Zipping along the wide banyan-tree-lined boulevards of Colombo, a grumbling privately owned Ashok Leyland bus, with its brash colours and retro design, pulled up beside the bright green tuk-tuk I was travelling in, just as the traffic lights on Bauddhaloka Mawatha flicked from amber to red.
The bus’s exhaust pipe seemed to align perfectly with the low-stacked three-wheeler, ensuring a heady dose of noxious fumes filled the interior, taking my breath away in the process.
Struggling to inhale, I felt as though I was drowning as the sharp acrid scent hit the back of my throat, and it reminded me of how loneliness often feels: like a suckerpunch that comes completely out of nowhere, knocking all of the oxygen clean out of your lungs.
The author in Mexico
As a nomadic writer, moving from bed to bed (all 179 of them), town to city and country to country with an ease not unlike how most people decide what they’re having for dinner, I’m often on the move alone.
One week I’ll be in the intriguing, arty city of Lodz, Poland, photographing large scale street art and retro neon signage curated by the journalist and writer Mariusz Szczygieł, the next I’ll be crammed into one of Georgia’s zippy marshrutka minivans, heading from Kutaisi to the Black Sea resort town of Batumi, with its high concentration of odd statues and casinos, each overflowing with Russians and Turks alike.
One of Sri Lanka's famous Ashok Leyland buses
Lydia Swinscoe
Each and every day is interesting, and how can they not be, when there’s a new street to walk down, a dish to try or a sight to behold? Sometimes vibrant experiences unravel at an alarming pace, surprising me with generosity and newfound friendships, often at times they’re incredibly humbling, and many times they can be devastatingly lonely, especially when I’ve been away from friends and family for months on end. Connection is, of course, what keeps us humans sane.
For intrepid female explorers like Martha Gellhorn and Dervla Murphy, loneliness was part and parcel of adventuring alone, with Gelhorn describing solitude in her book Travels with Myself and Another as, “making one feel blind and deaf, so complete is the isolation,” and Murphy would often muse that being completely cut off from family and friends was an essential part of an important journey. Despite the loneliness taking my breath away from time to time, I couldn’t agree with her sentiment more.
Pidurangala, Sri Lanka
Lydia Swinscoe
While Gelhorn combatted her loneliness with good books, letter writing and the occasional Equanil (a tranquiliser used to treat stress and depression) I tend to soothe mine with walking (long, long walks down unknown roads) and food, spending hour upon hour in brightly lit supermarkets, at food markets and beside streetside stalls picking out fruits I’ve never seen before and vegetables I have no idea how to cook. Which is why the places I choose to stay in while living nomadically are so important.
I tend to swerve large soulless chain hotels in favour of homestays and small Airbnbs where I can linger for weeks at a time with a simple French press and a portable gas ring stove. And it’s often in these places where the true kindness of strangers is revealed.
For around a month, I stayed in the Colombo garden studio of the Sri Lankan artist and architect, Tilak Samarawickrema, becoming close to both him and his generous wife, Sriyanthi.
They’d often pop over to the studio for a chat, to discuss politics or invite me on an afternoon walk, and as our friendship grew, at around 5pm each day, Sriyanthi began carrying from their house to mine, a bright red tray laden with homemade dahl and light-as-air hoppers, sometimes a perfectly round toasty or a soothing homemade vegetable soup. These small acts of kindness made my heart soar each and every time; it touched me more than they’ll ever imagine.
With my place-to-place lifestyle, it’s these little moments of elation, along with near-total freedom, and a life lived fully and fleetingly in the moment that keeps me firmly on the road. I want to go everywhere and experience life slowly and authentically.
But it hasn’t always been this way. For years I lived what we call a regular life until finally, spurred on by the global pandemic, too many wars to mention and a harsh realisation that each and every one of us is only on this beautiful planet for the shortest span of time (I’ll never forget the busking guitar player in Mexico who told me, “enjoy time, it goes fast like the wind”), it was make or break and I decided to leave the sedentary existence and fast-paced city life I’d known for 19 years.
