the globe, centred round three weeks in the North Island of New Zealand then taking in time in Tahiti and Rapa Nui;
- a two-month sojourn in Venice, renting a palazzo overlooking the Grand Canal; and
- a 75 day ramble round Eastern Europe and the Balkans (mostly) by train.
We have been able to visit some places where travel is no longer a practical proposition for most people. Libya, before the fall of Gaddafi was one, although I understand the more adventurous operators are, in the mid-2020s, venturing there again. White Island, off the coast of New Zealand, before the tragic eruption of 2019 is another. Equally there are places on our ever-growing ‘to go to’ list that it now seems unlikely we will ever go in our lifetimes; Syria is an obvious example and Putin’s appalling, brutal war on Ukraine means that plans to extend our railway wanderings in eastern Europe have become more constrained.