Question: Do you like travelling? If so, why and where?

Mark Booth answered on 20 Jun 2016:

@843 – I love travelling. I like arriving in a new place and exploring new areas to find out whats there. I then enjoy the feeling of familiarity when I return. It was a desire to travel that helped me think about my career in parasitology – the prospect of travelling to the tropics and beyond as part of my job.

I have travelled mainly to East Africa. My first ever trip to Africa was to a conference in Nairobi where I presented my PhD work to a conference (I remember being a bit nervous). I then did some fieldwork on the Tanzanian island of Pemba as part of my PhD. Since then I have been to Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania many times, and several other countries in Africa one or more times.

I’ve been to quite a few other countries for conferences, collaborative meetings, teaching. These days there is less travel for a number of reasons, not least because it is now easier to communicate using different electronic media, much easier to analyse data that have already been collected and much harder to get funding for large scale data collection exercises.