In 1990, I bought two new books that ended up transforming my life, completely altering its direction the following year.

At the start of this new decade I was 25, living and working in Stockport, just outside Manchester in England. It was at the height of the uber-cool Manchester music scene, loads of top gigs to go to, I had lots of great mates, the pubs were plentiful and like meccas to me, with the beers super tasty and much cheaper than down south, and life was good for a young single lad, apart from the dreadful cost of living! Oh, and Arsenal were the top football team in the land, and I was living in the belly of the beast of Manchester United supporters!!!

The two books were both Lonely Planet books. At that time I had read in a newspaper about the Lonely Planet series of travel guide books, which covered almost the entire world.

One was a big thick book, with a blue cover, called China. The other had a yellow cover and was called South-East Asia on a Shoestring. I can’t recall why, but Asia was on my radar. I did know a couple of people from my home town in Sussex who had been to India, but I was more intrigued by Chinese architecture, food and other Oriental allures. I bought the SE Asia guide too, because it had the low-down for six countries in it, giving me choices.

I know since I was about 20 I had had the kernel of an idea of travelling to some far-off exotic land for a year. I wanted to go way beyond the two week tourist kind of holiday, and get ‘lost’ in a faraway land. Now the idea was beginning to ferment.

Travel was in my blood. My Dad worked in aviation, and as a boy our family were lucky enough to visit America, Canada, Bahrain twice (family lived there), Sharjah in the UAE, and Kenya several times, on account of Dad being able to get us standby flight tickets for 10% of the real price, making them more than affordable for us.

I was first on a plane at the age of a few weeks, off to Kenya. My Mum had been born and brought up in this East African land of exotic animals and amazing fruits, and still had family there, and before I was an adult we went there six times. This was in the era before cheap flights, so I was fully accustomed to aeroplanes when most people rarely had been on one. I loved everything to do with flying, airports, and seeing other countries for our holidays.

Deepening this love affair with travel to other countries and cultures was a brilliant TV programme in the 60s and 70s called Whicker’s World. I watched it, along with Star Trek, religiously as a boy. Alan Whicker was an erudite English gentleman with a moustache, slick-backed hair and a proper English accent that suggested a highly groomed background! He would fly to countries all over the world, interviewing the famous and not famous, including dictators like Papa Doc Duvalier from Haiti. He visited festivals, street food scenes, beaches, mountains, deserts, bustling amazing-looking cities, and all kinds of exciting places. Sometimes it seemed like he was getting close to danger. But most of all I saw footage and images of our incomparably beautiful planet It captivated me and fired my imagination up no end…

Reading my new guide books to these Asian countries had me visualising all sorts of heavens, sights, adventures and excitement, and one thing stood out for sure: everything seemed to be several times cheaper than life in England. I was swayed by China and planned to go there. However, getting a visa at that time for more than a couple of weeks proved to be too difficult, and that’s when a catch-up with a good mate from down south in Sussex sorted me out.

By now it was early 1991, and my mate had recently come back from Thailand with his girlfriend. They’d been there travelling around for about nine months I think. He began telling me stories of his time there and I was immediately and emphatically sold on the idea of making Thailand my travel destination. He told of stories living on tropical islands in beachside bungalows, trekking in the mountains in the north, unbelievable foods and so on. Other stories have to remain undisclosed!

What he told me seemed to fit precisely the most brilliant place I could visualise on our planet! I just had to go there. I was sold.

I read the Thailand section of the famous yellow Lonely Planet book again (also covering The Philippines, Burma, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore), with super keen attention to detail, and I do recall tremendous excitement bubbling away in me. In particular the beachside bungalows on white sand beach coves and bays on tropical islands, costing about two pounds a night, with breakfast about 40 pence, had me completely hooked. I also read of curries and banana fritters for pudding, of reggae pubs and clubs, of shanty beach towns with cafes and eating places, of travellers from all countries, and it all seemed preposterously outrageously too good to be true.

It’s another story, but all that remained was for me to somehow get the money together to go there for a year. This was not easy. In the event I got together much less than I wanted, and it was clear I would never last a year, but I was desperate to go there.

I asked a couple of good mates if they wanted to come with me, and one of them was up for it, so we began planning all the stuff. I had to buy a rucksack, get certain things together, get the visa from the Thai embassy in London, create some ‘best of’ tape cassettes from my favourite albums (CDs not yet on the scene!), and ensure my Walkman was in fine working order.

