Cheta and I had a fabulous year last year. We took lots of pictures and Cheta has made a fantastic record of the year in this video. It presents all the many things we did and places we went during the year.

Enjoy.

Our visas for Australia allow us to stay for a maximum of three months and we plan to be here for five months. So at some point in the middle of the trip we need to leave Australia and come back again. It turns out that I’m OK because I had to go back to England for a week on a business trip. But Cheta still needs to go, so we start planning to go to New Zealand for a week or two. I go to the cafe to use the internet to start organising this.

I always check my email first and find an email that has just come in from a lady in Singapore offering us a week long house-sit in a beautiful house on a plot of land. She has written to two of us saying that the first to reply will get it. I read her email, it is effusive in its praise for what we offer;

“You both sound like the perfect well travelled, experienced and passionate animal people we are looking for to look after our landed property, small garden, 3 cats and our bird. We love your philosophy that your respective careers involve a lot of time writing as well as traveling around the world. You say, ‘Finding ourselves travelling, we have found that it is possible to create a win-win situation: owners get a well-educated, trustworthy couple who are capable of looking after their property and pets, and we get a place to stay and write. We are available to sit around the world and have a great understanding of many cultures and traditions as well as an ease with international travel at all levels.’”

This slightly overwhelms me and makes me determined to get it agreed. I reply within half an hour and await her response. (I get it later that day, all is agreed and proceeding.) I then get an email from a dear friend who is running an event in Fiji asking us if we can come out to crew. We would go next week and get back in time to go to Singapore, then returning from Singapore in time to go to our next house-sit in Gin Gin, near Bundaberg north of Brisbane, before flying back to Europe for a busy spring.

Wow! NZ is clearly off the cards by now, perhaps another year! Later on after some discussion and negotiation we decide not to go to Fiji, it really doesn’t serve where we are at the moment. But this is how things are all the time now. We have given in to uncertainty and trust that the right thing will come along just when we need it. We put our intention out there and always get a positive response. the more we do it and the more we trust, the more, we find, that we get the right result. It is truly amazing.

This is the Law of Intention in daily action. My email banner says,

“Progress and Passion are found in Uncertainty”.

We live it and can attest to it. It works.

Travel has been part of my life for many decades now. Travel was in my family’s blood long before me. I have relations in the USA, South Africa, Australia, Bali and all over the UK and Ireland. I can only call myself British because my family is an amalgam of English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish. My partner is Dutch and I had a sister-in-law who was Serbian. So clearly I am not a quiet stay-at-home who’s family have never left the village. (I still have all my old passports and love looking through them reminiscing about past journeys.)

But neither am I a vagabond, a backpacker, a tourist or a homeless wanderer (despite the fact that I have no home). I am a traveller who calls wherever he is home and who is comfortable anywhere. This stems from the attitude my father had to travel. He had an ease about being in other countries and revelled in immersing himself in other languages. Around the time I was born he went to post-war India to help set up some factories. He spent much of his time learning Hindustani and starting a life-long love of languages. I can’t remember ever seeing him read a novel in English, he always read in other languages. The last language he learnt just before his death was Gaelic, a fine task for a Scotsman, although lowland Scots was more appropriate to him with his love of the poet Robert Burns.

We travelled England and Scotland as a family, always going by car. I enjoyed sitting in the back watching the countryside fly by. I loved trains, I managed to catch the end of the era of steam trains and spent many a happy day watching them swish along the main lines of Britain. This love continues today with memorable journeys across country in India and Australia, as well as the TGV in France in 2009 alone. In my plan for the next couple of years is to return from Australia to Britain overland, journeying as far as possible by train (The Man in Seat 61 is essential for this). My last memorable journey as a child was my six week trip to Yugoslavia when I was 16. I went to visit my brother’s new mother-in-law in Belgrade during the time of Tito, she spoke no English so I had a very interesting time! I travelled there by train, the Orient Express, for two days and never looked back, my travelling days had started.

