Leyla Giray Woman on the Road
Women on Road Blogger Comes to GG
Leyla is both a backpacker and a nomad - at least in spirit. Wherever she is, she usually wants to be somewhere else!
Leyla GirayIt started many generations before her - rumor traces her ancestry back to the Golden Hordes that swept across Asia a millennium ago. And it doesn't look as though things have changed much.
Leyla took her first transcontinental trip at 5 weeks, when her parents bundled her on the Orient Express bound for Asia. She was born in France, grew up in Spain, Iran and the Middle East, and studied in Canada before moving to Switzerland. She rarely finished a school year in the same country, and changed schools 16 times before graduation.
She took her first backpacking trip (without her parents' knowledge) to Morocco at 15, and still remembers sitting in cafés by the casbah sipping mint tea, watching the ships come in, and feeling as though she owned the world.
She became a journalist, a foreign correspondent, following stories across the world and only settling down once in a while - but never long enough to build up a pension and a future.
A few years ago, thinking she had finally beat the travel bug, she left a perfectly fine and steady job to become a freelance journalist for a few months. She was gone three years, traveling with her backpack and one of the first portable laptops across Africa (12 countries), Asia (9 countries), Cuba, and the Baltic States.
From 1996-1999, she filed stories from many countries as a journalist concerned with development issues for The Earth Times, the Christian Science Monitor, many magazines and even websites - although electronic journalism was just beginning.
Today, Leyla works on issues of AIDS, environment and family planning, and manages her own website for backpacking women.
Have a backpacking question for our Woman on the Road? Post your questions here for Leyla and she'll answer them in a future post.
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