About Me

I’m glad your path led you here. Sit, stay for a while. Enjoy a cup of fermented horse milk, while I go on a little ramble about who I am and what I am trying to do on this little blog.

I’m originally from the UK, but my parents had a mid-life crisis when I was ten years old. They packed me into a car along with my two teenaged sisters and two silly spaniels and moved us all to France. 

Imagine the pre-pubescent nightmare of being a weird ginger girl, arriving in a new school with no friends, not knowing the language. L’horreur, as they say. 

The silver lining is that it did spark a lifelong love of travel. Or a trauma-induced tendency to repeatedly move to new countries, with the hope of one day being popular. Something like that.

I spent three years in India, where I worked with a documentary company, climbed some mountains, and decided to eschew the material world (starting with shoes, then technology after my phone got pick-pocketed). I learnt Muay Thai in Thailand, and how to make daiquiris in Cuba. I got buried up to my neck in powder snow in Japan, taught French in Benin, and got lost on various long distance hikes from Ladakh to Albania. 

At some point, I decided to make a career out of all of this. I got my Master’s degree in Journalism from Sciences Po in Paris, and have worked as a freelance journalist ever since. It is a massive privilege to be (barely) paid to meet interesting people and tell their stories. 

For the New York Times, I met refugees crossing the Alps on foot, taking dangerous routes through the snow in the hopes of a better life. For Thrillist, I tried out apitherapy (and got a couple of bee stings). I wrote about my experience cycling the Trans Dinarica route across the Balkans in Adventure.com. I attended a naked festival for New Lines and drank Churchill’s favorite wine for The Guardian. 

My travel experiences have been incredibly fun, but they have also been profoundly meaningful. 

Through solo travelling as a woman, I grew more empowered, more assertive and more confident to take up space.

Through meeting human beings from around the world, I became more empathetic, more convinced that we are all seeking the same things.

Travel has the ability to enrich our lives, to fight xenophobia and to bring us together. 

It also has the ability to create harm – through its environmental impact, and through its social impact. A growing number of communities are raising the issue of overtourism, and how it is making their cities more expensive and more crowded. 

Through this blog, I want to look at travel that has a positive-impact. To make sustainable travel more accessible to everyone, and to share my knowledge and discoveries from adventures around the world.