Back to Basics

In 1996, I embarked on a solo backpacking trip around India for one hundred nights – the journey that inspired much of Towards the Within. In those days, there was no social media or mobile phones, and instead of Spotify, I carried a Walkman loaded with cassette tapes. In some ways, they were simpler times.

When I returned from a trip around East Asia and Australia in 2017, I realised how much I’d lost by taking endless digital photos and being glued to my mobile phone – how much I’d missed by not simply absorbing the world around me.

I look back with great fondness at my travels to Africa and Asia in the late nineties. I came away with something – for want of a better word – spiritual. I connected more deeply with the people I met, and I had to be careful of how many photos I took because of the burden of lugging around endless 35mm film canisters. I would gaze from the windows of buses and trains, watching the world pass by, noticing the finer details of life that would have gone unseen if my eyes had been transfixed to a screen.

There were challenges, too – navigating unfamiliar cities, relying on instinct and wits – lessons that built a kind of resilience easily lost in today’s world of instant answers and modern technology.

When I wrote Towards the Within, I tried to keep it as authentic as possible. During those early trips, my life was documented by pen and paper in a journal. Words poured out at the end of each day; fleeting thoughts were jotted down and tucked away, leaving my mind free to wander through sweeping vistas I'd left behind. And in addition, there were interviews collated that when I read them back, I could summon up the people who spoke those words as if they were right in front of me talking once again.

Looking back, I feel a slight regret over some of my more recent travels, knowing that time cannot be reversed and those moments cannot be recaptured. The pixelated faces I photographed now feel like ghosts of people I barely remember meeting. It was a hard but valuable lesson.

These days, although I do use my phone for photography - I never want to rely too much on my memory as I get older - I tend to keep it tucked, more in than out of my pocket, resisting the urge to photograph everything. I enjoy taking notes, maybe with the possibility of ideas and locations for future stories, and I love sketching some of the amazing views I come across. The latter allowing me to relax into the world around me, clear my mind and let my senses light up and my future memories to be filled with feeling and depth.

I find the greatest happiness in rekindling my early days of travelling when I glide through thoughts and feelings in the form of crinkled pages from diaries, worn by adventures and the ticking hands of time. These diaries were scrapbooks filled with drawings, observations and inner thoughts, postcards and transportation tickets, testaments to a younger self who moved through the world with curiosity and intent.

Like many, I often catch myself wondering how I ever managed without the internet or a cell phone. The answer, I think, is simplicity. When I travelled in the nineties, I had no credit cards, only cash and travellers’ cheques; no satellite navigation, just maps and guidebooks. I made mistakes, a lot of them, and I got very lost, but I learnt some incredible lessons that have remained with me to this day.

And perhaps that’s what I miss most: the freedom that came with not knowing, the beauty in discovery, and the joy of finding my way – both out in the world and within myself.

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Towards The Within is available now at Amazon