The Power of Travel

Why Do I Love to Travel?

That is a question I genuinely find hard to answer in a sentence, which is probably the answer in itself.

I have a deep sense of curiosity. I love adventures. And both of those things mean I spend a lot of my life at what you might call the beginner's stage, arriving somewhere new and knowing almost nothing. Some people find that uncomfortable. I find it the most alive I ever feel.

There was a piece in The Guardian some years ago that I have thought about many times since. It made the argument that the beginner's phase is not something to be gotten through as quickly as possible on the way to fluency. It is the thing itself. The particular quality of attention you bring to a new place, a new skill, a new language, is very hard to recover once it has gone. You cannot manufacture it. You have to earn it by actually being a beginner.

Think of the last time you arrived somewhere that was genuinely new to you. The smell of the street food. The call to prayer. The traffic signs you could not read. In that moment you are alive to absolutely everything. Your senses are completely open. You are, whether you realise it or not, ripe for learning in a way you rarely are at home, in the familiar, in the already-known.

I love that state. I seek it out deliberately. I have spent my career in some version of it: new companies, new countries, new challenges. I think it is where I do my best thinking.

"[Travel] provides food for the mind; it contributes to the strength and enjoyment of the intellect; it helps to pull men out of the mire and pollution of old corrupt customs; it promotes a feeling of universal brotherhood; it accelerates the march of peace, and virtue, and love; it also contributes to the health of the body, by a relaxation from the toil and the invigoration of the physical powers."; Thomas Cook, Cook's Excursionist, June 1854

I have kept that quote close for a long time. Thomas Cook wrote it in 1854 and I think it is still, more than 170 years later, the truest and most complete case for travel that I have ever read. It is not about sightseeing. It is about what happens to a person when they move through the world with genuine openness.

What the Nordic Countries Taught Me

I have spent a good deal of time in the four Nordic countries, which year after year are ranked among the happiest in the world. I used to look at those infographics and think about what was actually being measured, and whether happiness was quite the right word for what I experienced there.

What I noticed, more than anything, was a particular quality of ease between people. Not warmth in the performative sense, but a kind of steady, undemonstrative respect. For each other, for the landscape, for the weather, which in those countries is not background noise but a genuine presence you have to plan around and accommodate. There is a reason those nations choose to direct roughly 65 per cent of their income in tax toward the collective project of living well together. They are not naive about the cost. They have simply decided that the fight against the cold and the dark is better done as a community than as a collection of individuals.

I found that quietly profound. Not as a policy argument but as a way of being. The humility that comes from knowing you need other people. The genuine respect for nature that comes from living in it rather than alongside it.

I brought something of that home with me. I am not sure I have ever fully been able to articulate what, but it changed how I think about collective endeavour.

Bu

Islands: The Most Beautiful and the Most Fragile

I want to write about islands, because so many of my most important journeys have been to islands. But I need to write about something alongside the beauty, because I think you cannot write honestly about islands in 2026 without it.

Around 15 per cent of the world's population lives within 10 kilometres of a coast. That is roughly 1.2 billion people. Between 2000 and 2018 the global coastal population grew by approximately 233 million, the equivalent of adding more than 20 new megacities to the water's edge. And in parts of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, rising saltwater is already infiltrating farmland and freshwater sources that communities have depended on for generations.

The 39 Small Island Developing States, home to around 65 million people and 40 per cent of the world's coral reef ecosystems, are responsible for less than 0.03 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. They did not cause what is happening to them. By 2050, half of Tuvalu's capital is estimated to be regularly flooded by tidal waters. The economic damage from coastal flooding could increase more than 14 times by the end of this century.

I am not raising this to lecture. I am raising it because the places I love most are the places most at risk. And that is not comfortable to sit with.

Madagascar: Mora Mora, and What I Did Not Expect

Madagascar does not feel like anywhere else on earth, and that is not a travel-brochure observation. It is a biological fact. Roughly 90 per cent of its mammals and 95 per cent of its reptiles and amphibians exist nowhere else. Not as a proportion of some global category. Nowhere. Else.

The national pace is captured in the phrase mora mora. Slowly, slowly. The country insists that you move at that pace. You cannot rush Madagascar. It will simply wait you out.

