Welcome To Leighton Travels!

It feels completely surreal writing this, but here goes nothing…

Welcome to Leighton Travels!

After nearly five years as Leighton Literature, the time has finally come to relaunch this little blog of mine. In the beginning I barely knew what kind of blog I wanted, I simply had some short stories to share from my travels around the world. A friend of mine suggested the alliteratively pleasing Leighton Literature and, with hardly a moment’s thought, I said “Sure!” Then, clickety click, my blog was born.

R.I.P. Leighton Literature. Born October the 29th 2014, passed away September the 29th 2019.

In the five years that have since passed I’ve been through a bunch of personal and professional reinventions. From eventful teaching posts in China, Cambodia and Spain, to superb travel adventures around Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Japan, England, Scotland and Serbia.

At Belgrade Fortress, Serbia. August, 2019.

At some point it really hit me like a thunderbolt. A proper Eureka! moment if you will. Basically, I love travelling and sharing my experiences! This is what makes me happy and this is what I want to continue doing, above all else. So I began documenting every single trip I’ve ever made and posting them as travel reports. You can flick through them here, so far there are over 540 from across 32 countries. And I still have hundreds more that I need to write up! There will be more short stories to share too, though frankly I have no idea when I’ll get around it. There just aren’t enough hours in a day and I’ve only got two hands and a somewhat limited brain. You’ll have to bear with me.

These days I live life as a digital nomad, which means I work online and base myself wherever I want. Sounds great, right? Well… it kinda is. I mean, on the one hand I get to choose my country and live life mostly on my own terms. However, achieving and maintaining this lifestyle is a huge amount of work. In fact, earning money from selling travel articles, affiliate marketing partnerships and a bit of online teaching is quite the balancing act.

“At work” – Tooting Bec Common Cafe, London. July 2019.

Anyhoo, it was from this new identity that the idea for Leighton Travels sprang forth. I’m hoping it’s self-explanatory, after all my name is Leighton and… oh, never mind. The challenge of morphing Leighton Literature into Leighton Travels proved to mountainous and one I was definitely guilty of underestimating. Luckily, I was able to work with some incredibly talented people through the global freelancing platform Upwork.

A massive shout out goes to the amazing Upworker Tushant Khanna, who created the Leighton Travels logo. Tushant has an incredible talent, enthusiasm and curiosity, all of which served him well in working with me on the logo. Tushant is based in Delhi where he runs his own design house, Publicis Sapient.

As for the actual on-site redesign, this was carried out by the fantastic Jitendra Patil, who worked tirelessly to transform the somewhat clunky look of LL into the site you see today. Patient, diligent and with a knack for problem-solving, I feel like I couldn’t have chosen a better developer. Jitendra is based in Indore, which he says is “the food capital of India!” It’s a bold claim, maybe one day I’ll visit and find out for myself.

Elsewhere, I’ve been to hell and back solving a million and one technical problems associated with changing domain name. In this respect I should also thank the good folk at WordPress for helping me sort out all kinds of unforeseen crises, including what amounted to a complete Google rankings meltdown! I can’t even begin to explain how it felt when, for a few days, I fully believed that five years of hard work had just been flushed down the toilet!

Last, and most definitely not least, I want to thank the people whose unwavering support throughout all of this have been so crucial in getting me to the other side in one piece. Thanks to Chris for putting a roof over my head, Walking Dead banter and endless late-night Twirls. Thanks to Mum, dad, Cory, Natalie and Emma for listening and responding to all those rambling audio updates. And of course thank you to my wonderful Sladja for being with me on this journey literally every single step of the way. What did I ever do without you?

Please do go and explore Leighton Travels! Even if you’re familiar with my site and content, you’ll still find some cool new features and flourishes throughout. There are a million and one bugs that crop up when you redesign a blog. So if you spot the odd broken link or formatting gremlin, please bear with me, this is still very much a work in progress.

Yours,

Leighton.