Hi there, my name is Scott “Cabal” Daniells, and I’d like to welcome you to Scott Of The World, a site featuring my travel blog plus writings, photos, and reviews from my trips around the world.
I originally created this site in 2009 for two reasons.
Firstly, so that I had a personal record of the experiences that I have been fortunate to have while seeing the amazing things this planet has to offer.
Secondly, travel blogs were the most helpful source of information to me when I started becoming curious about travelling around our diverse world and I wanted to create a public blog so that my experiences to off the beaten track destinations could help other people in the same way, and hopefully encourage your curiosity of the world too.
The site stayed as a simple travel blog, updated whenever I went on a trip abroad, until 2021 when I decided to expand it as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The pandemic has hit the travel industry hard. Not only has travel been pretty impossible, but travel agents and tour operators who have been both in business and profitable for decades have ceased trading.
But travel is one of the most important things to me and so I wanted to do the little that I could to help the industry recover when all of this is over.
In an effort to ensure survival many operators have been offering significant discounts and very flexible booking conditions to generate business as much as a few years into the future. This has led people to start considering long-term travel plans, including trips that are out of their comfort zone or that may have been on their bucket list for a long time.
But people are, understandably, asking a lot of questions and doing a lot of research. To address that I wanted to make this site as complete as possible to help people make decisions about those trips, and to help generate business for the smaller and more specialist operators that mean a lot to me. And so I decided to relaunch this blog as a proper site that also contains reviews, articles, and more.
This site is never going to be as extensive or cover as many destinations as other travel blogs or sites that are run commercially, but that it not its aim. It’s about sharing my experiences, and so I hope that you find the new version of the site even more useful as you research your next trip.
Feel free to get in contact if you want to ask any questions, share your experiences with me, or if you simply want to reach out to say hi.
Why “Scott of The World”?
This is actually the third incarnation of this site, and was created in an effort to streamline my content so that I could help in the ways described in the previous section.
The site started off as simply “Scott’s Travel Blog” before switching over to “The Get Happy Travel Blog” after a few years – primarily to make use of the gethappytour.com domain name that I purchased so that it wouldn’t get taken up by spammers after one of my favourite bands let it expire.
But “Scott of The World” is something that has been with me for some time and is a great summary of how I look at life and travel.
When I was growing up the response to me telling people that my name was Scott was, a lot more often than you would expect, “Scott? Like Scott of The Antarctic?”. I would always respond with something like “Yes, but I’m Scott of The World”.
Additionally, while I try to avoid talking about politics on this blog as I want my advice to unite people over a shared love of travel regardless of political affiliation, the second reason is political in nature.
There is a now infamous speech by Theresa May, the former Prime Minister of the UK, where she stated that people who consider themselves citizens of the world are actually citizens of nowhere.
Due to my love of travelling, since before I even started paying attention to politics, I have always considered myself a citizen of the world who just happens to be British. As I mentioned further up this page, I travel because I’m curious about our world and the cultures, sights, and experiences that travelling around it can bring to you.
So, while I may be based in one country, when it comes to travelling I think of the world as my playground.
So the new name of this site for 2021 and beyond is a response to that speech, a nod to the responses to my name when I was growing up, and recognition that the world is my playground. I hope to spend as much time travelling around it as I can, experiencing as many of its diverse destinations as possible.
My travelling style
Whenever I travel I like to get away from the feeling of being a “tourist” travelling to all the usual destinations. I’ve been to some pretty touristy destinations (New York, Singapore, Australia, and many parts of Europe) but I feel the most worthwhile type of travelling is when you get off the beaten path and immerse yourself in the culture of a destination.
That’s why I love visiting unusual or undiscovered destinations such as Rwanda, Nicaragua, Kyrgyzstan, North Korea etc – the sort of places you can go without being swamped by large groups of English-speaking people that take over the area for their visit. There’s nothing wrong with people who like visiting Benidorm, Paris, Florida etc – I’ve been there, done that and got the t-shirts from all three of those places.
But I get much more out of adventure travel.
Adventure travel is such a broad definition and ranges from visiting undiscovered destinations on group tours, overland trips through inhospitable places, backpacking through non-English speaking parts of the world and just generally getting out of your comfort zone to immerse yourself in a destination. Multi-stop visits to The USA, Australia etc with guided tours do let you see a destination, and I do like to skip out of the UK for the occasional city break, but I’d much rather be on an overland vehicle travelling across Uganda and stopping at questionable truck stops or (in a group) travelling across Honduras by public bus.
“Organised adventure travel” is a term I’ve heard used to describe how I like to travel – off the beaten path and immersing myself in the culture but with a group leader or driver who knows what they’re doing handling things like transport arrangements and hotels / camp sites. That’s why I love travelling with Dragoman, Intrepid, Regent etc.
That is the type of trip I love, which is usually at the top of my list each time I look at a trip, and which I hope will still be possible once we beat the COVID-19 pandemic.
This world has so much to offer. I hope to experience as much of it as I can, and I hope that this blog helps you to experience it too.