Once a Backpacker, Always a...!

Hi! My name is Leyla and I'm a backpacker and a nomad - at least in spirit, because wherever I am, I usually want to be somewhere else!

It started many generations before me - rumor in our family had it we could trace our ancestry back to the Golden Hordes that swept across Asia a millennium ago. Nomads, definitely - once mounted on those wild steeds my people just couldn't sit still!

I too share this nomadic streak. I was born in France, grew up in Spain and the Middle East, and studied in Canada before moving to Switzerland. I rarely stayed long enough in a country - my engineer father made sure of that - to finish a school year.

I took my first backpacking trip (without my parents' knowledge) from Spain to Morocco when I was 15 - I still remember sitting in cafés by the casbah sipping mint tea, watching the ships come in, and feeling as though the world belonged to me.

I became a journalist, a foreign correspondent, following stories across the world and only settling down once in a while - but never long enough to build up a pension and a future.

A few years ago, thinking I had finally beat the travel bug, I left a perfectly fine job to travel as a freelance journalist for the Earth Times for a few months. I was gone for three years, traveling with my backpack and one of the first laptops across Africa (12 countries), Asia (9 countries), Cuba, and the Baltic States.

From 1996-1999, I filed stories from many countries as a journalist concerned with development issues. A glimpse of the past may help explain the present so I'm slowly posting these one by one I'd like to share some of these older backpacking articles with you.

These days I'm back in a job, working for a development agency, but the bug has never left. I do travel for work, but at heart I'm still a backpacker, in word if not in deed. This site is the result.

The fact that I own and manage this website never ceases to amaze me. Believe it or not, you too can build your own site so if this is something you've ever contemplated, have a look at the video below - I joined and this website is the result!

 

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