Woven Journeys

Home
New Zealand
Wellington
Woven Journeys

Directions Website

Helping Families Worldschool in New Zealand | Bespoke Regenerative Travel Design in NZ & SE Asia

03/11/2026

“Take only photos, leave only footprints” sounds great. But if we’re being completely honest, leaving a fragile ecosystem in the exact state we found it isn’t enough anymore. We need to leave the soil richer.

When I design a travel experience, everything hangs on what I call the Three Thriving Threads: Traveller Thrives, Communities Thrive and Nature Thrives. People sometimes wonder what that actually looks like in reality. The honest answer is that it varies, depending on who the journey is designed for and what they care about.

It can be as subtle as staying with local hosts who have deep roots in the valley, keeping your spend directly in the community that looks after it. As exhilarating as flying through an ancient forest canopy where part of your ticket helps fund the predator trapping that’s bringing native birds back. Or as hands-on as spending a morning planting native species with a local community group, a project that was under way long before you arrived and will carry on long after you leave.

Whichever it is, the pattern is the same: the traveller comes away reconnected, the local community genuinely benefits on their own terms, and the land is that much closer to thriving because your journey contributed to the work.

What would “leaving it richer” look like in the places you love to travel?

29/10/2026

Capital cities are rarely the first choice for worldschooling families. They move too fast, pull you away from nature, and optimise for tourists passing through rather than families putting down temporary roots.

Wellington, New Zealand is different.

From wild seal colonies along the rugged coast to a daily train rhythm that quietly gave my four-year-old his confidence, our two weeks here showed me what worldschooling in a capital city can really look like.

I’ve just published a new piece on Substack exploring why Wellington might be the ideal worldschooling base. Find the link in the comments.

26/10/2026

The best lessons I’ve witnessed didn’t happen in a classroom. They happened on a bus, at a market, in the jungle or in a local friend’s kitchen.

More recently, they happened at a row of boat sheds, watching my four year old read the numbered doors and figure out which number came next. At a train platform where he pointed out the letters he recognised in the writing on the ground. At a museum, where he stood in awe of deep sea creatures and played an interactive game about deep-sea trawling.

Travel doesn’t teach the way most schools do. It doesn’t announce the lesson or test you afterwards. It just puts you in situations that require something of you — curiosity, adaptability, confidence, patience — and trusts you to rise. That’s true at four. It’s true at thirty-four.

The destinations that do this best aren’t always the obvious ones. They’re the places layered enough to keep revealing themselves. Where the learning isn’t designed — it just happens, because you showed up and paid attention.

This is what I think about when I design journeys for curious travellers — whatever their age. Not what they’ll see. What they’ll learn when they go into a trip with the right mindset.

Still processing what two weeks in one city can hold. I'm feeling inspired so stay tuned for more musings soon.

But first, I'm curious - where has travel taught you something a classroom never could?

21/10/2026

“What are you wanting to see there?” my friend asked about my upcoming student exchange to Canada.

National Parks, the Rockies, maybe even a bear — the words came easily enough. But they weren’t the real answer.

What I was actually chasing was harder to name. A curiosity about a different way of life. The quiet suspicion that the world was bigger and stranger than the version I’d grown up with — even for a country that shares a language, a monarchy and a fondness for rugby.

I wanted to feel that strangeness. I just didn’t have words for it yet.

Canada cracked something open.

After university I moved to China, and kept moving — through Southeast Asia, through years of work, curiosity and the kind of immersion that changes you without announcing it. New languages, new cultures, new versions of myself in places that had no obligation to make sense to me.

It was only when life asked me to start over that I understood what those years had actually given me.

Resilience. Adaptability. The ability to sit with uncertainty without it breaking me. The knowledge that I had started from scratch before — and found my way.

Travel didn’t announce these gifts. It just quietly deposited them, and moved on.

What it didn’t prepare me for was coming home.

Reverse culture shock is real. The disorientation of returning somewhere familiar — except it had changed, and so had I. The constant comparison. The sense of not quite fitting back into the shape I’d left behind.

I didn’t have a framework for integrating what I’d experienced. I figured it out alone, slowly, the hard way.

That’s why I design travel differently now. Not just the journey itself — but what comes before and what follows after. The mindset you bring. The space you give yourself to process it when you return. The difference between an experience that fades and one that actually changes something.

I'm curious to know, what did travel give you that you only noticed when you needed it most?

13/10/2026

I used to think a trip ended when I got home.

It doesn’t.

Some of the most meaningful shifts from my travels only revealed themselves weeks, months or even years later. In a conversation that landed differently. In a decision I made without realising why. In a perspective I didn’t know I’d developed until I needed it.

Transformation through travel isn’t dramatic. It’s learning. It happens in ordinary moments after you return — when the experience starts to integrate into how you actually live. Worldschooling families know that, subconsciously or not, and perhaps that’s the reason I see so much alignment between transformative travel and worldschooling.

The question I’m sitting with now: how do we design for this reality? Not just the journey itself, but what comes after.

