The things that stay with us

Field Notes began with the suspicion that the best parts of travel are rarely the ones we plan for. Not the migration dates or the packing lists. Not the infinity pools or the perfectly angled sundowners. Useful as those things may be, they have never been the moments that have stayed with me.

Instead, I remember the first night in a new place and that peculiar vulnerability of arrival. I remember the woman in the duka who insisted I stay for tea. The excitement I felt when our Samburu guide stopped to point out the tracks of a striped hyena on our night game drive, only for us to look up and see it standing in the headlights. Overhearing those conversations that slowly unfolded on long drives between strangers who would never have spoken so honestly at home. And the joy I get from the way my daughter, born in Nairobi and raised between Kenya and Australia, notices entirely different things to me.

After living and working in East Africa for more than a decade, I have come to believe that travel is not really about the ground we cover. It is about paying attention. Perhaps that practice is heightened in places where so much remains unknown to us. Landscapes that stretch beyond the edge of familiarity. Wildlife that appears without warning and disappears just as quickly. Days shaped as much by chance as intention. There is a particular expansiveness to East Africa that invites you to loosen your grip and let the newness of a place unfold slowly. Wonder often arrives unannounced, and the unfamiliar begins to unravel you in the best possible way.

Field Notes is a journal about that practice. It is about East Africa, but not only East Africa. It is about travel, but not tourism. It is about the ways movement through the world rearranges us: the stories we inherit, the strangers who alter our trajectory, the people we become when we leave home, and the places that refuse to remain merely destinations.

You will find essays here about women and adventure, mothers and daughters, fear and freedom, belonging and becoming. There will be reflections from campfires and city streets, observations gathered on foot, and small details that might otherwise go unnoticed. Some pieces will begin in Kenya and end somewhere entirely different. Others will circle back to the same questions again and again.

I don't write as an expert. Only as someone who has lived beside lions and traffic jams, worked in Nairobi's informal settlements and in the safari world, left and returned, and learned that certainty is often less interesting than curiosity.

Field Notes values observation over expertise. Specificity over spectacle. Questions over conclusions. Wonder without sentimentality. I hope these essays feel less like opening a magazine and more like opening someone's well-worn notebook at the end of a journey. If they encourage you to look closer, linger longer, or ask a different question of the world around you, then they will have done their job.

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