My yearning to travel started early. According to an oft-told family story, I was found, aged three, a mile and a half from home purposefully walking along the road, pushing the small blue wheelbarrow that I’d been given as a birthday present. When my relieved parents found me and asked, not unreasonably, where I thought I was going, I told them, perplexed why they should even need to ask, that I was going on an adventure. It was to be the first of many, although the only journey I’ve undertaken with a wheelbarrow.

Growing up, as I did, in the 70’s, family holidays rarely went beyond the shores of the UK. When, at 16, I spent a year’s hard-earned savings on a Eurorail ticket, I only had one of those temporary cardboard passports from the Post Office, but that was good enough to give me my first taste of independent travel in countries where everything was strange, unfamiliar and exciting. Travel, I was beginning to understand, introduced you not just to new places, but also new ideas, perspectives, food, views, smells, tastes, sounds. It was intoxicating and I was hooked.

I got bolder when I left school, setting my sights beyond Europe. In 1988 I did my first long-haul flight, travelling alone, with a second-hand rucksack and my savings hidden in my socks. My destination – Africa. Not a Dark Continent, I was soon to discover, but one so vibrant, so bright, so utterly, marvellously different I felt I hadn’t just left home, but left the world as I knew it and discovered a parallel universe. It was a truly formative experience, one that no university could have matched, and even now, all these years later, I know it was that journey that has shaped so much of my personal and working life since. I returned in 1994, lured by the seismic political shift that had occurred in South Africa and to scratch an itch. The itch was to see Madagascar.

I had discovered travel writing: the books of Chatwin, Raban, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Eric Newby and Thesiger. But also Freya Stark, Mary Kingsley, Christina Dodwell, Dervla Murphy, Hilary Bradt. Women who defied convention; who undertook expeditions that took them way off the beaten track. They were the inspiration that fuelled my unquashable wanderlust. It was through the writings of some of these intrepid women that I became entranced by the other-worldly island of Madagascar. And it was that journey in 1995, that led to my first travel writing commission and my first by-line in a national newspaper.

I was introduced to Jonny Bealby not long after my return from that second Africa trip. We were at a gathering for a mutual friend’s birthday and were introduced to each other as ‘both being people who like to go to places no one has ever heard of!’ Jonny had founded Wild Frontiers not long before we met. Inspired by his own extensive travels he wanted to enable others to see and experience some of the places he had seen. But having witnessed both the negative and positive impact of tourism on landscapes and communities, he also wanted to ensure that the trips he organised were as beneficial to the people and places on his itineraries, as they were authentic and immersive for the guests who travelled with him. Before ‘responsible travel’ became a byword for good practice, Jonny was not just advocating it. He was doing it. He was, as our mutual friend had already identified, my kind of traveller.

In the twenty years or so since we first met, neither of us have shown any signs of shaking the travel bug and both of us still get huge pleasure from travelling to the less well-trodden parts of the world. In 2009 I did a recce for Jonny in Afghanistan, an unforgettable experience in the wild Pamir mountains with the people of the Wakhan, whom I loved so much, I returned a few years later to film a documentary there. Together we went to DRC to scope out the possibility of a trip that would give guests the chance of seeing the truly magnificent Eastern Lowland gorilla, and by doing so, bring vital support to the conservation of the area and the people who live there. Thanks to Jonny, I’ve travelled in parts of India where I have been the sole foreign tourist amongst buildings, temples and landscapes as magnificent as anywhere in the Golden Triangle. I’ve spent a week in a little-known area of Northern Kenya in the company of a black leopard – a wildlife encounter forever burned in my memory.

I have been astonishingly lucky. I’ve travelled to all seven continents and to over 100 countries. People often say to me ‘You’ve been everywhere!’ But that’s not true. Nor does the world stand still. It is ever-changing. Doors close; others open up. There is as much chance of wonder and adventure close to home as there is in more far-flung destinations. And so, over the coming months, I will be sharing with you some of the ways we can all make the most of the uniquely wonderful planet we live on. We’ll explore the possibilities open to solo travellers, the advantages of slow travel, and how we can travel more sustainably. We’ll examine the pros and cons of visiting destinations considered ‘difficult’. We’ll find the unexpected in the familiar. We’ll eat. We’ll walk. We’ll discover. The world awaits us.