Then I was in my 30s, still with itchy feet. I travelled overland from St Petersburg to Beijing in a fortnight, pausing only in a few cities, the bulk of my time spent in a rattling train carriage watching Europe become Asia, watching the world turn.
There’s an assumption, I think, that travellers will slow down as they get older, particularly when your first journey took in most of a continent in the space of a month. And I have certainly become a fan of the slow-travel movement, to the point where a lot of the holidays I now take are to a single destination that I prefer to get to know intimately rather than move around.
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When I’m going on a journey, however, I still move fast. I appreciate the feeling of movement, the nature of travel itself. This to me is the way to embrace the journey, to get up each morning and just keep going, to have a goal for the day and achieve it.
I’m in my 40s now and the most memorable journeys of my recent past have all been rapid-fire. My partner, Jess, and I drove a ute around southern Africa for a month, through South Africa, Namibia and Botswana, never stopping for more than a few nights. We spent a week riding a scooter around the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, always on the road because the road was the adventure, the road was the goal.
So I haven’t slowed down in the way even I thought I would. If anything, I’ve learnt to embrace the nature of the journey, to love the movement, the essence of travel.
The main difference now is that I don’t like to fly much. And I don’t need a tour bus. And I’ve bought a proper raincoat.