Fried spiders, anyone?
An accidental tourist
My first experience of solo travelling was at 17 when a planned trip to Paris was transformed by an unexpected offer of a lift to Teheran. As I didn’t have the money to go further or back I then spent six months teaching English to the Iranian Navy. I came back to the UK to read English at university and then I went abroad again, working as an underground miner – among other jobs – in Australia to fund the overland journey home. Arriving home to penury I thought writing about my time in Nepal might bring in some money, but I was using a manual typewriter and carbon-paper copies. It took longer to get a clean version of my first travel feature than it did to do the Nepalese trek. The Telegraph accepted it (thanks, Elizabeth de Stroumillo) and sparked the idea that it might be possible to make some sort of living as a travel writer.
Learning the skills
After selling a handful of travel features I fitted in 18 months working as the only reporter on a local startup freesheet. This meant entering the world of magistrate’s courts, village fetes and planning committees and writing them up on a new electric typewriter. I also took all the photos, wet-processing them at home on Monday nights. All came into focus on Tuesday evenings, scanning in b&w prints and sticking in copy – cold-cutting with a scalpel where necessary – before sending it off to press. Thanks Hart Observer: it was enormous fun.
A golden age
Local journalism didn’t pay well so when the Hart Observer folded I was just as well off going freelance. I bought my first computer (this Amstrad) and entered London when UK national newspapers were booming. They had healthy circulation figures, reasonable budgets and were bursting with enlarged travel sections and new weekend supplements, all of which needed to be filled. Until the internet was a thing I was also able to sell the same travel features – with slightly changed intros – across the English-speaking world.