Category: Articles & Essays
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Lessons Learnt From Releasing A Stupidly Personal Adventure-Romance Documentary
Regular readers will have noticed that the blog has been rather quiet recently — specifically, since last Monday: the day before I launched Janapar. Continue reading →
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20 Questions Worth Answering Honestly (And My Responses)
Al Humphreys’ twenty questions — and I suggest you answer them too — came at just the right moment; when you suddenly find yourself wrestling with time and priorities and wondering if the path you set yourself on is still the right one. (It’s worth facing an uncomfortable truth or two sometimes. As a more talented writer than me once said, “no legacy is so rich as honesty”…) 1. Do you earn enough money? No. I currently don’t earn enough to keep a roof over my head and pursue my (inexpensive) interests. [At the start of 2012 I vowed to reconcile this… Continue reading →
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Adventure Does Not Require Any Fancy Gear. (Just Ask Rob & Maria)
I recently received an exasperated comment from a wound-up-sounding man called Rob on an article I published about trip sponsorship. ‘This is really annoying’, wrote Rob, referring to the fact that I’d got a 50% discount on an Extrawheel trailer five years ago. ‘Who needs celebrity bike tourers anyway?’ It’s not often that I find myself on the receiving end of an angry rant. I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve dealt a fair few of these in my younger and more obnoxious days, so it’s probably a case of “what goes around comes around”, as my mum would say. But… Continue reading →
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The Double Edged Sword Of Independent Film
I’m incredibly fortunate to be working with James on making Janapar. Not only is he a very talented producer-director, but he is one of the few with enough ambition (or recklessness) to turn down numerous well-paid TV gigs in favour of his own independent film. It’s an inherently risky business we’re in here. The majority of independent documentaries are passion projects. Most will never see a penny of profit. A startling proportion will bankrupt their makers. Why? Continue reading →
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The Moment I Actually Began To Enjoy Bicycle Touring
Earlier in 2012 I cycled from Vancouver to San Francisco with my brother Ben, who was a complete newcomer to life on the road. I asked him to share his experience of getting to grips with cycle-touring. Strangely enough, it was on a night of torrential rain in a northern Oregon forest that I actually started to enjoy travelling by bike. http://flickr.com/photos/ballenuk/7879203992/ Continue reading →
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Philosophy Of Travel & The Making Of ‘Janapar’: An Interview With The Sprocket Podcast
Podcasts are to radio stations what blogs are to newspapers, and — as with all things online and unfiltered — good content bubbles to the surface through persistence and collective appreciation. These varied and portable programmes are one of my favourite things to listen to (with one ear, naturally) during long bike rides. I’ve started to consider how the medium might be used for future projects after meeting and being inspired by the couple behind The Sprocket Podcast. Continue reading →
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Taking The First Step — A Half-Decade Of Adventure In Review
Five years ago today, on the 17th of June 2007, I took the first step. It was the step I’d been waiting to take all my life. Continue reading →
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Portland — Why I’ll Remember The People Over The Place
I would love to say that this will be an account of the wonders of the city of Portland. Because here is another city of the north-western States that manages to effortlessly exude its own particular flavour from the moment one begins to wander the downtown gridwork of avenues and cross-streets. [vimeo]https://vimeo.com/38385810[/vimeo] Continue reading →
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This Is Claire’s Legacy. What Will Yours Be?
British readers may have heard the sad news of Claire Squires, who collapsed and died on the final bend of last weekend’s London Marathon. She was running for two reasons — publicly, to raise money for the Samaritans, her favourite charity; and personally, in memory of her brother, who died 10 years ago under tragic circumstances. While I will not cast myself as a very close relative, Claire was still my cousin, and it is impossible to put into words the kind of pain that this side of my family has gone through. These events, now a headline story in the national… Continue reading →
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The Evolving Rationale Of A ‘Professional’ Adventurer
It’s less than a month until I leave these shores for the first of the two ‘big trips’ I’m going to undertake this year. And of all the questions in my head right now, this one sounds the simplest: “Which camera should I take?” But this post will not deal with the ins and outs of camera equipment selection. (That’s for another post, which non-geeks will be able to happily skip over.) No. As I sat down to write, I realised that this question in fact drills to the core of my motivation for continuing to journey, explore, adventure, or whatever… Continue reading →