Travel and Work

I spent the first 15 years of my working life in the theatre, moving from town to town, working in different theatres. It was a bit like running away to the circus but with more creature comforts. I toured Britain end even worked in Canada. I used to travel with an old wicker wardrobe skip to house all my belongings. It was perfect because it could fit through the door of a black cab as well as go on a train. It ensured I didn’t have to travel light!

Ii was in the world of Architectural Lighting Design that my travelling really took off. One of the great things about working on architectural projects is that they tend to be distributed all over the world. My early trips were to Norway and The Netherlands where a number of projects were. Working in a city means you meet local people and tend to treat the place like a local. This gets the tourist out of you, particularly important if you intend to do a lot of travelling. We all know that tourists stick out like sore thumbs, but we still find it hard not to become one. (Hmmm… I think a post on not being a tourist would be appropriate…) Greece became a big area of work for me with numerous trips to Athens. I made many friends there and visited many fabulous restaurants. I found it difficult to get used to their tradition of eating out late at night, I never quite new when the Greeks slept.

Travel as a Volunteer

For around seven years I worked as a volunteer with the IALD (The International Association of Lighting Designers). This organisation was based in Chicago, USA but was a truly international one. For the first three of those years I travelled a number of times to the US to places such as New York, Las Vegas, Chicago, San Francisco, Boulder and Monterey. I always took time out to get to know the city, generally walking around different neighbourhoods rather than sight-seeing as such. I had become interested in Punk Music by then (mainly due to my son’s life as a drummer) and took time to go to live gigs in whatever city I was in. The quality varied dramatically but I got such a kick out of experiencing the world of live, original music. During the latter four years I was Vice-President, President and Past President and my travelling ratcheted up a notch. During the four year period I calculated that I visited the US on average every six weeks. I remember flying into New York for a meeting and flying out again about six hours later, I was out of the Uk for less than a day.

The last few years I have spent as a volunteer with RRI, Tony Robbins Organisation, and spread my travels to Fiji in particular. In 2008 I spent a total of four months there over four visits and I have recently come back from a month long stay there. With this and business travel in lighting I have now visited Australia around eight times and grown to love the place in a strange way. I could never live here permanently, the waiting at the traffic lights would drive me insane and take years off my life.

My Home, the World

This trot down memory lane is not to trumpet my travel life but to show that becoming an Earth Pilgrim comes from a background of travel and enjoyment of other countries. Being part of the local culture is something that comes naturally to me helping me to quickly become absorbed into my surroundings. Wherever I am I could call it home and often do. The world is a home to me and one that I never grow bored with.

(I will come back to this subject, particularly in relation to “Drinking Around the World”! )

A year ago I left my cottage in the Derbyshire hills in the UK and joined my partner on the road. She had given up her house several years previously and had been travelling ever since. I earn my living as a designer and so I needed to make careful arrangements if this money was to continue. I achieved this and started a new career as a writer, speaker and blogger on travel and men’s issues.

In the past year we have travelled all over the world, several times, and only increased our thirst for, and enjoyment of, travel in all its forms. We have been to Australia 3 times, Fiji, Bali, India, China, Singapore, England, Ireland, Netherlands, France, Belgium, Spain. We have attended seminars, house-sat, stayed in hotels and apartments and travelled by plane, train, boat, car, bus and foot.

The important issue is how to do this and keep a business going, maintaining your income and sanity. Here are a few pointers on how:

1. Home

Let your house or flat go. It doesn’t work if you keep a base, you keep going back there, confusing the issue completely. I did this through 2008 and cost me a lot of money and created a lot of difficulty for me. In the 6 month rental of my cottage I was only there for 6 weeks.

2. Storage

Get a self-storage unit which is convenient to an airport you tend to use a lot. In my case my base was in London so I chose Heathrow. This is a busy airport and one I am likely to use through work and family visits. I put all my ‘stuff’ in here that I don’t want to travel with but don’t want to part with yet, that bit will come later, I assure you.

