Words and Journeys is the online home of Benedict Walker. This latest update and release was launched in April 2026.

My wanderlust began at age 12, fuelled by my obsession with all things Japanese. It took root a few years later when Dad, with deteriorating eyesight, handed down his camera gear and taught me the basics of photography. I couldn’t “grow up” fast enough to get out there On The Road… dreaming up, or remembering perhaps, my life as a Beat Poet. By the time I graduated from UTS with a BA(Communications), the condition had firmly taken hold.

I’m a bit of a dreamer. I write passionately and I love languages: in another life I’d probably have made an excellent diplomat!

The freedom to explore our amazing planet with its myriad of cultures, friends to find, customs and traditions to discover, ideas to consider and things to experience, means everything to me.

In 2020, the civilisations of our planet were plunged into an un-welcomed, unknown era which continues to confuse and confound. Most of us have been confronted and challenged and many of us have been forced to get intimate with our deepest fears; not an easy or pleasant thing to do, when you do it properly - with courage, honesty and integrity. COVID-19 put the brakes on my freedom to roam, showing me that I’d completely taken that freedom, for granted.

I’ve been chipping away at the myriad bits and pieces required to launch the site, since 2014, but as freelance travel writing consumed most of my waking hours, it was really only in December 2019, when I was home in Ausrtralia and on sabbatical due to illness in the family,  that I found my momentum. I’d never built a website before, and everything you see here from it’s design, content and construction, I’ve created myself. 

By March 2020, I was on the verge of launching the site as a launching pad for my writing and photography (the “words” part) and as the portal for an independent travel agency (“journeys”), bringing my former career back into focus for some security and stability after what had then been almost a decade working and travelling as a freelancer - before being a digital nomad was “a thing”.

This, as I was preparing to return to Leipzig, Germany where I was renting an apartment, and from where I would set off on another life-changing research trip for Lonely Planet, this time, in Sweden and Norway, when out of nowhere, the unthinkable unknowable thing that a pandemic is, happened.

Like millions of others whose best laid plans vanished overnight, my livelihood  and the path to prosperity I’d been paving for so long (both the “words” and the “journeys”) suddenly evaporated. 

You can’t write guidebooks if you can’t hit the road, and you can’t sell travel when there’s no travelling to sell. 

In the first weeks of the pandemic, I “pivoted”, also before that was a thing, launching a cut-down version of wordsandjourneys.com, without the travel agency portal, and with the wide-eyed ambition to provide resources that I found interesting about what was going on and as my first blog, which was to be armchair travel focused, or somewhere I could stand on my soapbox when I felt the need. Prior to this, I’d been using Instagram, to share my thoughts and photography with a small but regular audience, but also, under the auspices of being a Lonely Planet writer. Although sanctioned by LP, and free to post what I wanted, I felt the responsibility and limitations the platform and my position imposed on my creativity and freedom of expression: two things I’m an even fiercer advocate for today, than I was back then. 

My inaugral blog post, which landed in the first two weeks of the global travel shutdown, when few people seemed to get a handle on what was happenening, was, I thought at the time and still feel today, an insightful and accurate portent of what was to come and in retrospect, regrettably, what could have been (missed opportunities).

Sadly, I wasn’t able to practice what I preached in that post and the optimism and enthiusiasm of my launch video, waned, and like many others, I slowly began to pull away from social media and society itself and retreat into a literal and metaphorical lockdown, of my own making.

Almost five years on, it’s time to share my creativity, positivity and love for this planet and life on earth, once again.

#peabodyandme