In the Andasibe-Mantadia rainforest the indri lemurs call to each other with something that sounds like whale song. It rises through the canopy and stops you completely. More than 100 species of lemur, living nowhere else on earth. The ring-tailed lemurs in the canyons of Isalo National Park. The whale sharks at Nosy Be. The humpback whales off Ile Sainte-Marie between June and September, in seas that feel almost impossibly empty.

But Madagascar is also, now, deeply impoverished. Antananarivo, the capital, carries what I can only describe as a patina of poverty. The gang violence there is serious. The country has some of the lowest IT remote worker rates in the world, which tells you something about both the opportunity that exists and the desperation that drives it. The wildlife and the wilderness are extraordinary. The human story alongside that is very hard.

We are losing the habitat. The deforestation rate is among the highest in the world. And with it, species that exist nowhere else, that have no second location, no backup. When I stood in that rainforest listening to the indri, I understood that in a way I had not understood from any report or statistic. I think about it often. More often than is comfortable.

Mauritius: For the Friendship, Always

One of my closest friends has family from Mauritius. Travelling there with her, being taken in by her family, seeing an island through the eyes of people for whom it is not a destination but a home, that is a different kind of travel entirely.

Trou-aux-Biches is one of the most beautiful beaches I have ever seen, and I have seen a great many beaches. The white sand, the turquoise lagoon, the quality of the light. But what I carry from Mauritius is not the beach. It is the ease of the island. A genuinely multicultural society that functions, day to day, with a naturalness that I have not found in many places in the world. It is not perfect. No place is. But there is something real there, between communities of very different origins, that feels less manufactured and more simply practised over time.

Hiking in the rainforest. Sitting down to meals with people who knew every corner of the island and were glad to share it. Mauritius, for me, is synonymous with friendship. That is not a small thing.

My love of Mauritius centres on my almost life time love of Sireen

The Maldives: Beautiful, and I Did Not Enjoy It

I should be honest. I stayed at Soneva Fushi, which is objectively beautiful, and I did not really enjoy myself. Not for the reasons you might expect.

Every morning and every evening I set up a small mechanism on the shoreline to measure the water level. Tide marks. Incremental observations that I recorded and went back to. It became an obsession. I could not stop. While other guests were snorkelling and having sundowners, I was measuring the water and thinking about what I was measuring.

The Maldives exists only because the sea allows it to. The islands rise a matter of feet above sea level. That is all. The rising sea is not a policy debate for the people who live there. It is a question about whether their home will continue to exist. And this year, with the predicted strength of El Nino, the urgency of that feels even more acute.

I found I could not be a tourist there. I kept thinking about the horror and the reality of climate change in a way that made relaxation feel beside the point. Maybe that is a failing. Or maybe that is what the place asked of me, if I was paying attention.

Bawah Reserve: What Travel Can Still Be

The Bawah Reserve sits in Indonesia's Anambas archipelago in the South China Sea, and it is genuinely remote. It takes real effort to reach. That effort is part of the point.

What makes Bawah unlike almost anywhere else I have been is this: the Indonesian government has granted a 30-year development licence on the explicit condition that at the end of the tenure the site must be returned unharmed and essentially untouched. Not managed. Not offset. Returned. That is a fundamentally different relationship between tourism and nature than almost anything else operating at this level anywhere in the world.

Swimming in those lagoons, in coral that is alive and thriving, is a reminder of what the ocean looked like before we started damaging it at scale. The rarity is not incidental to the experience. It is the experience. You cannot have one without the other.

Singapore: An Amazing Bubble

I have lived and worked in Singapore, which means I can say this with genuine affection: Singapore is an amazing bubble. And I mean that in both senses.

It is extraordinary. From an island with almost no natural resources, with real questions in its early years about whether it could survive as an independent nation at all, it built one of the most sophisticated economies in the world through sheer discipline of mind and willingness to invest in people before the money was comfortable. The mermaid school. The Gardens by the Bay. The National Singapore Day energy, which is unlike any national celebration I have experienced anywhere.

But. Do you really live in Singapore if you have spent your whole life there? It is a place without much struggle in the daily sense. Very clean, very efficient, very controlled. Which is also, depending on your temperament, very sterile. I think Singapore is a place that is easier to appreciate if you have lived somewhere harder first. The smoothness of it is a genuine achievement. It is also, occasionally, a little airless.

