This issue sits in the Himalaya — learnings from a failed summit attempt in Nepal, and a journey through Drokpa Nomad Country in Kham, Tibet.

It’s been 10 years since I visited Nepal and I finally have a perspective on a journey. I’ve rewritten this story a few times, but I think I’ve found the right words now.

This year, I’ve pottered around the Yorkshire Dales and discovered some wonderful places on my doorstep in the Dark Peak, England. Forthcoming issues are likely to focus on these, and stories I’ve not yet processed from Patagonia, the Atacama Desert and the American West.

I hope you enjoy this issue of Far From!

Waking Up in the Khumbu Valley

On failing to make the summit — and what I found instead.

1.

I sat at a table for one, watching a Sherpa carry my breakfast to me on a tray. He walked slowly across the moraine, trying not to spill my coffee. The wait was awkward and colonial. I realised that I didn’t even know his name.

Should I have gone over and taken the tray from him? In the nausea of altitude sickness, it didn’t seem a good idea. Base camp was empty. My teammates were high above me, climbing the ice wall on Island Peak, a 6,200-metre mountain in the shadow of Everest.

I had signed up with a British expedition company, and in just three weeks of holiday from work, I was set to climb my first Himalayan peak.

Beyond Namche Bazaar, I felt nauseous and the headaches began. The Dal Bhat at the teahouses turned from comfort to trial. I wanted a day’s rest to acclimatise, but the schedule was too tight. We only had one spare day, and it was reserved for emergencies. I had always been strong in the mountains, but my experience in the Alps seemed to count for little here.

The group, mostly British climbers, coped better than I did. Conversation revolved around work, previous adventures, current fitness. I was physically in Nepal but mentally I’d not left Britain.

Just after Dingboche, we left the Everest Base Camp trail and climbed Pokalde, a 5,806-metre trekking peak, in time for a dawn cloud inversion over the whole Khumbu Valley. It was the sort of view mountaineers treasure. I witnessed it, and threw up on the climb to summit.

I told myself I felt sick because I was the only person in the group not taking Diamox. I told myself altitude sickness was a lottery. I told myself that even famous climbers had suffered from altitude sickness in the Himalayas. I told myself I would feel better soon. None of it helped.

The evening before the summit bid, I could not walk in a straight line to the toilet tent. Fearing something worse, I pulled out of the expedition. My English guide was disappointed. In the way a father might say he was ‘disappointed’.

I’d fallen off a conveyor belt that was moving too fast.

My tent mate left at 2 a.m., and I wished him luck. Later, I learned he collapsed on the summit and had to be lowered down the fixed ropes on the mountain.

2.

I packed up my gear as the Sherpas ate breakfast in a huddle. I told them I was walking down to Dingboche to lose some altitude. Pema filled up my water bottles and said he would walk with me.

Until then, Nepal had been mediated through the expedition. Walking down with Pema, that arrangement fell away.

We walked in silence until he asked me “do you have a religion?”. I told him no, but I had started to meditate with a local Zen group. Pema told me he followed Tibetan Buddhism, which worships a litany of old animist mountain gods and Buddhist deities. In an imposing valley where we were dwarfed by foreboding 8,000-metre peaks, one could sense that something other than humans are in charge here. Mountain gods seemed appropriate. I could see why Pema had no truck with Zen.

I flopped on a rock and gazed at the glinting pyramid of Ama Dablam. A mountain often called ‘the Matterhorn of the Himalayas’ in European expedition brochures. I had studied diagrams of the routes. I knew the position of the high camps. I knew where the crux of the route was, and I knew that it was a four-week holiday.

I realised that our expedition had not begun with the traditional Puja, a ceremony that takes place to bless the ropes and ice axes, and ask the mountain for safe passage. We had flown in, organised our kit, and marched into this land of old gods. Pema shrugged and said “yes, it’s common, but it’s disrespectful and unlucky”.

I might have pondered how western thinking, with its empirical reason and the mastery of nature, clashes with traditional Tibetan view of the land as living and sacred.

But all I wanted was lunch.

3.

Ten years on, while the others in the group have summit photos, I treasure an image of an eye painted on a stupa, above Namche Bazaar. A compassionate eye watching over us all.

The story I expected to tell ended on an ordinary morning, when a Sherpa, whose name I still don’t know, walked across the moraine to bring me my morning coffee. At the time, all I could think about was my altitude sickness, my failure, and what others might think.

On the walk down to Dingboche, I had the first conversation that wasn't about climbing, with someone from a different culture, with a different perspective to my own. I was travelling without achievement and I felt unfettered.

I could think of that journey as a kind of ego death, but at the time I just wanted to know when we’d stop for tea and Dal Bhat.

On expeditions these days, I’m in the huddle - making coffee with my hosts instead of waiting for it to be carried to me. Physically there. Actually there.

- Nicholas Holt

Red the Story on far-from.com

New on far-from.com

A Journey through Drokpa Nomad Country

Kham, Tibet

“It is one of the great differences between your civilisation and ours, that you admire the the man who achieves worldly success, while we admire the man who renounces the world” - Rinchen Lhamo

Scotland: Places Worth Disappearing to

Boltholes, Cabins, Lodges and Lighthouses

A list of noteworthy stays, some of which I'm planning to visit soon.

Themes: On foot The Hush The Analogue

New sections on some favourite themes, which I will add to over the coming months.

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading.

Do check out far-from.com if you have time. I add new posts every week.

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Far From #17 turns to the East for inspiration: A travel philosophy essay that takes Bashō as inspiration and ‘Wonders of Nangchen County’, a little visited region of Tibet. Plus ‘Far From Finds’ a new section on these emails.

Every day a journey, and the journey itself is home.
日々旅にして 旅を栖とす
— Matsuo Bashō, The Narrow Road to the Deep North (1689)

Reclaiming What we have Lost in Travel

Bashō and the Discipline of Attention

We often show up already prepared. In the past, a journey could change how we think, but now it usually just confirms what the guidebook or the internet has already told us.

There is an older, simpler tradition that stands apart from today’s carefully planned approach. I first heard the phrase “wandering scholarship” in an interview with writer Michael Ondaatje, where he talked about Bashō, the seventeenth-century wandering poet.

As a traveller and a student of Zen, the journey represented to Bashō all the mystery there was in the universe. Bashō travelled not simply to gather knowledge but to cultivate a quality of looking. Attention, for him, was the discipline. The road was where he went to practice it.

In Basho’s universe, there was no such thing as “travel writing” as we know it. Western writing at the time was concerned with navigation, trade, empire. The catalogue of distant places. Even within Japanese literature itself, the kik, the travel diary, was often quite mannered, and the writer would pass from one famous poetic place name or utamakura to the next, paying tribute within the conventions of classical court poetry.

Basho converted his restless wanderings into a philosophy: “Learn of the pine from the pine, and of the bamboo from the bamboo.” He fully absorbed his surroundings as he journeyed. In the afternoon, he would socialize, exchange ideas, and write his three-line haiku with friends and disciples he met along the road.

The form he used, haibun, alternated poem and prose, but they stood side by side, rather than the poem folding into the prose or the prose folding into the poem.

There was no explanation. It was a format I loved.

閑さや
岩にしみ入る
蝉の声

Such stillness
Piercing into the rock,
The cry of the cicada.

Basho was, in a very deep sense, an egalitarian in his attention. He did not distinguish between the grand and the petty. The stillness of the ancient, moss-covered temple at Yamadera and the sound of a frog plopping into an old pond both merited a haiku.

He found grace in a bowl of rice where another might see merely ordinariness, because anything could feel special if attended to.

This comes very close to what the Japanese call ‘mono no aware’, the poignancy of things, and the recognition that the moment’s beauty is partly in the fact of its passing. Both a great temple and an insect or a frog in a pond are in this way disappearing. His attention did not discriminate; it merely met it.

古池や　
蛙飛び込む　
水の音

The old pond
a frog jumps in,
sound of water.

That did not last long. In the West, the Grand Tour, although in theory concerned with education, mutated from a broad circuit of Europe to a constricted round of Rome, Florence, Venice. The undemanding gaze became the demanding one.

The arrival of the guidebook began to dictate to the traveler what was worth seeing, in what order.

The package tour further refined this, stipulating not just what was worth seeing but how long you were allowed to see it. The Internet to-do list is merely the most recent, hyper-efficient manifestation of this trend. Travel ceased to be an occasion for study, an opportunity for attention, and instead became an event or a backdrop-something to be “ticked off” or “claimed.” First in travel photographs and later on social-media.

None of this implies that travel today is pointless. It is just, I believe, different from what it used to be. The price is that our attention has atrophied to such an extent that we rarely give equal weight to a frog and a temple.

We come armed with information and already sorting: worthy, unworthy, photographic, not photographic, on the list, off the list.

