Mat runs Leatherback Travel, the group behind Patch Adventures, Camino Women, Wayward Paper and many other in-house brands.

Travel shaped most of his life. His parents took him across most continents when he was young, and in his solo-traveller days he once booked a same-day flight on a whim, driving himself to the airport for a last-minute flight to Bali because he felt like it. That habit took him to South America, where he lived for years, met his wife Rebeca, and picked up fluent Spanish along the way.

These days he splits his time between Leatherback's brands, meeting ground partners in person. He still believes travel can shift how someone sees a place. Wayward Paper is the plainest version of that belief: slow enough to notice where you are, structured enough that noticing doesn't feel like work.

Val has spent over five years on the road, living in whichever country made sense that season. Management and art sit on equal footing for him. Art meaning music and photography, both played on stage and shot in wild places, not just admired from a seat. He's spent ten-plus years managing teams and building the kind of workflow that keeps something complicated running smoothly and on time.

He's equally at home managing a team, designing a workflow, playing rock music on stage, sitting through a ten-day silent retreat, directing a music video, or working out what a new AI tool can do for the problem in front of him. He studied Servant Leadership in the US, and treats people as seriously as he treats results. What he's after, in his own words, is impact, beauty, and systems that work.

Abdu has spent over twenty-four years guiding journeys across Central Asia, working with companies including National Geographic, Leatherback, Road Scholar and the Smithsonian. He's led travellers through Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, and grew up in Samarkand, among bazaars that change colour through the day and courtyards you could sit in all afternoon without reaching the end of what's in front of you.

He's also lived and worked in England and the US, and speaks Uzbek, Tajik, Farsi, Russian and English.

For Abdu, a sketching trip matches how he already believes travel should work: slow, unhurried, paying attention. He handles the arranging and the small problems in the background, so the only job left for the group is to look and draw.

Meet Astrid ten Bosch: watercolor artist, teacher, and strategic freelance illustrator. She organizes watercolor workshops, courses, weekends and retreats in the Netherlands and abroad, inviting others to sketch and paint too. For her, sketching is a way to slow down and really see what's in front of you. She carries a sketchbook everywhere: from Scandinavia to the streets of Mexico to the desert in Morocco: and never just one. She fell for watercolor because you can make something beautiful with it in no time, and it fits easily in a bag.

Originally trained as an architect, Marius is an ink and watercolour artist who has been sketching all over the world for over three years. After a long period of sketching in Australia and New Zealand, he traveled back to his home in the south of France by crossing all of Asia and Europe overland across more than 40,000km, capturing each place directly on-location with his paint and some sketchbooks.

Along the way, his instructional videos and courses on urban sketching have amassed a following of over 400,000 people online. Whether capturing a busy street corner, a quaint little village or a sweeping landscape, Marius likes to break down every scene into simple, approachable steps so that anyone, at any level, can learn to see and paint the world around them.