When Did the Temple Become a Rush Hour?

On faith, overcrowding, and what we’re really searching for

I am religious. I believe in something larger than myself. I find meaning in ritual, comfort in prayer, and a kind of stillness in sacred spaces that I haven’t found anywhere else in the world. Faith, for me, is real. Which is why I keep going back — to the same temples, the same queues, the same chaos — hoping that this time, I’ll find what I came for. And that is precisely why what I am about to write comes from a place of pain, not cynicism.

What Is Religion? And What Is a Temple For?

Before we get into the chaos, let’s go back to the beginning. Religion, by definition is human beings’ relation to that which they regard as holy, sacred, absolute, spiritual, divine, or worthy of especial reverence. Hinduism, one of the oldest living religions on earth, built its answer across thousands of years — through the Vedas, the Upanishads, the epics, the stories of gods.

And the temple? The temple was the meeting point. The physical space where the human reaches toward the divine and — if you believe — the divine reaches back. In Hinduism, this moment has a name: darshan. It literally means “to see and be seen.” A two-way exchange between a devotee and the deity. A moment of stillness and recognition.

That is what a temple is supposed to be. Now let me tell you what it has become.

Puri. The Promise and the Stampede.

I have been to the Jagannath Temple in Puri more times than I can count. It is one of the holiest shrines in Hinduism — one of the four sacred dhams, a place that draws millions because they believe, genuinely believe, that Lord Jagannath resides there. The promise of the place is serenity. The name itself means Lord of the Universe.

The moment you step inside, it becomes a stampede. The queue stretches as far as the eye can see — men, women, children, the elderly, all pressed into a single mixed line that moves at the pace of barely controlled chaos. Women get shoved. Dupattas get caught. Feet get stepped on without apology. The volunteers — the very people who are supposed to regulate this — push and yell, adding to the confusion rather than managing it. Not on the streets during a brawl. Inside a temple. In the presence of the deity they are supposed to be serving.

One morning when I was there, there was a small girl standing near me. She couldn’t have been older than six or seven. Tears were streaming down her face — not from devotion, not from the emotion of being in the presence of the divine. From fear. From being crushed by a crowd that had no space for her smallness.

And yet, the crowds never decrease. Year after year, I return, and year after year, it is worse. When you finally fight your way to the sacred shrine, you get approximately fifteen seconds in front of Lord Jagannath. Maybe less. Because the moment you reach the deity, the priests are already sizing you up. The haggling begins. Who pays more gets the prasad — the mint, the offering, the blessing. Those who don’t pay enough? They get moved along. And amongst all of this, I don’t precisely get to do the thing I came for because of other distractions. Pray.

Did darshan even happen? Or did I just survive a crowd?

A Culture the World Will Never See

I have walked through the Blue Mosque in Istanbul as a non-Muslim. I have stood inside the Vatican City (Sistine Chapel, St Peter’s Basilica). These spaces draw the world because they offer something worth experiencing — the architecture, the history, the atmosphere, the sheer weight of centuries.

A foreign visitor can walk into many Hindu temples. But would they? Would you invite someone to witness something sacred, and hand them a stampede?

Because what they would be missing is extraordinary. The shikhara at Kashi Vishwanath is a three dimensional map of the cosmos. The inner sanctum at Rameshwaram was built with such precise acoustics that the conch and bells create frequencies that are anything but accidental. And the carvings at Konark’s Sun Temple are not decoration — they are the Vedas told in stone, an entire civilisation’s philosophy carved into a wall. I could write an entire blog on the amazing physics defying stories of Jagganath, Puri which can still be seen today. Nobody sees any of this. There is no time. There is a crowd to survive.

Hinduism is one of the oldest living religions on earth. Its temples are repositories of art, architecture, sculpture, and philosophy accumulated over thousands of years. That is world heritage by any reasonable measure. And the world is quietly choosing not to engage with it — not because of rules, but because of what we’ve allowed these spaces to become.

The tragedy is double. A rich, ancient culture remains unseen. And even we, who are allowed inside, are not really experiencing it anymore either.

VIP Darshan and The Ethics

I visited Vrindavan recently and had a genuinely beautiful darshan — calm, unhurried, meaningful. The kind that actually stays with you. No pushing, no haggling, no fifteen-second window before someone’s elbow finds your ribs. It was a VIP darshan.

And it left me with a question I haven’t been able to shake — is this the only way to experience a temple properly now? Because if the answer is yes, what does that say about where we’ve arrived? The person who saved for months, travelled overnight in a sleeper bus, fasted for three days before arriving — they stand in the stampede. The person who can pay, doesn’t. That’s not a system built on faith. That’s a system built on a queue that got so broken, someone figured out how to monetise the escape from it.

VIP darshan exists because temples are overwhelmed and nobody fixed the overwhelm. So instead they sold a workaround.

But Why Do People Still Suffer For It?

Here is the question that genuinely fascinates me. Because the crowds at Puri aren’t suffering passively — they are choosing to go. They know what awaits them. And they go anyway.

To understand this, you have to understand something more fundamental about faith and suffering. I have seen people beat themselves during Muharram — a physical, visceral expression of grief and devotion that is almost incomprehensible if you’re watching from the outside. I have seen devotees in Jatipura doing parikrama for months on bare feet — their soles cracked and blackened, their eyes somehow calm, even joyful. I have watched people make the gruelling climb to Kedarnath through cold, altitude, exhaustion, and genuine physical danger : not despite the difficulty, but because of it.

There is something deeply human in voluntary suffering for something you believe in. The hardship becomes the proof of devotion. The body endures so the soul can speak. When you suffer for something, you prove to yourself — and perhaps to the divine — that you mean it.

So then — is the Puri stampede the same thing? Are people enduring it as an act of faith?

I don’t think so. Because there is a difference between chosen suffering and suffering that is simply the result of poor management. The Kedarnath climb is hard because the mountain is hard. The Puri stampede is hard because no one has bothered to fix it. One is sacred. The other is avoidable.

The Contrast

I want to tell you about the times my religious sentiment has actually risen.

Salasar, early morning, before the crowds arrive. Rameshwaram, which has a quality to it I still can’t put into words. Dwarka, with the ocean right there and the temple behind you. Sri Kalahasti, where doing the Rahu Ketu puja felt meaningful and soul changing in some sense. And small local mandirs in towns nobody has heard of, where the priest has time to look you in the eye and actually bless you. Somnath was another that surprised me — a temple that has been destroyed and rebuilt seventeen times throughout history, and yet somehow still carries a quiet dignity that the crowds haven’t managed to take from it.

Every single time I have found genuine peace in a temple, it has been in the absence of a crowd which does not feel like a coincidence but a conclusion.

The Golden Temple: Proof That It Can Be Done

I need to talk about the Golden Temple in Amritsar. Because it is, quite simply, the finest example of sacred crowd management in India — and it asks every Hindu temple administration a question they should be deeply uncomfortable with.

No crazy queues. No security theatre. Shoes managed with efficiency. Langar, free food for thousands, served in fast, orderly lines. No one haggling. No one yelling. A genuine, overwhelming sense of peace, even when the place is full of people. I walked out of the Golden Temple feeling something I rarely feel in overcrowded Hindu temples: that I had actually been somewhere sacred.

Why does it work?

Because the SGPC has complete autonomous control. No bureaucracy managing faith. The people running it have genuine seva bhav (the spirit of selfless service). The architecture was designed with logical crowd flow in mind. And the volunteers are trained to reflect the values of the space they are serving, not just to push people through it.

Shirdi is another exception worth mentioning — despite drawing millions, something about the experience held. The energy was devotional, not chaotic. It gives you hope that scale doesn’t have to mean disorder.”

Most major Hindu temples, by contrast, are administered by state governments. The people who were once truly devoted to those deities — who understood what the space meant — are largely gone from administration. What remains is bureaucracy. And bureaucracy has no seva bhav.

India’s temple economy is estimated at Rs 3.02 lakh crore — roughly 2.32% of the country’s GDP. Tirupati alone generates thousands of crores annually. The money is there. The will to use it for the devotee’s experience, apparently, is not.

The Democratisation of Pilgrimage

I’ve thought a lot about why this is getting worse, not better. And I think I have part of the answer, even if it’s uncomfortable.

India’s rising middle class now has something previous generations didn’t — spending power and mobility. Better roads. Cheaper flights. More accommodation options at every price point. Pilgrimage, for centuries accessible only to those who could endure weeks of difficult travel, has been democratised. Anyone can go now. That is not a bad thing. It is, in many ways, a beautiful thing.

But it arrived without any of the systems required to handle it. Temples built for a few hundred devotees a day are now receiving tens of thousands. The architecture hasn’t changed. The crowd management hasn’t changed. The volunteer training hasn’t changed. The only thing that changed is the number of people walking through the door.

And somewhere along the way, the civic dimension collapsed too. No religious code of conduct is taught in families anymore. No community instruction on how to behave in a sacred space. People treat temples the way they treat traffic — every person for themselves, i.e. survival of the fittest, intent on their own destination, ignoring everyone around them. The same chaotic energy of the street, imported into a space that was designed for its opposite.