Place becomes what is to be seen, and that seeing gets in the way of paying attention. As Rebecca Solnit has written, walking can serve to bring the mind, the body and the world into harmony; in the same way, the attention Basho cultivated could not be rushed, categorized, or accumulated-it could simply be given.

We don’t have to sell all our possessions or wander for two years like Basho to become “wandering scholars.” We only need to change our pace and our intention. It is that simple: the noise falls away as we practice attention.

When travel is conceived of in this way, no individual trip is ever a complete, self-contained story; instead, it’s the continuation of an ongoing quest.

Over years and decades, across cities, landscapes, and encounters, we carry a sense of discovery about ourselves, tied to the memories of the road. One trip isn’t enough on its own, but it contributes to an ongoing education. What matters then, is not, “where did you go?” but, “what did you discover and what does it tell you about what came before?”

Basho himself wrote, “I do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old, I seek what they sought.” To travel as Basho traveled is to cultivate the quality of attention that lent value to his journeys. We need to delight not just in the destination, but in the passage.

This invitation is open to all of us-no matter our age, budget, or origin.

Let’s not just see the world, let’s attend to it. Reclaiming travel doesn’t necessarily mean avoiding tourist spots or heading to remote locations; it means recovering our capacity for wonder.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches

Matsuo Bashō

I loved the title of this book long before I read it. I assumed it to be some lengthly saga of ‘travels of old’, but it’s quite the opposite. In this slim volume of travel sketches Bashō writes of the seasons changing, the smell of the rain and the brightness of the moon through which he sensed the mysteries of the universe. The Christian mystic Thomas Merton went into raptures over it. A little Zen knowledge helps, but it’s gift to any curious traveller. Reading it might make you want to go to Japan.

Amazon link (non affiliate)

Wonders of Nancheng County, Tibet

A remote region of Tibet known as the ‘land of meditators’

Nangchen County (南城县) is one of the five original kingdoms of Kham, and perhaps the last truly wild and nomadic region on the Tibetan Plateau. A rarely visited place, it has maintained its Kagyu heritage despite outside influences. Nangchen earned the name ‘Gomde’, or ‘Land of the Meditators’, due to its high number of practising monks and nuns—a tradition that continues to this day.

Read on far-from.com

Reading Tibet

Read and Recommended: Books by Dervla Murphy, Lobsang P. Lhalungpa, Colin Thubron, Peter Matthiessen, Alexandra David–Neel, Lama Yeshe Losal Rinpoche and Heinrich Harrer.

Read on far-from.com

Far From Finds

Where travel writing is now by Barnaby Rogerson (Eland)
A good read by one of my favourite travel publishers.
An article written in 2014.

Against the Tide (Aeon)
Living off-grid on a remote Scottish island is a mix of rejection and acceptance.
A short film made on the Island of Erraid.

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading.

Do check out far-from.com if you have time. I add new posts every week.

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I started on Substack to get better at writing, which means I read a lot. So here are some reads that resonated with me. I’m grateful for everyone who subscribes or follows me.

I’ve just introduced a book section on far-from.com

Ten 'Travel-Adjacent' Books That Changed My Perspective

I pan for gold in all kinds of genres—reading a lot of ‘travel adjacent’ books, essays, stories, and poems, often with a vein of ancient culture and nature running through them.

When I read book lists I want to know will they amuse?, will they entertain?, or will they change my perspective?

I love brevity. So many of these are short. Some are very short.

1. In Timbuktu by Aminatta Forna (The Window Seat)

In just a few razor-sharp words, Forna completely dismantles romantic Western myths surrounding Timbuktu. In Timbuktu is one of the dazzling essays in The Window Seat, ranging across continents and time.

Read an interview with Forna (Guardian Link)

2. The Man at the River by Dave Eggers (Granta 124)

An American man sits by a river in Africa. All he wants is to be a man sitting on a riverbed, yet he is trapped inside the rigid box of being an “American tourist.” The story explores the clash between Western hyper-awareness and the local acceptance of the natural environment.

Read The Man at the River (Granta Link)

Dave Eggers is a master of the ‘Short Short’ story. Read ‘What The Water Feels Like To The Fishes’ for more brilliance. (Guardian Link)

3. Of Walking in Ice by Werner Herzog

A slender book (my favourite kind) as rich as any of Herzog’s films. In November 1974, upon learning that his friend, film historian Lotte Eisner, was gravely ill in Paris, Herzog set off to walk an icy 500 miles in full faith that she would stay alive if he came on foot. Of Walking in Ice is about the (absurdist?) belief that a physical act of endurance can alter destiny. Pure Herzog: in print.

4. Anima: A Wild Pastoral by Kapka Kassabova

A character in Anima tells Kassabova: “If you stay longer and open your eyes, you’ll see things that visitors don’t see.” This is the longing of many travellers: to be shown a different world. In Anima: A Wild Pastoral, Kassabova’s account of her time among the last pastoralists of The Karakachans, she got exactly that.

But Kassabova is a poet who cares nothing for genres. So we get:

“Am I here because of you or are you here because of me? you ask as you brush your teeth next to a curly-horned ram who steam-breathes through his nostrils like a dragon. And they answer with their collective mind: We will not abandon you.”

I’m halfway through this intense reflection on the human-animal connection, and the ancient spirits of the natural world, and I can’t put it down.

5. The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin

A flawed book (1987) by a brilliant writer who also had a disregard for non-fiction boundaries. The Songlines has the creative fearlessness that Natalie Goldberg champions in her book Writing Down the Bones: “Play around. Dive into absurdity and write. Take chances. You will succeed if you are fearless of failure.”

The Songlines boasts an opening line that still makes me smile:

“In Alice Springs, a grid of scorched streets where men in long white socks are forever getting in and out of Land Cruisers - I met a Russian who was mapping the sacred sites of the Aboriginals.”

The Songlines takes the reader on a journey into the sacred realm of Aboriginal ‘Country’. Bruce Chatwin was a white guy entranced by Aboriginal culture. I am too. This book made me curious to delve deeper into Aboriginal art and writers like Tara June Winch.

6. Tracks by Robyn Davidson

Tracks, published in 1975, follows Davidson’s “lunatic idea” to cross the Simpson Desert, from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean with camels. What I love about Tracks is that Davidson wanted to do the journey for herself, only reluctantly agreeing to National Geographic coverage as she needed the money.

In Davidson’s recently published biography, Unfinished Woman, she talks of “being immersed in that landscape – sleeping on it, eating it when you get sand in your food, shitting on it, and walking every day on it, you enter a rhythm that’s not like any other rhythm. Your consciousness gets bigger and bigger.” For the first time, she says, she felt at home in the world. There is an intimacy here that I often don’t get from men’s tales of derring-do.

7. The Stone Horse by Barry Lopez (Crossing Open Ground)

I read The Stone Horse during a solo stay at a cabin in the Nevada Desert. All I had for company was kangaroo rats, cottontail rabbits, and a shelf full of nature books. Lopez’s words had never clicked with me until I read this.

The story follows Lopez’s search for an ancient horse geoglyph carved into the earth centuries prior by Quechan artists. He follows fragile, reluctant directions into the California desert. The moment he finds the horse, local geography collapses and he is dropped into deep time, confronting sacred indigenous art. When I got home I bought the book to see if the magic was still there. It was.

8. Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo

I’ve never been to Mexico, but if I went, this is the book I would take. I latched onto Pedro Páramo because Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa revered it as an early work of magical realism.

Rulfo’s first and only novel, published in 1955, is a surreal tale of Juan Preciado who sets out on a strange quest to seek his father, Pedro Páramo. In the ruined town of Comala, he finds nothing but ghosts, whispers, and shadows. Susan Sontag, in her introduction, noted Rulfo’s literary restraint. He was the master of the hollowed-out sentence, spending years cutting the manuscript down, removing every unnecessary word. A great 20th-century novel that you can read in a day.

9. What We Lost by Michael Ondaatje (Handwriting)

Ondaatje’s writing wows me. While I love The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, this poem is something I can return to often. What We Lost is an elegy for lost childhood, culture, and language. It’s also a glimpse of the source of the writer’s mysterious imagination. The poems in Handwriting make me want to go to Sri Lanka.

Read What We Lost (Granta link)

10. Baptism of Solitude by Paul Bowles (Their Heads are Green)

I borrowed this book from a library van in rural Shropshire. I’m not sure why this book appealed to the 14-year-old me – perhaps it was slim pickings in the library van that day – but it made such an impression that 30 years later, I went to Algeria to experience my own ‘baptism of solitude’.

Bowles describes the unique sensation of encountering the profound silence of the Sahara Desert for the first time. I have a forthcoming photographic series based on my experiences in the Sahara.

Read Baptism of Solitude (far-from.com link)

The library. A new book section on far-from.com

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading.