If you’re a family considering worldschooling in New Zealand, I’ve just launched 1:1 online sessions to help you gain clarity on what your journey could really look like.

More info here: https://www.woven-journeys.com/worldschooling-newzealand

06/10/2026

I'm not going to tell you every travel decision needs to be a moral calculation. It doesn't. Sometimes you just need a coffee.

But when the coffee also happens to fund a youth barista training programme — and it’s sitting on one of Wellington's most beloved streets — that's the kind of win I've come to love.

Stories Café sits at the bottom of Cuba Street in Wellington. Run by youth organisation Zeal Wellington, it's where young people learn barista skills and gain their first paid work experience. The coffee is excellent. The story behind it is even better.

It got me thinking about the places I return to, wherever I am in the world, for exactly the same reason.

In Hanoi, it's KOTO — Vietnam's first social enterprise, started with nine street kids and a sandwich shop in 1999. Today it runs a 24-month hospitality training programme for disadvantaged youth, giving them internationally accredited qualifications and a pathway out of poverty. Over 1,700 graduates now work in leading hotels and restaurants across Vietnam. You can dine at their training restaurant or join a cooking class — either way, your meal helps fund the next generation of trainees.

In Chiang Mai, it's Free Bird Café — a social enterprise supporting Thai Freedom House, which provides education, shelter and community for displaced people from Myanmar and ethnic minorities living without legal status in Thailand. Brunch there helps fund language classes, safe housing and a future for people who have very few options.

And then there's Zambrero — a Mexican restaurant chain with a Plate 4 Plate model. Every burrito you order donates a meal to someone in need. Over 70 million meals and counting.

These places do require a little research, some local know-how. That's exactly where I come in.

This is the version of intentional travel I believe in. Not perfect. Not paralysing. Just trying to leave things a little better than you found them.

29/09/2026

There is a small studio outside Hội An, Vietnam.

A fish pond in front of it. A twenty-minute bicycle ride from town. No sign. No listing. No way to find it unless someone who knows opens the door for you.

The woman who runs it — Lê Thúy — doesn't take visitors. Her real work is silk and lacquer, held in collections across three continents. The indigo is something closer to research. She has spent years working out how to pull colour from the plant using a live bacteria culture instead of heat. A method that takes nothing but time and effort — and reaches a depth of blue that heat never quite gets to.

She is not in any travel catalogue. She won't be.

This is what I mean when I talk about regenerative travel. Not just locally owned accommodation or community-led activities — though those matter deeply. It's also about the relationships that take years to build quietly before a door like this one opens.

The partners I work with have put in those years. That's not something you buy. It's something you earn — through trust, through values alignment, through the same quiet conversation going the right way, over and over again.

Access to intimate moments like this isn't a selling point. It's a responsibility. And one I take seriously.

When I design a journey, I'm not just curating an itinerary. I'm stewarding relationships that took years to build, and making sure the travellers who enter them understand their true value.

22/09/2026

When I tell people I design "regenerative travel experiences" many people are not quite sure what that means.

Actually, this photo provides a better answer than any definition I could write. What do you see?

In the photo, two pairs of hands are holding the same basket. One pair has known this craft for a lifetime. The other — mine — was learning it for the first time. She's from Trang province in Thailand. We met at a Thailand Tourism convention. But for that hour, none of that context mattered. Fully engaged in a joint effort to weave together something both beautiful and useful — I wasn't a foreigner observing a tradition from a respectful distance. I was inside it.

That's where it starts.

Regenerative tourism isn't a certification or a carbon offset. It's a fundamental rethink of what travel is for, and who it serves.

It means choosing accommodation owned by a local family, not a platform that extracts commission and sends the profit elsewhere. It means activities where your presence creates genuine value — economic, cultural, human — for the people delivering them. It means slowing down enough to actually meet the place you're in, rather than consuming a version of it designed for tourists.

I know what it costs operators when bookings flow through platforms instead of directly to them. I've worked with enough of them to understand what that leakage means for a family business, a community, an artisan trying to survive.

That knowledge shapes every decision I make when designing a journey.

Not just what you experience as the traveller. But also who benefits from you being there.

10/09/2026

This is me at a festival in Northern Thailand. The Hmong people were celebrating their New Year in full force.

I didn't plan to end up covered in flour. I just showed up, said yes, and stopped worrying about what I looked like.

That's been my approach to most things that have taught me something worth knowing.

Years of moving through Asia — working, living, getting it wrong, occasionally getting it very right — taught me that the most valuable thing you can bring to a new place isn't a good camera or a strict itinerary.

It's a willingness to be in it. Fully. Even when that means flour in your eyebrows.

That's the experience I bring to every journey I design. Not research from a desk. Something considerably messier and more useful than that.

What's the most unexpectedly joyful moment you've had while travelling?

Address

Wellington

Website

https://www.woven-journeys.com/, https://linktr.ee/woven.journeys, https://tinyurl.com/worldschoolingnzFB

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Woven Journeys posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.