My first experience of independent travel...

...came at aged 12 when my mother put me on a train from Kings Cross Station to County Durham to visit my pen-pal, Angela, and her family. We had written to each other for ages but had never met. This was followed two years later by a youth exchange to Lewisham Borough’s twin municipality of Antony in France where I stayed with a French family for two weeks, with my family then hosting their daughter in London. 

By 19 the twelve months spent working for a travel company had confirmed that the travel bug had been well and truly embedded. Since then I have travelled the world from West to East and North to South. I have visited numerous capital cities in mainland Europe as well as the east coast USA, Bali, China, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, New Zealand and countries in West and Southern Africa. In the 1980’s I lived and worked for almost three years in the Caribbean Region and loved being able to visit and work in most of the English-speaking islands from my base in Guyana. 

After first visiting South Africa the year after the end of apartheid, I have spent extended periods there and visited every year over a period of 12 years. 

Last year I visited Jamaica (the home of my parents) for the first time in 25 years. With my roots in Europe, the Caribbean and Africa, I feel I have now reconnected significant parts of these ancestral threads and will spend the rest of my life stitching together this rich tapestry.