When I arrived in Jamaica in 1969, I was a twenty-three-year-old quantity surveyor from Birmingham with a one-way ticket and very little idea what I was getting into. Within weeks, I had moved in with a young Jamaican pilot, was flying in small planes over the Blue Mountains, and spending weekends on beaches in Westmoreland. I was blessed to become immersed in Jamaican society and culture early on — not as a tourist passing through, but as someone living inside it.
That immersion set the pattern for the next five decades. Through my career in construction across the Caribbean and my travels with my wife Vivian to more than 120 countries, I have come to believe that the most valuable education I ever received did not come from a classroom or a boardroom. It came from showing up in unfamiliar places with an open mind and paying attention.
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. My wife bought me a leather-bound travel journal early in our marriage, and I filled it religiously at every destination. That journal became the foundation of much of my book. Re-reading it while writing was not only a pleasure but deeply cathartic — because what I found on those pages was not a record of places visited but a record of assumptions overturned.
One example stays with me. In 2024, Vivian and I were traveling from Tbilisi to Baku on Azerbaijan Airlines. Vivian had reluctantly agreed to fly on what she assumed would be a third-world carrier for a one-hour hop. What we encountered was an efficient business-class check-in, an excellent first-class lounge, a brand-new Airbus with proper first-class seats, a choice of champagne and wines, and a beautifully prepared meal. So much for preconceptions. We later flew Lufthansa on the return leg and found it had earned the title, as far as we were concerned, of “not the world’s favourite airline.” The lesson was simple and humbling: the quality of an experience rarely correlates with the assumptions you bring to it.
I learned a version of the same lesson much earlier, in my first visit back to England after three years in the Caribbean. I started telling friends about the places I had been — Ecuador, Haiti, St. Kitts — and it quickly turned into what I can only describe as a tennis match. “I’ve been to Ecuador.” “Well, we were in Benidorm.” Back and forth. I soon learned that it was best to keep fairly subdued about what you had been doing, otherwise the listeners’ eyes glazed over. That early experience taught me something that has served me in every culture since: humility about your own story is the price of admission to someone else’s.
Some of the most memorable lessons came from the most unexpected settings. In Bangkok, Vivian and I took a cooking class that required traveling by a series of water taxis deep into the city’s waterways until we arrived at what appeared to be a garage. It was actually a boatshed, and behind it stood a beautiful two-story mahogany Thai house belonging to our hostess, Pip. My first task was to sit on a low stool and grate coconut flesh into a bowl with a metal scraper. You do not learn that from a guidebook. You learn it by sitting on the stool.
In Azerbaijan, our driver Xalid navigated mountain roads in a Russian-built Lada with no upholstery on the back seat — just a carpet draped over it. He started the engine by having our guide turn the ignition while he poked the starter motor with a piece of rebar. When the brake pads overheated on a steep descent, he freewheeled down the mountain with the engine off. That evening, after an extraordinary hike to a frozen waterfall inside a cave and a home-cooked lamb soup prepared by a local family, I told Xalid the day’s entertainment had been worth far more than any five-star resort. I meant it.
T.S. Eliot wrote that the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. I have found that to be profoundly true. Every country I have visited has sent me home understanding my own life and work a little differently — and usually with at least one assumption quietly dismantled.
For anyone looking to travel more intentionally, here are a few principles I would pass along:
- Immerse, don’t observe. The difference between a trip and an education is participation. Move in with the locals if you can. Take the cooking class. Sit on the stool. The version of a country you experience from inside someone’s home is entirely different from the one you see from a hotel balcony.
- Check your preconceptions at the gate. The airline you dismissed may outperform the one you trusted. The country you underestimated may teach you the most. Travel with curiosity, not assumptions, and let every experience earn its own verdict.
- Keep a journal — and be honest in it. Write down not just where you went but what surprised you, what you got wrong, and what changed your mind. Decades later, those entries will be worth more than any photograph, because they capture who you were becoming, not just where you were standing.
- Practice humility about your own story. Nobody wants to sit across from someone narrating their adventures like a highlight reel. Listen more than you tell. The fastest way to connect with someone from a different culture — or your own — is to be genuinely interested in theirs.
Written By Martyn Bould, author of More Than Just The Climb: Life’s Lessons Well Learned (Unicorn Publishing, 2025)
Martyn Bould is a highly successful entrepreneur based in the Cayman Islands. He is a founding member for the Cayman National Cultural Foundation and the National Gallery of the Cayman Islands. He was honored by Queen Elizabeth II in 2012 for services in preserving and developing Caymanian culture, and by the Cayman Islands Government in the 2025 Hero’s Day Awards as a Legacy Builder for laying the groundwork for future economic development since 1970. His memoir, More than Just the Climb – Life’s Lessons Well Learned(Unicorn, Nov. 24, 2025), weaves his personal journey alongside the transformation of the Cayman Islands. Learn more here.
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