Who am I?
I grew up travelling.
By the time I was 18, I'd lived in the UK, the USA, Singapore, the Netherlands and Nigeria. I've never stopped, and so by the end of 2021, I've visited 62 countries at least once.
I've been asked, "Do you ever just go to a beach and just lay there?" and the answer is never, I relax by seeing something new.
I bought an early digital camera in 1999 from savings earned working with my father. It was a tiny thing that ran on AA batteries and could take perhaps a hundred 640x480 images. I loved it, and it was an early example of where photography was moving to, but it was a still a toy.
It was almost another ten years before I first got seriously into photography, in 2008. Fresh out of a relationship, I took a dSLR on holiday with me that I'd borrowed from a friend and fell in love with the art of travel. (You can even read the realisation here: Galata Tower) Previously, I'd been living with a talented amateur photographer and had not really taken a hand in shooting, except for the occasional snap. Ever since I visited Istanbul, I've been taking photos of everywhere I have been. I've always been a prolific writer, and the photos I've taken have given me the power to illustrate the places I'd been writing about.
A year or two later, I started turning the bigger trips into published travel diaries, a reminder for myself more than anything and looking back the narrative is taking more and more space. These books evolved into this website, a chronicle of where I have been and what I've experienced. This is also why some of the entries are written chronologically or as a narrative, and others are more descriptive of a location and in the style of a travel site.
The name "a Tog's Trek" comes from the shorthand a number of my photography friends use for a group of Photographers, a group of "Togs". As a Tog, I wanted a record of where I had trekked.
Happy travels,
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