Travel Stories

Norfolk Island: An island of great Bounty

22 Feb 2010 | 7 min read

“So, here we are on Norfolk Island,” said Richard as we stood by the baggage carousel and beneath the sign which read “Welkam tu Norf’k alien”. “Welcome to Norfolk Island,” I said pointing to the weird wording in the local dialect. He took it in, then added with the raise of an eyebrow: “And why not?” It is easy to be cynical about... > Read more

Kath and Donald: Norfuk es awas Hoem

Vancouver Island, Canada: Cocktails by the highway

8 Feb 2010 | 4 min read

My Canadian friend Bob would often tell me that there was a highway right outside his house, and then he’d laugh loudly. I didn’t think that was a laughing matter -- until I went to his beautiful ocean-side apartment in Victoria on Vancouver Island. As we sat on his patio sipping cocktails in the late afternoon he swept his hand towards the blue harbour in front of him and said,... > Read more

Edinburgh, Scotland: Connected in the family

7 Feb 2010 | 3 min read

This may seem unusual -- especially given I was born in Scotland -- but it is true: my godfather was Italian. And I say that hoping never to be troubled again by pesky creditors or door-to-door religious groups. When I was born my parents, who weren’t especially religious, had me baptised and asked their good friend Dominic Valente -- whom we always called Uncle Dom -- to be my... > Read more

Uluru/Ayers Rock, Outback Australia: Into the great wide open

7 Feb 2010 | 3 min read | 1

>Uluru at the close of another cloudless day in the desert. In the designated “sunset viewing spot” a few kilometres from the big red rock, campervans and cars are arriving. In this tiny part of the seemingly endless landscape, largely silent except for the whistle of wind through scrubby Spinifex and myrtle trees, the air is alive with the sound of beer cans being cracked open,... > Read more

Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu: Djarimirri (from The Rough Guide to Australian Aboriginal Music)

Golden Triangle, Thailand: Paradise without the soundtrack

7 Jan 2010 | 2 min read

What is that wise old saying: be careful what you wish for, you might just get it? Raymond got a wish come true, but I suspect it was mine. I met him at the luxurious Anantara Resort and Spa in Thailand's Golden Triangle where my room with a private terrace overlooking the steamy jungle cost around $1200 a night. After I had relaxed in the pool-sized bath with its rose petals and... > Read more

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: Old and new, the same but different

26 Oct 2009 | 5 min read

In Kuala Lumpur which offers a colourful multicultural tapestry of life, it was a small but significant image: just before the expensive frockshop in the up-market Starhill Gallery opened the middle-aged cleaning woman in a headscarf snapped off the vacuum cleaner and answered her cellphone. Behind her on a massive flat-screen a barely dressed blonde gazelle in high heels hip-swayed down a... > Read more

Paris, France: Clubbed by culture

24 Oct 2009 | 1 min read

We were -- with a few exceptions in the café -- exhausted foot soldiers in the Art Wars. The small café where we found ourselves that late afternoon, on the corner of Rue de l’Universite about 15 minutes walk from the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, was our r’n’r refuge for an invigorating pastis, cold Belgian beer or coffee. Time to recover from a day of big ticket... > Read more

Melaka, Peninsula Malaysia: The cuisine capital of Malaysia

18 Oct 2009 | 6 min read

Bong comes out of her busy kitchen in the elegant Seri Nyonya Peranakan Restaurant to explain how she learned the Baba-Nyonya culinary style unique to the town of Melaka, here on Malaysia’s west coast. “No, they do not teach this in any schools,” she laughs. “You have to learn it from when you are very young. I learned this style from my family in the kitchen at... > Read more

Samoa: A stranger in paradise (2001)

2 Oct 2009 | 6 min read | 2

As a tourist carrying stress into Samoa you notice things by their absence. Ordinary, boring stuff like clocks and timetables, cellphones and power-dressers in black, graffiti and rubbish, and haste and urgency. And surprisingly, New Zealand accents. In 2000 fewer than 7000 New Zealand tourists flew the 3 1/2 hours to Apia, Samoa's largest town. In the same period almost 50,000 chose... > Read more

Bordeaux, France: Paradise and lunch

13 Sep 2009 | 5 min read

As I looked across the manicured box-hedge to the garden where peacocks ambled, and then on up the orderly rows of grape vines marching towards the 18th century chateau, the thought occurred to me: if the prettiest part of Paradise -- with a cellar of more than 15,000 wines -- were transported to our world then it would look exactly like this. The thought didn't linger however because my... > Read more