3. Address

Arrange for a virtual office address in a convenient location. I use a company called OfficeFront in London, again convenient to Heathrow. I used to have a physical office there but now they look after my office phone number – passing calls to my mobile anywhere in the world or emailing messages, my physical post – scanning and emailing it to me once a week, my banking – banking any cheques that come in. Most important of all they provide me with an address I can use as my home address, something you cannot do without.

4. Luggage

Get 2 (and only 2) bags that are tough and not too big, for all your travel ‘stuff’. In today’s increasingly difficult travel worlds baggage has become a dirty word with airlines. The big one, for check-in should be a maximum of 20kgs and the small one 7kgs, although i’m usually around 10kgs. Best to carry it on your back, the attendants tend not to look at it there. I carry a small digital scale  with me so I can deal with luggage issues quickly, especially in the airport. You can have some lightweight pack away bags in your luggage to cope with ‘weight’ issues. If your hand luggage is being checked for weight take your laptop out first. It always works and it reduces the weight considerably.

5. Computer & Internet

Take great care to plan your digital and electronic needs, the amount of equipment can spiral out of control. For me a working laptop and gear are essential. I am working as I travel and I need all my software and data. I have a MacBook Pro with Parallels so I can run Windows as well. I have a lovely Apple wireless mouse and only the cables and adaptors I need. I carry 3 international power adaptors for computer, phones etc. One absolute essential is a portable wifi router. Connecting it to a fixed ethernet point creates a wireless network for me and my partner, although the MacBook creates a great wifi net work as well. I carry 2 phones, my UK 3G phone, mainly for incoming business and family calls, and my unlocked phone for a local PAYG sim card. I use Skype wherever possible for outgoing calls.

6. Other Bits

Your home is where you travel so carry some personal bits to aid your comfort, travelling is not about roughing it. The main I carry item is a CPAP machine to help my Sleep Apnoea and my snoring, believe me this is essential when I don’t know where I am going to be sleeping! I have an extension cable drum for this, which is also available for computer use out in the garden. I carry a small amount of essential items such as, salt, pepper, herbs, vegetable stock, extra virgin olive oil; they help my cooking. I have incense to help deal with unexpected smells and stuff for mosquito bites. I carry a small stock of DVD’s and books which I send back to the office when I am finished with them.

7. Clothes

Clothes are so personal that it’s not something I want to say too much about. Keep them few and make them washable and crease-proof. Buy cheap clothes as you travel and keep rotating them by throwing old ones away when you buy new ones. I have a set of smart clothes and shoes, I never know when a lucrative deal needs personal negotiation! Colour matching is important and weight is critical. When flying wear small, soft shoes (no metal!) and leave your belt in the luggage (don’t ask me why they focus so much on that!).

8. Money

Money is essential… But how you access it is fraught with problems. My debit and credit cards keep getting locked in foreign countries. Their automatic systems think they detect fraud. Always thank them for this but keep the number handy to phone them, they should be able to reset it while you wait at an ATM, if not get another bank. I use HSBC who are very good at sorting out problems. I once had a phone call from them while I was standing at an ATM in India cursing, they were checking all was OK and quickly unlocked the account, amazing service. My partner uses HSBC Premier giving her accounts in different counties, this is extremely useful.

9. Car

What on earth are you doing with a car, you say, I thought you travelled all the time. At the moment I still have it and use it when travelling around Europe, that may well change having calculated that hiring a car when I need it is actually cheaper. When I travel out of Europe I leave the car at an off airport car park near Heathrow. If you book in advance you can get amazing deals for long term storage. At the moment my car is stored for 5 months with Purple Parking for a low cost and it is totally secure.

10. Planning and Spontaneity

We like our travels to be spontaneous having both spent years over organising family holidays. We often move and book on the spur of the moment and have got great deals. Planning is still needed to deal with fixed future events, particularly where work is concerned, and to get even greater deals. A well structured balance between these is necessary for a truly relaxed and stimulating time. I haven’t yet just moved to the single tickets only category yet but I feel that is on the way.

That covers the generality of what I have discovered to date. What have I missed…