Do check out far-from.com if you have time. It has new posts and fresh coat of paint.

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It's been a while since I’ve written a ‘think piece’, so here are my musings on how travel has changed, wrapped up in a story.

Travel Then and Now

A story of an obsession, and how travel changed around it (1979–2026)

1979

I can pinpoint the exact moment it began.

I came home from school to find a khaki expedition Land Rover parked on the drive, and in the kitchen a man with a black, bushy beard testing his watch for waterproofness in the sink. My uncle John, a National Geographic photographer, had stopped by on his way to cross the Sahara Desert. I was thirteen and hadn’t been further than Wales.

This was the late 1970s, when men who fancied your mum were called “uncle,” and trans‑Saharan travel was in a golden age.

After he returned, he gave a slideshow of his photographs at my school. As the carousel clicked through — set to Here Comes the Sun — I saw landscapes and characters so otherworldly that I shed a tear.

Year by year, I built an intensely private vision from the expanse of khaki in my atlas. I dreamed of travelling to Tamanrasset, Djanet, the Ténéré, and Timbuktu. I imagined nights under desert skies with the Tuareg, and smoking Kif with Berbers in the Rif Mountains of Morocco.

1987

At twenty‑one, I persuaded my girlfriend to go to Morocco — which felt like the only way to reach the Sahara. Rough Guide in hand, we flew to Tangier, stayed at the Hotel Muniria, drank at the Tangerinn, and ate swordfish at a little restaurant by the harbour. On a quiet street, a shopkeeper beckoned us in, then hissed “fuck the tourist” as we passed.

The deeper we travelled into Morocco, the more we felt like prey in a Paul Bowles story: western travellers, ignorant of local ways, disoriented by an environment whose amorality we didn’t understand.

In a restaurant, a man trying to sell a lump of hashish set upon me before being ejected into the street by waiters, wild‑west style.

In Fez, staying in a hotel watched by the same men who had installed us there from the train, we thought — after finding the windows to our room open — that drugs had been planted in our bags, a scam we’d heard about by other travellers. We fled the city at 5 a.m.

While Yves Saint Laurent was languishing at Jardin Majorelle, we were caught inside the maze-like medina in Marrakesh with a “guide,” who demanded more money to get us out.

We reached Zagora—the last outpost before the Sahara Desert—in the grip of 50°C-degree heat and mounting paranoia.

We met a man called Mbark, who bought us mint tea and said he wanted to take us to the desert. We followed him across a stony plain, braced for trouble, but he led us instead to his brother’s rooftop, where we ate under a clear desert sky.

At 5 a.m. he rang our room “Are you coming to the desert?.” We told him we were unwell.

As the bus pulled out of Zagora, he waved it down, stepped aboard and placed two silver bracelets in our hands.

We left Morocco without seeing the desert.

Travel, I learned, was a rite of passage.

2018

Lured back to Morocco for a motorcycle tour along the edges of the Sahara, I found myself in an affable restaurant in the Marrakesh medina, surrounded by influencers in floppy hats filming their food.

There are still snakes and storytellers at the Jemaa el‑Fnaa, but the swarms of children trying to pick pockets had gone. You could wander past chic boutiques, spas and the new Maison de la Photographie without being dragged into a hostile choreography with hustlers.

The chaos that once terrified me is now tidied into a gentrified tourist hub. A taxi took me straight to my pre‑booked hotel — a far cry from the days when I wandered the streets fending off men trying to grab my girlfriend, only to discover the guidebook was out of date and the hotel had closed down.

The mystique I’d once sought here was always hidden behind walls and courtyards, or perhaps only existed in the 1950s, on the pages of Elias Canetti, Mohammed Mrabet, and Paul Bowles.

From Marrakesh I rode south with Chris Scott, over the Atlas and into Morocco’s Saharan frontier near the Algerian border. We travelled along empty desert roads, sipped mint tea at roadside cafés and stayed in Bedouin‑run auberges with open fires. Ouarzazate seemed like a city now, compared to the outpost I’d known three decades earlier. I brought home a black‑and‑white Berber rug strapped to the back of my hired motorcycle; it now sits on the floor of my study.

2022

My boyhood obsession with the Sahara had settled into the background years ago. And then, scrolling through Instagram one evening, I found the profile of a Polish woman who had close ties to the Tuareg. We exchanged a few messages. It felt improbable, almost naïve — the kind of thing only a thirteen‑year‑old would believe in.

Weeks later, I was flying to Algeria.

Tito, a Tuareg guide, met us with drivers, a cook and musicians, and led us into the desert in Toyota 4x4s. We travelled under luminous North African skies, listening to Tuareg laughter and music around the glow of the fire at night.

The Sahara I found there had no paranoia, just an elemental landscape that worked its way into my consciousness. Around every corner lay a startling new arrangement of sand, sky, and rock, which I never tired of.

The dream I’d carried for decades arrived without ceremony — as if it had been waiting for me all along.

2026

Travel is easier now, it may have lost some of its shadows, but I don’t mind.

Read on far-from.com

On far-from.com

Moroccan Mystery Tour

A tour of the Moroccan Sahara by Motorcycle with Chris Scott, author of Morocco Overland

Read on far-from.com

That’s all for now. Thank you for reading.

Do check out far-from.com if you have time. It has more posts and fresh coat of paint.

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Pre-Season in the Disneyland of Trekking

Torres del Paine national park in October—before the crowds arrive.

I awake at 5:30am and crawl out of my tent, shivering in the pre‑dawn air. Nursing a coffee and swaddled in my duvet jacket, I make a mental plan to sell this coffin‑like tent and the “4‑season” sleeping bag the moment I get home. My friend Aky, roused by the sound of the brewing coffee, emerges from his tent to announce he’s had a “very cosy” night’s sleep. Naturally, his gear was sourced from China for a third of the cost of mine.

It’s too cold to sit around, so we walk through the mostly empty campsite toward the scenic viewpoint. We watch in excited silence as two eagles feed their young with small fish from Lake Pehoé, their shapes silhouetted against the glow of civil dawn. Reaching the top of the bank, the landscape opens — vast water, wind, and the jagged outline of the Cuernos del Paine, being enjoyed by a couple of geese. We stand beside them as the first light turns the water and peaks pink. For a while, we have it to ourselves.

At moments like this, Torres del Paine has a surreal perfection — it looks too composed, too symmetrical, too cinematic to be real. It’s this perfection that draws the crowds.

I didn’t end up here through any planning wizardry; my artist residency in the Atacama Desert finished in early October, and Patagonia felt like the natural place to gravitate toward.

We arrive at park ‘wake up’, when Torres del Paine shakes off its winter slumber and the gates have just swung open for the year. The fire‑red Notro flowers are beginning to bloom alongside lingering snow in the higher elevations.

We are camping next to Pau, a Mexican artist I met during the residency. Travelling with a Spanish speaker has its advantages: Pau sweet‑talked the host of a coffee shop into giving us the staff Wi‑Fi code—gold dust in these parts—and drew out a revealing chat with the campsite cook. “In December,” he warns us, “high season arrives and everything changes.”

There is, of course, a reason why most people visit between December and February. The weather is more reliable (if Patagonian weather could ever truly be called reliable) and offers warmer temperatures and longer days.

We drive the gravel roads, past grazing guanacos, to Hotel Lago Grey. It’s an upmarket place with a line of people winding across the alluvial plain to gaze at a crystalline iceberg. Lago Grey is pre‑packaged tourist territory, but a boat trip to the Grey Glacier is hard to pass up.

Aboard the Grey III, a white‑and‑red catamaran, I talk to Alberto, a Chilean guide. “The best way to think of the glacier,” he says, “is as a river — just frozen, and moving very slowly.” “The human eye can’t grasp the flow,” he adds, looking at the chunk of glacier ice chilling my Pisco Sour, “but it’s moving.”

Out on the water, it has taken centuries for snow falling high in the Andes to be compressed into solid blue ice and move to the front of the glacier where we are now. Patagonia was once completely covered in ice like this. You feel the age of it more than you understand it.

After the boat trip we climb up onto Isla de los Hielos (Ice Island) to get a closer look at the lone iceberg. While I’ve flown over icebergs in East Greenland, I’d never seen one up close. This chunk of ice is the size of a house and has recently tipped, revealing its shimmering blue underside. The colour feels almost impossible—a compressed, luminous blue pulled from deep time.

Though the summer crowds haven’t arrived yet, popular hikes in the park, such as the Mirador Cuernos trail, already feel busy with coach parties. Trekkers bus in for the day from Puerto Natales to hike the French Valley, in a long 12‑hour day.

Between the mandatory bookings made months in advance and the strictly defined trails, Torres del Paine can feel a bit rigid compared to the wilder parts of Patagonia. But this orchestration is what keeps the park pristine, and the turquoise lakes and granite towers from being overrun in peak season.

