Overland Travel
“Travel is transition, and at its best it is a journey from home. I hated parachuting into a place. I needed to be able to link one place to another. One of the problems with travel was the ease and speed with which a person could be transported from the familiar to the strange...
The other way, going slowly, crossing national frontiers, scuttling past razor wire with my bag and my passport, was the best way of being reminded that there was a relationship between Here and There, and that a travel narrative was the story of There and Back” (Paul Theroux).
Travelling the world for 26 summers has provided an education in people and places. There is no intention to see every nation on earth - just most of them. My current country count is 178. Included on that list are countries recognised by some but not others.
There have been hundreds of flights – 56 in 2006 alone – but the preferable modes of transport involve contact with land or sea, especially for more ambitious expeditions. This outlines the individual or cumulative routes of the most epic voyages, spanning each year of my adult life.
1999, 2000 and 2003
Four days after leaving school I flew to California to work as a football coach for three months. I spent the summers of 1999, 2000 and 2003 coaching across 15 states. Weekends involved driving between camps, with the final contract culminating in an impromptu road trip to America’s Midwest. I went to USA for 17 consecutive years, spending 18 months of my life there.
2001
Four separate interrailing trips across Europe in two years inspired a profound appreciation for train travel. Days began waking at dawn on arrival in new cities, passing through their railway terminals – which E.M. Forster called ‘gates to the glorious and unknown – through them we pass into adventure.’
2002
Travelling through Japan for the 2002 World Cup was followed by an epic overland Trans-Siberian / Eurasian train journey from Beijing to Liverpool, lasting five weeks. The European route went north of the Arctic Circle, and as far south as Naples.
2003
After notching up 70 European away matches watching Liverpool, the 11 trips in 2002/03 and 2003/04 proved some of the least glamorous and most memorable. Following fixtures in Valencia and Moscow, Champions League prospects ended abruptly in Switzerland – which I partly remember for our infamous journey from Brussels to Basel. UEFA Cup campaigns ensued, with overland tours to Arnhem, Auxere, Ljubljana, Bucharest, Sofia and Marseille. I wrote about some of those experiences in Places I Remember. The most memorable was the passage from Budapest to Sofia, driving the length of the war-torn country then known as Serbia and Montenegro.
2004
I worked on various sport-for-development and peace projects, including health promotion camps for those living near the Chernobyl exclusion zone in Belarus, co-existence programmes in post-war Bosnia, with survivors of Chechen terrorism in schools in Russia, and playground construction for displaced children in Azerbaijan.
I was recruited to run football coach education programmes in Uganda, Zimbabwe and Mozambique for an NGO during the summer. I wrote about the project in the latter location in a 2023 issue of Gløry magazine. Those African coaching clinics and the journeys between were some of the most incredible (yet at times terrifying) experiences of my life.
2005
At the midway point of a PhD, I interrupted my studies for five months to lead youth sport-for-development projects in Eastern Europe – notably for Ukrainian street children, Belarusian prisoners and Albanian asylum seekers. The short scribbles on this map do no justice to the memorable journeys these projects entailed.
2006
Four friends from Liverpool embarked on an adventure of a lifetime in America, driving from the Pacific to the Atlantic. The only fixed points of the coast-to-coast journey were the inbound and return flights to San Francisco and from Washington D.C. We visited 46 states together in six weeks.
2007
Travelling with a different group of friends, this around-the-world tour consumed an entire summer. It was a journey travelled almost entirely by plane, but circumnavigating the globe by any other means was unfeasible within our timeframe. The main destinations were New Delhi, Kathmandu, Ho Chi Minh, Phnom Penh, Bangkok, Singapore, Bali, Sydney, Auckland, Suva, Hawaii and Los Angeles. It embodied everything that Paul Theroux speaks against in the quote at the top of this page.
2008
Five of us embarked on this epic overland journey from Quito to Rio. We travelled through Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Brazil.
I then drove from Seattle to Fairbanks, passing more bears than people in The Yukon en route to Alaska.
They were two parts of a Pan-American expedition.
2009
On another memorable train journey from Beijing, I travelled to Hanoi via Hong Kong and Macau. I then flew to South Korea and Papua New Guinea, before landing in Australia.
After driving from Cairns to Adelaide, via Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, Tasmanian and then New Zealand journeys followed. The latter itinerary was reshaped in midair, after our plane to Queenstown was rerouted to Christchurch in heavy turbulence.
2010
Of the six World Cups I have been to, South Africa was the most memorable. We did a tour of every host city, watching games in six grounds. We also visited Botswana, Lesotho and what was then Swaziland, before a safari at Kruger National Park.
2010
This was an unplanned overland adventure of epic but also disjointed proportions, travelling through Cuba, and then from Panama City to New York City. Bus journeys from Panama to San Diego went via Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Belize and Mexico.
We underestimated the sheer scale of Mexico, resulting in three 24-hour bus journeys between major cities in a week - in a bid to meet a friend in San Diego by a set date. Another coast-to-coast drive across USA followed, taking a more direct route than the 2006 version.
