The vultures arrived before the wrestlers did. In Bwiam, a dusty town in southern Gambia that most travelers see only through a windshield, an annual wrestling festival slowly takes shape beneath the heat: women cooking under a shea tree, children and vendors gathering around a circle scratched into the sand, drums waiting to begin. And…
Not everyone who travels is a traveller. And perhaps it is becoming harder to be one. In the latest issue of the Ateneo de Cáceres magazine, I write about mass tourism and something much older: what it actually means to travel. From Marbella to Ibn Battuta, from Portugal to Mali, from consuming places to allowing…
Some places demand to be seen. Others persuade you to stop looking quite so hard. Sal, in Cabo Verde, was the latter: volcanic, salt-scoured and spare, an island of tradewinds, long horizons and enough light to make ambition seem faintly ridiculous. My short piece “No Stress” appears in the Autumn 2026 issue of Travel Africa,…
There are landscapes we carry inside us long after we leave them, places we assume will always be there waiting for us. The Okanagan Valley is one of those places for me. Last summer, I brought my daughters back there. Then the highway closed, the smoke descended, and a familiar landscape suddenly became something else.…
Before I properly met the river that gives The Gambia its name, I met a kola nut. It was bitter, faintly medicinal and almost comically unpleasant — but it also turned out to be a small doorway into the country itself. From the market stalls of Soma, the journey moved east: across a river strangely…
Travel stories often begin with a destination. This one begins with a return. My latest feature for the South China Morning Post explores Sal, the best-known island in Cabo Verde. While most visitors come for its beaches, warm Atlantic waters and year-round sunshine, I found a more compelling story unfolding just beneath the surface. Across…
My travel essay on the island of Sal, in Cape Verde, has just been published by Nueva Tribuna, making it my second travel piece to appear in a national Spanish publication. The story has an interesting backstory. I wrote it after visiting Sal, an island shaped by salt, arrivals, departures, and centuries of movement across…
A salt lake inside the crater of an extinct volcano is not where most people expect to find a lesson in history, identity, and cultural resilience. Yet on the island of Sal, Cabo Verde, floating in mineral-rich brine while voices echoed from the crater walls, it became impossible to ignore how landscapes absorb human stories…
Vultures circling above a dusty football pitch. A traditional wrestling festival in rural Gambia. A man who seemed to drift through the edges of the crowd unnoticed — until he stepped into the circle and became something else entirely. My latest travel feature, published in Spanish by Nueva Tribuna, explores transformation, belonging and the strange…
My travel-essay, “Everywhere and Nowhere: Following Ibn Battuta Across Marbella”, has been selected as a finalist by Intrepid Times in their “A Book Led Me There” competition. Intrepid Times In this piece I venture beyond Marbella’s glittering façade of sun-saturated luxury—Ferraris, gold chains, shopping sprees—and into the old town’s labyrinth of alleys where the echoes…