It can be tempting to be reductionist and just pick off the ‘must‑do’ sights or trails. But in pre‑season, with a hire car and a little time, you can be intimate with the quiet dawns, the birds of prey, the empty viewpoints, and the subtle movements that appear when the park is still waking up.

See farfrom.co for practicalities

Calving

A sequence of photographs made at Perito Moreno Glacier, Patagonia, as ancient ice reaches its shedding point, breaks free, and drifts north into Lago Argentino.

View on Far From

Reading

Frostlines by Neil Shea

The experiences of National Geographic writer Neil Shea in the arctic. I’m a few pages in.

Amazon link

Brief Flashings in the Phenomenal World: Zen and the Art of Running Free by Katie Arnold.

A Zen study wrapped in a memoir of an ultra runner. Looks up my street. Haven’t started it yet.

Amazon link

(links are non affiliate)

That’s all for now. Thank you for reading.

Do check out farfrom.co if you have time. I’ve tweaked it!

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The Last Word of the Yaghan.
Thoughts at Estancia Harberton, Tierra del Fuego

I.
At Estancia Harberton, on the southern tip of Tierra del Fuego, there is no key to the door of the little red-roofed house I’m staying in. Perhaps this is clerical error, or just an old habit, as this is a ranch that existed for a century without a road, accessible only by the waters of the Beagle Channel until 1973.

Harberton was built in 1886 by Thomas Bridges, an English missionary turned sheep farmer. Harberton is the oldest ranch in Argentinian Tierra del Fuego, and the most southerly ranch on earth—a place where the road ends and Antarctica begins to loom large in the imagination.

Today, Harberton looks much as it did in old photographs: a bunch of whitewashed, wooden buildings set on a sheltered bay, flanked by snow-streaked Andean peaks. Each house still looks out onto an old lavatory building, perched precariously at the end of a small pier in the bay. Although, mercifully, these are not in use.

II.

As the wood-burner warms up the living room, I think about the Yaghan people who were here long before this house was built.

The Yaghan lived naked; covering themselves with animal fat to protect them from the elements while they hunted seals and sat by fires that they had dug into the earth within the base of their birch bark canoes. It was the continuous flame of the fires lit by the Yaghan along their coastlines that prompted the Spanish explorers to refer to this land as the Tierra del Fuego — or The Land of Fire. While I personally enjoy Thomas Bridges’ term for this place: Fireland.

I go for a walk, leaving my friend Aky drinking tea by the fire. A boisterous black collie appears from between the wooden houses and joins me. Together we pass stacks of winter logs and a neat picket fence fronted with the bleached skulls of killer whales. The dog races ahead; I'm guessing he has done this walk before.

Everywhere I look, I see a clean and untouched landscape. Mosses grow on top of each other in tiny forests on the rock surfaces. The scrub bushes turn vibrant colors of red, yellow and orange as they prepare for the coming southern summer. Lichens that only thrive in air this pure cover the Magellan beech trees like tangles of hair.

III.

On my trip back to the estancia, the dog finds his way home; I meet with Tommy Goodall, the grandson of Thomas Bridges. The son of a man who has lived in the same house since the early days. We are standing by a whalebone arch while the wind is blowing between us, when we hear him talk about the winter of 1995. “The snow fell from may until September,” he said. “Eighty five percent of our animals died. They really hit us hard.”

Today, the estancia is funded by tourism. People come to see the Magellanic penguins that live on Martillo Island and to view the exhibits at the Acatushun Museum (the “Museum at the End of the World”). Mariana, a resident scientist shows us the skeletons of Peale’s dolphin and the Andrews’ beaked whale, some of South America’s rarest creatures. Next door, large plastic tubs contain the strong odour of various sea mammals that have been completely disarticulated to their skeletal remains.

IV.

I came here with a book: The Uttermost Part of the Earth, written by Lucas Bridges who was the third white child born in this vast area. He grew up by the sea, sailing boats with his father through the glacier-strewn waters of the Beagle Channel. As he grew older he became enraptured with the Yaghan, Selkʼnam and Ona tribes: wearing moccasins, hunting with bows, speaking their languages and eventually becoming the first “blood brother” to the Selk’nam.

But The Uttermost Part of the Earth is more than an adventure story; its a record of the last of the Yaghan people. When Darwin sailed down the Beagle Channel in 1830, the Yaghan numbered around 3,000. By 1900, Lucas wrote that only 200 remained — thinned by measles, smallpox, violence, and the spread of European culture.

The only reminder of the Yaghan tribe at Harberton is a reconstruction of a Yaghan shelter built with branches and foliage on top of the hill, next to the Bridges family graveyard, surrounded by a copse of a Ñire and Lenga trees swaying in the wind.

V.

With the death of Cristina Calderón, the last native speaker, the Yaghan language became functionally extinct in 2022.

According to my guide, Joaquin, the last Yaghan word really used today is mamihlapinatapai. He says it refers to “amoment of meditation around the fire when the elders pass on stories to the young, and there is deep, shared silence.”

That sounds like a reasonable interpretation, albeit romantic. Indeed, mamihlapinatapai has been taken up by Internetculture and remixed in dozens of ways; its beauty lies in its resistance to the grasp of modern tongues.

For me, the word carries something of Michael Ondaatje’s poem What We Lost: the gestures, courtesies, and hidden knowledge that have slipped away with the loss of tribes such as the Yaghan, the Selk’nam and the Ona.

VI.

On my last day, I met Abby Goodall, the fifth-generation descendant of Thomas Bridges and the current manager of Harberton. She took me to the allotment garden, where she grows rhubarb and cauliflower in the cold Patagonian soil without a poly-tunnel. When I ask if she would she share these miraculous secrets on the internet with my gardening friends back home in England, she smiles and replies, “They need to come here to have their hands deep in the soil. It’s the only way to learn.”

On the way back to Ushuaia, the driver said he had not been here in years. Most visitors take the day tour, look at the penguins and whale skeletons, and return to the city by coach.

I think of Lucas Bridges, an Argentine by birth who was brought up among indigenous tribes yet still considered himself an Englishman.

I step outside; the door swings, catching the wind as if the place has never learned to close itself off. These petty defences of civilization seem unnecessary in the sharp, deliberate light of Tierra del Fuego.

Reading: Uttermost Part of the Earth — Lucas Bridges.

That’s all for now. Thank you for reading.

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In the summer of 2025 I took a road trip through ‘Georgia O’Keeffe Country’, visited the Georgia O’Keeffe museum in Santa Fe, her house at Abiquiu, hung out in Taos, and stayed at Ghost Ranch. I fell in love with the landscape that she often called the "the faraway."

The Faraway Nearby—a Gift from Georgia O’Keeffe

Ghost Ranch sits in the landscape that Georgia O’Keeffe called the far away: “a fine little spot quite far off the road with thick old cedar trees… Such a beautiful, untouched lonely-feeling place.”

One day in 1937, she painted an antlered skull levitating over a distant mountain slope. The original title was Deer’s Horns, Near Cameron, but when she renamed it From the Faraway Nearby, the painting opened up. The close and the distant collapsed into one.

The faraway nearby is one of those koan-like phrases that keeps unfolding the longer you sit with it.

Rebecca Solnit used it to describe “physical and psychic geography together” in her book The Faraway Nearby. That luminous line stayed with me as I travelled through New Mexico — and even more so when I arrived back in the UK.

After I’d been in O’Keeffe’s far away, I started to see my own landscape differently.

When I’m home and want to be somewhere else, I walk up onto the moors above my house: a treeless place with thick blankets of purple heather, drifting mists, and the nasal squeal of grouse.

Sometimes, when I glimpse a hare leaping in the foreground of a rainbow, it feels like Narnia; other times, passing one of the WWII aircraft wrecks scattered across the moors, it resembles the Zone in Tarkovsky’s Stalker.

This area of moorland in the Dark Peak has aways been the place I go to clear my head. But after Ghost Ranch, the walk shifted in my mind. It became less of a reset and more of an entry point into mystery.

Alix Kates Shulman writes in Drinking the Rain:

Within walking distance of any spot on Earth there’s probably more than enough mystery to investigate in a lifetime.

I go without my phone and fall into the faraway nearby — a place both known and unknown, shaped by weather and geography. I always return with more clarity and a fresh idea or two.

For me, the faraway nearby is the reminder that elsewhere is always available, even when you’re close to home.

Read more Georgia O’Keeffe Travels on Far From

Georgia O’Keefe Country: A Four Day Itinerary

On the trail of Georgia O’Keefe in New Mexico.

Ghost Ranch–A Retreat in Georgia O’Keeffe’s Landscape

In 1934, an artist rented a small house on a ranch in the Valley of the Shining Stone, in the Piedra Lumbre Basin in New Mexico. Every morning, she would leave her adobe ranch house at dawn, and venture into the red hills in search of paintings.

