Howdy all. Well, as some will already know, I’ve back home in Australia after four and a half months of travelling around the world. 21 countries, six continents (including Australia), amazing things seen, issues faced, lessons learnt, what else can I say?

Right now I am still in the midst of editing the diary style vlogs I shot whilst away. Lesson One should probably be that vlogging almost every single day for four and a half months does not a holiday make. Anything but really. I suddenly find that when I travel I go out and shoot and then come back, back everything up at my hotel or whatever accommodation I am at and get down to editing as well. The side effect of this is that I am not blogging now really whilst I travel, although I am publishing blogs that feature the vlogs so that is something, right?

The question then becomes – does this affect my enjoyment, relaxation and attitude whilst travelling and the answer is definitely YES. So, I should stop and just enjoy the time off, right? Well, no I don’t think right now I would be capable of doing that. Also, the positive spin on this apart from have a full record of the experiences is that this does motivate me more to get out. Whilst travelling back when I was younger I would often just ‘waste’ days chilling, doing very little. Vlogging gives more purpose and motivation.

So, well, it’s something I am thinking through at the moment. For once in my travels I have returned home without a huge desire to start planning the next one, and I may well not leave the shores of Australia for some time now. I’m also enjoying the remainder of my leave at home which I don’t ever do so a bit of time to reflect, although my thoughts seem to be more concerned with what’s wrong with my football team, the structure of my work and needing to save money now than anything I may have learnt whilst away from home soil.

What were the best parts of the trip? Well, most rewarding, exhilarating thing done/seen was my gorilla trek in Uganda – Bwindi Impenetrable National Park. Standing metres away from a family of gorillas is such a unique and heartwarming experience – the vlog of that incredible day will be up in a few weeks.

Most beautiful spot was undoubtedly Santorini in Greece. What a beautiful island, just stunning any direction you looked. It’s also covered in tourists, but it doesn’t seem to matter so much and you can definitely see why.

Favourite Country of the trip would be… it’s a tough call but I’m going to land on Kenya I think. I’m so grateful I decided to go on safari and some of the wildlife experiences – Giraffe Sanctuary in Nairobi, Nyguuni Animal Park near Mombasa and Kisite Marine Sanctuary off the coast near the Tanzanian Border were all so rewarding. And I discovered that seeing African animals in Africa is just a top shelf experience. Africa also was the continent where I felt most engaged and inspired and looking forward to the experiences that lay before me, if not the early wake times that accompanied them. Zimbabwe was another country that I found extremely rewarding. Every day an enriching experience.

On the downside I had to deal with being pretty sick at one point and as a result discovering underlying health issues that I will be dealing with in life going forward, which was not so easy to deal with. And this was at a time when I was about to go to Moldova, so that ended up being a place I had planned to visit that I did not. Lost a bit of money due to this and I ended up staying 9 – 10 days in Suceava, Romania, and a long day in one of their hospitals. It’s not a proper overseas holiday if I don’t get to visit at least one hospital.

From my second day in Hungary all the way through to leaving Romania for the UK I was unwell, and failed to recover because despite the occasional day of rest I never let myself recover properly which in the end made me a lot sicker and in need of a hospital. The hospital was grim as a place to visit in Suceava, but at the same time very thorough, they did all kinds of tests and they didn’t charge me a single Romanian Lei. Even when I hit the UK I was not myself for a while as I did slowly recover.

Going forward in the last part of the trip I had a credit card hacked, and also was saddled with the most exorbitant roaming fees one could ever imagine when I failed to check the kind of roaming I had in a certain country, and received no messages from my company back home. My left shoulder had been ‘unhappy’ the entire trip, but in Thailand it flared up something rotten and sleep became hard and of low quality, and I was in quite a bit of pain in the last 2 weeks of the trip.

Since being home that is well on the mend thankfully. Due to physiotherapy and probably not carrying a backpack with me all the time.

If I was planning a four month trip again, well, I would probably plan it quite differently. I took so many flights in 2025 I feel I owe the Earth an apology, and I’m no environmentalist. I’m happy not to see the inside of an airport for a long time now too. The actual mechanics of the trip though were pretty good. Flights connected, no cancellations or indeed any significant delays that I can think of apart from the flight from Jamaica to Gatwick, due to an ill passenger and it was only a couple of hours.

Actually, coming home the last leg was Jakarta to Melbourne via Manila on Philippine Airlines and a month into the trip or less I got an email telling me the first flight, which was an afternoon flight to Manila was now a 1am flight. Plus they moved the booking to a flight that was AFTER the connection to Melbourne left at 8pm. I moved it to the previous evening but I didn’t fancy two overnight flights in a row. So much so that I kept looking for a cheap afternoon flight to Manila, but in the end stuck with what I had.

Anyways, Melbourne has welcomed me back with some of the worst weather I can remember for years here. Rain most days, cold, miserable. It is rather de-motivating. I have more than enough diary style vlogs to get us to Christmas, and enough vlogs to edit for next year as well from the trip to fill most of the year. I’ll be back at work before this post is published, albeit at only one of my two jobs, and facing old and new challenges.

I may not shoot another vlog this year, although I suspect I will. And of course, I can start to share the experiences in blog form right here from 21 countries, stories, experiences and hopefully the occasional tip. I will start later this week with the experience of getting the ‘East African Tourist Visa’ on arrival at Kigali Airport, because I was desperately looking for information on it before I arrived and couldn’t find much. There will be weekly photo shares too from the last four months.

Thanks for reading today. Hope you are well wherever you may be in the world. Take care – May the Journey Never End!