2011
This trip to the southern hemisphere began with an inter-island adventure in New Zealand, followed by two overland journeys in Australia, and a South African safari. I proposed to my wife at Cape Point on the penultimate day.
2012
We got married in June 2012. My mum died the week before, so we postponed plans for a long honeymoon. After returning from a week’s minimoon driving around Iceland, an unplanned trip to the Adriatic followed, travelling on buses and ferries between Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
2013
The long-awaited honeymoon was an epic North American adventure in three parts. After two road trips, we finished with what we thought would be a one-off voyage in the Caribbean – a cruise.
2014
There would be ten more cruises in the next five years, exploring waters and lands difficult to visit otherwise, particularly in combination. This was the second of four tours of the Caribbean.
2015
Five consecutive winter holidays were spent on cruises - in the Caribbean and Mediterranean, and Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The 2015 voyage also involved an action-packed overland tour of Israel and Palestine.
2016
After a road trip from New York to Cape Cod and the islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, we sailed across the Atlantic Ocean, cruising from America to Holland with Holland America. The highlights were Newfoundland, Labrador, Greenland, Iceland and Norway. An overland journey through the Netherlands and Belgium followed.
2017
I have only embarked on two organised tours, both to countries that do not permit independent travel. The first of those was a Central Asian tour that was supposed to proceed overland between Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, from Ashgabat to Almaty - but having failed to secure a visa for Uzbekistan, I was stranded alone at the Turkmenistan border.
The GCC was in the midst of a diplomatic crisis, with travel restrictions and blockades complicating the process of navigating my way out of Turkmenistan and across the region. I managed to return to the capital to fly to Dubai, and then on to Bahrain and Kuwait, before arriving in Qatar, from where I was able to fly to Tajikistan to intersect the party and rejoin the rest of the tour. Given the travel restrictions, it was the most direct route possible.
2017
Another cruise followed over Christmas, visiting some of the best destinations in the Caribbean.
2018
An unforgettable overland journey from China to the DPRK.
2019
This was a Christmas cruise in the Indian Ocean, visiting Reunion, Mauritius, Seychelles and Madagascar. They can be dangerous waters, probably not advisable for a family with a two-year-old. It was our daughter’s third cruise in as many continents – and our last.
2020
In January 2020 we went to the Canary Islands, and did a road trip around Grand Canaria. It was supposed to be a final holiday in Europe before moving to Melbourne. As COVID spread across the globe, Australia stopped processing visas. The delay lasted longer than we were prepared to wait, and whilst I worked for the new university employer remotely for a period, we did not relocate to Australia as planned.
The journey across the 600 square mile island was our last for 22 months.
2021
After almost two years without travel during the COVID pandemic (during which time we lived in four houses), international travel finally returned with a trip to Portugal.
2022
The World Cup in Qatar was followed by a trip to Saudi Arabia. The eight tournament venues were constructed within a fifty-mile radius. I saw games in six grounds at the World Cup. Returning to Doha to speak at a post-Qatar 2022 event, I watched four matches in the 2023 Qatari Stars League. I had also seen 19 games at the 2011 Asian Cup and 2019 FIFA Club World Cup, visiting 12 stadiums in total.
2023
There were numerous derby matches in Spain, Belgium, Czechia, Austria, Sweden, Portugal and Denmark. I also covered Napoli’s historic title win and the Lisbon derby for Gløry magazine. Scandinavian tours to Åland, Stockholm and Svalbard proved particularly memorable. Along with visits to the Faroes, Sápmi, Iceland and the Arctic Circle, this map documents the journeys in and around Scandinavia / the Nordic region and Europe - over land and sea.
2023
A trip to Svalbard completed a journey across the eight countries of the Nordic region. At 78° it is the northernmost settlement and airport in the world. The archipelago is in complete darkness for three months during winter, and constant daylight for three months during summer. Its human population is outnumbered by 3,000 polar bears. During a summer trip, I travelled by boat, encountering humpback, minke and beluga whales, as well as walruses, artic foxes and polar bears.
2024
A family road trip around Iceland’s Route 1 and Snæfellsnes peninsula. We got caught in hurricane winds and a snow storm and got snowed in for three days in a mountainside guesthouse. When the roads re-opened we continued north, eventually completing the circular route around the island. We missed our flight home but got to see whales, puffins and reindeer in the wild.
2024
A family road trip through Montenegro, visiting Podgorica, Petrovac, Sveti Stefan, Budva, Tivat, Prčanj, Perast and Luštica Bay - travelling via car, boat and cable car.
2024
A family road trip around Florida, spending Christmas in South Carolina and Georgia.
2025
A New Year cruise in the Caribbean, visiting the Dutch Antilles, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica and Jamaica. The ship sailed through part of the Panama Ship Canal, and visited Aruba, Curacao, Cartagena, Colón, Limón, and Ocho Rios.
