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Travel

I've been to... 1. UK (obviously!) * 2. France 3. Belgium 4. Luxembourg 5. Germany 6. Austria 7. Italy 8. San Marino ** 9. Greece 10. Macedonia 11. Serbia *** 12. Montenegro *** 13. Albania 14. USA 15. Czech Republic 16. Slovakia 17. Hungary 18. Slovenia 19. Croatia 20. Bosnia 21. Bulgaria 22. Romania 23. Turkey 24. Israel 25. Egypt 26. Ireland 27. Netherlands 28. Lichtenstein ** 29. Australia 30. Latvia 31. Faroe Islands **** 32. Canada 33. New Zealand * Doesn't (yet!) count as 4. ** Both have their own passport stamps and football teams... that counts in my book! *** Serbia (specifically Kosova) first visited when still called Yugoslavia; both later visited when called Serbia-Montenegro. The split into two independent countries was agreed in May 2006. *** Technically counts as part of Denmark, for these purposes. My 3 favourite countries: (excluding Scotland) 1. Croatia 2. Albania 3. New Zealand My 3 favourite cities: (excluding Inverness, naturally) 1. Aberdeen 2. Zagreb 3. London	So far in life, I've been fortunate enough to see more countries than birthdays - with any luck, I'll be able to keep it that way. I'm also in a long-running competition with my friend Niall to see who can visit most countries. I think it's neck and neck at the moment. AID CONVOYS - my first major trip abroad was in 1999. I was 21, and went on an aid convoy to Kosova. I went with a group of people from the students' association at my university, along with Brighton Lifeline Humanitarian Aid, now known as aidconvoy.net, and delivered various resources including computers and other aid to the students' union at the university of Pristina. It was an epic journey involving far too many vegetable and lime curries in German service stations, and we spent two weeks exploring Kosova and meeting with so many wonderful people very soon after the terrible war that overtook the country in that year. It's a stunningly beautiful country, although at the time the effects of war were all over the place: minefields, destroyed houses, razed villages, and people with the most haunting stories to tell us. We broke down on the way home in the middle of the Albanian mountains, but that's another story entirely... In 2003 I went back to the Balkans with aidconvoy.net and the globe-trotting, multi-talented fool Devilstick Peat to Bathore, a slum suburb of Tirana, the capital of Albania. Tirana is an energetic, chaotic and compelling city in the middle of a wild, mountainous and proud country, and I absolutely love the rugged and beautiful north of Albania to pieces. Both experiences were amazing, and although they helped me get hooked on travel, they were above all very humbling and moving - we met people who were battling on against all the odds, not least poverty and war, and it was good to feel that I had taken part in doing something about it. Obviously what I was involved in was nothing compared to what has been needed in this part of the world, and I am sure I have not changed the world by doing it and that it was only a drop in the ocean. But as a fellow convoyer once said to me, "if there is no drop, there is no ocean". Cheesy, but true. THE BIG TRAVELS - along with Niall I travelled from Frankfurt to Cairo over four months in the autumn of 2001. It was a truly epic adventure - we met South Korean media celebrities, Croatian military deserters, warm and welcoming Hungarians, Serbians and Albanians, and bumped into far too many Australians than is healthy for one trip. We also appeared on Israeli television and managed to feature in a Bulgarian magazine. The journey was quite a revelatory coming of age experience, not least because Niall awoke me to the strange and wonderful world of mullets. WORK - I've been lucky enough when living in Inverness to have jobs that involved a great deal of travel around the north of Scotland, plus often futher afield to exotic places like London. I occasionally wrote about these sorts of trips in my blog and put a photo or two in my Flickr site. PRESENT/FUTURE - Er... that's about it, really. There's plenty more places I'd love to go to. However, I'll not be able to do much more for the foreseeable future beyond my mullet adventure.