Hi everyone, my name is James and this is my blog, Been Travelling, thanks for stopping by.

I’m finally back online after a few years of inactivity/lack of time, or to put it more accurately, and if I’m totally honest with myself, just simple procrastination and then forgetfulness that I even owned the domain name!

Longer version and reason for blogging?

The wake-up call and reason I was inspired to restart this back up again in 2020? Pretty simple really, it was the idea that I could NOT travel, as I write this we are in the midst of the global pandemic that is the Covid-19 Coronavirus outbreak which is sweeping around the world and while I’m away from my home country of the UK and in Canada right now, we’re grounded, the whole world is.

Travel is only allowed if it’s completely essential and therefore it kind of made me begin to think about travel (it’s amazing what you crave when you realise you can’t have it!) think about all the places that I would like to go and see, and equally has allowed me to have the opportunity to reflect on how fortunate I have been over the last 32 years to see/visit all of the places that I have.

So that’s my inspiration and reason why I restarted this blog, now I guess a little bit about me…

I come from a humble hard-working background. I was born in East London and grew up in the county of Essex which is a region just outside of London in the east of the UK.

I’m the eldest of four and my parents worked very hard when we were growing up to allow us the opportunity to travel each summer, mostly to Spain (Mallorca/Majorca specifically) but also to some other places like Portugal, Malta, Turkey and other destinations all within a max 4-Hour Flight of the UK. I’m so thankful to my Mum and Dad for this because not only is it far from cheap to take four kids away on foreign holiday, but we also created some great memories which we will treasure forever.

I think for me, with hindsight, looking back on it, that’s probably where I started to realise that I loved the idea of travelling the world, it was formed while I was young boarding ‘Airtours’ package holiday charter flights in the UK. As I grew older and entered the workplace myself I realised my passion wasn’t particularly unique and that most people love to travel (or at least, they loved idea of it), but it wasn’t until really into my twenties when I had, what I saw at the time as a once-in-a-lifetime job opportunity to relocate my job on a six month secondment to Sydney Australia.

I flew to Sydney in September 2010, connecting through Taipei in Taiwan and it was the first time I’d ever left Europe, my eyes were opened!

I landed in Sydney and immediately loved it, I fell in love with both Australia and Australians (who doesn’t) and just generally everything about being somewhere new. It felt strange to me that you could jump on a flight somewhere as familiar as London, watch a few films have something to eat, stopover in some cool airport and a few more hours later you’re literally on the opposite side of the planet, and they speak English!

This blog is very much a work-in-progress, and it’s also a form of nostalgia for me to be able to dispense the memories, jot them down online and record it – up until now I’ve never been particularly great at either remembering things or writing them down!

I’ll detail down all the places that I’ve been to so far and go into as much detail as possible knowing that for some of locations I’ve only visited once, some years ago. Importantly this blog is also intended to be an inspiration to myself to go and scratch off the many more countries, territories and regions on the surface of this planet and yes, I’m intending to visit them all!

James