Further Reading

Georgia O’Keeffe and Her Houses: Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu

I bought this book after I got back home, as you are not allowed to take photographs at the Ghost Ranch house. The details on the mountains, the skulls, the Jimson weeds, and a ladder against a wall—were all transformed by her genius into art.

Agnes Martin: Painting, Writings, Remembrances

Agnes Martin: Painting, Writings, Remembrances is the finest book I’ve seen on the artist Agnes Martin, who was also influenced by the New Mexico desert. Don’t miss the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, where there is a room dedicated to Martin’s contemplative paintings (akin to the Rothko Chapel). Martin’s ashes were scattered under a tree at the Harwood Museum in Taos. Her book Writings is also worth tracking down.

Amazon links (non-affiliate)

Images were made on a Rolleiflex film camera and iPhone.
I left my digital camera behind for this trip.

That’s all for now!

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Hello! You’re reading Far From, for travellers in search of wonder.

I’ve made the best use of the miserable January weather in the UK to update farfrom.co and publish the first three stories from Patagonia. Links are below.

Forty Minutes a Gaucho

Gaucho culture meets traditional luxury at Estancia Nibepo Aike in the Argentine wilderness.

Ancient Ice

A sequence recorded at Perito Moreno Glacier, as ice formed over centuries reaches its shedding point, breaks free, and drifts north into Lago Argentino.

A Region so Lonely: Photographs of Patagonia

“Its a region… so lonely, where the earth is filled with ocean, and there is no one but a horses hoof prints, there is no one but the rain falling over waters of the sea, no one but rain growing over sea”

- Pablo Neruda

Silence & Solitude: A new section on farfrom.co

farfrom.co is slowly evolving. I’ve added the first in a series of pages exploring travel themes close to my heart. Silence and Solitude explores quiet places — where silence feels rich and luxurious. Stories, books, and stays for those seeking clarity, stillness, and connection with self and nature.

Far From in Print

I’m exploring an Atacama Desert print-only edition of Far From. The trip yielded particularly rich material, and I’ve always seen print as the ideal home for the slow-burn stories of Far From. Here’s a mock-up of the cover — I’d love to know what you think.

Reading: True Nature - the lives of Peter Matthiessen

The Snow Leopard has long resonated with me. So when I spotted Lance Richardson’s biography, I grabbed a copy, pronto.

Richardson retraced Matthiessen’s trek over a 17,550-foot pass to Shey Gompa, the Tibetan Buddhist monastery beneath Crystal Mountain — the place where, in 1973, Matthiessen tested himself in pursuit of enlightenment.

Nearly 50 years later, Richardson had to turn back, descending rapidly with pulmonary edema.

It’s a journey I hope to make myself one day. For now, I’ll settle for this book — which promises a fascinating read, not least because Matthiessen was also once a CIA spy.

That’s all for now. Thank you for reading.

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In 2025, I realised I’m not designed to process information at the speed I’m supposed to scroll—let alone write. The pace is exhausting.

So in 2026, I’m choosing to slow down to a rhythm that feels correct.

That’s where better work comes from.

So with that in mind here is a new story from The Sahara Issue of Far From .

Feel free to bookmark and read when the mood is right.

Three Glasses

There is no hurry to Tuareg tea, nor any need for explanation.

Tea in the Sahara is prepared slowly. In the Sahara one does not prepare it in any other way. A small metal teapot goes on the coals; the blue or red paint is thin in spots from years of heat and use. With the very glasses that will be used for drinking, a measure of Chinese gunpowder green tea is put in the pot. Water is added and then poured off before the pot is put back to the fire. What comes of those leaves are three rounds of tea.

The first glass is as unsoftened and sharp as life itself, and is taken without comment. Bitter, it sets a serious tone for the ritual.

Sugar makes the second glass sweet, like love. The bitterness is still there but has given way. One pours from some height, a thin and deliberate stream to make the pale foam rise in the glass. That foam is important, a sign of care.

Then there is the third glass. The leaves have been mostly spent, so the tea is faint in colour and light, all sweetness.

The children come forward now for what was not offered them at the start. The adults do not drink with haste; there is no point in rushing the conclusion.

It would be impolite to refuse. To go before the third glass is to leave matters unfinished. Conversation may ebb and flow around the proceedings or stop altogether. Silence and waiting are part of it.

Time, heat and sugar are the only things put into the same leaves to alter their concentration and yield three different outcomes.

One pot, three glasses. In the Sahara, that is enough.

That’s all for now. Happy New Year to you all!

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I’ve just returned from two months in search of ‘big nature’ in Chile and Argentina, and I’m still processing both the experiences and the film I shot along the way (120 and Super 8, for those curious).

While I work on the next issue, I’d like to share a little taste of what’s coming on far from.

“Its a region… so lonely, where the earth is filled with ocean, and there is no one but a horses hoof prints, there is no one but the rain falling over waters of the sea, no one but rain growing over sea”
Pablo Neruda

This text by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda speaks to why we are drawn to wild, untamed places like Patagonia. I was captivated by the vast, raw landscapes, yet I also discovered some surprisingly civilized spots along the way—a combination that made the journey all the more satisfying.

In the footsteps of…

To travel in Patagonia is to journey through the pages of some great writers. I visited Estancia Harberton, where Lucas Bridges wrote The Uttermost Part of the Earth, and ventured into the Milodon Cave, following the ghost of Bruce Chatwin.

Whale Skeletons at Estancia Harberton, at the southern tip of Argentina.

Estancia Harberton is where Lucas Bridges lived and penned The Uttermost Part of the Earth, chronicling his life among the Yahgan, the now-vanished Indigenous people of Tierra del Fuego. It’s a book I’ve held dear for years.

Into the Milodon Cave: in the footsteps of Bruce Chatwin.

Bruce Chatwin’s book In Patagonia looms large for any Englishman traveling in Patagonia. I visited near the 40th anniversary of Chatwin’s journey, when he was researching the book that transformed travel writing in 1977. I’ll be sharing some thoughts on the experience.

A ‘James Bond moment’ on Chiloe Island

My friend Aky standing by our hire car at the entrance to Parque Tepuhueico on Chiloe Island in Chile.

On Chiloe Island we hacked our way through overgrown forest paths and crossed rickety bridges in Parque Tepuhueico, only to arrive at a hidden tower. Inside? A three-course lunch with wine, served impeccably before we hacked our way back out.

Postcards from Patagonia

A condor soars past the window of a high-rise hotel in Puerto Montt, Chile.

Sailing the Beagle Channel from Ushuaia, the world’s southernmost city.

Tasting the wild romance of Gaucho life at Estancia Nibepo Aike in remote Argentina.

Scenic bus journeys of the world: the view from the top deck as we approach El Chaltén in Argentina.

Icebergs drift gracefully by at Torres del Paine.

Sunrise over the stilt houses in Castro on Chiloé Island—our house was the eighth from the right.

Perito Moreno Glacier, a work of staggering beauty in Argentina

Torres del Paine: birds of prey nesting right outside your door.

I am currently writing up the full stories for these locations, including my Gaucho experience, the location of that tower restaurant, and the best place to stay in Torres Del Paine.

farfrom.co

What I’m reading: Original Traveller Magazine

I’ve been enjoying the stories and the photography in Original Traveller Magazine. The magazine is edited by Tom Barber of Original Travel and has stories by Stanley Stewart - one of my favourite travel writers. You can get hold of a copy here

Note: I have no affiliation with Original Travel, but I like what they are doing.

That’s all for now. Happy Christmas to you all!

Note: I am now back in the studio and will be sharing stories from this trip once a month.

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You’re reading Far From, a newsletter about searching for wonder in an over -travelled world. Thank you so much for subscribing.

I’m back from a wonderful trip to Loch Fyne and Scotland’s Outer Hebrides. I’m packing for my trip to Chile/Argentina tomorrow, so September’s Newsletter is short on intro but big on stories…

The Wonder of a Sunday on Lewis & Harris

Outside Arnol Blackhouse on Lewis, I meet an elderly man with JD Salinger eyes who tells me: “During the Revival in 1949, the village literally shook with the presence of God – pictures fell from the walls, and a 16-year-old boy was given powers by God and conducted services out on the moor, one by one the villages fell to the Holy Spirit”, before wandering into the museum through the exit door to find his family.

This impromptu sermon – gloriously out of step with the modern world – was my first impression of Lewis and Harris, the largest island in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides and a last stronghold of Scotland’s Bible belt.

Wandering around Tarbert, the largest town on Harris, on a Sunday, the streets are virtually deserted, except for a group of hungry tourists gazing at a closed cafe in disbelief. Outside the closed Harris Tweed Shop, Seagulls drink rainwater from the overflowing dog bowl. In the sea outside the harbour, cruise ships, with bellies full of hundreds of tourists, sail past – not bothering to come ashore on a Sunday.

