Between October 2020 and March 2021, I developed an audio tour about the history of the Battle of Britain House in Rusilip Woods with the help of Voicemap, a GPS driven audio guide app. The tour costs £5 / $6.99 per device, and you can pick it up here. I am delighted to share this with you, and I’m taking the opportunity to reveal a bit more about where I come from, why am I doing what I’m doing, and some of the thought processes that went into creating this audio walk.

Why make an audio tour about the Battle of Britain House ruin, or even at all

The easy answer is that I loved hosting the first guided walks in the woods in summer 2020, and so I thought I’d commit the story to audio as well. I wanted to use a new format to reach a broader audience. There were many who didn’t get the chance to join physical walks on weekends because of other commitments, and there are those who preferred to remain distanced from a group. Then there are others, including myself, who just enjoy a radiophone or podcast-style delivery. First I toyed with the idea of making this an online experience, like a zoom tour. But then I realized that in the course of the last year, so many of us were already stuck living out great parts of our lives in front of a screen, doing most of our socialising online, or taking part in numerous zoom calls about this and that. So what I really aimed for was creating something that didn’t just relate a noteworthy story in a refreshing way, but also urged people to get off their seats and enjoy nature, and the great outdoors.

But there were more complex reasons for creating a tour in this new format. Reasons that didn’t have to do with the global health situation per se. In recent years, I have arrived to the belief that the way we’ve been doing leisure is past its due date, and dying fast. Travel and leisure across the planet in the last 70 years has become a mass manufacturing process, standardised, packaged, and plastic. Looking beyond the immediate benefits to the economy, people people have started waking up to the detrimental effects travel has and leisure on local communities, the environment, and ultimately our psychology. Coming from a 15 year career in travel and leisure, I was directly involved in the inner workings of package travel, and grew disillusioned by the ways we do leisure, and what it has come to mean to us.

There’s a need to go back to basics

Armed with an inquisitive mind and a philosophical mood, I began looking for alternative, more individual, and ultimately less intrusive ways to approach travel and leisure. The quest became a rabbit hole : to places I’d never been before, to perspectives that were alien to me, and straight to the heart of our very thought processes as human beings. I began looking at the ways our perceptive and psychological mechanisms affect our need for leisure and wanderlust. Soon I understood the basic mechanisms, and arrived at the realisation that we don’t make the most of our capacity to experience when we’re crammed like sardines inside venues and resorts. The breakthrough came when I was acquainted with the work of Agoraphobic Traveller, which kickstarted an extraordinary 18-month philosophical exchange about what is a travel experience, after all. For those of you who’d like to find out more, I have committed these thoughts and discussions in a long read called The Drift : an interview with the Agoraphobic Traveller

While I was in the midst of this process, the new decade started in style with a huge global challenge : the outbreak of disease, forcing upon us isolation, social upheaval, financial and psychological pressure . Adding the heart-breaking death toll of Covid 19 to that, we are admittedly living through a multitude of stacking, universally experienced hardships such as the world hasn’t seen since World War 2 – as some world leaders put it. A pleasant thought is that mankind, for once, aren’t at each others’ throats in anger (well, mostly anyway). The global effort to find a cure to the malady is progressing, while governments and organisations around the world are releasing, to the best of their ability, unprecedented support to alleviate the impact of this crisis and ensure that livelihoods aren’t in immediate danger.

Each one of us will have a story to tell once this is over. My story is that the major plans I had for Explorabilia my small tour company in 2020 had to be put on hold. None of my painstakingly researched, lovingly crafted weekly guided walks and monthly international adven-tours took place, leaving me with a hole in my pocket, and also another one in my heart. All the excitement that comes with a new venture and doing what I love most had to be put on hold – indefinitely.

I know I am not alone in experiencing this, and that gives me courage, and perspective. One of the benefits of the situation, is us witnessing and participating in a massive cultural shift in our travel and leisure habits. I found that this situation validated my existing thoughts about the changing ways we experience the world. Homeworking. Video calling. Non-commuting. Spending more time with those closest to us, in non-commercial spaces, in the park or in the woods. And there have been ample opportunities to change some of our deep-rooted habits, and somewhat forcefully, embrace change. Given, it’s not ideal for everyone, but most of us have had the time to develop new approaches, or change our perspectives on how we live our lives, how we get things done, and what really matters. A lot of this change, in my mind, is for the better, especially when it comes to realising how we want to spend our precious leisure time. I, for one, have enjoyed my freedom from shopping malls, multiplexes and resorts, and poured myself into experiencing the best my immediate environment has to offer. I guess I’m just lucky it’s Ruilsip Woods !

I have the certainty that much of this fundamental shift in how we experience our lives is here to stay. Working from home, less commuting, breaking our routines with new experiences and venturing outside our routines and comfort zone might become part of a new, post-Covid19 way of life. Subconsciously, many of us might still want to stay away the crowds, enjoy more peaceful lifestyles and remain open to new perspectives and pursuits. It’s been a tough period, but if that’s the silver lining, then I’ll be almost glad it happened by the time it’s all over. Hopefully soon.