Both restless and relentlessly curious, Nigel Buckland is the epitome of a traveller, in the gratifyingly anachronistic manner of Eric Newby and Wilfred Thesiger. A temperamental observer without a safe harbour, he declines the studied urbanity of the acerbic cultural flâneur - roll over Jonathan Meades and Will Self – for the straitened climes of the world’s fastnesses, the realm of real people, counter-intuitive kindness, and echoing deserts.

By his own admission an Islamophile and a lover of emptiness, there are clues to Nigel’s urge to travel in his fulsome, and equally footloose biography. Born in Halifax, raised in a family with a strong military history – his ancestors have served since at least the Seven Years' War of 1756 – his early ambition to be a soldier bore fruit when he passed out from Sandhurst in the early Eighties, headed a platoon in Londonderry’s Bogside during the Troubles, and subsequently served in the Balkans and the Middle East, before leaving the army as a Major in 1999 to accommodate the demands of a growing family.

His CV is nothing if not eclectic: numbering among his subsequent career moves, a spell as head of security at a large Leeds nightclub, an interlude at what he fondly terms ‘the evil empire’ of the RBS whose good offices took him to India and China, and latterly a successful trajectory at Beckett University, where a combination of, in his own word, ‘blagging’, and the immense good fortune of being surrounded by very able staff, led him to the pinnacle of an IT Directorship.

The tendency to self-effacement is both typical of the man, and a wild understatement: his experiences, especially military, have been ‘defining’, yielding a window on his instinct for adventure and absorbing interest in how others endure, often cheerfully, and often in penury. His recent travels have taken him to Kerala and the Lebanon, to the Atlas mountains in Morocco and across the Northern Sahara desert in his adapted Land Rover. Keeping a diary and photographic record of his journeys, of remote outposts and peoples, Nigel’s observations are both unique and compelling, organic testimonies of an innate, glass-half-full optimism for which ‘missed opportunities’ are anathema.

This February, Nigel Buckland is taking an offbeat sabbatical around the island of Sri Lanka in the company of his daughter, Rachel, and we at Yorkshire Times Newspapers are privileged to be hosting a blog record of their adventure as it progresses.

Watch this space for his first instalment…