Developing a love for Asia

A three-week voyage halfway around the globe brought my geographic fantasies to life. At the tender age of sixteen I found myself footing the back streets of Naples, devouring a moonlit meal in an Aden souk and gaining a first taste of a sweaty Asia, in Colombo.

For several years I remained captivated by the vast sprawling land down under which had become my new home. Then came a holiday in New Caledonia, bringing back the memories of a tropical Asia, first conjured up in Colombo five or six years before. There was a further gap of consolidating life in outback corners of Australia, before taking up the character-building Aussie ritual of returning to Mother England and back-packing Europe.

The route to get there was via Hong Kong and Bangkok.

 Hong Kong in the latter years of the 20^th Century was even then a mass of towering concrete and glass, while Bangkok was already developing a dubious reputation as the traffic-jam mecca of Asia. Touching down in Hong Kong – on the old airstrip surrounded by the waters of Victoria Harbour -was exhilarating. I was told it was a challenge for pilots to stay above the roof tops, whilst hitting the strip early enough, to avoid ending up in the drink at the other end!

The whole city was a mind-blowing experience for me: a young man just arrived from a very white Australia, suddenly immersed into an incredibly diverse Asian setting. Yet there were a host of similarities which made transition to such a land of opposites, that little bit easier: the Star Ferry reminded me of Sydney; The taxis of Melbourne, the buses of London; and all – at that time  in history – still in the safe hands of good Queen Elizabeth.

This brief Asian stopover lasted only a week, but by the end I was reluctant to leave for the earlier perceived safety of my birthplace and a hitch-hiker’s Europe. These visits were short in time, but long enough to confirm the workings of my geographical brain, which demonstrated an attraction to unfamiliar parts of the globe and the peoples who inhabited those places. They reaffirmed a need to travel, alluding to a world beyond the boundaries of white, English-speaking parts: a world that could hold a multitude of new and robust experiences; enough to test my senses and leave more of an impression on my mind than I could ever have guessed at the time.

In the early 1980s – a decade after returning down under – I ditched a promising career in industry and went back to the classroom, to learn more about development issues in Asia, and the so-called Third World. My early flair for geography and a longing to know more about the wider world, was coming to the fore.

Those development studies included a mini-thesis, based on development project work carried out by Oxfam, where I immersed myself in the day-to-day experience of life within a cluster of Indian villages. This gave me both a reason and a vehicle to re-visit the Asia I had glimpsed ten years before, but with a profoundly altered approach, compared to earlier travels. Now, I was plunged into the South Asian interior, whereas before I’d simply skated on the veneer of Asian mega-cities. I would come to discover and learn more about the vast disparity between these two almost contradictory perspectives.

A few years after that, in the late 1980s, I returned to Asia as part of an Australian-based job, where once again – and not dissimilar to the mini-thesis which was added to my studies a few years before – I managed to build in a component which involved outreach to South Asia. This work was directed towards schools and focused on enabling young people to understand perspectives from different peoples and faraway places.

In some respects, I was putting into practice my love for all things geographical and a type of learning that introduced the learner to people and places which in a practical sense, were beyond his or her capacity to reach. I was in fact building a learning process for others based on my own experiences.

At around this time, I also visited Bangladesh to photograph and report on a series of development projects; perhaps one of the most memorable periods in my life.

There was a brief interim stage in the 1990s when I switched to teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL). The ensuing work began in Australia (teaching non-English speaking immigrants the basics of the language) before taking me back once again to Asian classrooms in Singapore and Bangkok. It proved to be an extremely intriguing time; a pleasant interlude one might say, between the more focused work which centred on education for development, sustainable living and inter-cultural empathy.

After that flirtation with the world of TEFL, and now resident back in Britain, I returned to working in partnership with my previous Mumbai-based colleagues in India. By then, these key Indian educators and their families had become close friends. The work repeated the type of networks I had built up between schools in Australia and India, but this time with a focus on links between the UK, India, and Kenya.

This transition back to what I would consider my prime area of interest showed that though I loved the TEFL work with non-English speakers, my real passion was in the development field, and particularly that part which involved hands-on, South-North connections. The inclusion of Kenya in the mix, introduced me to an African perspective, similar in many ways, but then also quite different to my experiences in Asia. Some years later Kenya would become my new home, where eventually I would come full circle to live on the equatorial coast of that country, a tropical world not dissimilar to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) that I’d visited as a teenager those many years before.