{"id":68258,"date":"2026-10-09T09:41:05","date_gmt":"2026-10-09T08:41:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/?p=68258"},"modified":"2026-10-09T09:42:04","modified_gmt":"2026-10-09T08:42:04","slug":"modern-nomads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/modern-nomads\/","title":{"rendered":"Modern Nomads"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photo by Helen Owl \/ wikimedia, CC BY-SA 4.0<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The nomadic contests stir a different kind of interest. Watching a rider in the saddle, you begin to sense a world beyond the record books. And a rather more intriguing one: in er enish, wrestling on horseback, staying on your horse matters far more than staying on the podium. That skill has been shaped not only by gruelling training on synthetic tracks, but by the memory and traditions of generations for whom it was a matter of survival. Sometimes an individual\u2019s. Sometimes an entire nation\u2019s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fourteen hours in an airport, waiting for a connecting flight. I feel like a nomad who has found pasture in the business lounge, with unlimited food and water, settled comfortably in an armchair rather than a saddle, facing a however-many-inch television showing the latest market prices for oats and kumis. Gold and oil, I mean. When they call my next flight, I\u2019ll be on the move again. The grazing is perfectly good, but I don\u2019t want to stay. I want to keep going. For all the settled habits of the modern world, there are far more nomads among us than we might imagine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Who are they, these people of the road? Tourists? Pilgrims? Touring performers or undercover intelligence officers? Executives of multinational corporations, or simply wanderers who once left home for the feeling of being on the move? I look at the faces in the smoking rooms of airport transit zones and see a different story in each. Some need to keep going. Others have had quite enough of the whole bloody business.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Marco Polo’s caravan. Detail from the Catalan Atlas, 1375 \/ Wikimedia<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Humans discovered the benefits of moving long before the pleasures of staying put. Our species left Africa, the cradle of humanity, in several waves, the most consequential around 50,000 years ago. Much of the spread of Homo sapiens across the planet is associated with that migration, but there was no concerted march to \u2018conquer the world\u2019. A thirst for adventure was probably not what drove our ancestors. Changes in the climate shifted the ranges of plants and animals; people followed the resources and found themselves in entirely unfamiliar territory. The Arabian Peninsula was not always a sandy desert.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some 10,000 years ago, livestock appears in the Neolithic settlements of the Middle East, and a herd of cattle takes human development in a new direction: into lands where growing crops would struggle to provide a living. The wheel arrives, then wagons, allowing families and possessions to travel with the herd. Across the Eurasian steppe, entire livelihoods take shape around these journeys. Mobile herding societies spread eastwards from the Black Sea as far as the Altai Mountains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In time, people take to horseback, and by the beginning of the first millennium BC, the familiar world of the steppe nomads is emerging. Scythians, Sarmatians, Cimmerians and Massagetae hold sway over vast territories, and settled peoples must reckon with them: trade, fight or make alliances. The steppe becomes an arena of high politics. In the third century BC, the Xiongnu establish a powerful confederation in what is now Mongolia, causing Chinese rulers no end of trouble. To defend against the nomads, Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of the Qin dynasty, begins building the Great Wall of China. The Turkic Khaganate emerges in the sixth century AD, and in the thirteenth, under Genghis Khan, the steppe world expands into an empire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet long before the Mongol horsemen, nomads of a very different kind were travelling these roads. Across the vast stretch of land between China and eastern Europe, connections were being made and trade routes were coming to life. Knowledge, technologies and ways of living travelled with the goods. Sogdian merchants built a whole network of trading outposts: some settled in commercial towns, while others accompanied caravans along the Silk Road. Commerce brought cultural exchange, and travelling from one place to another ceased to be solely a matter of conquest. Some fifteen centuries ago, the principles of modern nomadism were beginning to take shape. I would count Marco Polo among its forebears; the business lounge at Kublai Khan\u2019s court held little interest for him. After a couple of decades on the road, he brought his Venetian investors enough of other people\u2019s lives to fill a book we still read today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Several centuries separate Marco Polo from the person with a laptop at the airport. These days, you don\u2019t have to disappear for twenty years to live that way. Your work is on your laptop, your updates on your phone, your T-shirts and pants in your hand luggage. A musician can bring an entire studio along, while a sales rep needs little more than an internet connection between flights.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Photo by NHP&Co\/pexels<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Journalists, archaeologists, tattoo artists, pensioners on cruise ships and families in campervans, DJs, pilgrims, art and antiques dealers, salmon fishermen off Norway and biologists watching penguins on the Antarctic coast: all these people have left home in search of their own pasture. For some, it\u2019s seasonal work; for others, research; for others still, the chance to live differently. For some, being on the road pays for their usual life. For others, the road has become their usual life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I can no longer tell whether work keeps me moving or I look for work that will let me keep going. I like figuring out how unfamiliar places work, meeting people with whom, only yesterday, I had no connection, accumulating names and new entries in my contacts. If I have pastures of my own, this is where they are. I\u2019m closer to a Sogdian merchant than to one of Genghis Khan\u2019s warriors, but I can confidently count myself among the modern nomads carrying music, ideas and stories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Somewhere, sooner or later, they will be traded for new contracts and collaborations. This is my stock-in-trade. It needs no customs declaration, takes up no room in my suitcase, and there is more of it after every trip. Modern nomads don\u2019t settle in Costa Rica or Croatia, where there are no taxes to pay. They live in transit zones and meet in airport smoking rooms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The World Nomad Games in Kyrgyzstan became another pasture for me. We all arrived with very different baggage, crossed paths briefly, then left with something we hadn\u2019t brought. I came away with new names, ideas and this piece, which I\u2019m finishing as I wait to board. The brief stop on the shores of Issyk-Kul was a good one. Reason enough to return.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m on my way back from Kyrgyzstan and the World Nomad Games. Like the Olympics, they brought together thousands of competitors from practically every country in the world. Apart from Fiji and Barbados. There\u2019s only so far you can roam from an island. But the two events are very different. In Olympic sport, the pursuit of results has squeezed out the life, leaving doping scandals, athletes stripped of their national pride and biased judging in its place. The battle over a few hundredths of a second at the finish line no longer gives me the rush it did in Samaranch\u2019s day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":176,"featured_media":68259,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[144],"tags":[],"type_post":[184],"column":[489],"class_list":["post-68258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lifestyle","column-the-man-from-the-aeroplane"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/176"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68258"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68258\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68263,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68258\/revisions\/68263"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68258"},{"taxonomy":"type_post","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_post?post=68258"},{"taxonomy":"column","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/column?post=68258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}