Drifter | Webmaster | 2002-2005
About Link to heading
A long time ago, when blogs were still called weblogs, I built a journaling website to document my early nomadic period - as a 19 year old setting off on a 2 year long adventure taking me around the world - with no flights.
Over the course of this period I posted some outragiously cringy travel writing, the musings of an angsty late teenager trying to make sense of the world as I saw it passing by on sail-boats, trains and buses.
The trip was also an opportunity to hone my photography skills - as a young solo traveller on a long journey, I used photography as an outlet to keep myself busy and try to add some fleeting purpose to my ever changing days and environment.
This was the first thing I had done independently as an adult and made a profound impact on how I approached the world. I was on a minimal budget, travelling almost entirrely on local buses or trains, so I got to see things up close. and understand the more fluid aspects of culture as I made my way from border to border, across old empires and more than a few places untouched by globalisation.
The site itself was build on a rickity but ingenious set of CGI scripts called greymatter, which was the prototypical open source blog software. A distant ancestor to wordpress.
Map of places visited and documented on Drifter