Personal Chapter
Two Years. Seven Continents. One Recipe Book.
Between 2010 and 2012 I stepped away from a corporate marketing career and travelled the world overland with my partner. We covered every continent (Antarctica included), lived on long-distance trains and overnight buses, and learned to cook in the kitchens of the people who fed us.
What it produced
- 168 long-form travel posts and 112 reference pages covering planning, packing, route maps, food, photography and destination guides for every country we visited.
- Sharing the World's Local Food — a published recipe book gathering authentic local dishes from four continents, written entirely on the road from interviews with home cooks and street vendors.
- A four-year photo archive including a daily self-portrait series (“A Picture Per Day”), wildlife macro photography and landscape work from over 30 countries.
Why it's on my CV
The trip was as much a business experiment as a personal one. I ran a self-funded content operation from cafes and guesthouses for two years — commissioning my own writing, building an audience, producing a physical product, managing distribution and getting paid for it. Most of the disciplines I use today in performance marketing, AI consultancy and digital strategy were learned, or at least sharpened, in that period: relentless prioritisation, lean budgets, doing more with less, talking to customers (or in that case, cooks), and shipping the thing.
It also taught me how to operate when nothing is familiar — new currency, new language, no infrastructure — which has turned out to be exactly the skill needed for working at the edge of AI right now.
The Full Archive
All of it lives on a separate site.
The complete travel blog — every post, recipe, photo gallery and destination guide — is at aroundtheworldtravels.co.uk. That's the home of the travel brand and where the content is maintained.