We are in Yorkshire, walking out from the back of Menston, along a lane that becomes more rutted and uneven the further past the farm we walk, rising slowly up the hillside until the view back across to the tower of High Royds and the Chevin beyond opens up in front of us. This is a flying visit, just a couple of days with friends and family, and tomorrow we will return to Berlin. But the weather has offered us a window to get out of the house and feel the ground beneath our feet.
This is a walk we have done before, and like any journey repeated, each version is shaped by memories of the time before. The Curlew Cafe is closed today, but once we ate bacon sandwiches on the terrace in a suntrap of unseasonable warmth. The Reva Reservoir is much lower than the last time we sat on these rocks between the gorse bushes. Remember when we crossed the road to enter Hawksworth Moor just ahead of Team Sky? They were on their final training ride the day before the opening stage of the Tour de France.
Our walk today is full of memories, but it is also full of plans too. We are about three weeks from the biggest journey either of us have undertaken in more than 25 years. And unlike these days in Yorkshire, out of about nine weeks on the road, we will only be retracing previous steps for a handful of days. And so, as we drop down from the top of the moor, passing through the old shooting range and across a field that skirts the overgrown remnants of a mill pond, we are allowing ourselves to get a little bit excited about what’s to come.
Japan and New Zealand. This is where we are heading and where our imagination increasingly lives as we make our final preparations. We are looking forward to what we will discover on the other side of the world, and there is some trepidation too. But that’s okay. Because what we are also thinking about, especially when we explain our trip to other people, is why it is that we are drawn to travel in the first place. Especially when it is so far and for so long.
Travel isn’t always pretty, Anthony Bourdain once wrote, as he tried to explain his own wanderlust and why it took him to places sometimes far from his comfort zone. Sometimes it hurts, it breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you. It should change you… you should take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.
His words come to mind right now because we are embarking on this nine-week journey at a time of personal change. Katrin is leaving a job and a place of work that has centred her life for the past two decades. What the next chapter is to contain is yet to be written, and this trip is part of that process. It is a very specific example of how travel is about discovery both out in the world but within the person that is doing it.
How many times have you made a big decision about life while away from home? Yes, it is often about having space and time to think. But I think it is also about having totally new experiences, sometimes outside of your comfort zone, that allows you to imagine what might be possible, triggering something that might have seemed absolutely impossible a few days or weeks before when still immersed in your everyday routine.
As much as anything, it is probably because travel is an exercise in learning. About people and places, about the things that are different and the things that are the same, however unlikely it might seem at first glance. One of the joys of travel has always been the realisation that the vast majority of people, wherever you might find them, are fundamentally good and kind and willing to help the person in front of them at any given moment. I am convinced this is true, regardless of how the world is presented to us online and in the media.
The only place on our trip that we have been to before is Tokyo, and writing these words reminds me of an incredibly small moment that nevertheless often comes to mind when I think about travel and why we do it. I was in the bowels of Tokyo station, alone for the first time in the Japanese capital, trying to decide what to have to eat. Everything about the choice of restaurants intimidated me, from the language barrier to the food itself. What happens if I can’t make myself understood? What happens if I don’t know what I order? What happens if I make a fool of myself?
And in that moment I was reminded of a passage from Anthony Bourdain about his first visit to Japan, and how he could never live with himself if he ate his first meal on his trip in the McDonalds across the road from his hotel. I chose a place pretty much at random. A noodle restaurant with some handy plastic representations of the meals they served in a cabinet beside the door. Once inside I was handed a laminated menu with a series of lunch specials at the top. I pointed at one and smiled at the waitress, who gave me a smile back and then asked me a question.
It was clearly not a yes or no question. But I had no understanding of what she wanted to know and she had no way of reframing it so that I might understand. We looked at each other desperately for a moment or two, and then a man sitting a few seats down interrupted us. He was having his lunch ahead of a journey for work, and was wearing a suit. His English was limited and he spoke with a bit of shyness. Indeed, he did not seem all that comfortable at all, but he had made the decision he was going to help.
‘She wants to know if you want the noodles hot or cold.’
‘Oh.’
I looked at the waitress again and she smiled with encouragement.
‘What would you choose?’
‘I like them hot,’ the man said, who then switched to Japanese for a few words, causing the waitress to turn on her heels.
The food came and it was delicious. We had got through all the things that had worried me when I was standing on the other side of the curtain, mainly thanks to the kindness of a guy who had only popped in for a bite to eat in the middle of his everyday routine. He probably forgot the interaction by the time his train left Tokyo station. As you can see, I still think about it more than a decade later.
Those memories feed a desire for more. They are echoed in more recent moments, also in Japan where we stepped through the curtain so many times without really knowing what we would find on the other side, only to come away fed and full of stories. Or too many acts of random kindness from strangers, from a lookout point in the Azores to a mountainside in Austria, than we have space for here.
In Yorkshire we end our walk in the comfort of a familiar place, and use maps to describe our planned route across Japan and New Zealand over cups of tea. Some people say that the journey is more important than the destination, but I also think that wanderlust and the plans that are made are all part of it too. A trip does not need to be nine weeks long to change you, and it always lasts longer, before or after, than simply the number of days you are away from home.
If I am an advocate for anything, it is to move, Anthony Bourdain also wrote. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. Walk in someone else’s shoes or at least eat their food. It’s a plus for everybody. Open your mind, get off the couch, move.
Thanks for reading,
Paul & Katrin,
Yorkshire, September 2026
Nepal and The Winding Trail
If you have been following the news you will have seen the devastating pictures from the floods close to the Nepal-Tibet border. Because of our connection to Nepal, a lot of people have asked us for ways that they can contribute to emergency relief, and our friends at Pahar Trust Nepal have created a fundraiser and the team in Pokhara will make sure it goes to the places where it can have the most useful impact.
But more than anything, if you were planning a trip to Nepal, the message from the country is that you should still come. Tourism is such an important part of the livelihood for so many people and communities in the country, most of which is safe and open to visit. We recently published a love letter to Nepal with sketches from a journey through the foothills of the Himalaya, and we have other articles and guides to share that will hopefully inspire a future visit to this wonderful country.
Notes from the road: A love letter to Nepal
Our guide to Pokhara
“The road snakes up the hill, through patches of jungle and villages clinging to the hillside. We pass by women sweeping their front steps in the early morning light and men hosing down their mopeds. Kids already in school uniform play in the road. More dogs stroll and sniff and only move out of the way of the oncoming taxi at the very last minute. The closer we get to the summit, we come to hotels and lodging houses, their guests stringing out along the road as they walk up towards the temple and the viewing tower at the top…”
Walking in Kathmandu
An exploration on foot through Kathmandu, city of temples and tempos, where new buildings rise alongside ancient streets, a place of new arrivals and those making plans to depart…
Between the mountain and the river
The uneven gravel roads that are slowly but surely connecting the hill villages of Nepal bring the rest of the world to these hard-to-reach places while also offering a way out. Journeys from Pokhara with Pahar Trust Nepal.
