Category: Articles
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Help Tom Finish What He Started
I’m writing this post from a rural guesthouse near the city of Sisian in southern Armenia, where I’ve just finished a lovely breakfast of freshly-picked raspberries, cheese curds, sour cream, new season honey, and gata (a type of regional sweet pastry). Yum. This guesthouse, run by Mher Azoyan and his family on the site of…
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Yet Another Defender Camper Conversion: DIY 2-Berth 110 In A Weekend
Quick back-story: several years ago I was the lucky recipient of the Land Rover Bursary, an expedition grant administered by the Royal Geographical Society. As well as a generous pile of cash, JLR’s Special Vehicle Operations built us a bespoke expedition Land Rover Defender 110 called Georgina. Pretty neat, right? Land Rover Owner magazine thought…
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Exactly How Do You Fund Your Adventure Travel Lifestyle?
A reader writes: I would be very interested in how you fund your adventures / lifestyle. I know this is always a bit of an awkward one, but I think there are many people in the community that would be interested in ways to make extra income, source sponsorship and budget for adventures. Thanks so…
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How To Fundraise For Your Expedition (Or Other Adventurous Project)
This article is based on a lecture I gave for the Royal Geographical Society at the 2019 Explore expedition planning conference. If you’ve arrived here expecting an ‘ultimate guide’ or ‘blueprint’ with three easy steps to finding funding for your expedition, then I am afraid I must disappoint you. Not only is your expedition unique,…
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#FlightFree2020: About The Time I Travelled The World Flight-Free For 4 Years (And Nobody Cared)
My Flight Free 2020 pledge hasn’t come out of nowhere. Call it a rekindling of a long-forgotten conviction that the example I set might actually matter. Because we are all participants, now, in this huge and never-ending conversation we call global society. Our impact is measured in terms of the number of people paying attention…
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10 Illustrated Tips For Improving Your Expedition Photography No End
Last weekend I flew to London for the annual Explore expedition planning conference at the Royal Geographical Society (the one chance I get to catch up with a lot of people I wish I saw more often). On the Sunday I joined the expedition photography workshop to share my thoughts on the storytelling medium of the still…
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5 Ancient Monasteries In Armenia’s Dilijan National Park (& How To Hike To Them)
The experience of exploring Armenia on foot is characterised by three things: an abundance of breath-taking landscapes, being invited in by locals to drink homemade oghi (vodka), and stumbling upon at least one ancient church or monastery per day. Dilijan National Park – part of the forested northeastern province of Tavush – is no exception to…
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9 Reasons To Make Yerevan Your Next Digital Nomading Basecamp
Given the title of this article, you might be expecting to read a list post designed as clickbait for bored tech startup founders in co-working spaces in Chiang Mai, probably written by an underpaid copywriter who’s never been to Yerevan and has dashed off this piece after an hour or two of Googling. Not quite.…
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Is The Canon XC10 The Adventure Travel Filmmaker’s Ideal Camera?
People keep asking me for camera recommendations for travel videos and adventure films. Here’s one: the Canon XC10. (With a few accessories, on which more later.) Both Leon and I are shooting on this camera right now. Indeed, we’ve both worked our way through the exact same progression of cameras over the years. First came the Sony HVR-A1E, which…
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Why Do Adventure Snobs Hate The Camino De Santiago?
There is a certain snobbery in the adventure travel world about the Camino de Santiago. I’ll assume you’ve heard of it, but if you haven’t, the Camino — as it’s known for short — is a network of Christian pilgrimage routes that all end in Santiago de Compostela, an ancient city in north-west Spain. Santiago (San Tiago) is the…