Who Actually Loses

The people with genuine shraddha — that deep, bone-level faith that cannot be performed or purchased — they are the ones being failed.

The elderly woman who has prayed for this moment her entire life. Who saved for years. Who travelled for days. Who can barely stand. She gets pushed aside at the entrance. She may not make it inside. If she does, she gets fifteen seconds and no prasad because she didn’t pay enough. The young family that drove twelve hours because the children have grown up hearing about this temple. They leave with a memory of chaos, not the divine. The person who came alone, quietly, to ask for something who needed a moment of stillness and found a stampede instead.

These are not edge cases. These are the majority. VIPs are few. The faithful are many. And the system serves the former at the expense of the latter.

What Are We Actually Searching For?

I keep coming back to the same thought.

We are a billion people looking for something. Peace. Meaning. Connection. Answers to questions we don’t even know how to ask. And we are all going to the same GPS coordinates, hoping to find it there, in the exact same window of time, pushing each other in the dark.

The divine, if it exists anywhere — and I believe it does — is probably not in the stampede. It is in the moment of stillness before the crowd arrives. It is in the small temple in the town nobody has heard of, where the priest lights the aarti slowly.

I am religious. I will keep going. But I have maybe even subconsciously have quietly started finding God in different places — the uncrowded ones, the unglamorous ones, the ones that haven’t been discovered yet.

The temple was never meant to be a rush hour.

Have you had a similar experience at a temple? Or a moment of genuine peace in an unexpected sacred space? I’d love to hear it in the comments below.

Cyprus

Nobody really talks about Cyprus. Ask most people to name a Mediterranean island and you’ll get Santorini, Sicily, maybe Mallorca if they’re feeling adventurous, and Cyprus will sit there, three hours from most of Europe, doing absolutely nothing to promote itself. Which is baffling, because in four days it managed to hand us a water park, a beach so blue it looks Photoshopped, ruins that predate most of what people fly to Italy for and one of the best days of diving and sailing I’ve had anywhere. Cyprus isn’t trying to be discovered. It’s just what it is.

Day One

Landing in Cyprus felt like stepping into a different pace almost immediately — the airport was small and easy, the drive out to Ayia Napa – a place we were going to call base for the next four days – was short, and the town showed itself in an unmistakable seaside-resort kind of way: whitewashed buildings, strips of bars and restaurants, and the sea showing up between buildings well before we actually reached it. Ayia Napa has a reputation as Cyprus’s party town, and there’s truth to that. We checked straight into Nissiblu which is a large hotel with a decent pool, five minutes from the beach, spacious rooms and made everyone settled and happy within the hour.

The pool came first, mostly out of impatience, and Nissi Beach came almost immediately after. It’s the beach every Ayia Napa postcard is showing, and for once the postcards aren’t exaggerating. The water is an almost unreal shade of turquoise that you assume must be filtered or enhanced until you’re actually standing in it, shallow enough for a long way out, and the sand is so soft and fine. It gets busy, understandably, but there’s enough space along the curve of the bay that it never felt crowded in the way that name suggests it might.

We headed back to the hotel for lunch at the cafe there, which ended up being one of those meals you don’t expect much from and then can’t stop talking about. Two salads, one of them a proper Greek salad and one a halloumi salad, both genuinely excellent, alongside a vegetarian burger, pizzas that were unreal, and a truffle risotto which was cooked perfectly. It was, without exaggeration, one of the better meals of the four days.

The afternoon was unplanned on purpose. We wandered the streets around the hotel, dipped into shops selling everything from local sweets to overpriced clothes. By evening we’d freshened up and headed to Zaatar, which is a middle eastern joint a few hundred meters away from our hotel. Every single mezze dish was three to four euros, and with nine of us at the table: we ordered essentially the entire mezze menu and skipped the mains without a second thought. Hummus, halloumi, muhammara, baba ganoush and dips I couldn’t name but kept reaching for, small plates arriving faster than we could finish them — it was one of the best value meals you can have, and we didn’t come close to needing the mains too. The desserts were amazing though with an apple puff, Muhallabieh and a soft and mellow Orange tea cake.

We rounded off the night with a visit to the supermarket where we bought a bottle of local orange wine which we planned to drink slowly off the balcony through the next few days admiring the amazing views of the sea.

Day Two

Day two opened at the pace we’d decided the whole trip should run at — unhurried. After Breakfast, we took a taxi into town to start the day, straight to the promenade. The promenade leads right into the heart of the area, a lively scene where the daytime buzz was just starting to wake up. First stop was ice cream, a scoop at the Order of the 5 Brothers and then another not far along at Mövenpick. On route we also stopped by the Monastery and the Church which were a 5 minute detour. From there we wandered down toward the beach area, taking photos as we went, and noticed something — patches of salt visibly forming and depositing along the shoreline, crusted white where the water had evaporated off the rock. Curiosity got the better of me and I tasted it straight off the sea, which was quite fun too.

By around 2:30 another taxi had us at Waterworld, Ayia Napa’s Greek mythology-themed water park, and it turned into the real event of the day — we didn’t leave until we’d been on nearly everything twice. The theming runs through the whole place, gods and myths worked into the rides and the layout, and the slides themselves deliver properly on the drop, followed by a lazy river that undid every bit of energy they’d just burned through us. We spent the whole afternoon there, and not one of us was ready to leave when it was time to go.

We came back to the hotel to recover properly, sat with the sea view until the light started changing colour, and then headed to Sale e Pepe on the main street for dinner. The pastas were good, the pizzas were better, and the staff managed a table of nine well with the head chef personally taking interest in each table’s order. A calm, well-fed close to a genuinely fun day.

Day Three

This was the day we drove out to Paphos, and I’ll be upfront about it: it’s a long way to go, the better part of the day eaten up in the car, and by the time we were walking around in the afternoon heat, we were for sure wondering if it was worth the distance. It’s a fair question.

The route took us through Kourion, an ancient Greco-Roman city set above the coastline, its amphitheatre still intact enough that you can sit in the stone seating and get a rough sense of what it once held, sea stretched out behind the stage. It’s a solid stop, worth the twenty minutes, though the heat had started climbing by the time we got there and it took some of the shine off standing around in an open-air ruin at midday. From there we stopped briefly at Aphrodite’s Rock, the sea stack said to be the birthplace of Aphrodite herself, rising out of the water right by the coast road — a nice photo stop, over in perhaps ten minutes.

Paphos itself is the better half of the day. We spent a while in the Nea Paphos Archaeological Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site built around Roman mosaics that have survived nearly two thousand years and still show scenes of gods and hunts in surprising detail, and the Tombs of the Kings nearby, an underground necropolis carved directly into rock that despite the grand name likely wasn’t for royalty at all, but for the island’s wealthiest families. Both are genuinely interesting, and worth seeing if you’re making the trip anyway — I just wouldn’t oversell them as reason enough on their own to give up most of a day, especially in the thick of the afternoon heat, which by that point had most of us moving a lot slower than we’d started. Breakfast had been heavy enough that lunch disappeared from the plan altogether, and a good cold brew at Beanhaus was more than enough to keep us going until dinner.

On the drive back, at around 5:30, we made a detour to the Famagusta checkpoint, to check if we would be granted entry into the north the following day, on advice by our driver. Cyprus has been divided since Turkey’s military intervention in 1974, which split the island into the internationally recognised Republic of Cyprus in the south and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, recognised only by Turkey itself. For years, Indian passport holders had generally been able to cross into the north without much trouble. That’s changed more recently — ties between India and Turkey soured sharply after fighting broke out between India and Pakistan in 2025, with Turkey publicly backing Pakistan during the conflict, and the fallout has spilled into places you wouldn’t necessarily expect, including passport control at a checkpoint on a divided island. At Famagusta, the answer we got was a firm no — my passport meant I’d need a Turkish visa to cross, something we hadn’t arranged and weren’t going to sort out on the spot. Our driver that day, a Greek Cypriot who’d grown up in the south, mentioned almost in passing that his own family had been among those displaced in 1974, moved out of homes in the north they were never able to return to.

Back at the hotel, we swam with piña coladas in hand before making the two-kilometre walk to the promenade, which by evening had turned genuinely lively — music, crowds, a stall running a game where you had to smash four swinging plates with six balls, which I managed cleanly (not that I need to mention it, but I will). Some shopping followed — local coffee, souvenirs, a few too many packets of olives — before dinner at Los Mexicanos, where the atmosphere was electric. I felt like I was at a Mexican fiesta. Good food, better margaritas but it was really the crowd and the energy that made the evening, the kind of place where the night runs an hour longer than planned.

Day Four

If I had to sell someone on this trip in one day, it would be this one.

I hold my Advanced Open Water certification, which is the level above the basic beginner’s course and opens up deeper, more technical dive sites that you can’t access as a first-timer. And Cyprus, as it turns out, is home to something most people don’t associate with a beach holiday at all: the MS Zenobia, consistently ranked among the top ten wreck dives in the world (Advanced Open Water and Nitrox certification is mandatory). I went with Alpha Divers out of Ayia Napa, who ran through a proper gear check before driving us to Larnaca and out onto the water for two dives.

