The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
I listened to my ‘Astro Life Coach’ and took a mini gap year in my 40s
When an astrologer predicted a big change in explorer Levison Wood’s life, she was right – a tripling of his mortgage costs forced him to rent out his home, sell his furniture and set out to see the world
One of the more unusual gifts that I received for my 40th birthday came from Henny, an eccentric hippy of aristocratic blood and a distant relative of Jane Digby. “You’re getting old now, you need to figure your life out,” she told me, handing me the business card of someone who called herself an “Astro Life Coach”.
“What on earth is this?,” I replied “I’ve booked you a session. She’ll read your stars and give you some useful advice. It’s time to manifest some magic.”
It took me quite some time to get around to manifesting anything other than work, though. I’d spent the last couple of years frantically trying to make up for lost income because of Covid: expeditions, photography assignments, speaking tours and months in jungles and deserts – hot on the tail of lions, polar bears and great apes. All exciting stuff, of course, but it took its toll and showed no sign of letting up.
My limited downtime was curtailed by a motorcycle accident that led to multiple surgeries and being confined to a wheelchair in Battersea. I was getting a bit burned out, and contrary to what Mr Johnson (Samuel, not Boris) might think, I was indeed tired of London. Ever since lockdown, I had been threatening to escape the city, and return to my backpacking roots. But I’d always found excuses to take on more projects and do more work. Much of that was financially driven, but I had a psychological block too: I had become used to the comforts of home.
Almost a year later, in the spring of 2023, I finally had my session with Helen the Astro Life Coach. Like most meetings these days, it took place on Zoom and lasted an hour. After handing over my date, location and time of birth (May 5, Stoke, 08:05) I received a rather brain-muddling explanation all about how my Venus was passing my Mercury, and that I was in a state of Gemini rising. Or something like that.
I was told that I would have a significant family event in eight years’ time, and that, in a past life, I was probably a shaman. Apparently, my star alignment meant that I found it difficult to settle down (hardly an epiphany) and that I was searching for something bigger than myself (aren’t we all?).
But amid the vagaries, Helen said something that caught my attention.
“In the third week of July, something will happen that will force you to change. It will force you away. Your dream will be realised.”
A week after the session, I received a letter from my bank. It was a reminder that my mortgage was up for renewal – in the third week of July. I quickly rang my bank and asked them what a new one would look like. I was met with some rather shocking news. Thanks to the combined efforts of Mr Putin, Liz
Truss and general economic instability, my interest repayments were going to treble.
Helen was either a visionary or had been rooting through my bank statements, but she was right about a change in my life. It was time to cut costs and get out of London. I gave my motorbike to a friend, donated most of my clothes to charity, sold half of my furniture on Facebook, put the rest in storage and rented out my home. I was going on another gap year (well, six months at least), to see if I still had what it takes to live life out of a bag, and on the road.
My plan was simple: write wherever I could, do something useful, and follow my nose. I wouldn’t bunk down in dorm rooms with teenagers (those days are long gone) but I wouldn’t splurge on fancy hotels every night either. My unwritten rule was: so long as I was spending less than my daily outgoings in London, then all was good.
I have spent the last 15 years travelling, so I can see why a “gap year” might seem like a busman’s holiday. But this felt different. Those previous travels always had a defined aim; a walking journey, a military mission or a writing assignment. And, while all of that might sound glamorous, constant pressures and deadlines kept me tied to a schedule. I hadn’t been free. And now, more than anything, I really craved freedom.
Of course, I couldn’t completely abandon ship, much as I wanted to. I still had bills to pay, and responsibilities to take care of. I had a team to support, and projects that had been kicked into the long grass, so moving to a monastery and throwing away my phone was out of the question. No, I still needed to work, and so I became that most clichéd of millennials – a digital nomad; that is to say a functioning vagabond, a workaholic creative of no fixed abode, a productive flaneur… you get it.
First stop, the United States. Two years prior, a friend and I had bought some land in Colorado in a fit of Covid madness with the aim of creating a retreat for groups and charities. This was to be the official launch, and it went with a bang. Landing at Alamosa airport is like arriving in the Wild West. Men wear cowboy hats and carry pistols. Mustangs run free, and elks and bison grace the high desert plains. I met with a team of wounded veterans from the Invictus Games Foundation, and joined them for a hike across the Great Sand Dunes National Park. It was a rewarding adventure that became the basis for a beautiful short film called The Summit Within, which was selected for the Kendal Mountain Festival.
In late August, I stuck with the desert theme by heading to the infamous Burning Man Festival. I had been before – in pre-Covid times – and had enjoyed the wild, carefree community atmosphere. Except, this time, the man didn’t burn. In fact, due to heavy rain, the whole thing was a bit of a damp squib and I spent most of the time stuck in a soggy tent. We did, however, manage to escape on time – unlike some who got marooned for days in the mud. The sound of crypto bros losing their minds and behaving as if it were the apocalypse, all because of a bit of rain, provided much amusement. Thankfully the reports of an Ebola outbreak and cannibalism were unfounded.