Lewis’s staunch Protestant community has fought to ensure that Christianity rather than commerce has dictated the pattern of everyday life here. They consider Sunday a day of peace and tranquility, and many still observe the old niceties – gardens aren’t dug, televisions are not watched, and washing isn’t pinned to outdoor clotheslines.

But the stillness of a Lewis and Harris Sunday is being steadily eroded. The writer Louis MacNeice, who visited the Hebrides in the 1930s, described the islands struggle with “tides of unbelief and materialism from the mainland.”

When the first Sunday-breaking ferry sailed from Stornoway in 1989, the Rev Angus Smith lay down on the slipway in protest, islanders sang psalms and wiped away tears as cars were loaded aboard the MV Isle of Lewis ferry. Scheduled flights have popped in and out of Stornoway airport since 2002, and, despite protests, Tesco’s tills bleeped into life in Stornoway on a Sunday for the first time in 2025.

Read the rest of the story on farfrom.co

Luxuriating in Nature: An Off-Grid stay at KABN, Loch Fyne

DO WE HAVE TO GIVE UP HOME COMFORTS TO CONNECT WITH NATURE? I VISITED A LUXURY CABIN ON THE SHORES OF LOCH FYNE IN SCOTLAND TO FIND OUT.

After stays at a cabin in Nevada and a bothy on the Island of Ulva, I’ve become evangelistic about off-grid retreats in nature. Last week I travelled to KABN to experience a luxury stay on the shores of Loch Fyne.

KABN offers two architect-designed, luxury cabins nestled on the shore of Loch Fyne with loch views, wood-burning stoves, and private beaches. The cabins are tucked away with no signage until the very last turn, giving the feeling of seclusion that comes with a nature retreat, but without the arduous journeys of my previous off-grid stays.

I stayed in KABN 2, which is clad in beautiful charred larch and has large floor-to-ceiling windows that catch the morning light. The design of the cabin blends Scandinavian contemporary design with Japanese minimalism and is a world away from my last stay at a rustic bothy.

Read the rest of the story on farfrom.co

Handpicked: The Best Experiences on Lewis & Harris

WHERE TO WATCH SEALS BASK, WARM UP IN A BEACHSIDE SAUNA, SIP THE ISLAND’S FINEST COFFEE, SPOT SOARING EAGLES, FIND PEACE AT A MEDIEVAL CHURCH, AND SAVOUR HARRIS GIN BY THE FIRE.

Visiting Lewis and Harris is a journey I delayed far too long.

Scotland’s Outer Hebrides always felt a step further than the Inner Isles: a journey that demanded extra time, more intention, and more of my tightly-guarded holiday allowance — which was always reserved for foreign climes.

But after hearing enough rapturous tales of Caribbean-like beaches I finally gave in. And yes — the stories are true.

Now that my jaw has returned to its rightful place, I want to share my favourite moments from Lewis and Harris — one island with 2 distinct personalities: sometimes raw; sometimes refined; always restorative.

Read the rest of the story on farfrom.co

Keep an eye out on my Instagram stories for updates from my travels in Chile and Argentina.

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Thats it for September.
Happy Travels!

You’re reading Far From, a newsletter about searching for wonder in an over -travelled world.

On the road to Scotland’s Outer Hebrides via Loch Fyne and Skye.

After weeks spent in the basement working on the farfrom.co website, I’m heading to Scotland to visit Harris and Lewis. This will be my first time in the Outer Hebrides, and I’m excited to see those white beaches and turquoise seas.

I’m catching the ferry from Skye. It’s a short, cheap crossing and will give me a chance to do some new walks on Skye on the way back.

I wanted to get to the Isle of Eigg too, but the ferries are booked up, as is the accommodation. I can't resort to my camper van on Eigg either, as it's a car-free island.

My first night in Scotland will be spent at KABN on the shores of Loch Fyne. I’m working with the team there on some photography and video, which I’m excited about.

Under the bonnet at farfrom.co

Bringing farfrom.co this far has been more work than I had imagined. I’ve put a lot of energy into the branding, design, and functionality.

At one point, I thought the 14 initial posts were finished, but realised that my images were too large, so I had to redo them all. Aaaaargh!

I’m still working on getting the balance of content right. Currently, it’s heavy on practical guides and light on the longer, deeper writing that I want to do. Something I intend to put right soon.

New posts on farfrom.co

The Cape Wrath post is a new story based on a trip I took for my MA in photography in 2021.

The Isle of Iona post is part narrative writing and part guide. It will eventually be split into two expanded posts to do justice to this special place.

The Isle of Islay post is a guide to whisky tasting on one of my favourite Scottish Islands. The photography is 35mm film from a few years ago.

Cape Wrath: After the Day Trippers Have Gone

A Day on Iona, Scotland’s Holy Island

A Weekend of Whisky Tasting on Islay, Scotland

The Joy of SEO

Back in October 2024, I decided to collect all my travel writing and photography on farfrom.co. I got the website live on Google and: tumbleweed. I had a portfolio-style website that was not discoverable on Google as it had no SEO.

After working so hard on the creative side, I simply couldn’t face trying to grapple with SEO. So I left it and started this Substack, where I could write my heart out.

But at the back of my mind, I knew I had to do something about farfrom.co. So 6 months later, I revamped it, thinking of it more as a brand than a portfolio website.

I did a crash course in SEO, and now have a couple of posts on page one of Google search. Which, quite frankly, leaves me incredulous.

Strangely, I've enjoyed the challenge of trying to strike the right balance between evocative writing and keywords.

AI wins

The deeper I got into the design and functionality of farfrom.co, the more I realised that I needed custom coding to get what I wanted from Squarespace.

With zero budget for anything that I couldn’t do myself, I turned to Claude: an AI recommended by my friend who ‘trains’ them.

Claude wrote me some clever CSS/JavaScript to get around problems that are far too nerdy to discuss here. Claude also taught me a few cool things about SEO.

AI woes

Claude is tragic at writing, suggesting sweeping generalisations rather than the specifics that are needed for good writing. This is because AIs have no direct experience of the things they are writing about. For me, writing is a profoundly human activity.

What I’m reading in August

The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths by John Gray.

I’m a few pages in. This is powerful stuff so far.

FT HTSI spring travel special 2025. I bought the print magazine as it has an article on Patagonia, where I’m heading in a month. The FT HSTI travel special magazines are big, lavish, and have some great photography and writing (in amongst the private jet and perfume ads!). I sometimes pick up old issues on eBay.

Thats all for August!
Happy travels.

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You’re reading Far From, a newsletter about searching for wonder in an over -travelled world.

I’ve been quieter than usual on Substack, so thanks for bearing with me!

I put my Creative Director’s head on, and revamped farfrom.co, which had been feeling neglected since I started writing on Substack.

The new farfrom.co has been reimagined as travel blog–meets–magazine that blends practical travel advice with the visual storytelling and editorial depth of a magazine.

This brings my passions and skills together, while offering more to the traveller: I couldn’t be more excited.

The new farfrom.co is based around themed Issues (a nod to print).

Issue One is about Scotland–a place where I’ve had many wonderful experiences over the years.

The first 11 posts are now available to read on the website, with more to follow.

Plus, I’m taking a trip to the Outer Hebrides soon. Followed by Jura, Eigg, and the Cairngorms.

My big trip

In late September, I will travel to Chile. where I will be creating content for farfrom.co in the Atacama Desert and Patagonia. I will also be working on a film photography project at La Wayaka Current, an artists residency in the Atacama Desert.

A few changes to my Instagram(s):
My Instagram_nicholasholt_ will soon be renamed to Far From.
My photography projects will be on nicholas_holt_art

What caught my eye in July:

Shafik Meghji
Has a new book out: Small Earthquakes: A Journey Through Lost British History in South America, which looks right up my alley. (Amazon link)

Sophy Roberts
Is on Substack with Gone to Timbuktu

The Timbuktu Review
Always a good read: A Year in a Day: On the value of remoteness and wilderness, and how to slip into worlds ,and On Anticipation by Alain de Botton

The Marlowe Review
‘A literary magazine that reaches beyond the travelogue, publishing stories about place, people, memory, and meaning’. I look forward to diving into this one.

On a personal note: my youngest daughter Mia gained a 1st in Geography and Geology from Leeds University 🍾

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You’re reading Far From, a newsletter about searching for wonder in an over - travelled world.

In the summer of 2024, I spent two months in the USA.

With no digital camera (oh, the horror).

Instead, I took my Rolleiflex film camera and my Bell & Howell Super8 Cine Camera along to use during my retreat in a cabin in the Nevada Desert.

The plan was to complete the two week artist residency – make a road trip across Utah and New Mexico – pack the cameras in my backpack – and hike the Colorado Trail with my youngest daughter, Mia.

