Welcome to Wayfarer!

Greetings and welcome to the Wayfarer blog! First I would like to thank everybody who regularly followed the Jumping Through Hoops blog and gave me such good feedback. I very much enjoyed writing that blog about my daily life, but always felt it to be a bit unfocused. It's not that I have closed the blog completely, just put it on the back-burner for now. The purpose of Wayfarer is to focus primarily on travel. I unsure yet which direction to take this in, but it will mainly be about my own personal travels - past, present and future, the travels of others, travel news and any other related subjects. Please do not assume that I set out to be an armchair traveller - quite the opposite! I am just not yet in the position where I am able to 'travel write' full time as I eventually aim to due to the restrictions of a full-time degree and student finances! So it is my intention to develop my writing skills, and provide information (and perhaps a little entertainment) for others interested in travel.

As this is my very first blog, it would only be right to include some information about myself, however I am going to forsake the usual 'interests and activities' (see my profile if you want to know any of that) and instead borrow the wonderful The World According To... quiz from Wanderlust Magazine. I have been an avid reader of this publication for many years and it's back issues have completely taken over my spare room! It is the magazine I read when I wish to shut out the world and dream for an hour or two. My answers to this quiz have yet to be published (hopefully one day!), but here they are:

Mountain/desert/ocean/jungle ... which are you?

Ocean - in fact, large bodies of water in general. Lakes, rivers, seas... I feel very much at home beside water.

What was your first great travel experience?

Getting out of the holiday resorts and into rural, 'untouched' Spain as a child and learning my first lesson about other cultures.

What has been your favourite journey?

Four weeks travelling through Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand in 2009.

What are your top five places worldwide?

Tokyo, Japan; Berlin, Germany; Hoi An, Vietnam; Toronto, Canada; Sorrento, Italy.

Which passport stamp are you proudest of?

Japan - after years of dreaming I finally got there!

Which passport stamp would you most like to have?

Cuba

Where or what is your guilty travel pleasure?

I would have to say Marmite. There are times when the travel diet of a vegetarian is somewhat limited, and a little jar of Marmite does wonders for brightening up the most boring of meals.

These answers do differ from those on my somewhat out-of-date gowander.com profile. I need to update this as it is a highly useful networking site for travellers. I would be very interested to hear other people's answers to this quiz, so if anybody has the time, please e-mail them to me at gemma.gannon@googlemail.com and I will publish them in a future post.

Here's looking forward to much more to come!

Thank you xx

P.S. I would just like to mention that the photograph I am currently using as the title photograph for this blog was taken on a recent trip to Vietnam by my good friend Jenny Veness who is currently in Borneo doing some very important work for Raleigh International. The photograph is of myself and my friends Sam and Nic walking by the riverside in Hoi An on a very hot day.