The Zenobia has a genuinely wild backstory. She was a Swedish-built ferry that sank on her maiden voyage in June 1980, just off Larnaca, after a computer error flooded her ballast tanks unevenly and tipped her onto her side. She went down with over a hundred trucks still loaded in her cargo holds. She’s enormous, 172 metres of ferry lying on her port side in water ranging from around 16 to 42 metres, with a route in her for almost every level of diver, right up to technical divers doing deep penetration through her interior.

Visibility on the day was some of the best I’ve ever dived in — properly clear, the kind where you can see the full silhouette of the wreck from well above it. Marine life was lighter than I expected, a lionfish here, a sea urchin there, nothing like the density you’d get on a tropical reef, but it genuinely didn’t matter once we started the swim-throughs. Weaving between trucks still strapped down in the cargo hold, corridors tilted at odd angles because the whole ship is lying on its side, the scale of it pressing in from every direction — it’s one of the best dives I’ve ever done, and I’d go back tomorrow if I could.

While I was underwater, the rest of the family spent the day exploring Nicosia. I surfaced tired in the good way, grabbed a short nap, and then all nine of us headed out for a private luxury yacht charter to Cape Greco. Three hours on the water, and Cape Greco earns every bit of its reputation as one of the most striking stretches of coastline on the island. The cliffs there drop straight into the sea in these dramatic, layered limestone formations, carved out over years into arches, sea caves and narrow inlets that you can only really appreciate from the water, the boat gliding close enough to see the rock striations up close before pulling back out into open sea. The water itself shifts colour as it deepens, from a pale, glassy turquoise right up against the rocks to a much deeper blue further out, and it was calm enough that day to be almost glass-like, barely a ripple breaking the surface. We anchored in one of the quieter coves, jumped straight in, and swam in some of the clearest water I’ve ever been in, easily thirty feet of visibility straight down to the seabed. No other boat came near us the whole time. Our own playlist ran in the background, prosecco and snacks stayed within arm’s reach, and there was nothing to do but float, swim, and take in the cliffs from below. If Cyprus has a single defining moment from this trip, it’s this one.

We came off the boat, changed, and headed to Deck Terrace Restaurant, which we’d chosen for the ambience and the views as much as the menu, and it delivered on both. Dinner ran from asparagus and exotic salads and a rich velouté through to asparagus risotto and mushroom ravioli for mains.

We were up early the next morning for a flight to Malta, the second leg of this trip. Cyprus wasn’t the destination anyone in the group had been counting down to. It was almost an afterthought on the itinerary, the island we were passing through on the way to somewhere else. And yet by the end, it was the one we kept circling back to in conversation. Small, specific moments, the kind that don’t photograph as well as they felt.

That’s the thing about a place like this. It doesn’t hand you one big, obvious reason to visit — it hands you a dozen smaller ones, stacked close enough together which add up to an amazing trip. Cyprus doesn’t need the hype. It just needs a few days from your end and it is sure to impress.

What We Didn’t Get To

A few things which might be worth adding to your own itinerary if you have the time we didn’t:

Famagusta / Varosha — the one we were turned away from. The old walled city and the eerily abandoned resort district of Varosha, frozen since 1974

Nicosia — the rest of the group spent a day here while I was diving, and it’s Europe’s last divided capital, a city split by the Green Line with the old town, Ledra Street, and a city type atmosphere

Larnaca — worth a stop for the Salt Lake, home to flamingos in the winter months and St Lazarus Church

The Troodos Mountains — hill villages, vineyards, and Kykkos Monastery

Limassol — we drove straight through on the way multiple times, but the old town and medieval castle might have deserved more time

Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka doesn’t try to impress you, and that’s precisely what makes it good. A small island just off the southern tip of India, it has ancient ruins, tea-covered hills, decent surf, wildlife, colonial streets and a food scene that quietly holds its own. It moves at its own pace, unbothered by the noise of flashier destinations in the region. The cafe culture is genuinely solid, the coastline is never far away, and there’s an ease to the place, a kind of unhurried confidence, that makes it hard not to like. It won’t be the most dramatic country you ever visit. It probably won’t top any list. But not every destination needs to blow you away. Some just need to feel right and Sri Lanka, for the most part, does.

I’ll be honest about the shape of this trip from the start, as I always try to be. Four nights in Sri Lanka, two of which were spent at a work conference. That left me with two real days to actually experience the country, both in Colombo. No hill trains, no leopard safaris, no ancient ruins by torchlight. Just the city, its cafes and its coastline. And yet, it was enough to make me absolutely certain I needed to come back.

This blog is split into two halves. The first half is mine — two days in Colombo, told the way I like to tell things. Honestly, hungrily, and with a strong cup of coffee in hand.The second is for you — the reader planning a proper Sri Lanka trip, the places I didn’t get to but fully intend to one day, ranked in the order I’d personally do them.

Colombo

Colombo is not what most people picture when they think of Sri Lanka. No paddy fields, no ancient temples on the horizon, no postcard beaches. It is a proper city — layered, occasionally chaotic, and considerably more interesting than its reputation gives it credit for. I had two days here before the conference took over. I didn’t plan them particularly carefully. As it turned out, I didn’t need to.

Day One

I landed in the morning and checked into the ITC Ratnadipa which is the brand’s first property outside India, sitting on Beira Lake in the heart of the city. On paper it has everything: grand facilities, a strong location, the ITC name. In practice, it felt like a property that had invested heavily in the broad strokes and overlooked the details. The kind of hotel where the pool is impressive but the service lacks the warmth and curation you’d expect at that price point. Fine, comfortable, and slightly disappointing in the way that only expensive hotels can be.

I left fairly quickly.

Lunch was at the Ceylon Curry Club, and it was one of the better decisions of the trip. Sri Lankan food is not Indian food, though the two are routinely and lazily grouped together. It is coconut-forward, boldly spiced, and built around a logic that is entirely its own. A proper Sri Lankan spread means rice surrounded by a constellation of small dishes which each with a different character, each better when eaten alongside the others. I had curries, sambals, and a jackfruit preparation that was genuinely outstanding. If you leave this country without eating properly, that is entirely on you.

From lunch I walked to Radicle which is a specialty coffee shop that doubles as an art gallery, quiet and unhurried in the way that good cafes always are. The barista and I got talking, the way you do when there’s nobody else in the room, and somewhere between the first cup and the second he told me I had to go to Grind the next day. I noted it down. Genuine Tip : walk into the best specialty cafe you can find, talk to the person behind the counter, and ask them where they’d go. The answer will always be better than anything you find online.

I followed it up with another stop at Divide, a second specialty cafe nearby, partly because the coffee was excellent and partly because I needed the caffeine to keep exploring.

I came back to the hotel mid-afternoon, used the spa, and headed to the gym and then out again for dinner at Gini. Modern Sri Lankan cuisine, cooked over fire. I was eating alone, which turned out to be exactly the right way to experience it. The chef came out and walked me through every dish personally which all used the open fire techniques, the local ingredients, the thinking behind each preparation. We talked about Sri Lankan cuisine, about what fire does to flavour, about food as a philosophy. It was the kind of conversation that a full table would have interrupted. The food matched it: charred leeks over cashew sauce, charred cabbage with mushroom sauce and local cheese, an eggplant moussaka with a Sri Lankan twist, and a molten chocolate cake with mint crumble and ice cream that closed the meal on exactly the right note. Before I left, the chef mentioned Kampong. I wrote that down too.

Day Two

I was up early for a dive with Island Scuba — and if I’m honest, this was the highlight of the trip for me, though I suspect diving always will be.

Colombo is not a city most people associate with diving, which is part of what makes it worth knowing about. The waters off the coast are home to 18 wrecks including cargo ships, fishing boats, vessels of various sizes and histories, all all resting on the seabed within easy reach of the city. I have my Advanced Open Water certification, which opened up the deeper sites. We went down to two wrecks sitting at around 30 metres which were a cargo ship and a fishing boat, both encrusted with marine life and carrying that particular atmosphere that only wrecks have underwater. The marine life around them was rich with ray, lionfish, and the general sense of abundance you get around structures that have been sitting on the seabed long enough to become ecosystems. I also met a German couple on the boat who were seasoned wreck divers, and the three of us spent the surface intervals comparing notes on dive sites around the world. That is one of the small pleasures of diving that nobody really warns you about — the people you meet between the dives are often as interesting as what you find below. If you dive, Colombo’s wrecks are genuinely worth your time.

After the dives I visited the Gangaramaya Temple being one of Colombo’s most significant Buddhist temples, sitting on the edge of Beira Lake. It is eclectically decorated and surprisingly vast inside, the kind of place that accumulates meaning slowly the longer you spend in it. From there I went to GRIND for lunch which was the place the barista at Radicle had pointed me toward the day before. The rainbow bowl was as good as advertised and as good to look at as it was to eat.

The afternoon was unhurried : Galle Face Mall, a grooming session, some time looking up at the Lotus Tower, which is the tallest self-supported structure in South Asia and hard to miss on the Colombo skyline, and a wander through the boutiques on Ward Place and Horton Place. I finished with a poke bowl at Seed Cafe. Colombo rewards this kind of aimless afternoon. Nobody is in a rush here and eventually you stop being in one too.

