Pauls_Travels

Pauls Travels

I started travelling many years ago, as a child with a father in the Royal Air Force. My first international trip was to Singapore, at the ripe old age of six. That first trip, and the three years that we lived in Singapore, were to instil a wanderlust that lasted for years. We returned to the UK in 1970 but I was never the same, and England just wasn't what I wanted in life, even at that tender age. It seemed old, dull, boring, everything that Singapore wasn't.

My next overseas journey was by motorcycle, to the south of France, in 1984. I went with three friends, two of us on my kawasaki 1100, the other two on a Norton 850. Looking back it was a great adventure, but at the time I recall it was a little chaotic. Same the following year, four of us on two bikes. This was even more chaotic, with egos clashing and continual differences of opinion. I went back again a few months later, with just one friend riding pillion, but after that I was always on my own, every time, by choice.

In the early eighties I'd discovered the classic book 'Jupiters Travels', by Ted Simon, and I tried to emulate the spirit of that epic, 70,000 mile, four year journey around the world.
Riding alone gave me a much better perspective on what was going on around me too. I hated having to confer and plan with others about the distance to travel, the direction, the speed, where and when to stop etc. Alone I just made the decision, and that was it. Not always the best one, but it was mine. No one to blame, no one to disagree. I also had no one to run to with problems, nobody to help share the burden or worry of a breakdown or accident. It was just me, and I liked it. A little scary, but it kept me on my toes.

But I always wanted to travel the rest of the world, and I felt that touring Europe was just practise for the big global trip, but, like the vast majority of would be travellers, the intricacies of everyday existence tended to get in the way of my well laid plans. Things like money, and time. Finally, in 1989, after a particularly well done deal on a house sale, I had the money to get up and hit the road big time. I quit my job in the factory and started planning for the adventure of a lifetime.

The plan was to leave at the start of the new decade, and it took a while to realise that January 1st, 1990 was not actually the first year of the new decade. But I left anyway.
Regretfully, I was to make the trip on foot, not by motorcycle, as years of thinking, planning, dreaming and calculation had made me realise that I just didn't have the capital to cover the costs of buying, running and transporting a bike anywhere near as far as I wanted to go.

On 1st January I hitched down through Europe to Greece, and after two weeks messing around getting used to life on the road, flew from Greece to Bangladesh. After an interesting night there it was off to Nepal, where the world adventure really started.

And now, 15 years later, I'm back in the UK. Back in Stafford, where it all started so many years ago. Except now I have a wife and a baby daughter. I never did get all the way around the world, not yet anyway. I'm a little older, a little wiser and a little richer for the experience. We have a house, and car, and all the normal things that normal people have. In fact, to most of our neighbours, we're just another normal working class family, in a working class house.

We've actually been here three years now, and Shirley has been to college for a year to get some qualifications so she can start studying nursing at the local university. Paulina is in nursery, has been for two years already, and is nearly four years old now.

There is still something that niggles me on certain days, when I walk round the area and pass by the places I grew up in so many years ago. Something that bugs me like a bad memory or a regret: Basically, it wasn't meant to be this way! I wasn't supposed to just come home and settle into the life I ran away from.

The problem is, I'm actually sorta happy to be here, happy to try to blend in and be normal. I have a great wife and daughter, and I can't think of anything else I really want to do. Lets face it, I've had all the opportunities I ever needed to go off and do something else, and yet I still came back to Stafford!

I bought a restaurant once, in Phuket, and watched it, and myself, go bankrupt over a few short months thanks to the Gulf war of '91. That ended a wild year living there, and I thought that was the end of the world for me.

I worked in a sailing boat yard in Singapore for two years, hoping to save money to go back to Phuket, to live again. It never happened. Money was never saved in Singapore. It's such an expensive, boring, souless place to live.

Years passed, many things happened, and I finally returned to Phuket, that exotic island paradise of my memory, only to find it had changed, and I had changed, and it was then I realised things could never be the same second time around. They could be better, or worse, but they could never be the same. Reliving those golden days just wasn't going to happen, exept for in my memories, but I do have some rich memories of those long passed golden days in a paradise in south east asia.

In time I travelled further afield, and eventually ended up in the Philippines. Where I finally met my wife.

My job still takes me overseas for six months of the year, and without that I honestly think I'd be crawling up the walls in England.

Some of my adventures may be told here in, in time, but some never will, for I have lived a while, travelled far, and there are other people in my life to consider now.

It'll take a while in the telling though, as a lot has happened in the last few years.

My first ever solo trip abroad was taken on this rather tired 750 kawasaki twin. I also had an 1100 Kawasaki tourer at home, but preferred the 750 as it was lighter and more economical. Though I was only going to France and Spain, I was nervous as hell of whatever I could think of to be nervous about. The trip lasted two weeks, and was 'interesting', as it included a record breaking crawl home, at fifty mph max, due to a shortage of funds for gas. the bike managed some seventy mpg on that econocrawl!.

The CX500 shown here was bought a few years later, as an emergency transport vehicle after my 1300 kawasaki had broken down in Nice, on another of my many trips through France. I originally hated the CX 500 with a passion, as did every red blooded biker in those days, but I grew to love and respect it as it capably covered thousands of miles of English and European roads with me aboard. I took it to France and Spain three times with no problems at all.

In those far off days I was younger, thinner and hairier, and life was a lot more simple.

The shot above was taken at 7.30 one morning at Crazy Su bar in Kata beach, Phuket, in May '90. I didn't realise it at the time, but Phuket was about as far as I would get as a back packer. I'd been pretty bored of continually moving for a while by then, and there are only so many things to see before every sunset, every beach, every city, starts looking pretty much alike. I'd worked for 14 years, travelled for five months, and I now decided I wanted a real rest. Plans to fly to Bangkok were cancelled and I decided to stay in Phuket for a while. That while turned into nearly a year. I visited England three months later to get some more money, the last of the money, and that was to be the last trip home for nearly six years!.

Three very different forms of transport I used on my travels through India.
I spent three months in India, travelling from Varanasi in the east , to Jaiselmier in the west, then down through Goa to Trivandrum, and from there I flew out to Sri lanka

Penang island, in Malaysia, April '90

A different type of 'round the world' story!

So, where was a young free and single guy to go????