About

Welcome #

I’m Ibi, and this is my little blog.

If you want me in a single sentence, I’m a musician and a wanderer. What does that mean? It means I travel, I make music, and I love building fires and cooking over them. Mostly, I’m trying to leave people, and the world, a little better than I found them.

The long and short of it is this. I’m British, but I’m also Indian. Or possibly Pakistani. We still haven’t worked that one out. I haven’t had a fixed home since 2019. These days I move between colivings, though I only discovered those in 2024. Before that I did a lot of strange digital nomad things, like living in my car. I travel with my handpan and my camera, so I play music in the places I visit and photograph what happens there.

What’s on this site #

Every month gets its own theme, its own capsule. Inside each capsule you’ll find a set of photos, some music, a conversation with someone I met along the way, and my own thoughts and reflections.

I publish each capsule a month after I’ve lived it, so I’ve had time to work out what it was actually about. The more months pass, the further back you’ll be able to dig, though my first capsule went up in August 2026, so that’s where the timeline starts.

You’ll find a little fire on every capsule. Press it, and my handpan music plays while you read. Enjoy.

How I got here #

My journey hasn’t been a straight line. I grew up in a cult in West London. Yes, a cult. It had a big impact on me, but eventually my very wise mother decided to leave, which turned out to be an excellent idea.

After that I studied neuro-linguistic programming, becoming the youngest practitioner in the UK in 2014. Learning how the subconscious mind actually works changed everything for me. School got easy. Learning got easy. I found I could excel at most things I set my mind to.

In 2016 I joined Deloitte straight out of school, and spent the next few years on major programmes for banks, big companies and governments. It taught me an enormous amount about how large organisations really work. Most of my time went into cyber warfare, including one of Russia’s major cyber attacks against Ukraine that went wrong.

Then in 2017, while working for HSBC in their enormous London skyscraper, I listened to a podcast called World Wanderers, about people working remotely while travelling around Asia. The idea of being a digital nomad lodged itself in my head and never left. Funny how things turn out. Now I make a podcast just like that one. I left Deloitte at twenty-one to build a life that travels, and so far it’s going rather well.

My digital nomad life #

The early years weren’t especially glamorous. A lot of solo travel, a spell living in my car, and a few years where money came and went.

I launched an Egyptian drum business specialising in the darbuka, the drum you hear behind belly dancing. It grew fast, and by volume we became the biggest seller of those drums in Europe, with warehouses in London, Germany, Egypt and the US. Eventually I sold it to an Egyptian musical instrument powerhouse, who carried it on from there. The business taught me a great deal, but mostly it taught me I didn’t actually want to be an entrepreneur. Being one means handing your life over to the business, stress and all. What I wanted was the lifestyle, not the weight that came with it.

So in 2022 I got a remote job instead. I even moved back to London while settling into it, despite it being fully remote. I was happy for six months, right up until they fired me. Rather inconvenient. So I packed everything I owned into my car with my girlfriend at the time and we drove into Europe, and kept driving until we found a small house in Greece, where we stayed for a year.

I was jobless for three of those months, until I reached out to a client I’d worked with before and won an engagement of my own. That became the founding of Earthas DNCS. That company has done remarkably well, and it’s the reason I can run this blog and my other side projects, like darbuka.org and ihandpan.com.

All in all, a strange journey, but I like where it’s landed. I’m a solopreneur, and I make money from the internet. That’s really all you need to know, because that’s what a digital nomad is.