The evening arranged itself around the T20 World Cup semi final between India and England. We started at the hotel bar for the first innings which comfortable enough, but lacking atmosphere. So we moved, on the chef’s recommendation from the night before, to Kampong. The entrance is a corner chicken shop — genuinely unassuming, the kind of place you’d walk past without a second thought. Push past the storage racks at the back and you find yourself in a low-lit, chic speakeasy with a cocktail menu built around the districts of Colombo. The menu is deliberately short and everything on it is good. We worked through the whole thing. It was, in every sense, the right place to end the night and I wouldn’t have found it without a conversation over dinner the evening before.

The next two nights were a different Sri Lanka entirely. The conference had moved us to the Pegasus Reef Hotel which was further out, right on the coast. The days were full with long sessions, good conversations, the particular exhaustion that comes from being professionally switched on for hours at a stretch. The nights were the opposite. Beach, a drink, the sound of the water. One morning I broke away for brunch at Cafe Kampuk — Turkish eggs, excellent ambience and very good coffee.

Sri Lanka didn’t need two weeks to make an impression. Two days in Colombo and it had already done the damage. This was the kind of trip that doesn’t leave you satisfied, just hungry for more, which is a cruel thing for a country to do. The hill trains, the leopards, Galle, the east coast which was unvisited. I have no excuse except that I ran out of days, which is the most common travel problem in the world and the least sympathetic one. I’ll be back. Probably with a longer itinerary, a better hotel choice, and the same completely unrealistic idea that I’ll fit everything in.

If you’re planning your own Colombo, here’s where I’d point you.

Hotels : Paradise Road Tintagel, Shangri-La Colombo, Galle Face Hotel, Taj Samudra, Jetwing Colombo Seven
Restaurants : Ministry of Crab, Kaema Sutra, Nihonbashi, Monsoon, The Gallery Cafe, Upali’s by Nawaloka, Barefoot Garden Cafe, VOC Cafe, Nuga Gama, Kodamba Kade
Bars : Uncle’s, Shoulders By Harpos
Sights : Galle Face Green, Dutch Hospital Precinct, Jami ul-Alfar Mosque, Independence Square, Seema Malakaya, National Museum, Pettah Market

Places I Missed (Ranked)

A note before we begin: I haven’t been to any of these. This ranking is built on research, conversations with people who have, and mostly the order in which I’d personally book my return trip. I’ve noted alongside each who it’s best suited to.

Sigiriya & the Cultural Triangle The one I’d do first, without question. Sigiriya is a 5th-century rock fortress rising nearly 200 metres from the central plains — frescoes, landscaped gardens, and a lion’s paw gateway built by a king who chose a boulder as his palace. The surrounding Cultural Triangle also takes in Dambulla’s cave temples and the ancient city of Polonnaruwa.
Best for: history lovers and anyone who appreciates a genuine UNESCO wonder that hasn’t been overrun.
Yala National Park Sri Lanka has the highest density of leopards of any country in the world, and Yala is where you find them. Sightings are genuinely frequent — add elephants, sloth bears, and crocodiles and it’s a safari that holds its own against anywhere.
Best for: wildlife enthusiasts and anyone who’s done East Africa and wants something different.
Galle A 16th-century Dutch fort town on the southwestern tip of the island, Galle is one of those places that rewards simply wandering. Cobbled streets, colonial architecture, boutique hotels tucked inside old merchant houses, good restaurants and cafes, and a rampart walk at sunset that’s hard to beat. It’s compact, charming, and very easy to spend a day or two in without any real agenda.
Best for: architecture lovers, slow walkers, and anyone who wants history without the full cultural circuit.
The South Coast — Mirissa, Unawatuna & Tangalle Three distinct beaches within easy reach of each other. Mirissa for whale watching between November and April. Unawatuna for the classic lively beach town experience. Tangalle for those who want the south coast without the crowds.
Best for: beach lovers, whale watching in season, and a proper wind-down after a cultural circuit.
Trincomalee & the East Coast Sri Lanka’s best-kept secret and the one most Indians haven’t discovered yet. Stunning uncrowded beaches at Nilaveli and Uppuveli, one of the world’s great natural harbours, and Arugam Bay — a globally recognised surf point further south.
Best for: solitude seekers, surfers, divers, and travellers willing to go slightly off the beaten path.
Ella & the Hill Country Train The train from Kandy to Ella is consistently rated one of the great rail journeys in the world — tea plantations, misty mountains, waterfalls through the window. Ella itself is a small hill town with good hiking, excellent cafes, and the iconic Nine Arch Bridge. The hill country region, including Nuwara Eliya, is a world apart from the coast.
Best for: slow travellers, couples, and anyone who equates good scenery with good coffee.
Kandy Sri Lanka’s second city, set in the hills at a noticeably gentler pace. The Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic is one of the most important Buddhist sites in the world, and the surrounding lake, botanical gardens, and nightly dance performances make it a complete destination in its own right. Best for: cultural travellers and a natural midpoint in any full itinerary.

Sam Goodwin

“I Don’t Want To Be Known For The Things That Happen To Me”

Some travel stories are impressive. Some are entertaining. And then, once in a while, you come across one that quietly forces you to rethink what travel actually is — not as a hobby or an aesthetic, but as something that tests you in ways you never anticipated. Sam Goodwin’s story lands in that third category.

Sam is originally from St. Louis, Missouri, now based in Tampa, Florida. Over roughly a decade, he visited all 193 UN-recognised countries. But the reason this conversation stays with you isn’t the number. It’s what happened while chasing it, and more importantly, how he responded.

Sam didn’t grow up as a travel kid in the conventional sense. His childhood was built around ice hockey, crisscrossing the US and Canada for tournaments, with a couple of family trips to Europe thrown in. That kind of travel isn’t glamorous, but it teaches you something useful early: how to operate outside your normal environment, how to be flexible, how to feel comfortable in unfamiliar places. The foundation was there. It just needed the right location to activate it.

That location was Singapore. After college, Sam moved there for what was supposed to be a three-month internship. It became six years. I studied in Singapore myself from 2020 to 2024, so I understood immediately what he meant when he described the city as a launchpad. The world feels closer from there. Changi airport in your backyard, two hours from Bali, connectivity to every corner of Asia. Travel stops feeling like a rare annual event and starts feeling like part of the rhythm of your week. It’s where my own travel journey accelerated too, hopping on Scoot to some random corner of Indonesia on a Friday evening and figuring out the rest when I landed. Sam did the same thing, just for six years longer.

During those years he traveled solo and with friends, hockey connections, work colleagues, whoever was available. He spoke about both styles with balance. Solo gives you full control and forces a certain kind of growth. But there are moments that feel incomplete without someone next to you, a view, a meal, a discovery that deserves to be shared. I’ve felt both sides of that. Most people who travel seriously have.

One of the most unusual chapters in his journey is how he ended up in North Korea, not as a tourist, but as a hockey coach. In 2016, a Canadian organiser put together a sports exhibition and invited Sam to coach the North Korean men’s hockey team. He was clear-eyed about the experience: he knew he was being shown what they wanted him to see. But the bigger takeaway wasn’t about monuments or controlled itineraries. It was about what happens when people stop thinking about division and focus on something shared.

Once the puck dropped, he said, the teamwork ran like a Swiss watch. Political tension, global narratives, the idea of us and them, it all faded. Nobody cared about demarcation lines or nuclear weapons. Hockey became the common language. It’s the same thing I’ve found with diving. Drop into the water with a stranger from anywhere in the world and within minutes you’re communicating through hand signals, pointing out the same fish, sharing the same silence. A shared activity collapses distance faster than anything else.

That experience shaped one of Sam’s strongest travel convictions: never judge people by the actions of their government. He described how stereotypes dissolve the moment you meet people directly. He also repeated something I’ve heard from several travellers in this series but that never gets less true: people who have the least often give the most. Not sentimentally, but practically. The hospitality, the generosity, the small kindnesses that don’t make headlines but end up being the most memorable part of being somewhere new.

Sam didn’t start out chasing 193. Travel was just something he loved and learned from, the best education he’d ever had, in his words. What built the momentum was a single preference: he didn’t like to repeat destinations. Even when he loved a country, the next opportunity meant somewhere new. That one habit, applied consistently over years, is like compound interest for travel. By early 2018 he’d already been to around 120 countries. That’s when it clicked. 193 UN sovereign states, 73 remaining, and the competitive athlete in him took over. He set a goal and started moving toward it deliberately.

But the most intense part of Sam’s story, the part that completely reshapes how you view the number, comes in Syria. In spring 2019, Sam was at around 180 countries. Syria was one of the remaining ones. On May 25th, he arrived and within two hours everything changed. He was walking through a roundabout to meet his guide when a black pickup truck pulled up. Two armed men got out and told him to get inside. He was calm in how he described it, no dramatisation, no performance. They had guns. You don’t argue. You get in.

The men were loyal to the Syrian government and suspicious of his travel history. They couldn’t understand why an American would have visited so many countries. They accused him of espionage, a spy, they said, collaborating with terrorists. For the first time in all his years of travel, Sam had no control over what happened next. This wasn’t a difficult border crossing or a rough neighbourhood. This was a closed room, armed guards, and serious accusations with no one coming to help.

