I’m Bob Cranwell; this is my website and memoirs… Everybody travels, whether going down to the market, tramping across hillsides at the weekend, taking holidays, travelling in the imagination from your armchair or undertaking a full-scale expedition.

In ages past, the main reasons for moving around voluntarily would have been in search of new resources, pilgrimage or festivals, involuntary travel might involve being captured and deported as a slave or conscripted in somebody’s army ! Nowadays, people can travel at the drop of a credit card, and it is one of the largest businesses in the world, some countries almost entirely dependent on tourism

The choice on Amateur Emigrant is refreshingly wide, so cut to the blog and get started here !

Stroll around the Swat valley in Pakistan, or the frozen Afghan border, discover connections to history in Arctic Norway, feast your mind in the splendours of India, from the luscious south to the colourful north; taxing journeys in Yemen and Ethiopia, taxing travellers in many places, check out the interactive map below and click through to stories of that area…

You’ll find pleasures, dreams, nightmares and plenty of irreverent humour bundled together with the philosophical insights from people who have been in places long enough to buy their second tube of toothpaste !  Here you find glimpses of lives lived of likely lads and lasses who were curious to answer that timeless question: ‘what is over that hill’…