Biography Page

Victor Paul Borg grew up in a small remote island in the Mediterranean. When he was a toddler he used to join his father or uncle in the countryside: working in the family’s orchards and the fields, picking up wild capers and herbs, fishing for sea breams, and scavenging for limpets and other edible seashells along the shoreline – a rural and outdoorsy upbringing that proved to be a formative influence. He went on to study veterinary science and agriculture at university, and in his teenage years he became deeply involved in the environmental movement; for several years he worked in agriculture and nature conservation. He furthered his practical studies in Parma, Italy, where he learned about the cure, recuperation, and rehabilitation of injured wild birds, and then set up his own wild bird hospital.  

Such passion for nature and environmentalism has never departed him – it has influenced his life-journey – and his compulsion for writing and photography arose out of his activism in nature conservation. Such interest became vocational; and after studying the craft of writing and photography, he began to write and take pictures commercially for magazines and newspapers as a freelancer. As his freelancing evolved, Victor moved to larger places – he spent a year in Berlin first, and then he moved to London, where he lived for several years. It was in London that Victor’s writing and photography developed most rapidly, and for much of the past 15 years he has made a living almost solely from freelance writing and photography for magazines.    

Eventually, when he got fidgety feet in London, he went travelling to Asia and ended up staying in Asia for the past ten years. Initially, he based himself in Bangkok, where he wrote about Southeast Asia for various magazines. He travelled constantly, exploring virtually every part of Southeast Asia. And, although Bangkok is the base he always returned to, he also spent an extended time – a cumulative time of more than one year – in other Asian countries, namely Laos, Malaysia, India, and the Philippines. Eventually, the lure and challenge of China beckoned, and Victor moved to China.

      

Throughout his freelancing career, Victor has been published in books and magazines and newspapers in virtually all corners of the world, but particularly in England and America and Asia. His writing has mostly focused on his core interests – nature, environmentalism, geography, culture, and food – covering those subjects from a travel-related perspective mostly. He disdains the moniker of ‘travel writer’ because he considers a lot of the writing that passes as travel writing to be dull and trite – by contrast, Victor likes to do stories about people and places and culture and nature, sometimes singly and sometimes in combination, either as features or geographic reportage, and sometimes writes features about what’s innovative and emerging in travel itself. But that’s not all; Victor also writes in other genres – commentaries or opinions, literary essays, memoir, service pieces, and news features about environmental issues mostly. Victor’s writing and photography has been published in some of the world’s leading magazines and newspapers.  

In recent years, Victor has also been doing some other related work. He taught photography at a leading art school in Malta, and he has also undertaken the occasional consultancy job – most notably for a hotel group in Thailand, as well as the tourism bureau responsible for a local prefecture in west China. Every year he also does a few exclusive tours for private groups of travellers in the mountains of Sichuan, China. These are special journeys of discovery in which Victor takes like-minded travellers to discover the vast nature and rich culture of the mountains in west China, going to the kind of locations that are not mentioned in guidebooks or included in the itineraries of established tour operators – the idea is to take clients to the special locations that Victor himself discovers during his intrepid travels.  

There is a common streak in all of Victor’s interests, arising out of the influences of his formative years in a tiny Mediterranean island. In those early years, he wallowed in nature and rural living, and acquired the countryside ethos and wholesomeness that continues to define all the work he does and inform his values and way of life.    

Organic Journeys