He was held for 63 days. The conditions were, in his careful words, “pretty uncomfortable.” He didn’t dramatise it. The restraint in how he spoke about it is what makes it land. The experience became the basis of his book, Saving Sam, and on July 26th, after weeks of effort from a long list of people working behind the scenes, he was released and came home.

And then he said the line that defines everything: “I don’t want to be known for the things that happen to me. I want to be known for the way I’ve responded to them.”

After Syria, most people would stop. Nobody would blame them. Sam didn’t stop. He recovered, reflected, and went back out to finish the remaining countries. Brazil was last, December 31st, 2019. The final day of the year. The final day of the decade. The close of a chapter that had started in a hockey rink in Missouri and ended, somehow, exactly where it was supposed to.

Today Sam speaks professionally, at corporate conferences and faith-based settings, on the subject of uncertainty. He built a framework from what Syria forced him to learn: lean into gratitude, control what you can control, and recognise uncertainty as an opportunity rather than a threat. It’s not a complicated framework. But simple things, applied consistently, tend to be the ones that actually work.

His advice for young travellers was equally simple: just go. You won’t have enough money. You won’t have everything planned. Go anyway. The turtle, he said, doesn’t move forward unless it sticks its neck out. You can be responsible and still take risks. In fact, in your twenties, not taking risks is the bigger mistake.

The countries are impressive, yes. But Sam’s story is really about something smaller and more portable than 193 passport stamps. It’s about what you build when you keep choosing new over familiar, keep showing up in uncomfortable places, and keep deciding, even after Syria, that the response matters more than the event. That’s the thing that lasts long after the journey is over.

Fabio Cao

Travel Is Easier Now — But There Are Fewer Surprises.

Follow Fabio on Instagram here : https://www.instagram.com/fabiocaoscorpio/?hl=en

I had a conversation recently that stayed with me, not because it was dramatic or overly philosophical, but because it was honest. The person I spoke to was Fabio Cao — the first Italian to visit every country in the world. What I liked most was that his story didn’t begin with a goal. It began with something far simpler: curiosity. Fabio told me he’d always been curious about geography and the world, even as a teenager, and the detail that made me instantly visualize his mindset was when he described sitting on flights back when there was no internet in your pocket. He said that on planes, “there used to be the magazine… and in the back there are the maps,” and he’d look at those maps, reading country names like they were mysteries. “I used to look at the maps and read the names of some of the countries and wonder… I wonder what Indonesia is like,” he said. There’s something almost childlike about that kind of curiosity.

And that idea of not knowing became the real theme of our conversation. Fabio explained that the older version of travel had a different energy because you didn’t arrive with certainty. You might have seen a few images on TV, but you couldn’t research everything in advance, so when you landed somewhere new, it felt genuinely new. He put it perfectly: “Before, I think there was more magic, because you don’t know what you’re gonna see… you get there, and everything is new.” Now, the opposite is true. You can “almost see the roads you’re gonna be walking,” he said, and although it makes travel easier, “it removes a little bit of magic from traveling.”

That line hit because it’s not anti-technology. It’s just accurate. We’ve traded uncertainty for efficiency. We’ve replaced discovery with previews. We’ve turned the world into a place we’ve already “seen” before we step into it. And it’s not just visuals — it’s the human part too. I brought up how earlier, travelers were forced to talk to people. You couldn’t land in a new city and silently “figure it out.” You had to ask where to eat, where to go, how to get somewhere, what was safe, what wasn’t. Fabio agreed immediately. “Right now, really, if you don’t want to talk to anyone, you can,” he said. “Everything is in your phone… you can actually avoid any, almost any human interaction.” And that sentence quietly describes modern travel in a way that no influencer reel ever will.

But Fabio didn’t romanticize the past either. He acknowledged that forced interaction wasn’t always comfortable, but that discomfort created something valuable: surprise. When you have to talk to people, you stumble into recommendations that aren’t on your screen. You find out what’s happening right now in a city rather than what was happening when a blog post was written. Fabio said only locals can really tell you, “this is what’s happening in this part of the city today.” And that’s when travel becomes real — when the experience isn’t something you downloaded but something you earned by being present and open.

At some point, I asked him when the travel changed from “going places” to “finishing the world.” And again, the answer was far more grounded than I expected. Fabio said the goal didn’t exist in the beginning. Around 2013, he randomly started counting how many countries he had visited and realized it was already around 130 or 135. It wasn’t planned. He was simply someone who kept going to new places whenever he got a chance. Then he watched a YouTube video about a traveler who tried something extreme — traveling all countries without flying — and Fabio said it made him think about legacy. Not in a dramatic way, but in a human way: “If anything happened tomorrow, as a legacy… to have set foot in every place in the world… it’s pretty cool.” That’s when it became intentional.

And even then, the idea of visiting all countries wasn’t just a bucket list. Fabio pointed out something obvious once you hear it: some countries don’t happen “by accident.” You’re not going to “end up by mistake” in places like South Sudan. Some travel requires deliberate planning and effort, and once he started aiming for the missing countries, the whole process became more complicated, more logistical, and honestly more tiring.

One part of the discussion that I’m glad we didn’t skip over is how Fabio views “fast travel.” Today, people love speed as if it’s proof of achievement — fastest to visit all countries, quickest to cover a continent, shortest time to complete a “world tour.” Fabio’s reaction was blunt: “To me, it makes zero sense whatsoever.” He wasn’t judging anyone, but he made the point clearly: why go as fast as possible through something that’s supposed to be a “massive life experience of learning”? You can technically pass through twelve European countries in a day by car, but what did you actually experience? What did you actually learn? That question is uncomfortable because it exposes what a lot of modern travel has become — movement without meaning.

In total, Fabio said you could count his travel journey as starting around 1998 and finishing in 2017 — nearly 19 years — but he clarified again that the goal wasn’t there from day one. And that timeline matters because it shows how slow, long-term travel builds depth. It isn’t just about collecting countries. It’s about repeatedly choosing unfamiliarity, repeatedly letting places challenge your assumptions, and repeatedly reshaping your perspective.

Of course, the part people don’t talk about enough is what makes travel difficult in the real world: visas. Fabio explained that he didn’t lose motivation, but there were “massive delays” and a lot of “headaches” with approvals, especially in parts of Africa in earlier years. He mentioned Equatorial Guinea as one of the toughest cases — visa refused three times — and also countries like Mali, Nigeria, Libya, and conflict-affected places like Yemen and Syria. Sometimes the requirements weren’t just difficult, they were absurd. Fabio said Equatorial Guinea demanded an invitation letter that had to be legalized by something like the “Ministry of National Defense,” and even he was like, how do you even get that done? It’s the kind of detail that makes you realize how different “travel the world” looks outside of the comfortable mainstream destinations.

Then he said something that flips a common belief: the most underdeveloped countries can be the most expensive. People assume they’ll be cheap, but the paperwork, fees, and logistics add up quickly. Fabio explained that in many West African countries there aren’t really tourists — the main presence is NGOs, UN agencies, and organizations with money — so hotels and services price themselves accordingly. He gave an example that sounded almost unbelievable: paying $150 per night in Monrovia, Liberia, while a comparable stay in Marrakesh might be $20. The logic is simple: in places where only organizations operate, the pricing is built for that market, not for backpackers. If you show up as the only tourist, you pay the same price anyway.

From there, the conversation shifted into what I think is the biggest issue with travel today: people are losing curiosity. Fabio said it’s “a shame” because the world is huge, yet people go back to the same places every year and repeat the same experiences. His metaphor was sharp and honestly hard to forget: doing that is like “reading the same page of a book over and over.” He wasn’t saying famous places are pointless — he acknowledged that many destinations like Machu Picchu, Petra, and the Taj Mahal are worth it — but he was saying the internet has made travel too copy-paste. People aren’t choosing places because they’re personally interested. They’re choosing them because they saw a picture and want to recreate it.

One of Fabio’s most interesting perspectives was that after traveling enough, your preferences flip. You stop craving famous destinations and start craving places without tourists. Not because you want to be “different,” but because crowds often drain the authenticity out of places. He said he enjoys traveling more when there are fewer tourists, because overly popular cities can start feeling like “a theme park.” Venice was his example — beautiful, but scaled for foreigners, designed to extract money. He compared it to the pyramids and places like Marrakesh too, where aggressive hustling can completely change the vibe.

When I asked him about a region that was special to him, he said parts of the Pacific and Oceania feel “authentic” to him. He described it as remote, expensive, and not built for comfort — which is exactly why mass tourism hasn’t flattened it yet. He liked that there’s no McDonald’s on every corner, that people live closer to their roots, and that you actually have to make an effort to be there. And effort matters. Because when a place demands effort, it forces you to show up more seriously — not as a consumer, but as a participant.

That idea connected to another part of travel that Fabio values: how it builds you as a person. He said travel refines your problem-solving skills because you’re constantly solving situations on the go. You get better at reading environments. You develop a “sixth sense.”