I say that as someone who loves it. You can love a place and see it clearly at the same time. In fact I think that is the only way to love a place properly.

Japan: Lost for Hours, and Grateful for It

Japan is like nowhere else in the world. When I first started travelling there in the late 1990s, deep in the country, there were no train signs in English. None. I got lost for hours. Not charmingly lost. Actually lost, in a way that required genuine problem-solving and a lot of goodwill from people who did not share my language. Those journeys taught me more about navigation, patience, and human kindness than any planned itinerary ever has.

I went back for Graham's 60th birthday. He wanted to ski with family and friends in Hokkaido, and Niseko delivered on a scale none of us had quite anticipated. Twelve to eighteen feet of powder. The deepest snow I have ever seen in my life. I am not a skier. I am also, it is fair to say, not great with the cold. So I snowshoed. A bit.

Australia the great

I had the great privilege of spending a lot of time in Australia at the end of the last decade, and it genuinely changed my view of the country and its people.

From Darwin to Perth, Adelaide to Canberra, Hamilton Island, Fraser Island and Lord Howe Island, and through my time with clients and our teams in Melbourne, Sydney and Bendigo, it was a joy.

I met forthright, funny, generous people with a real appetite for growth, ideas and action. The landscapes were breathtaking, the outdoor life extraordinary, and the women I met in business and leadership were truly inspiring.

There were wonderful learnings too: Tasmania has some of the cleanest air in the world, the Great Barrier Reef is the largest coral reef system on earth, Australia has more than 60 seriously great wine regions, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures are among the oldest living cultures in the world.

One of my most treasured gifts was a beautiful Louise Numina painting, Bush Medicine Leaves, given to me by the team as a parting gift.

Are We Loving These Places to Death?

There is a serious debate happening right now about whether we should travel less. In 2024, 1.5 billion tourists moved around the world. By the end of the decade that figure may reach 2 billion. In Mallorca and Tenerife, residents took to the streets with placards reading "Our island is not a theme park." In Venice, day-trippers now pay an entry fee. In Barcelona, locals have turned water pistols on tourists. In Dubrovnik, UNESCO has repeatedly warned of irreversible damage.

A World Travel and Tourism Council study found that 77 per cent of all tourist overnight stays in island destinations occur on just 5 per cent of their land area. The beauty is not being spread. It is being concentrated, over and over, on the same few square kilometres, until those square kilometres begin to break under the weight of us.

I do not think the answer is simply to travel less, though I understand why some people argue it is. I think the answer is to travel with more seriousness. To spend longer in fewer places. To choose operators who have genuine conservation commitments and not just the language of them. To put money into local economies, local guides, local food, rather than international resort chains whose profits leave the island immediately. To ask what the place actually needs from visitors, and what it does not.

The line between travel as enrichment and travel as extraction is real. I have been on both sides of it. The difference is not where you go. It is how much attention you are willing to bring.

What I Know After All of It

I have been to more countries than I can count without a list. I say that not as a boast but as context for what follows.

Travel has not always been comfortable. Some places I loved and found difficult at the same time. The Maldives made me incapable of enjoying myself. Madagascar broke my heart in two directions at once: the extraordinary living world of it, and the deep poverty that surrounds it. Singapore delighted and slightly suffocated me in equal measure.

That, I think, is the point. Travel is not a delivery mechanism for beautiful experiences. It is a collision with reality that is not your own. The places that changed me most were the ones that complicated what I thought I understood. That made me argue, or grieve, or get genuinely lost, or feel implicated in something I had not expected to be implicated in.

I am going to New Zealand in October and I am genuinely curious what I will find. I go as a beginner. I always try to.

The Thomas Cook quote is from 1854. Travel promotes a feeling of universal brotherhood, he wrote. I think what he meant, and what I have found to be true, is that it is very hard to remain certain and enclosed and ungenerous after you have spent real time somewhere that is not home. The world gets larger. Your own assumptions get smaller. That is not a comfortable process. It is an essential one.

Where has travel changed how you see the world? What is the place that made you a beginner again? I would genuinely love to know.

Warmest,

Harriet