About

The Long Road to Owilybug

I’m Jonathan Hodgson—a Vancouver-based tour leader, photographer and lifelong traveller. Since 1994, my travel and work has taken me across more than 140 countries, although my curiosity about the wider world began long before travel became my profession.

Owilybug Travel brings the different parts of that life together: years spent leading groups, a camera rarely far from reach, and an enduring interest in people, places and the unexpected stories found along the way.

A Life Shaped by Place

Home has never meant just one place

I’ve lived in Scotland, Australia, Uzbekistan and several Canadian cities, and each has influenced how I see the world. For roughly 25 years, Vancouver has been my home base—the place I return to between journeys and where Owilybug Travel is now based.

Living in different countries taught me that the most interesting parts of a place are rarely confined to its headline attractions. They are found in everyday rhythms, conversations, humour and small details that take time to notice. That curiosity continues to shape both how I lead and how I photograph the world.

So, What on Earth is an Owilybug?

A Scottish mountain, a questionable line of poetry and a name that stuck

The story begins in 1997, during the inaugural summer of Castle Rock Hostel in Edinburgh, where I was working at the time. One day, receptionist Sheralee MacDonald and I joined staff from several other hostels on an outing with a start-up tour company to the Trossachs.

The day included a five-hour hike up Ben Venue. Somewhere along the way—perhaps inspired by the scenery, the fresh air or simply the novelty of escaping from behind the hostel desk—I drifted into a moment of impromptu and highly questionable poetry.

One of the immortal lines—and I use “immortal” very loosely—went something like:

“O wily bug, O you art thou so wily…”

I would like to blame the altitude, but Ben Venue is not nearly high enough to support that defence. More likely, it was simply the product of a summer mood, a good walk and the sort of travel silliness that flourishes when people are outdoors and not behaving entirely normally.

And so, somehow, Owilybug was born.

Years later, when I created a business card for my original website, the “bug” acquired a visual identity: a scruffy, hand-drawn creature with a startled blue face, sketchy wings and limbs, and a bright red maple leaf behind him—part oddball insect, part travel mascot and part tiny emblem of Canadian absurdity abroad.

There was no corporate branding strategy, focus group or marketing plan. Just a long-ago walk in Scotland, a bad line of poetry and a name that refused to disappear.