I write occasional articles about travel, adventure and expeditions. This piece, that I wrote for the classy Traveller magazine, is one of my favourite pieces. It’s short and sweet and makes me want to get out on the road.
This is what I wrote for them:

I would never have learned backgammon at a pavement café
in Amman.I would never have drunk tej,Ethiopian mead,from a vase flask in a dim drinking den.I would never have heaved the helm of a yacht to run down the face of an Atlantic wave along the silver path of a full moon.I would never have camped beside the Straits of Magellan or on the banks of the Yukon. I would never have had my beard entombed in Siberian ice,eaten octopus in Tokyo or sat humbled in Samarkand’s Registan. I would never have ridden around the planet if I had not taken the hardest journey of all:stepping out of my front door and beginning the ride. From your front door it’s a long way home.
They were the best of times and the worst of times. The thrill of new experiences was tempered by numbing boredom and loneliness.The challenge and privilege of solo travel fought my lazy streak dreaming of sofas and cappuccino. Slums terrified me then surprised me with gestures of welcome.I was afraid of entering violent and dangerous countries yet they often turned out to be amongst my favourite countries.
Being totally fit, riding hard but comfortably over Andean passes with all my worldly possessions in a few small bags, no deadline to make and no persistent phone demanding my attention, the vast freedom of a long adventure and the privilege of time and space to evaluate what is and what is not really important in life. These are the things I appreciate most from my ride. I never thought when I began that I would actually succeed.
But the essence for me was not whether I succeeded in the end. It was whether I gave it my best shot. More important was that I turned a dusty daydream into a reality and reaped the rewards from taking time out from our hectic 21st Century whirlwind to smell the roses, smell the coffee, smell the stinking industrial wastelands, smell our amazing world. In our era of email and Chinese takeaways we glibly say that the world is a small place. That is nonsense: the world is enormous; certainly too big for a
single lifetime. Its diversity and variety is staggering. I am fortunate that I took the chance to see a small part of it. For in hauling myself around a thin slice of our world I discovered so much about myself.