Cool idea (on paper).

Hikers on the Colorado Trail go lightweight for a reason: lugging two cameras with a tent, equipment, clothes, 3 litres of water, and 4 days of food in a bear barrel almost broke me!

The heavy Bell & Howell Super8 camera went into the trash bin in a toilet on day five.

The Rolleiflex camera hung on until the end of the hike (just).

Shooting film frustrated me.

I needed the wide lens of my digital camera for the grand desert vistas of Utah. I missed magical moments while loading new film into the Rolleiflex in New Mexico.

Would my films survive the doses of radiation from multiple airport scanners, or the battering they received in the bottom of my backpack day after day?

Would the frustration of shooting film would be justified?

When I got home I did not have the excitement of viewing thousands of digital images on my Mac, posting dozens of images onto Instagram, or pitching high-res images to glossy travel magazines.

I had just a few rolls of film to process.

Bryce Canyon National Park and Yellowstone National Park - 120 film

Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson - 120 film

But, as time passed, the film photographs took on greater resonance than my digital images.

Each photograph is a mystery of intention, light, and place burned onto the film emulsion – “a secret about a secret”, as Diane Arbus once said.

Embracing film photography brought silver linings - no more peeking at what I had shot the week, day, or hour before – leaving me free to dwell in the moment.

Nevada - 120 film

My film photography and writing from Nevada will be published in Volume 3 of the Revelry Collection - an exciting new analog magazine from America.

Changing things up can feel risky, but opens up new ways of perceiving, working, and new opportunities.

What will you change up?

Celebrating 6 months on Substack

I started this Substack as the newsletter for my travel blog farfrom.co

I’ve been having so much fun here that farfrom.co has been neglected.

So, for the second half of 2025, I’m giving farfrom.co a makeover.

Plans are being hatched. Watch this space!

Read more at Far From → https://www.farfrom.co

Future posts

A visit to Ghost Ranch in New Mexico | Georgia O’Keefe and ‘The Faraway Nearby,’ | Hiking the Colorado trail with my youngest daughter Mia.

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Iv’e realised that many of my journeys have literary beginnings.

Most are a search for something that I feel is missing in contemporary European society.

One of the motivations behind my journey by camel across the Sudan’s Bayuda Desert was a book called Yallah.

Published in 1957, Yallah combines the photography of Peter W. Haeberlin and text by Paul Bowles - a writer who is an important voice for me.

Yallah documents a journey through the Sahara.

The ideas in the book became a central reference for my journey.

The easiest way to get those ideas across is to include a text from Paul Bowles’s introduction:

“How greatly the West needs to study the religions, the music and the dances of the doomed African Cultures! How much, if we wished, we could learn from them about man’s relationship to the cosmos, about his conscious connection with his own soul. Instead of which, we talk about raising their standard of living! Where we could learn why, we try to teach them the all-important how, so that they may become as rootless, futile and materialistic as we are. Perhaps, at least, this is not wholly inevitable. I cannot help interpreting the title of the book (which in arabic means let us be off) as an exhortation to those of us who are able to salvage which is still intact and valuable”

My journey through the Bayuda desert with the Bedouin – an ancient people who have not forgotten their connection to the land – was a way to do exactly that.

To travel slowly. To travel traditionally.

To accept the privations of the desert – far from the latest eco-lodge and ‘destination that’s having a moment’.

To share simple food around a campfire at night under the cosmos, to access original wisdom of the desert and its inhabitants, and, for a short while, to taste a freedom that is unattainable elsewhere.

Yallah also became the title of my SUITCASE Magazine article:

You might agree that these two desert journeys – 70 years apart – were in many aspects - remarkably unchanged.

There is still magic if you go looking for it.

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“Pre-1949?”, they replied in unison, their eyes alive with possibility.

Photographs of Tibet before the Chinese annexation of 1949 are hard to come by in modern Tibet – effectively cutting off Tibetans from visual records of their own sacred heritage.

The book is called Tibet: The Sacred Realm, Photographs 1880-1950.

It’s freely available to the rest of the world but – according to Tashi and Kinga – unknown in Tibet.

The book contains a treasure trove of images taken by the first Westerners who gained access to the secretive Himalayan Kingdom – illuminating a Buddhist way of life that had remained unchanged since the Middle Ages.

Before I left Tibet I noted down Tashi’s and Kinga’s addresses and promised to send them a copy of the book.

A few weeks later I received a message over WeChat (the Chinese version of WhatsApp) to tell me that they had received the book and “were astonished”.

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First came the shock. Then elation. Then anxiety.

The £4000 bursary is awarded to one person a year to fund the production of an environmental photography project. 

I had gone big with my proposal to document communities living with climate change in Senegal.

Now, I needed to make it work.

I knew I needed to collaborate with an NGO for local expertise, logistics, and access to the communities.

I approached a large British NGO and they turned me down, saying that I needed to have “more impressive media contacts” and that “there is nothing in it for us except photography.”

Ouch. Could I make this work?

I found a French/Senegalese NGO, SOS Sahel, working on environmental projects in Senegal and approached.

As luck would have it, SOS Sahel was launching a campaign to celebrate food in the Sahel, called ‘Africa Days’, and they needed a photographer.

We agreed that I would shoot their campaign images alongside my Royal Photographic Society Environmental Bursary project.

I would have a driver, a translator, and an itinerary that took me to the key places and communities involved in environmental initiatives.

Three months later, I found myself on a plane to Dakar.

After a restless night in a hotel, I am collected by SOS Sahel’s driver Ibou and translator Inza and whisked away in a Toyota 4x4 into the interior of Senegal.

The story was happening.

Still bleary-eyed from travel, I find myself in the middle of a dance party to welcome us to a village.

I photograph traditional food being prepared inside a thatched village house, and have a jig under the village Baobab tree with assorted ladies, children, and Goats, before eating a tasty lunch of Thieboudienne (Senegalese rice and fish).

Then, we hop into the Toyota to travel to the next location, where another welcome party will begin.

Just as I’m getting used to this, a woman in the next village tells me with a wry smile, “We love it when white people come. They bring money.”

There is much for me to learn and unlearn in Senegal:

I realise that the gardeners here haven’t read the doom-laden European newspaper headlines about climate change in the Sahel. Instead, they are joyfully growing vegetables on the edge of the Sahara, despite frequent water pump breakdowns.

I witness the generous skill-sharing that is part of village life in Senegal: someone goes to university to study horticulture or cookery and returns home to upskill the whole village, turning organic produce into energy drinks and patches of bare land into productive community gardens.

The rules of engagement for photography need to be relearned as well.

Photo shoots in villages are special occasions where everyone turns out, often filming the spectacle on their phones. It’s a party atmosphere that you just roll along with, fuelled by copious cups of sweet Sahel tea.

The camaraderie I share on the road with Ibou and Inza feels special.

We roll along the desert roads to a soundtrack of music from Mali, picking up cups of Nescafe espresso and fresh mangos from roadside stands.

When I lose my drone amongst the acacia trees, Ibou searches for it in the Toyota while I photograph in a village.

Part 2 - Coming Soon

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“Tuareg Culture is written in people, not books”, says my guide Tito, as I leaf through a flimsy pamphlet at the Museum of Tuareg Culture in Djanet, Algeria.

Nearby, a sign on a wobbly stand proclaims, “Intangible cultural heritage lives only within and among people.”

I begin to wonder why bother with the museum?

Whilst lovers of antique tents, picked fish and small asteroid fragments might pass a pleasant 10 minutes here, the true riches of the Tuareg lie outside the walls.

To Tito, the Sahara Desert is a vast repository of signs, history, art, and texts written into stone and sand–an intimate ancestral geography spread over a desert landscape of thousands of miles.

At each camping place: a memory, at each grave: a story to be retold, at each strangely shaped rock: a myth.

Signs written in Tomachek (the Tuareg language) on sandblasted rock tell where water can be found, and who has passed this way.

Tito tells me that the Tuareg are “the original nomadic wanderers of the Sahara”, and “do not recognise borders”.

When Algeria gained independence in 1962, it secured its frontiers and ended the Tuareg’s cross–border wanderings.

Tito’s family are now scattered across Algeria, Libya, and Niger.

But news, and people, still travel across the vast porous borders–after an encounter with a nomad on the Tassilli plateau, Tito tells me that “a European man without a guide has arrived in Timbuktu”.

Timbuktu! I’m tempted to ask Tito to fire up the Toyota, but I know in troubled Mali, my luck–certainly my travel insurance–might run out.

Later, Tito takes me to his house, a high-ceilinged, windowless place on a quiet street in Djanet.

He says, “My grandfather was a nomad and built this house when he settled in Djanet”. I look around the living room and–save for a table and chairs set aside for tourists–see nothing that would look out of place in a nomad’s tent.