When I asked him what advice he’d give young travelers, he said “Don’t be scared.” Fabio said the world isn’t as bad as people assume, and that many fears come from misconceptions, headlines, and stereotypes. His advice wasn’t to be careless — he said be alert, don’t be naive — but to give places the benefit of doubt and stay open-minded. He also encouraged being adventurous with food and spending time around locals, because otherwise you miss the real experience of a place.

Fabio described tourists who fly to Jamaica or the Bahamas, stay inside a beach resort, interact only with staff, and then leave. “There could have really been anywhere else,” he said, because they didn’t actually see Jamaica — they saw a pool with a better view. And that’s not an attack on comfort. It’s a reminder that travel is expensive in time, energy, and money, so if you’re going to do it, it’s worth doing in a way that changes you, and I couldn’t agree more.

His best examples of meaningful travel were moments that weren’t planned at all: getting invited to a funeral party in Congo, ending up in a wedding in Mauritania, wearing local clothing, being the only foreigner in the room, and still being welcomed into something real. Those experiences aren’t in any itineraries. They don’t show up on Google ever. They happen when you’re curious enough to say yes and open enough to trust people.

Before we ended, I asked him for underrated Italy recommendations, because honestly people do get stuck doing the same Rome–Florence–Venice loop. Fabio mentioned Tropea in Calabria, calling it a beautiful beach town in summer and “extremely inexpensive,” and he recommended Sicily as a whole — from Palermo to Catania — including the Valley of the Temples near Agrigento, and the baroque town of Noto with great food and lower costs compared to the mainstream tourist route.

When I think back on the conversation, the biggest takeaway wasn’t “wow, 193 countries.” It was that travel is slowly becoming too easy to automate. We can now book, plan, navigate, and review everything so efficiently that we forget travel was never meant to be efficient in the first place. It was meant to be uncertain. It was meant to have friction. It was meant to demand human interaction. And it was meant to surprise you. Fabio said it perfectly early on: travel today is easier, but there are fewer surprises. And maybe that’s the real challenge now — not reaching the next destination, but protecting that feeling of discovery even when the world is trying to hand you the experience in advance.

🎧 Listen to 193 Perspective on:

Spotify : https://open.spotify.com/show/3KE7f8AOpiQdCwQqqckfTG?si=4x89NKL8RQa_ChjMQMvRKA

Apple Podcasts : https://podcasts.apple.com/in/podcast/the-193-perspective/id1858063638

Billy Offland

“Travel gives you consciousness — and then that consciousness inspires you to travel even more”

Please watch Billy Offlands Documentary Here on Prime Video : https://www.primevideo.com/detail/Pot-of-Gold/0NIFG9AJ2NTKVSZNA7T92IR401

Billy Offland, 27, is the youngest verified Brit to have visited all 193 UN-recognised countries, according to Nomad Mania. But the statistic collapses quickly under its own weight. Because once you’ve crossed every border travel stops being aspirational and starts becoming ethical. This piece isn’t about finishing the world. It’s about what remains when movement turns into responsibility, when seeing too much makes ignorance impossible, and when travel no longer lets you look away.

What struck me wasn’t the achievement, but the philosophy that shaped it.

Billy grew up travelling. Not the kind of travel defined by resorts or rigid itineraries, but trips driven by curiosity and discomfort. His father believed in “seeing places before they were ruined” — a phrase Billy acknowledges is loaded, but also honest. It meant places like Bosnia and Herzegovina, remote Argentina, Oman, Indonesia long before its quieter corners became mainstream, and a childhood where school holidays stretched into experiences rather than escapes. Travel wasn’t a break from education; it was education.

That early exposure planted a seed. Billy didn’t grow into a traveller chasing novelty — he grew into someone chasing understanding.

By the time he was travelling solo, that mentality had hardened into instinct. He worked in São Tomé and Príncipe, crossed Madagascar, earned his divemaster certification, and slowly stitched together a worldview shaped by repetition and contrast. Diving became a turning point. Seeing coral reefs up close — not once, but repeatedly — changed everything. Places like the Maldives, pristine one year and visibly deteriorated the next, made environmental decline impossible to ignore.

“People don’t act because they don’t see it,” he said. “When you see it physically, it hits differently.” Indonesia became central to this awakening. Raja Ampat in West Papua, Bunaken in Sulawesi — underwater worlds so alive they felt unreal. But even there, urgency lingered. Climate change and coral reefs are not patient companions.

This awareness shaped how Billy travelled next. He didn’t just move through countries — he embedded himself within stories. He sought environmentalists, conservationists, and people living at the edges of global systems. From Congo to the Central African Republic, from Cameroon to Djibouti and Somaliland, he saw both collapse and resilience. Dzanga-Sangha National Park in the Central African Republic stood out — a place so remote that just reaching it felt like a commitment. But that commitment mattered. “If people don’t go,” he said, “those places lose support. And then they disappear.”

Yet Billy is honest about the weight of it all. Global environmental collapse is overwhelming. UN conferences feel distant. Policy feels abstract. What saved him from paralysis was reframing scale. “If you get scared by the size of the problem,” he told me, “break it down to something local.” Pick a reef. A forest. A valley. A species. “Pick your passion and try to do whatever you can.”

Despite visiting every country, Billy doesn’t romanticize constant interaction. In fact, much of his travel was quiet. Walking markets with AirPods in. Observing. Blending in. “You’re interrupting someone’s normal life,” he said. “That’s a privilege.” He’s wary of loud tourism, of presence without respect. His approach balanced observation with participation — knowing when to speak and when to disappear.

That said, some interactions are unavoidable — especially when travelling solo, on a budget, over land. Billy crossed Africa largely by bus, moving continuously through countries rather than hopping between capitals. That style forced connection. You speak to drivers. To strangers beside you. You ask questions because you have no plan. “Local knowledge is everything,” he said. “If people come to Manchester, good luck finding the good places without asking someone.”

We spoke about the difference between “travel” and “holiday.” Billy doesn’t judge either, but he’s clear: deep travel is hard. It takes time, skill, patience, and a tolerance for discomfort. Crossing from Djibouti into Somaliland, pushing deep into Congo’s rainforest, or navigating Central African Republic is not aspirational content. It’s exhausting. “Most people wouldn’t enjoy it,” he said. “And I don’t blame them.”

But for a few, there’s an obligation — especially when that travel supports fragile ecosystems or forgotten communities. And even that phase doesn’t last forever. “I couldn’t replicate that travel now,” he admitted. Youth, resilience, and foolish courage played their part. Some journeys are time-bound.

I never ask my guests their favourite country, instead I ask them what are some regions or places which hold a special place in their heart. For Billy, Indonesia topped the list for depth and accessibility. Damascus in Syria stood out historically — one of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited cities, layered with memory. Africa offered unmatched adventure. Brazil surprised him with simplicity — beaches, presence, ease. Uzbekistan gave him a surreal memory: a techno festival on the banks of the Aral Sea. Context defines experience.

Diving surfaced again when we spoke about community. Whether in Malaysia’s Tioman Island, Southeast Asia, or beyond, dive shops form instant tribes. Sport does the same. Billy spoke about wearing a Manchester United badge across Africa, playing rugby in Fiji, football with Afghans in Pakistan, cricket opening doors across India and Pakistan.

One of the most grounded moments of our conversation centred on Azad Kashmir in Pakistan. Billy spent months there filming a documentary on beekeepers and honey production called “Pot of Gold” — not in the tourist-heavy northern regions, but in a quiet valley called Dir Kot. There was no reason to go there unless you had purpose. Heavy militarisation contrasted with extraordinary warmth. Tea. Community. People dropping in unannounced. “People are not their politics,” he said. “Most people are just thinking about lunch and their kids.” I have seen this documentary and it is absolutely stunning. The cinematography and the underlying message of climate change is absolutely beautifully told.

Yet he also acknowledged a blind spot. Solo, deep travel can miss broader political and historical context. Guides, often dismissed by independent travellers, offer something essential. Billy admitted he looks forward to returning to places like Pakistan, Syria, Brazil, or Tunisia with less time and more structure — forced to listen, to contextualize, to zoom out.

If dropped into a new country tomorrow, Billy wouldn’t open a map. He’d walk. Find food. Sit down. Ask questions. Photography, for him, is just another excuse to move slowly, to wait, to notice.

This conversation wasn’t about finishing the world. It was about relating to it. From Japan to Malaysia, Singapore to Indonesia, Congo to CAR, Pakistan to Indian Kashmir by reflection, Tunisia to the United States, Palau, Micronesia, Marshall Islands, Kiribati, Nauru, Fiji, Thailand — the geography mattered, but the insight mattered more.

Travel, when done honestly, doesn’t simplify the world. It complicates it. And maybe that’s the point.

Boris Kester

“Follow Your Heart, Just Go“

Follow Boris Here on his website : https://boriskester.com/

Read the Preface of his book here : https://boriskester.com/preface/

See his stunning images here : https://www.traveladventures.org/

Follow him on instagram here : https://www.instagram.com/boris_traveladventures/

The first thing you notice when speaking to someone who has travelled to every country in the world is not the number itself. It’s calm. The clarity. The sense that they have seen enough of humanity — its beauty, its contradictions, its patterns — to understand something the rest of us spend years trying to grasp.