Next up, I pursued my passion for history. I had been invited to be the headline speaker for an archaeological conference in the oasis town of Al-Ula in Saudi Arabia. Here, I mingled with the world’s leading experts in bone digging and met professors from all over the planet. I had the delightful pleasure of hanging out with eminent historian Bettany Hughes. Naturally, we explored a lost city together.
Leaving the sand behind, but sticking with the historical theme, I returned to Europe and fulfilled an ambition to visit the island of Visby in Sweden, an ancient Viking stronghold. The town museum hosts a vast horde of gold coins that had been hidden on the island for 1,400 years. Having just travelled thousands of miles from the deserts of Arabia, I was interested to find that many of the coins were Nabataean. It’s a small world – seems it always has been.
It was there that I received an invitation to attend the unveiling of the Queens Reading Room at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. I took the train in a bid to counter some of my carbon emissions and met with Queen Camilla and Brigitte Macron. Since I was close to home, I nipped back to see my parents who happened to be housesitting a very nice pad in Devon. They are on some sort of house swap website for seniors; they look after other people’s dogs, and in this case, llamas. While I was there, I went to see Wistman’s wood, an ancient oak forest on Dartmoor as part of some research for a new book and film I am working on about trees.
Before I realised it, two months had passed. By the time October came I was craving some sunshine and needed to actually sit down and get some writing done. So I travelled to Bali and rented a beautiful villa. It’s a bit of a cliché but I loved the digital nomad life there. A massage costs a fiver and you can live healthily on next to nothing. I had given up booze in the summer anyway so I figured there was no better place to eat acai bowls and sip smoothies. I even signed up to a gym for a few weeks and Wim Hoff-ed in the cold plunge every morning. In between writing sessions, I whiled away a wonderful month climbing volcanoes, attempting to surf and perfecting my downward dog.
My radical sabbatical wasn’t all sunshine and mocktails, though. There was somewhere I had been desperate to get back to for 18 months: Ukraine. The opportunity arose when my friend Jody Bragger, a former soldier, invited me to see the conservation work being done by his organisation Tellus in the wartorn country. Since the Russian invasion, Jody had been raising funds to help protect the forests and document the ecocide resulting from the war.
From Poland I took the overnight train to Kyiv. Eighteen months into the war, the city was repopulated but still getting hit regularly by missiles and drone attacks. There we met with Andreiy, a Ukrainian film producer and now our driver, who took us to Kharkiv and deep into the Donbas. The mood was despondent. Since the October 7 attacks in Israel and the subsequent invasion of Gaza, all eyes have turned back to the Middle East – a big coup for Putin. Most Ukrainians I met were worried that funds might dry up because of this new conflict and that the world would forget about their struggle.
We drove for seven or eight hours a day in order to witness and document the frontline and monitor how Russian aggression had impacted Ukrainian nature.
In a place called Kamianska Sich, I met Sergeiy Skoryk, a truly inspirational man who set up a new national park in 2019 on the banks of the Dnipro River. He told us how, just a few days after the invasion, he was captured by the Russians and locked in a basement for a week with some other men from the village. He was then ordered to go outside and dig his own grave while the Russian soldiers drank vodka. Sergei decided that a better option would be to make a run for it and swim two miles across the icy river towards the safety of the Ukrainian troops. Here he immediately joined them; he has been serving his country ever since (while also still helping to preserve the forests).
Our own journey was fraught. Almost every day we heard the sounds of shelling in the distance and, the day I left, Kyiv came under the biggest drone attack it had seen for the whole duration of the war.
After all that (and still having not managed to finish my book), I decided I needed to yet again park myself up somewhere far away but considerably less dangerous – and get writing. I had always fancied the Pacific islands, so I flew out to Honolulu for New Year. Despite being outrageously expensive, Hawaii is as beautiful as the travel magazines promise and I eked out a few weeks there staying in Airbnb’s learning to play the ukulele.
Before I knew it, the end of January had come around and it was time to return to London, where, it seemed, nothing very much had changed at all. Most of my friends hardly noticed that I had even been away, which tells you everything you need to know. Sneak off and nobody will even notice. On balance, I probably didn’t save very much money at all by being away, but I had crammed in so much more than I could have ever imagined; the expense was worth every penny.
What did I learn? Mainly that the hardest bit is getting started and letting go of preconceived notions of why you can’t do something. Longterm travel is liberating, life-affirming and gave me a renewed vigour to go home grateful and energised. The magic had indeed been manifested.
The question, therefore, isn’t whether you can afford to travel, but rather more: can you afford not to?
Most of my friends hardly noticed that I had even been away, which tells you all you need to know