About

Hello, I'm Dan

I like seeing new things, meeting new people and finding out what the world has to offer. Life's too short to spend it in the same place doing the same things over and over. For me it's all about new experiences, and the more of a buzz they give me the better.

Ask my mates and they'll tell you I'm a bit of an adrenaline junkie. I've jumped out of planes until I got my skydiving licence, cycled Bolivia's Death Road, slid down an active volcano in Nicaragua on a plank, and run marathons from Greenland to Chicago. I'm also a non-swimmer who once jumped 20 feet into a river in Chile because the rafting guide said so. Not my finest decision.

I've never been one to settle in one place. I moved around a lot as a kid, with lots of houses and lots of schools, and it followed me into adulthood and stuck. Holidays weren't really a thing in our house, though I did go to India twice as a boy. Somewhere there's a photo of me at the Taj Mahal aged 10. I'll share it if it ever turns up.

The bucket list

Then I watched The Bucket List with Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson. I'd already done a lot of cool stuff, there was loads more I wanted to do, and you never know when your time's up. So I started writing it down.

I've got a terrible memory. I'd read about something amazing and forget it five minutes later, so it had to go on paper. It started on a scrap of paper, and when that filled up it became a spreadsheet, because I am an IT guy after all.

There are now over 300 things on it and I've ticked off around half. Some are big (all seven continents, done in December 2024), some are daft (sleep in a plane hotel) and some still scare me. That's the point. If I can get one person to write their own list down, I'm happy. Have a look at mine.

Big yellow trucks

Four weeks of holiday a year was never going to be enough. In late 2015 I put my things in storage, quit my job and spent six months overlanding South America on a big yellow truck called Rosita: Lima to Quito, the long way round, via Patagonia, the Amazon and Venezuela.

That just made it worse. In November 2018 I flew to Gibraltar and spent five months on another big yellow truck with Oasis Overland, all the way down West Africa to Cape Town, until April 2019. Bush camps, embassy days, 60 km taking an entire day, Christmas on a beach in Sierra Leone. A few months later I was back on the truck for the second half of overland Africa, up to Cairo, then carried on through Lebanon, Israel and Jordan.

On New Year's Eve 2019 I flew to Cancún and backpacked down through Central America to Colombia. I landed back in London on 3 March 2020 and went straight to the port for a cruise to Iceland. It ended up being a solo trip, and a great one, even if it was cut short so the ship could get back into port before the whole world shut down.

About Pass The Passport

Having my own website was always on the list: publicise my own website. I put it off for years because it was too hard, I didn't have time, or nobody would read it. Excuses. It went live in 2017, then, if I'm honest, not much happened. I picked it back up during Covid when nobody was going anywhere, and it's grown bit by bit into what you see now.

It's for anyone who wants to see more of the world without quitting their job: guides to every country I've been to, the stories behind the bucket list, and somewhere to keep track of your own. Everything marked as visited is somewhere I've been myself, and the photos are mine unless I say otherwise.

I don't want to be the person looking back asking "what if?". So write your list down, look at it often, and start ticking things off. Book the flight. Chase the thing you've always wanted to do.

Need a push? See 230+ more travel quotes, each one on a photo from my travels.

Got a question, or an idea for my list? Email me. I read everything.