Pearl Harbor, Hawaii: Sunday morning, coming down

24 Jun 2009 | 4 min read

The sky is a perfect and pale comic-book blue, the breeze as warm as a whisper. Palm trees line the white sandy beach, the very image of a Pacific cliché. In the downtown streets before the shops and offices open people make their sleepy, slow way to work. It is the start to yet another balmy December day in Honolulu. And on just such a morning, I remind myself as I wait for a taxi,... > Read more

Jake Shimabukuro: The Star Spangled Banner

Buenos Aires, Argentina: Little Eva

15 May 2009 | 4 min read

As the large drops of intermittent rain turned to persistent drizzle, people on the streets hurried to find shelter, but in this city of the dead there was very little. People disappeared into whatever tiny alcoves they could find, some ran to the gates, and the huge cemetery in the Recoleta district of Buenos Aires took on an eerie grey pallor under sullen skies. But even on this damp... > Read more

Nelly Omar: La criolla

Anywhere Elsewhere: The romance of the road

3 May 2009 | 3 min read

Among my hundreds of photographs in boxes or in my laptop are rather too many of variations on the same theme: a road ahead as seen through the windscreen. In some it is an unforgivingly straight line of bitumen to the hazy horizon with the Arizona desert on each side, in others it undulates through rural Georgia, in yet more it is winding snake of dust through the Australian Outback, in... > Read more

Wayne Hancock: Flat Land Boogie

Sunshine Coast, Australia: Land, sea and me

30 Apr 2009 | 15 min read

There are things you do on holiday you’d never contemplate at home: like careering around a race track with your backside just centimetres above the tarmac. I’m throwing my go-kart into S-bends, accelerating out of corners, feeling the simultaneous rush of fear and laughter as I hit the hairpin too fast . . . I don’t usually do this but here on the Big Kart Track just... > Read more

Didjitalis: Sunrise Session

Ko Samet, Thailand: Lonely days

26 Mar 2009 | 2 min read

Greg would have been hard to miss in most places, but on the small beach at the southern end of Ko Samet -- a tiny teardrop-shaped island off to the east of Bangkok -- he was impossible to overlook. It wasn't just that he was, shall we say, a large man. Or that he was conspicuously gay. And it wasn't even that he carried the pampered Miss Spitty, a white Pomeranian, with him everywhere.... > Read more

Mendocino, California: On the road again

6 Mar 2009 | 1 min read

Sal introduced himself in the lounge bar of the Hotel Mendocino in the mellow seaside town about four hours north of San Francisco. "I'm a Ferrari doctor," he said. That figured. The hotel dining room had been fully booked by those on the Mille Miglia, a 1000 mile tour for cars manufactured between 1927 and 1957. The street outside was gleaming with much-loved, classic cars,... > Read more

Hawaii: Where Nature shows off

3 Dec 2008 | 5 min read | 1

The dramatically beautiful island of Kaua’i -- a 20 minute flight from Honolulu and not to be missed -- is where Nature shows off in the towering cliffs and deep valleys of the largely impassable Na Pali coast. However Kaua’i, known as the Garden Island, is also a place of intimate details and easy to self-drive around, a place where you take life and the day at its own pace,... > Read more

Barcelona, Spain: Sex and drunks and rock'n'roll

22 Nov 2008 | 4 min read | 1

Warning: this article contains sexually graphic and amusing content. There was no suitable excuse to be standing outside Barcelona’s Museu de l’Erotica. It was a dreary mid-morning and the sky had a hangover. So did I. The previous evening, which stretched close to dawn, I had stumbled on the district known as El Raval. It’s curious what you find when looking... > Read more

San Francisco and Seattle: are you talkin' to me?

16 Nov 2008 | 2 min read

It was at a mayoral dinner function in Seoul recently and I had got dressed up. For the previous few days my young interpreter had seen me in jeans and an open-neck shirt -- so I guess it was her surprise at my well-groomed appearance in dinner jacket, pale pink shirt and red tie that made her startled. “You are very handsome, Mr Graham,” she said with the kind of charm I am... > Read more

The Dordogne, France: Where centuries roll back

27 Oct 2008 | 4 min read

Half an hour out of Bordeaux I stop the car so we can gasp at the beauty of a crumbling chateau on a picture perfect hillside. Ten minutes later I do the same above a valley deliberately posing for a photograph. A few kilometres further it’s for an old stone house by the roadside. The day is clear and radiant blue, the breeze warm, and the architecture and landscapes quaint or... > Read more