(Fortuitously I packed a pair of trousers, a long-sleeved shirt and a tie at the bottom of the rucksack…)

And so it was that me and my mate left England on a one-way ticket to Bangkok, on Aeroflot via Moscow. The adventure had begun! It was a one-way ticket because then I had more spending money. It was on Aeroflot as they had the cheapest ticket prices, no doubt because, at that time, it had the very worst safety record of all airlines, but I wanted as long as I could have in Thailand, so it was a no-brainer to choose them.

Sat at the back of the plane, looking ahead to our huge adventure with immense pleasure, I was thinking to myself that, despite being fully used to aeroplanes and never usually bothering to listen to the safety protocols before take-off, on account of Aeroflot’s safety record I would, on this occasion, listen to the air hostess. But there weren’t any!!

We were in Moscow Airport for five hours, and I recall ‘chatting’ with a couple of lads from Iran. They spoke no English, but knew all about English football, and thumbs up and smiles meant we agreed or it was ‘good’, and thumbs down and funny noises meant ‘no good’! This meeting with people who my country’s government always said were an enemy, was just the kind of experience I was hoping to get, to meet ordinary people from everywhere, to see and hear and understand our world from my own direct experiences, not the mediated version from the media.

I never slept a wink, too much excitement. At about 4pm, on Saturday 7th September 1991, our plane touched down on Bangkok tarmac and, I clearly recall it, a thought immediately entered my mind, seemingly from nowhere: I had ‘arrived home’. Although I’d been to Bahrain and the UAE which are in Asia, it now felt like I was in ‘real’ Asia, and for some unexplainable reason this thought of ‘coming home’ filled my being at the moment of landing.

In short order we’d been processed through immigration, our rucksacks were already waiting for us, and we emerged out of the airport into a wet steaming oven and got in a rickety old yellow cab to get downtown. An hour later we arrived in Khao San Road, the travellers’ haunt and HQ for the travellers of all South-East Asia at the time, with daylight just clinging on still.

I was fit to burst with excitement in this riot of colours, sounds, smells, street foods, people hustling and bustling everywhere, and me and my mate walked along and selected a likely looking guest house, it was super cheap and so we checked in. I couldn’t hang around in the room and wanted to get straight back out into the action.

It was all so much better than all my prior imaginations, a bit like a film that friends build up so much, yet the real film is so much better! We found some dinner, I think it was fried rice for me, and had a look around up and down the street, just revelling in the atmosphere of it all. The first thing I saw was stalls everywhere selling tape cassettes for about 50p!

Seriously, it’s impossible to convey in language the sheer sense of adventure of it all!

Anyway, at some point we found our way into the iconic Hello Bar, and there we stayed for several hours, as if we were completely used to such a place, drinking lots of Singha beer, and then moving onto the local whisky. They were playing Doors and Pink Floyd and all the music that I loved at home in England. Beautiful girls would come and go, travellers would come and go, and everybody seemed to be having the time of their life. I was! Why, surely this had to be the best pub in the world!!

I was in total heaven. I’d had no sleep for well over 24 hours, but at something like 2am I fell into my bed in the guest house for a well-earned rest for my body and mind. Two days later we were in Chiang Mai in the north, ready and willing to get on a trek into the mountains. We’d taken a night time bus which took about 10 hours from Bangkok.

And that, dear reader, was my entrance into Thailand. I will pick up the story in my next travel post. Needless to say, as I write in June 2022, I’m still in Thailand, still on the one-way ticket, and the thought that flooded my mind telling me I’d ‘come home’ when we first landed in Bangkok, proved to be completely correct!! As did my anticipation of possibly getting an English teaching job by packing the shirt, tie and trousers. I did get that job, just before Christmas…

My money had run out in December, after three months of travel. So much for the year! But by that time Thailand was coursing through my veins, and I sensed a new life opening up for me; going home to England in the middle of a cold wet winter had me aghast…

[In this, the third of my three themes I will be blogging on, I shall bring to you various tales of my adventures on the road, mostly in Asia, but also in Australia, Kenya, England and France. In the past 30 years I’ve certainly done my fair share of travelling around, much of it in Thailand because I’m hooked on the island life here, but I have managed to fit in 10 other Asian countries, and have been to Australia 21 times, yes, I counted in my passports! My sister emigrated shortly after I did, to marry her Australian boyfriend.

So I’d like to end this first travel blog post with a famous quote, which I know to be true from my own experiences: “Travel broadens your horizons”. Indeed it does. I shall be sharing those horizons with you in the coming months and years, so get ready for the ride, Dear Reader!

If you want to be sure of getting my blog posts and soon-to-be weekly newsletter, sign up on the form just below. My other two themes are My Book World and Our Human World.]