My conversation with Boris Kester carried exactly that feeling. There was no grand introduction, no dramatic claim about having completed all 193 nations. Instead, there was a quiet confidence shaped by decades of movement, thousands of encounters, and a lot of curiosity.

Boris told me he wasn’t born with the dream of visiting every country; no one is. But his life began in motion. At just five months old, his parents placed him in a travel cart and took him on a two-day train ride to Greece, followed by a boat to Crete. Even before he could “walk or talk,” he was absorbing foreign sounds, foods, people, and rhythms. He didn’t consciously remember any of it, “but this is what basically started to make me a traveler,” he said. Before turning ten, he was keeping diaries and excitedly counting countries.

Much later, after passing the halfway mark without ever intending to, a major life event pushed him to reevaluate everything. “That’s when I decided: this will be my life goal.” He committed to the remaining 75 countries with purpose, discipline, and curiosity.

As he spoke, I felt echoes from my own childhood — being pushed through Hong Kong in a pram, scratching countries off my gifted map, widening my world one tiny patch at a time. Some people stumble into travel while are quietly shaped by it long before they realise. As we called it, we caught the travel bug. What we both shared was curiosity. “We share a very genuine curiosity,” he said. “You look at a map and imagine every place — and you want to know what it actually looks like when you go there.”

But as we discussed, many people today avoid the unknown. They chase the familiar: Paris, Italy, Santorini, the places everyone posts. Others avoid entire regions because of misconceptions, stereotypes, or fear. I told him how people ask me where Tunisia is when I mention I’m going — as if the unfamiliar is automatically unsafe or unworthy.

Boris nodded, and his perspective was sharp: “People should travel where they want — but they miss out on so much. Famous places are crowded every day of the year now. And unknown places hold the real magic.” He emphasised that most negative assumptions are just that — assumptions. “The reality on the ground is almost always very different from the image you have before going.”

That led us to the essence of travel: people. For him, travel is far less about scenery than human connection. “In the end, travel is about connecting — understanding how people live and why they do things the way they do.” And this connection goes both ways. Locals ask where he’s from, what his life is like. Stories are exchanged, worlds grow larger, and stereotypes dissolve.

His encounters illustrated this beautifully. When he was 18, two Moroccan boys befriended him, eager to practise English — until they suddenly tried to recruit him into a drug-smuggling deal. A harsh early lesson: some people have agendas. But the very next year, in Finland, when he lost his wallet, a poor elderly couple took him into their home, fed him, sheltered him, and even paid for his return journey.

But the story that reshaped him most came from a remote island in Kiribati. When asked where he was from, he explained the Netherlands — near Germany and France. The man looked confused and asked, “So how many hours by boat between Netherlands and Germany?” When Boris explained there was no boat — you could drive, take a train, even walk — the man was stunned. “Why would you have borders if there is no sea?” he asked. And suddenly it clicked for Boris: for people whose entire lives revolve around islands, land borders make no sense. “It made me question why borders exist at all. Countries are invented by humans — arbitrary lines. Yet we treat them like absolute truths.”

He also told me about a moment in Sudan that stayed with him forever: a mother and her young son, clearly poor and wearing worn-out clothes, whom he had spent a long bus journey wondering how he might help, only to discover at the end that they had quietly paid for his ticket without even telling him — an act of generosity that left him humbled and emotional.

That revelation fed into a lesson travel taught him. “When you speak to people one-on-one, you realise we are so similar. But at the same time, people fear others who look or sound different. That is the tragedy of humankind.” He added, “99.9% percent of people are good. They’ll help you, welcome you, feed you. But we still generalise and say ‘those people are bad.’ It makes no sense.”

Eventually, we reached his final country. Strangely, it was not a remote Pacific island or a war zone, but Ireland. Most travellers save the hardest nation for last — Yemen, Somalia, Nauru. But Boris planned differently. “I wanted to celebrate with family and friends. If I finished in the Pacific, no one would come.” So he held Ireland for the end. He walked over the border from Northern Ireland, knowing that the moment he took one more step, the quest of almost 20 years would be complete. It felt surreal. The real emotion came later, standing before the UN Headquarters in New York, walking past each flag from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe in alphabetical order, remembering — really remembering — every story, every struggle, every kindness.

Those memories became his book, The long road to Cullaville. It isn’t a guidebook. It isn’t about attractions. It is about reality — the unseen, unheard, unfiltered truth of places we misunderstand. He wrote it because people constantly asked if travel was dangerous. “I wanted to show the reality, not confirm the bias,” he said. He is soon publishing his second book Wonderheart, whose message is clear: “Follow your heart, don’t be afraid.”

I asked what still excites him now that he has been everywhere. His answer was simple and beautiful. “Curiosity. This naive, pure curiosity. Even a small waterfall can make me emotional. Just knowing I’m going to see something new already excites me.” I understood instantly. I had once stood before a simple wadi in Oman and felt unexpectedly emotional — not because it was the largest or most famous, but because something inside me shifted. Some places touch a part of you you didn’t know was waiting.

When I asked him to name places that truly fascinated him, he immediately mentioned the Pacific, admitting he had once assumed it would be dull because he imagined nothing more than beaches and small islands, but after spending three months travelling through the region, he realised how wrong he had been: “The Pacific surprised me more than anything,” he said, describing volcanoes, ancient ruins, wildly different cultures and how “every island has its own identity.” He added that when you travel with an open mind, almost every country surprises you — not always in big ways, but in the small, intimate moments that stay with you long after you leave. So I asked him a question I pose to every traveller: if he were dropped into a completely new place, how would he explore it? He didn’t hesitate: “I’d try to meet someone,” he said, explaining that his first instinct is always to talk to a local, find a common language if possible, and understand the place through the people who live there, because that, to him, is where the real soul of a destination lies.

When I asked what advice he would give to a 19-year-old traveler like me, he smiled. “Just go. Don’t rush. Take your time. Don’t be afraid. Travel slowly, and you’ll learn more than any school or college can teach you.” We also spoke about privilege — and how we admire travelers from Malawi, Togo, or countries with weaker passports, especially women who navigate far greater challenges yet still chase their dreams. “It proves anyone can travel if they truly want to. It may be harder, but not impossible.”

The world is vast, complicated, gentle, chaotic, heartbreaking, beautiful — and overwhelmingly human. And if there is one lesson we can carry from someone who has seen every corner of it, it is this: Follow your heart, not the map. The world will meet you halfway.

Gunnar Garfors

“Start Small, Stay Curious“

Speaking to Gunnar Garfors felt less like interviewing a record-holding traveller and more like sitting down with someone who has allowed the world to shape him with an unusual openness. Gunnar is the first person to visit every country in the world twice, he’s written books that have redefined how people think about travel, and he holds several world records that sound outrageous even when said out loud. Yet, when our conversation began, what struck me most was his simplicity. He didn’t decide to become a world traveler. There was no dramatic moment where he declared, “This is my life.” He said it almost casually: he just loved travel from an early age — out of curiosity, out of the joy of seeing new places, and out of the thrill of discovering that Norway wasn’t the center of the universe. “Everywhere else is completely different,” he told me, and realizing that was powerful enough to keep him going.

Gunnar spoke about travel not as something that changed him, but something that revealed him. And the first thing it revealed, he said, was privilege. Coming from Norway — a stable democracy with strong passports, high living standards, and the luxury of long holidays — he understood early on how fortunate he was. Recognising that shaped the way he travels. When you move through the world knowing you’re privileged, you naturally approach people with more humility, more patience, more willingness to learn. “Everyone grows up believing they’re from the center of the universe,” he said, “but then you travel and see others believe the same — and they’re also right in their own way.”

A theme that kept resurfacing was his belief that travel is not observation — it is participation. Too many travellers today, he said, move through places with the objective of taking the perfect photograph, recreating the same scene they saw on Instagram. “Copycat tourism,” he calls it. Stunning photos show people alone in breathtaking locations, but in reality, those spots are overflowing with crowds. And rather than discovering the world, travellers are simply repeating each other. Gunnar isn’t against photography — far from it. He believes you get better photographs when you talk to locals, when you are guided to the most meaningful corners of a place. Travelers rely on Google Maps and TripAdvisor reviews written by other travellers, but the true experts are always the people who live there, the locals.

He talked about language barriers, shyness, cultural differences, religion — all the things that stop people from interacting with locals. Those are just merely excuses. “Just smile. It’s free”.And he’s right. A smile opens doors. A simple hello opens conversations. Even without language, there are drawings, gestures, and body language. He told me a funny story of ordering food in Iran by drawing cows, sheep, and bread in his notebook because no one spoke English. The restaurant understood immediately. I related this deeply — in Tokyo, a local friend took me into a hidden lane to eat authentic soba noodles I would never have discovered on my own. Experiences like that don’t come from maps; they come from people.

Naturally, I had to ask him about going to every country twice. Most people dream of visiting all countries once, but doing them twice sounds impossible. When you like something, you revisit it as his response. You don’t go to your favorite restaurant once; you return. Countries evolve, cultures shift, atmospheres change. If you revisit after ten or fifteen years, you notice transformations in people, cities, energy. And sometimes, you simply go back to meet people again, because travel is made of relationships. But the challenge, he said, is always choosing between going back to a place you love or seeing something new.