Vineetha in Sri Lanka
Lydia Swinscoe
And so it was, at the very end of 2020, that I started to sell off the few pieces of furniture I had accumulated as a lifelong renter, donate excess clothing and books to charity and start living a life centring around experiences, rather than ‘things’.
Since then, the four-year journey, so far, has taken me from the magical Isle of Skye and Scotland’s Highlands to the Peak District, where baby-faced tractor drivers dominate single-track roads, and over 13 overpriced London studios.
Outside of the UK, I’ve hopped from city to city in France, Portugal, Spain, and Italy and made short but sweet bases of Germany, Lithuania, Greece and Poland.
There’s been a feline-filled two-week stint in Istanbul and a two-month stay in Georgia where, bizarrely, I kept bumping into one of my idols, Patti Smith, everywhere I wandered. Armenia, Kenya and Palestine each provided much too short a stay, before the cloud forests of Costa Rica and the colourful towns of central Mexico beckoned.
Sri Lanka caught me off guard when a planned one-month visit turned into nine on account of the island’s tropical beauty, endless elephant-spotting opportunities, majestic ancient cities and a guy from Kurunegala, with the most infectious laugh. I fell in love with the land and the sea, the mountains and the sky.
Even those damned Ashok Leylands with their billowing fumes and reckless motorists couldn’t drive me away. The highs were so high, I would often think to myself, ‘if this is not happiness, I don’t know what is’.
Batumi, Georgia
Lydia Swinscoe
The diminutive country’s abundant nature and vivid colours, dramatic storms and wild seas all conspired to create an environment so addictive I couldn’t contemplate leaving and slowly, slowly, over hot days and hotter nights, I made connections that pushed my return flight further and further away. Moments spent watching crabs with spindly legs on tiny Madiha beach led to scrambling along rocks to chat with Vineetha, a head monk at a local Buddhist temple perched high above.
He’d text me every other day informing me he had mangos to gift me, and as the weeks rolled on and the seasons changed, the mangos turned into rambutans, then deep red mangosteens, later there were thick sections of jackfruit with its sickly sweet scent and translucent flesh-encased seeds which he told me could be cooked into a curry.
As we talked about Buddhism and the 2004 tsunami, about loss and belonging, I realised conversations like these wouldn’t have occurred if I’d simply been passing through on a flying visit. Like every one of the 21 countries I’ve visited on this four-year-long nomadic journey, knowing I’ll be in situ for a limited time forces me to really make the most of a place, living slowly and purposefully with no distractions.
Bran Castle, Romania
Lydia Swinscoe
Practically, it’s made me realise that we, as human beings, don’t need a great deal of belongings, and I now cherish longevity over affordability. As witnessed on the streets of India and Nepal, mending clothing or footwear when it frays or rips is preferable to consuming more and more, which inevitably will end up in landfills in some of the world’s most impoverished countries.
A well-made backpack filled with a few select outfits, a good book (right now it’s Cookie Mueller’s Walking Through Clear Water In A Pool Painted Black) and some essentials, like a Victorinox penknife, a laptop, some duct tape (handy for mending in the interim) and a few plasters are all I really need.
I often wonder if I’ll wander forever, and if so, if seeking permanent escape from the daily grind is sustainable. What, or who, could halt this transient lifestyle?
Yet, for now, over 1,400 days in, still a proud dreamer and pleasure seeker with no dependants in tow, I’ll continue to live each day as it comes, in whatever form that may take; be it exploring deserted east-coast Costa Rican beaches close to the border of Panama, drinking ice-cold Mezcalitas with a German psychotherapist in a Mexican pueblo magico, hiking amongst waxy pink banana trees in Colombia’s Jardín, or even sat in a mass of Colombo traffic, breathing in a thick, grey fog of Lanka Ashok Leyland fumes, loneliness and all.
