bio
Wayfarer Extraordinaire.
My fascination with our planet began as a kid. I was ‘gifted’ and incredibly studious (the typical offspring of South Asian immigrants), and would spend every spare minute of childhood with my head buried in encyclopedias, voraciously devouring information about the outside world – its peoples and cultures, its animals and landscapes, its arbitrary borders. The seeds of my wanderlust were planted thus.
Once, aged an enthusiastic twelve, I single-handedly dragged some friends to every travel agency in town, filled my school backpack with all the free brochures I could lay my hands upon, and spent the next few weeks ensconced in daydreams of lands far and wide. The Masai Mara, Mount Fuji, Machu Picchu, and everything in between. Images which etched themselves permanently into my mind. Along with the price tags attached to those images. Beyond any numbers that I had ever comprehended. Beyond my imagination.
young me – waaaay back when I was still precocious and cute
awkward teen sporting frightful tee while side-eyeing OJ in Hungary
slightly less awkward a few years later, having just moved to Cambodia
See, I also grew up working-class. And Brown. In a very conservative part of the UK, where the majority of my friends were upper-middle-class White kids who went on holiday at least once per year. ‘Holiday’ had generally been an intangible concept for young me. Through my first eighteen years, I had only a single encounter with the notion: a visit to my parents’ birth nation, Bangladesh, as an eleven-year-old. A formative experience, certainly – it would positively shape my politics and negatively shape my relationship with my heritage for years to come – but hardly comparable to the beach vacays or trips to Disneyworld that classmates were revelling in at the time. As knowledgeable as I was about all things geographical, I soon realised that mine was a knowledge doomed to be shorn of any lived-in experience. It wasn’t long before a traumatic adolescence waylaid my hitherto flawless academic journey and, saddled with the undesirable intersection of being both poor and Brown, it became ever more apparent that travel was never intended for folks like me.
‘Never’ has never been part of my vocabulary, however. After hitting adulthood, I took matters into my own hands. Part-time work and a little financial assistance fuelled my first forays onto the European continent to which I felt almost as strong a kinship as the UK (don’t ever mention Brexit to me unless you want your ears bitten off). The frequency of these sojourns increased with each passing year, but rather than dispelling my thirst for travel, they merely added fuel to the fire within – a burning compounded by the sadness that had overwhelmed my young life up until that stage. If I could gallivant so easily around Europe with no issue, then wasn’t it time to test some real boundaries and find some genuine liberation from an otherwise bleak existence? With my taste for foreign climes now confirmed, and at a complete loss for direction following my undergraduate studies, I arrived at the only logical conclusion for a bruised-but-forever-curious young man seeking both redemption and renewal: I had to relocate to the other side of the world.
That was 2010. It’s been a long time since, and both my life and my travels have unfolded along paths impossible to have foreseen. It’s been a rollercoaster of an adventure, and it remains an ongoing one albeit slightly less prone to such wild tumults nowadays. I’ve been living in Shanghai, China, for the past decade (!) – a rollercoaster unto itself during that period – and am fortunate enough to take an unusual amount of time off from my day job, a privilege that has allowed me to branch out into every direction imagineable. For those that care about the count, I’ve now managed to visit 74 countries across all inhabited continents, and am confident that I’ll get to a fair few more before I tire myself out.
my current ‘travel map’ of the world courtesy of visitedplaces.com.
(last updated: Apr 2026)
As I’ve aged, I’ve become a little more pragmatic and considerably more forgetful. I gave up on Facebook many years ago, and with it I inadvertently laid waste to the vast assemblage of memories which I’d created there. That upsets me – particularly as it becomes harder to reach back into the past and recollect the exact nature of all my mad escapades. Travel has been my life’s saving grace: it’s only when on the road, far removed from my nominal comfort zones, that I paradoxically feel most at ease with myself and who I am. When tumbling head-first into mishaps and mayhem in cultures alien to my own, when inevitably needing to be bailed out by a kindly local that may not even speak my language – that’s when I realise there’s a lot more which tethers me to mankind than which separates me, when I fully grasp that the only form of beauty which can possibly match the natural world is the one found deep within humanity itself. It’s what single-handedly keeps me going, despite the manifold injuries inflicted upon my person over the years, and despite the despair that I often feel when assessing the state of the world nowadays.
somewhere on the Annapurna circuit, Nepal, 2014
back in the Himalayas for Everest Base Camp, Tibetan side, 2018
I’m not starting this blog to retroactively trade in on those past adventures, nor am I seeking to monetise any future travels. What I am doing is creating a new museum for myself; trawling through those old photo albums and curating a new collection of memories that’ll give me an opportunity to reflect upon what I’ve done, and possibly share some tips on how others might go about doing things themselves. Note the following: I’m perpetually-broke and conduct most of my travels on shoestring budgets (if you haven’t figured already, I’ve prioritised living in the present when it comes to life, much to my financial detriment); I’m drawn towards older folk, although I’m rapidly becoming one myself, as well as misfits and those who like to drink; I take my clothes off a lot (one day you’lI find out the valid reasons why); I view the world through the lens of a British, ultra-progressive, vegetarian POC and my commentary will likely reflect those identity markers, for better or worse; and I’m generally allergic to the idea of planning. I’ll share whatever advice I can when it comes to how I approach my exploits, but ‘freedom’ is the value which most strongly informs how I roll.
Perhaps all this will achieve nothing beyond dredging up excess tumbleweed. There’s not much I can realistically add to the pre-existing literature about the places I’ve been and the things I’ve done. But I also think that’s okay. When the dust eventually settles, this site might serve as a reminder that a troubled young soul once dreamed crazy big and figured he could take on the whole damn world. Whether he succeeded or failed is ultimately irrelevant, what matters is only this: it’s been one heck of a ride.
And long may it stay that way.
Fitz Roy, Argentina, 2019.
Probably the only time I’ve ever loved a photo with me in it (hard to believe given my obvious narcissism, I know)!