A View from Afar: For the Love of Travel
by Nick Pulley
It’s been a minute since the last one of these notes of mine…or 10 months, to be more precise - sorry for the radio silence! I started this series to share what I'm seeing and hearing across the wider travel industry, and though the past months have been far from lacking in, erm, entertainment or interest (far from it), it's simply been a matter of time, or rather, the lack of it. Is the planet actually spinning faster these days?!
One year on…
Unbelievably (to me, at least) it’s been a year since I set off from Brighton towards the Taj Mahal, travelling 13,277 km almost entirely by rail. You may have heard me mention it once or twice! If you missed my dispatches at the time, you can catch up on our dedicated Taj trip blog. I was delighted that my trip got a bit of coverage in the wider media too, and I’ve put links to a couple of articles I featured in, and a podcast, at the bottom of this piece.
As the anniversary approached, I’d been thinking about how the journey changed my vision for Selective Asia, and my hopes and fears for the wider travel industry. The deep stuff.
The essence of travel
Going on the trip reminded me, in glorious technicolour, of the simpler beauties of travel. Having new first-hand experiences, discovering new treasures, new tastes and new stories. As I counted off the miles, track by track, I was transported back in time to my early backpacking days and their heady mix of exploration and uncertainty. I kept as much flexibility in my plans as I could, and researched each place with a light touch, so that I’d be discovering them fresh upon arrival. This has always been my preferred approach: I like to make up my own mind and hear the perspectives of local people. I had a solid overall structure, and some firm dates and places to be, but the sections in between I kept looser, letting the small shifts within the journey dictate my exact path.
Little things made a big impact: a cup of tea with a new friend in the Carpathians; shared awe with my guide in the Lut Desert; waking to majestic and entirely new sunrises each morning; feasting on roasted lamb and dahl in the Karikoram mountains.
I was constantly reminded that it’s the people and communities you meet on a journey that make the most difference; chance meetings that unlock doors and create a greater depth of experience. This trip reinforced the importance of treasuring and protecting these relationships, acting responsibly, not overstaying our welcome, and spreading the benefits of travel as equally as we can.
Making travel work for everyone
That idea of 'spreading the benefit' is easy to say, but in practice? It’s messy. It means challenging assumptions. There are massive disparities between the 'haves' and the 'have-nots' in tourism. Certain famous destinations are bursting at the seams with international visitors, their systems straining under the pressure and the locals feeling abandoned and locked out of their own home towns. Other places are entirely bypassed, receiving none of the economic benefits that the industry can bring. This pattern isn’t random. It’s driven by convenience, preconception, and the power of privileged economies to ‘make or break’ a destination.
Overtourism is now a political-level issue and there’s a reckoning on the horizon that will force all of us - operators, travellers and policymakers - to stop leaning on good intentions, or pointing fingers, and start confronting hard truths. Properly making things better will mean disrupting well-trodden international supply chains and really investing in local people and infrastructure.
Different highlights
My trip reminded me that it’s not always the big ticket items - the over-subscribed ‘highlights’ - that provide the moments you remember most. Often, it’s the lesser-knowns and the places in between. To discover them means letting go of our assumptions and allowing the journeys to become integral to the travel experience. For me, that meant rediscovering the rhythms and joys of train travel. This has strongly stuck with me since I got back, and if I’ve managed to pass any insight from the trip to my colleagues, I hope it’s this: create space, look for the alternative route, slow it down and leave plenty of room for spontaneity. I say that as if it’s an easy thing to do, but stepping away from the well-trodden path can feel hard.
Stepping off the path…
I travelled through Iran at a particularly challenging time, with acts of aggression in both directions between the Iranian and Israeli military in the months, and even days, before I arrived. It was a very different travel experience from those I’ve had before, and I learned a lot during that time about our shared place in the geo-political story.
With the world seeming to unravel on a daily basis, and news cycles becoming ever more torrid, this journey reinforced to me the unwavering importance of travel in pushing back on the divisive narrative driven by some of the planet’s leaders and their cronies. It has a huge role to play in helping to soften these divides. Experiencing other cultures, becoming immersed in them, and spending time with those living in unfamiliar places is one of the few defences we have against the, quite frankly, tyrannical intentions of certain world leaders.
The downsides
Alongside the huge benefits of travel, however, there are the costs too. By the time I reached the Taj, with plenty more highs and a few short-lived lows in between, the journey had forced me to reckon with what modern travel really is. Not just financially, but emotionally, societally, environmentally. It made me face the impact of tourism head on, on a broad scale. To question its volume, and the machinery behind it.
It’s become harder to ignore the disconnect between the travel industry’s mass-marketing gloss and its underlying reality. There’s a lot of language around sustainability, responsibility and positive impact, but much of it feels hollow.
Doing better
The journey reinforced what I already believed: it’s not about doing more, it’s about doing better. I’ve started to ask harder questions about where the benefits of tourism really land, and about who is being left behind. The things we do at Selective Asia are carefully considered and well-intentioned, but we aren’t, and shouldn’t be, immune from scrutiny. Looking honestly at how we approach things has made us double down and go further; to recognise that making progress in this area isn’t an easy task, and to be braver in where we go, how we operate, and what we stand for. To really think about what ‘unfollow the herd’ means.
Increasingly, we’re taking people to places that sit outside of the usual routes; destinations where the logistics are a bit more complex and the infrastructure less polished. Places where you don’t get five-star hotels at every stop, but you do make real connections. It’s not about roughing it, it’s about embracing more texture. This might mean choosing a slower mode of transport, spending longer in one place, or saying ‘yes’ to something unfamiliar. Or, simply, stepping away from the pre-packaged, algorithm-approved path to experience something different. When trips are smoothed to ‘perfection’, something essential can get lost.
Shifting perspectives
I like to think that my trip has reinforced shifts that we were already making within Selective Asia. There’s more ebb and flow in the mix of our trips now, not just in how we navigate the geography, but in the flexibility of their mood and pace. We want travellers to feel the heartbeat of the places they visit in real time, not just move from point to point across a map. Responsible travel doesn’t mean compromise. When done right, it makes the experience more rewarding, more connected, more human and more alive. Whenever you travel, don’t switch to autopilot. Tune in, question the obvious, and even get a little lost sometimes.
We all want to come home with wider horizons.
Read more about Nick’s Taj by Rail adventure in Country & Town House here, on Adventure.com here, or have a listen on the podcast ‘Show Us Your Bits’ here.
by Nick Pulley on 13th October 2025