A Malaysian Travel Writer Journey
Hi, I’m Shannim.
I’m a Malaysian travel writer, a mother of two boys, former Malaysia Airlines cabin crew and a woman who, more than three decades after first taking to the skies, still gets ridiculously excited about travelling.
I’ve been travelling since 1992 – back when flight tickets were on paper, train tickets meant figuring things out at the station, and booking a journey often involved an airline office, a travel agent or actually speaking to another human being.
A Lonely Planet guidebook was practically part of your luggage. Battered rucksacks were everywhere. And getting lost meant actually being lost – you asked people, pointed at things, got on the wrong bus and somehow figured it out.
There was no Google Translate. You learnt a few useful words before you arrived, attempted terrible pronunciation and resorted to sign language when all else failed.
And perhaps that’s one thing I miss about travelling before technology made everything so easy. You had to talk to people. You asked a stranger which bus to take. Someone walked you in the right direction. Sometimes neither of you understood a word the other was saying, but somehow you understood each other anyway.
I value that human connection enormously. I still ask people instead of reaching for my phone whenever I can. I talk to strangers. I want to know how they live, what they eat, what makes them laugh, what they worry about.
To me, the people have always been as important as the places.
Somehow, it all worked. I survived. And I loved it.
I loved arriving somewhere unfamiliar and having to figure things out. I loved the freedom of not quite knowing what would happen next.
I think that curiosity has followed me through most of my life.
I’ll ride a motocross bike for hours, not because I particularly care about the bike, but because of where it can take me – up volcanoes, along dirt tracks and into remote places I would never reach from the window of a car.
I learnt to snowboard in my late 40s for an equally simple reason: my boys could snowboard and I wanted to keep up with them.
I’m curious by nature and probably a little too willing to say yes to an adventure before working out the practicalities. I can sleep in a hut in Papua, spend days crossing the mountains of Tajikistan and then happily check into a luxury hotel and appreciate a very good bed.
I don’t think one makes me more adventurous than the other. I just love experiencing the world.
And becoming a mother didn’t change that. Instead, my two sons became part of the adventure.
They grew up backpacking with me, staying with the locals in the yurts in Mongolia, travelling on third-class trains through Sri Lanka, diving, trekking, eating whatever appeared on the table and learning very early that the world is much bigger than the one they know at home.
Somewhere along all those years, I realised the stories I brought home mattered to me almost as much as the journeys themselves.
So I started writing them down.
That became EpicAdventuress.
Travel has shaped the woman I became, the mother I became and, eventually, the writer I became.
Because I wasn’t a writer who decided to travel. I am a traveller who eventually realised I had stories to tell.
And I’m still telling them.
For collaborations, commissioned travel writing and destination storytelling, you can view my portfolio and work with me here.