Tito has a fitted kitchen, yet he cooks on a gas burner on the floor. Tea is prepared, desert style, on open coals in a portable cast iron grate. Tuareg guests sit on traditional rugs on the floor.

It seems that inherited nomadic instincts run deep.

As Bruce Chatwin wrote: “If this were so; if the desert were 'home'; if our instincts were forged in the desert; to survive the rigours of the desert–then it is why possessions exhaust us”.

With thanks to Piora Klinger and Tito Khellaoui.

Text excerpt from The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin.

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“I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news”
― John Muir

Cragaig Bothy, Ulva, Scotland

I opened my front door to find two rams sitting on the step, thinking they had the place to themselves. In the bay, a skein of geese scatters three seals from a tiny island in the first light.

As the first visitor to Cragaig Bothy in May this year, I am news to the wild congregation of animals who have been tenants on this rugged stretch of Scottish coastline over the winter.

The sky is azure; the earth is cool. I’m outside my own private bothy, in a week of unseasonably warm weather.

The whole of the island’s south side is mine, I feel like a character from a half-remembered childhood adventure—Sam Gribley in My Side of the Mountain—waiting to befriend an eagle so my defection from the modern world could be complete.

I eat breakfast watched over by white-tailed sea eagles, read evening pages by the guttering light of a candelabra, and spent nights in the attic hammock staring into a darker sky.

Tom, who manages the Bothy, calls by with logs and tells me that “people come here to step away from the busyness of their lives, and to have real experiences”.

But the “tonic of wildness,” as Thoreau called it, has an entry price.

For me, it was a two-hour haul from the ferry quay with a week’s worth of food and wine. Although Tom offers luggage delivery on his 4x4 quad bike, I wanted to ‘earn’ my stay.

I had foolishly bought a lightweight “festival trolley” for the trek, which I dragged through mud and ruts. I must have looked more like a medieval peasant than a modern sojourner. Eventually, I abandoned the contraption behind a rock, shouldered my bags, and walked the rest of the way in.

Life here is certainly a ‘real experience’. No electricity. Water boiled for safety. The wood burner’s eccentricities learned through cold mornings. The toilet often needing to be flushed with seawater.

We often talk about ‘stripping back’ as a luxury, but it’s really a transaction: with comfort traded for the primitive salve that a bothy offers.

Cragaig Bothy lies on a remote, beautiful coastline. No wifi and a single fluctuating bar of mobile signal force presence.

Time here can also be boring. That, too, is a novelty. Boredom is a kind of luxury now — something that only appears once we stop filling every quiet moment.

In the hills, wildness is often a pursuit—a peak to be gained. But a retreat is different. Once you arrive, there is no physical effort left, only an invitation to drop familiar habits. As the days of silence mount, the ‘noise’ I usually carry begins to drop away.

I wonder what Thoreau would make of our current era, where the screen competes with the real world. On Ulva, the daily scroll was replaced by the daily seal watch. Updates were found in the movement of the tides or where the sheep had wandered.

I leave Ulva having broken the digital spell for a short time. The effort was worth it.

Photographs from Ulva

Evening view

See that small house in the distance? That was me.

Bothy view

Broadleaved forest

Morning landscape with basking Seals

Recent Reads

Books on a theme:

Consolations of the Forest – Sylvain Tesson

Sylvain Tesson shares his extraordinary experience of living like an old Russian Hermit in a cabin on the shores of Baikal for six months. He chops wood in winter temperatures, drills through the ice on the lake for water, drinks a lot of Russian vodka, and spends hours watching the light changing in the forest. The book is both macho and spiritual–tempered with honesty and humour.

A Time to Keep Silence – Patrick Leigh Fermor

I love dipping into Patrick Leigh Fermor’s river of delicate prose. A Time to Keep Silence is a slim volume (my favourite kind of book), and less well-known than his travel books. Although Leigh Fermor was no believer, he was moved by the silent lives of the monks in the monasteries that he retreated to, which is what makes these essays so charming.

A Flat Place – Noreen Masud

Noreen Masud takes Britain’s flatlands and uses them as a foil for her personal histories and trauma. The narrative provides a new way of seeing places such as Morecambe Bay, Orford Ness, and the Fens. I found lots to take away from this beautifully written book.

Cloud-Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown – Alan Watts

I think of this book as a ‘Zen Walden’. Whilst the writing is very late 1970s, Watts was a skilled and enthusiastic translator of Eastern wisdom—as numerous ecstatic Youtube videos will attest. This book is assembled in the form of a "mountain journal," written during a retreat in the foothills of Mount Tamalpais, California. Alan Watts was my gateway into Zen, and it feels good to revisit his writing.

Walden – Henry David Thoreau

While many of us dream of escaping to a cabin in the woods—few have read the book that started it all. I didn’t read Walden until I found a copy of the book in a cabin in the USA. I was glad I did, because despite being published in 1864, Walden is very readable, full of wisdom, and remains the definitive book for anyone interested in escaping into the woods to “live deep and suck out all the marrow of life”.

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A note on my Substack

I joined Substack as an experiment in writing and I’m having a great time.

After 3 months, I’ve decided to keep my Substack free as I want my writing to be read, not to be hidden behind a paywall.

Far From is resolutely AI-free and writing it takes time, so I’ve decided to reduce my publishing frequency to one or two posts a month.

This means I can devote more time to each individual post, and leave room for paying work and writing my new book project.

There is a new buy me a coffee button on my posts - for those who want to support my work.

As always, thank you for subscribing and reading. It means a lot.

Read more at Far From → https://www.farfrom.co

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As I run the gauntlet of tunics, swords, goblets, and feathered hats, Robin Hood ambushes me: “Can I interest you in an RSPB membership, sir?”. When I decline to hand over my money, he goes back to chat with Maid Marion at the till.

By the time I arrive at a tree, I have been subjected to the full ‘Robin Hood experience’–jokes, ‘fun facts,’ and film memorabilia. In the cafe, a couple warns me to “watch out for naked men”–meaning the naturists that use the quieter parts of the forest.

Pumped full of forest folklore and with a slight sense of foreboding, I set out along the ‘Greenwood Trail’ to sample ‘the place where legends grow.’

Sherwood Forest, now run by the RSPB, is smaller than I had imagined. Only 450 acres of the original 10,000 acres remain from when it was a royal hunting ground in the 10th century. A line of ancient oaks stands along the edge of the forest, looking out over the ploughed fields as if sensing how much has been lost. Their earthy scent reassures me as I am lured into the leafy depths of the forest ahead. Coming around a bend, a Kestrel takes flight, swooping through the play of light and shadow from the forest’s summer canopy.

To enter Sherwood Forest is to walk in a world of story and legend. In literature, forests are where we get lost, and anything can happen. Shakespeare writes about the Greenwood forest as a place of transformation. Merlin sends the future King Arthur into the forest, where he falls asleep and dreams himself into the lives of the animals and trees. As I walk, the forest feels fortified and secretive; I can sense that the trees commune with each other. An orange butterfly flutters in front of me. If this was a fairy tale, she might want me to follow her. I feel that at any moment, I might glimpse the green man or a naked man peering through the foliage at me.

In Sherwood Forest, all paths lead to the ‘Major Oak,’ a squat old survivor that sits in a clearing ringed by Silver Birches. This twisted pedunculate oak is between 800-1000 years old, its hollow trunk a universe of myth and legend. The branches where Robin Hood and his Merry Men once dozed are now weary and braced by nine steel struts. Beneath me, its roots pass under the couple posing for a selfie, under the father and son enjoying a mock sword fight, to the picnic benches where a party of primary school children are sketching.

I look at an old Victorian photograph printed on the shield-shaped information board. It shows a man with a white beard sitting by the Major Oak as a lady in a white dress emerges from the hollow of its trunk. A soft breeze lifts the leaves of the Silver Birches. I contemplate the procession of human history that has passed by this ancient tree.

Tired of the hubbub, I set off down an unmarked trail. With only the Oaks and Birches to keep me company, I indulge in some ‘forest bathing’– nestling against the trunk of an Oak to watch a lime green caterpillar heave itself along a branch. Although this term originated in Japan, I would wager that Sherwood Forest goers have been practicing mindfulness in nature long before it had a name. The idea of becoming immersed and cleansed by the forest appears in the Robin Hood stories, where Sherwood Forest offers an escape from the everyday and a chance to be our childhood selves.

I don’t see any naked men during my walk, but it strikes me that Sherwood Forest is still a place of retreat and revelry for some, with surprises waiting in the forest for the unsuspecting traveller.

Photo credit: The Edwinstowe Historical Society

This is a piece I wrote on a travel writing workshop.

A simple exercise to write about my experience in a place I hadn’t been before.

For a challenge I chose Sherwood Forest - a popular destination a world away from the remote places I usually write about.