Hello and welcome to The Itinerant. In case you’re not quite sure what you’re doing here or who the blazes The Itinerant is, read on to find out more.
The Itinerant is the electronic home of myself, Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent; a travel writer with a particular love of wandering alone through remote regions. My latest book, A Short Ride in the Jungle: the Ho Chi Minh Trail by Motorcycle, was published in April 2014.
This current, prolonged attack of itchy feet dates back to a telephone call from my best friend Jo on a dark December night in 2005. ‘Do you want to drive a tuk tuk home from Bangkok with me?’ she said, without a hint of irony in her voice. Six months later I’d ditched my job on ITV’s South Bank Show and the two of us were thundering across China’s Gobi desert in Ting Tong, our pink tuk tuk, heading in the general direction of England. 12,561 miles later we’d raised £50,000 for Mind, set the Guinness World Record for the longest ever journey by auto-rickshaw, written Tuk Tuk to the Road and won Cosmopolitan magazine’s Fun Fearless Female Award. It was a far cry from passing Melvyn his comb for pre-shot coiffures.
Now hooked on mud, dust and deserts I spent the following few years setting up a series of extreme adventures for The Adventurists and producing the odd TV programme. I negotiated with baffled government ministers in Cameroon, Indonesia, Mongolia, Siberia and beyond; pulled small vehicles out of countless potholes, bogs and snowdrifts; was charged by a baby elephant in Tanzania, won The Wilderness Award, rode 3000-miles around the Black Sea on a zebra print motorcycle and nearly froze to death whilst attempting to reach the Russian Arctic on an old Ural.
But my dusty quill was calling and in 2012 I decided it was time for another book. A few months later - after endless sleepless nights spent imagining being eaten by a tiger - I headed to Vietnam to begin a solo motorcycle journey down the remnants of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. A Short Ride in the Jungle recounts the tale of this gruelling, thrilling and occasionally terrifying journey.
As well as the physical and mental endurance of this trip, what really excited me was the stories I heard whilst travelling alone in these little explored regions. I met illegal loggers, former US fighter pilots, eccentric bomb disposal experts, gold miners, wildlife traders and tribal chiefs. I experienced a region going through unprecedented change and saw the devastation wreaked by our insatiable desire for natural resources. Everyone I met had a story to tell, and I adored being able to tell it.
My next book, about the far north-eastern state of Arunachal Pradesh, is going to be about a solo journey through a similarly unexplored region – keep an eye on this page for details.
When I’m not peering at maps and looking up obscure travel titles in the British Library, I can be found giving talks, penning articles for magazines such as Overland, Wanderlust, Ride, Overland Journal, Avaunt and Ernest Journal and working as a producer at the BBC.
Enjoy wandering around my website and if you want to get in touch then drop me a line here.
After ‘How many punctures did you get?’ and ‘What’s next?’ the third most common question people ask me is where my love of adventure came from. I could blame it on my wandering genes – that distant ancestor who voyaged to Demerary in 1809, the intrepid grandmother who steamed off to Peking in the thirties – but I’m sure my exploratory tendencies can be traced back to my childhood in the wilds of north Norfolk. Miles from any form of ‘entertainment’ I instead spent my days scrambling up trees, exploring the countryside and bolting across fields on a series of uncontrollable ponies (and one obstinate donkey). By my mid-teens I knew that that my future lay not in starched shirts and spreadsheets, but in distant lands and steamy jungles.
Within nanoseconds of graduating from Edinburgh University with a 1st class degree in history, I hot-footed it to Canada to co-author a guide book. There was no going back…
