Trials & Tea Ceremonies: Misadventures in Far Away Places

What happens when hitting thirty triggers not a mid-life crisis, but a global escape? Facing personal challenges, my partner Cesca and I traded London careers for backpacks, and set off for a year with two big questions - "Is there a better way to live?" and "Can we survive this?" Maybe we'd find a different way to live, maybe we'd find proof that spreadsheets and timetables didn't run the world.

More than just a travelogue, Trials and Tea Ceremonies is the story of that journey - unflinchingly honest, looking for answers, finding mostly chaos, but somehow, amidst the arguments over maps and mosquito nets, finding a genuine kind of peace and realising that "home" wasn't a place we'd left behind, but the person standing right beside me.

Follow our transformation as the road strips away preconceptions, tests our relationship, and leads to surprising moments of clarity, from comical encounters with eccentric locals to quiet satori atop a sacred Chinese mountain. All while navigating the glorious, baffling, often terrifying gap between the 'trip of a lifetime' brochure and the reality of finding yourself arguing with a tuk-tuk driver who insists your hotel burned down five minutes after you booked it.