Dawn Punter

The morning after New Year’s Eve in Phnom Penh arrived quietly. The park outside the Royal Palace had returned to normal, the ice-cream cartons gone, the kites replaced by traffic and dust. The night before already felt oddly distant, as if it belonged to another version of us. We woke…

The train pulled out of Bangkok’s Hua Lamphong Station with a series of lurches and reluctant sighs, as if to remind everyone that it was getting far too old for all this hard work. We settled into our hard wooden seats in third class. The pull-down windows, most of them…

Only a few months after arriving back in Spain, we were off again. Thirty-litre backpacks ready, minds already slipping back into travel mode. It felt like an itch I just had to scratch, despite promising myself I’d behave for at least a year.We chose Bangkok as our first stop deliberately.We’d…

As I touched down at Heathrow after seven months of backpacking through Central America, I reached for my hand luggage sized backpack. It contained little more than a couple of items of clothing, worn well beyond recognition. At the bottom, grains of sand and scuff marks told the story of…

At last, our gap year adventure was ready to begin.We had a loose idea of which countries we might visit, and roughly in what order, but not much more than that. We booked the outward flights from Heathrow, partly because they were cheaper, partly because it felt important to say…

I had arrived in Spain in late September, and somehow Christmas had crept up on me quietly, almost unnoticed.In our small village on the Almería and Murcia border, there was just one lonely string of Christmas lights hanging at the entrance, probably unwanted and discarded by a larger town nearby.…

Six more days of work.Eighteen days of planning. … And then we were meant to wave goodbye to England from the back of a ferry and head south through France and Spain on the very first leg of our adventure. In theory. In reality, the final weeks looked more like…