Travel Stories

Maharashtra state, India: Riding the rail

9 Jun 2013 | 6 min read

In the historic, temple-filled and rather wealthy Indian city of Kolhapur a couple of hours north of Goa there's a glimpse of a past which is appealingly distant but also curiously contemporary. The day I arrive at the New Palace – an imposing 150-year old building in the Indo-Gothic style commanding spacious grounds – it is the day of the famously crazy and colourful Holi... > Read more

Canterbury, England: Murder and more in the cathedral

25 May 2013 | 2 min read

So the murder was good for business then, