After running a successful catering company and eventually selling the business, John concentrated on his main passions in life, which were travel, writing and photography.

John has traveled around the world to over 60 countries by almost every means known to man.

He has stayed in all manner of places, including a never-ending night in a one-dollar room in India wrapped in a mosquito net for protection against a cloud of high-pitched mosquitoes, which were sharing the room.

He’s hitched a ride on a cargo boat down the Amazon River, snoozing for several days and nights in a hammock, being the source of fascination for a few hundred puzzled locals, with chickens, monkeys and pigs roaming all over the place.  

He’s spent nights crashing out with a hill tribe in Asia, celebrated the Mardi Gras with locals in Brazil, cycled from Bangkok through Cambodia into Vietnam, and deliberately sought many other bizarre and funny experiences, all in the name of “surrendering to providence”, a good story, and a different picture.

John has used his wealth of travel knowledge to write articles on places, accommodations, restaurants and transport, as well as taking some of the most diverse travel photos on the planet.

He has recently set up the charity Helpthesrilankankids.com, which proudly supports a small group of kids orphaned by the events of the tsunami in Sri Lanka.

He is now writing a book:
Before traveling, John was a 41 year old conventional-thinking businessman. He built up his company over 22 years in a world of ridiculous stress, because “that’s what he did”.

Then one day, after a week when just about everything went wrong that could, he became convinced that there must be more to life than this.

The book describes the journey in a fun and observational humour way from how in a matter of months, he became brave enough to wrap up his professional life, rent out the house, put his stuff in storage – that is except a rucksack’s worth of gear – and clear off into the unknown, to backpack around the world to find out for himself.

It’s a fascinating journey from the bewilderment of the naïve traveler on day one, who’s thrown himself in at the deep end with no idea what to expect, and totally reliant on the goodwill of humanity, to hardened streetwise traveler the other end.

It includes the many, many funny and not-so-funny observations, contrasts and encounters that happen during a year whilst traveling solo across 26 countries.

It takes the reader with him by proxy, and shares the personal journey of self discovery along the way, and the different way he came to look at life as a result, and they find out together whether in fact there really is “more to life than this”, after all.