A Traveller of
Considerable
Appetite
There is little that needs to be said of the traveller, save that they are fond of good food, long roads, and returning home with more stories than they set out with. His name is Mitch Chadban.
The traveller is, by disposition, a creature of the road. Not by restlessness — they are equally fond of the armchair, the long meal, the second helping — but by a conviction, held quietly and without apology, that the world is larger and stranger and more generous than any single life spent in one place could account for.
They travel alone. Not from misanthropy — they have been known to linger over a shared bottle until the proprietor begins stacking chairs — but because solo travel demands a particular quality of attention. When there is no companion to consult, the traveller must look harder, listen more carefully, and make peace with being lost in a foreign city at dusk with only their wits and a vague memory of where they ate lunch.
They consider this an education.
"The wise traveller knows two things above all others: that the road is long, and that it is best faced on a full stomach."
This blog was begun for a simple reason: the traveller could not find the kind of travel writing they actually wanted to read. Everything was either beautiful and useless — lyrical prose that told you nothing about where to eat or how to get there — or useful and joyless, a spreadsheet dressed as a story.
There and Back Again is an attempt at both at once. The narrative sections are written in earnest — no irony, no winking at the reader, no apology for the register. The practical sections are written with equal seriousness. A budget is not beneath the dignity of good prose. A restaurant recommendation is not incompatible with fine writing.
The traveller has been to many places and intends to go to many more. Australia is home — which means the road is always long before it even begins, and the return is always sweeter for it.
There and Back Again is written and photographed by Mitch Chadban. Australia is home. Every journey recorded here was made in person, alone, and mostly overland.
The traveller is not a pseudonym and not an invented character. It is only the third person — the older habit of writing an account of a journey rather than an account of oneself. Where these chronicles say the traveller walked a route, missed a train, ate well or paid too much for a taxi, that is him, and it happened.
The photographs are his own, taken on the journeys they illustrate. A few articles carry no photographs at all rather than borrow someone else's. The practical sections — the routes in walking order, the opening hours and ticket prices, the meals and what they cost — come from the same journeys, and are checked against primary sources before anything is published.
The map grows slowly, as all good maps do.
"The road goes ever on. Begin here."
Read the chronicles →