Last year (2024) after hitting a significant milestone, I awarded myself a ten-week sabbatical, backpacking around Southeast Asia.

Originally, I had planned to go solo but when friends heard about the trip, some wanted to join me. As I travelled in a loop around Thailand, Cambodia and Laos, by boats, buses, trains and tuk tuks, one friend after another flew out to meet up with me and join me on a stretch of my mini odyssey.

Together we climbed mountains, trekked in jungles, explored Angkor temples and ancient monuments, met people who had lost limbs to the war that dominated the region in the 1960s and 1970s (the Vietnam War overspilled into Laos and Cambodia inflicting a terrible toll on their populations which continues to this day due to the unexploded landmines and cluster bombs that are strewn across both countries) kayaked down the Mekong River in search of rare freshwater dolphins, snorkelled along colourful coral reefs, and spent several days visiting and volunteering at rescued elephant projects.

The trip combined several of my favourite things – obsessions in fact: travel, exploring, wildlife, conservation, history, and friendship. Making a positive impact is also important to me – I was careful to visit places and people who would benefit from tourism. Homestays not grand hotels, buses not internal flights, women’s weaving collectives not swanky shops.

When I came home, I wrote about the trip in a series of articles for newspapers and magazines.

If you think I sound like a righteous do-gooder then think again! The point of that sabbatical was not to find myself – I’m pretty sure I know who and where I am – but to enjoy myself, to step off the hamster wheel of life for a moment to do something that I love.

I was lucky to be able to make the trip more or less self-financing. Lucky too that a peripatetic childhood – I grew up partly in Southeast Asia – has given me a taste for adventure.  And even luckier that my family said, ‘Go for it!’ knowing how much I needed to.

So that’s me: adventurous, endlessly curious about places and people, but grounded by the knowledge that at the end of each adventure, I’ll return to what I love most of all: my family.