Who is Joe?

I am an explorer as I travel and experience places, people and cultures. I am an artist because I express myself. I am a judge as I decide right and wrong. I am a warrior as I live by the choices I make.

Is security a utopian goal or is it another word for rut?
Where would the world be if all men sought security and had not taken risks or gambled with their lives on the chance that, if they won, life would be different and richer?
We shall let the reader answer this question for himself:
Who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived, or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?

Hunter S. Thompson

Travel has been in my blood since I first left to discover Vancouver in 1988, it was the first time I had been somewhere on my own where I was thousands of miles from home and had to find my own way. Since then the urge to be in a new place continues to flow in my veins. Its an adrenaline rush, one that keeps me mentally sharp, knowing that as I travel I am the stranger, the observer, the visitor, sometimes with the lucky opportunity of participating too.

Travelling is an escape from life itself, which helps discover what I want and who I really am. Joe is JAM, representing journeys, adventures and more!

JOEJOURNEYS started as a way to record and share my adventures with friends on the other side of the world, it became a log of my travels, a time capsule and record of a time and place.

There are lots of travel guides online, my business is not to sell you anything, simply to provide you with information and tools you need, inspiration or ideas on where to go.

He who doesn’t flap his wings never flies at all.

Hunter S. Thompson

Travel today has never been easier or as affordable, allowing most of us the opportunity to put on our wings and fly somewhere exotic and new. Marketing a culture or heritage is a modern phenomenon, in the past, it was simply a road we needed to pass to get to our destination. Language, culture, tradition, hospitality is now packaged and labelled, governments bidding for new visitors, residents and businesses to migrate and move. Sometimes when visiting certain places there is doubt as to where you are actually visiting or living, what does it mean to be English, Canadian, or American? These are melting pots and mosaics of cultures.

Buy the ticket, take the ride.

Hunter S. Thompson

To have the best travel experience is one where you can find somewhere that still remains uniquely genuine. Cambodia and Vietnam come top of my list in terms of immersing oneself into an unspoiled territory, relatively untouched by the modern world, where people are raw and few signs of western influence and big business, progress advances at a slower pace.

The best ice-breaker, in this age of everybody moving around, is: “Where are you from?”
Geography is the most neutral of subjects but is pregnant with conversational possibilities.
It opens up a whole range of secondary questions, allows you to compare impressions of places where you’ve been, and prompts you to explain how you came to be where you are.
More than that depends on chemistry.

Glen Waggoner and Peggy Maloney

The other part of travel is discovering the truth of life elsewhere. There are parts of the world which are heavily criticized by Western governments and media for lack of freedoms and different forms of government. Some are punished and others we simply look the other way. Myanmar is a military dictatorship, as well as North Korea, has separated itself from the world and limits the eyes of the world to what life is like inside it. Then we have places like Egypt, a mecca for tourist flocking to see structures left behind by one of the worlds first ordered civilizations, but Egypt too is rated low on the scale of human rights and freedoms, yet the western world does nothing to stop the torture and punishment that happens within its borders, simply turning a blind eye – travelling opens the realities to those who choose to visit and learn the ways of the destination.

None but ourselves can free our minds.

Bob Marley

The art of travel allows us to pop the bubble of life we live from day to day. It opens the windows into cultures we are unfamiliar and sometimes frightened of. Behind all borders are people, humans on the struggle of life, where the grass is not always greener, and the politics of the world are at work under the propaganda machine to feed information which is not always accurate. The old proverb says, seeing is believing, knowledge is power. The traveller is the true explorer of life, discovering the self by observing the ways of mankind today, and the history left behind in all corners of the world.

Wisdom is the daughter of experience.

Leonardo DaVinci

This is all part of a passage of discovery. I’ll add new guides with every new stamp in my passport and maybe one day we’ll cross paths. If you really want to know who Joe is then you just have to navigate your way around my pages and discover a bit more.

Regards,

Joe

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