Laurence Mitchell is a travel writer and photographer who specialises in places that mostly lie well away from more familiar tourist territory. His main areas of interest are Eastern Europe, Central Asia and India, although he believes that even well-known destinations often have hidden and less familiar faces to reveal.
Just like any prospective Miss World, Laurence would always state that his ambitions were to travel, meet people and work with children. He has been lucky to achieve all three of these, although he doesn't do much of the third one these days.
Travel has always been important. Early formative hitchhiking trips across Europe and North Africa gave way to a journey to India at the tail-end of the so-called ‘Hippy Highway’ era, just before the Iranian Revolution and war in Afghanistan put a brake on straightforward overland travel. Finally getting around to going to university, he graduated with a degree in Environmental Science in the early 1980s before going to live and work in rural Sudan for a year as a teacher of English. Following sporadic employment back in the UK, which included TEFL teaching and working as a surveyor of historic farm buildings, he eventually ended up in Sheffield retraining as a geography teacher, which he worked at for a decade or so. This at least allowed for plenty of foreign travel in the holidays – one of the perks of the job. Following several summer-holiday trips to Latin America, he turned his focus back towards the Old World once again, this time to newly open possibilities in Eastern Europe, the Middle East. and Central Asia. He left the security of full-time teaching a few years ago to embrace the uncertainty and excitement of freelance travel journalism.
