Uncharted Backpacker

Seoul hits you like a shot of soju on an empty stomach. Fast, delicious, and impossible to ignore.

This is a city that never really decided whether it wanted to be ancient or set in a futuristic dystopian movie set. so Seoul just became both. A thousand-year-old palace sits in the shadow of gold and blue glass towers decked out in neon which soaks the ancient cobble pathways in light. Grandmothers sell rice cakes in markets older than many countries while teenagers walk past carrying enough technology to launch a satellite into space. A city of contrast, bold and beautiful.

Why do we leave the comfort and safety of our homes in search of something else. Something, that we don’t understand, often with high risks, the unknown, the fortunate few who can choose discomfort over the mundane. As if coded in our DNA, curiosity to move, to be someplace new, to learn, to feel again.

Sitting in a cafe in Bali I now reflect on the past few weeks in the Solomon Islands. Every now and then a memory appears, the smell of the ocean as the boat slowly passed by remote, untouched jungles. The sounds of the people of The Solomon Islands singing in undocumented dialects. The sense of adventure, the unknown, all at my fingertips to discover.

That cliche saying “no photo can describe this” every feeling I had while being there couldn’t be more true. There are few places that can be described as “authentic” anymore. Globalization has worked its way to every corner of this planet, yet places like the Solomons seem to get forgotten, remaining lost in time.

This isn’t a place you come to tick off the box of “been there”, it’s a place that you come to get under your skin. It’s a destination for those trying to reconnect, searching for a time that doesn’t exist anymore and it doesn’t care to be a part of whatever the hell we call society these days.

Traveling the Solomon’s with

The Solomon Islands don’t roll out a red carpet for you. They don’t need to. You get here because you mean to, because you’re willing to sit through the long haul, the missed connections, the feeling that you’ve slipped off the edge of the map a little wondering “what have I got myself into?”

And that’s when it starts to make sense.
This isn’t the polished paradise like its island neighbours. It’s raw, humid, and alive in a way that doesn’t care about your comfort. The jungle crowds the coastline. The ocean isn’t just scenery, it’s the highway, the pantry, and a history book all in one. Out in the Coral Triangle waters, reefs pulse with life, mostly untouched, the kind of place where you drop below the surface and realize how loud the rest of the world has been, yet the Solomon’s have just kept going on as they always have.

Exploring the Solomon’s with