We Do Adventure

Nine years ago yesterday Rowan and I sat on a beach in Crete talking about the future. It was one of those moments that changes the way you see things from then on. For me it was the first time I realised I wanted to move on and do something different (well, sort of the same-but-different) from what I'd been doing up to that point. We came back from the beach to a text telling us a plane had crashed in New York and walked into a hotel bar to join a crowd watching live TV coverage minutes before the second plane crashed into the Twin Towers. The world changed that day. But for all the things that were different in the post-911 world what we were doing wasn't much changed, at least not dramatically so. Until two years ago. Two years ago today we arrived in Mostar , after an epic road trip across Europe, to start doing something the same-but-different in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was a life change unlike any I'd imagined, although Rowan had spent half her life wanting to d...

Living in another country does make you aware of how easy it is to fall into culturally imperialistic attitudes. By that I mean the assumption that your norm is better that the new norm you’re encountering. With this can unwittingly come the urge to convert all around to your way of thinking. I could quite easily become a crusader for the supremacy of the three-pin plug! I’ve long held that the UK as the best system of delivering electricity to devices I’ve ever encountered. Or I could campaign against the common practice here of attempting to overtake four cars at once into a blind corner. Such behaviour is not normal in the UK as we generally relieve such drivers of the undue pressure of holding a driving licence. However, these and similar desires have to be curbed because different is so often just different; not better or worse. The danger is every new experience is greeted with a value judgement rather than being embraced for what it is. While I don’t underestimate the power of l...