We spoke about why travellers should go beyond hotspots and explore lesser-visited countries — something he knows well, having written a book about the twenty least visited nations called “Elsewhere: A Journey to the World’s Least-visited Countries”. He sees mass tourism becoming a real problem, driven by the influencer mindset where people chase the same experiences. That’s why he believes travellers should intentionally explore offbeat regions. Not only do you get richer experiences, but you help distribute tourism money to villages, towns, and families who genuinely benefit from it — instead of pouring money into global hotel chains where profits leave the country. He also highlighted how staying in local hotels and eating local food makes travel more rewarding and helpful for local and the global economy. My own stay at a lady’s riad in Meknes (Morocco) came to mind where I had the most authentic local experience — no Marriott could replicate that.

When I asked him which regions he feels especially connected to, he spoke fondly of Kerala in India which is a state in the southwest — exploring the backwaters, eating local food, and even accidentally stealing coconuts with his brother before paying the farmer. Hardly anyone outside India truly understands how magical Kerala is, he said. He described Central Asia with admiration — vast landscapes, sincere hospitality, and the warmth of being treated like a guest, not a walking bag of cash. Africa, too, holds a special place for him. His wife is from Sudan, a country with some of the kindest people he has ever met, despite its current conflict. Madagascar, with its terrible roads but unmatched natural wonders, left a deep impression. And then there’s Norway — his own home — which many tourists misunderstand by sticking to Oslo alone. “The real Norway,” he said, “is in the fjords, in northern villages, in the midnight sun and the northern lights.”

We also spoke about his world records — visiting six continents in one calendar day, nineteen countries in twenty-four hours, and 23 US states in 24 hours. But he refuses to call these achievements “travel.” They are logistical challenges, fun to do with friends, but lacking cultural experience. “You don’t speak to anyone, you don’t eat local food, you don’t learn anything,” he said. They’re accomplishments, yes, but not travel. And he finds it amusing when people count airport transits as country visits. “If you don’t meet the people or taste the food, what’s the point?” I agreed completely as it is my philosophy as well.

Later in our conversation, I asked what he would do if dropped into a completely unknown country with no plan. He would simply walk. Walking is how he maps a place — by absorbing its smells, sounds, and rhythms. It’s how he figures out which neighborhoods feel alive, which ones feel peaceful, where markets are, where local life happens.

Hardships are natural in a journey as extensive as Gunnar’s, so I asked him how he overcame difficult moments. “By being humble,” he said. “By remembering how privileged I am to travel at all.” He believes attitude influences outcomes. When I asked what came after visiting every country twice, he said there doesn’t need to be a next big goal. “There’s always something new to see, even in my own village,” he said. I found that beautiful — the idea that wonder is not tied to grand achievements but to everyday curiosity.

Before ending, I asked the one question I always ask world travelers: What advice would you give to young travelers like me? His answer was simple and one I’ll remember for sure: “Start small. Don’t travel far at first. Try it. See if you really like it. Not everyone does. Be humble. Talk to locals. Build friendships. That’s what travel is about.”

As we said goodbye, he told me to visit Norway soon. I smiled because my lock screen is literally a picture of Norway’s fjords — and because, like him, I believe the world is too big, too beautiful, and too full of stories to ever stop exploring. Talking to Gunnar didn’t just inspire me. It reshaped the way I want to travel next — with more curiosity, more patience and more humility.

Thor Pedersen

“A Stranger Is a Friend You Haven’t Met”

When I finally sat down to speak with Thor Pedersen — the first person in history to visit every country in the world without flying in a single unbroken journey — it felt full-circle. I first discovered him six years ago, as a teenager watching a Drew Binsky video. Drew was the first travel creator I ever followed, and Thor was the first traveler whose philosophy made me think about what travel meant, not just where it took you. Interviewing him now, after visiting fifty countries myself, felt surreal.

Thor’s decade-long project, Once Upon a Saga, didn’t begin as the philosophical journey it later became. When he left home in 2013, the goal was purely ambitious: visit every country without flying. But, as he explained, journeys like these develop the way humans do — slowly growing over time. The project became about sharing the positive sides of every country, about humanitarian storytelling as a Red Cross Goodwill Ambassador, and eventually, about perseverance itself.

Among all challenges, nothing compared to the pandemic. Thor arrived in Hong Kong expecting to stay four days. He stayed two years. Borders closed, ships stopped moving, and countries refused entry. Yet he never spoke about it with bitterness. One word kept him going: Hope — hope that restrictions would ease, hope that vaccines would change things, hope restored when his then fiancée managed to join him during that period. “She brought me hope too,” he said. His resilience came from equal parts determination and love.

One of my favourite parts of Thor’s philosophy is his belief that a stranger is a friend you haven’t met yet. I shared stories of my own travel friendships — the couple I met in a Casablanca bar, the children I met in Buenos Aires at age six, the couple in Kyoto who led me to hidden temples. Thor said his father used to tell him: “Trust, but don’t be a fool.” For him, friendships on the road grow from small things: kindness, respect, remembering names, making eye contact. Not everyone becomes a friend, he said, but anyone can. But the energy you bring massively shapes the energy you receive.

This is also why Thor believes in slow travel. Travel has layers — and most people skim only the top. You can rush through a place in three days and leave believing you understand it, but deeper truths only reveal themselves with time. He told me a story from Thailand: many Westerners assume Thai people are timid when they stay quiet while being yelled at by drunk tourists. But, as he learned, they’re not scared — they’re ashamed on behalf of the person acting like a child. And this kind of cultural insight isn’t found on a three-day itinerary. It comes from lingering, observing, listening, and letting your assumptions dissolve.

We also spoke about how western media narrows our view of countries. Thor was blunt: the news shows a keyhole, not the full room. War-torn countries are always depicted as danger zones. But when he visited them, he saw people living full lives — falling in love, celebrating weddings, playing football, making TikToks, laughing, cooking, hosting, dancing. In many of these countries, hospitality was some of the strongest he experienced because locals desperately wanted visitors to see the human side of their country, not the version broadcast on evening news. It reminded me why travel matters: it restores balance to the world we see.

Thor completed his entire saga on an average of $20 a day — something that shocked me. “In India,” he laughed, “$20 can be nothing or everything.” He often skipped meals in Europe, slept on trains, and in other countries lived comfortably. In some countries for instance India, families invited him home, and from the moment he entered their house, he didn’t pay for anything — our culture of Atithi Devo Bhava which translates to “Guest is God”.

When he finally returned home after nearly ten years, he and his wife started a family; their daughter was born last December. He now gives talks around the world, and his book The Impossible Journey is being published in multiple languages. His advice to young travelers like me was beautifully simple: put your phone away. Be kind. Be polite. Learn to say hello, thank you, and sorry in every language. “Magic words,” I told him. These small gestures open doors that no app can.

I didn’t want to ask him about his favourite country — a question both of us dislike — but he spoke fondly of Southeast Asia for its gentleness and ease, Western Africa for its incredible humor, food, and cultural richness, and Central America for its vibrancy. Toward the end, I asked him a simple question: if I placed him in a brand-new place he had never been to, what would he do first? He said he’d orient himself with a map if there was one, otherwise with his senses. He’d look around, find someone to talk to, and when hungry, he’d find local food that wasn’t anything like home.

As we ended, he said something:
“People say it’s a small world. It’s not true. It’s a very big world — and there’s a lot to see and do.”

Speaking with Thor felt like being handed a map — not of countries, but of how to move through the world with openness, gratitude, and wonder.

You can follow Thor’s journey on his website https://thorpedersen.dk/ and you can follow him on instagram at @onceuponasaga.

The full interview is linked below — I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed having the conversation.

The 193 Perspective

Here’s something most people don’t realise: about 700 people have flown to space… but only a 400 of travellers have ever completed the monumental journey of visiting every country on Earth. And that alone tells you how rare, demanding, and fascinating these journeys are — not just logistically, but emotionally, culturally, and personally.

Travel has shaped me in ways I’m still discovering. The moments I remember most aren’t the landmarks or the “Instagram spots” — it’s the strangers who became friends, the conversations that shifted my perspective, the small surprises that rewired how I see the world. And I’ve always wondered:
What does someone learn when they take travel to the absolute extreme — every country, every culture, every border?
What does the world look like through the eyes of someone who has eaten in remote homes, crossed oceans on cargo ships, slept through border delays, navigated conflict zones, and collected more human stories than most people hear in a lifetime?

That curiosity is the heart of my new series.

I’ll be speaking with some of the few people who’ve completed this unbelievable journey. We’ll explore their biggest lessons, their hardest moments, the kindness they encountered, the stereotypes that shattered, the crazy stories that could only happen on the road — and how travel shaped their identity in ways no book or classroom ever could.

Each conversation will be shared as both a video interview and a written blog, where I reflect on what surprised me, what inspired me, and what I personally take forward into my own travels.

This series isn’t about counting countries. It’s about understanding the world through the travellers who’ve seen all of it — the highlights, the hardships, and the humanity.

Welcome to a journey across the entire planet — one conversation at a time.

“The world doesn’t get smaller when you travel — it gets deeper.”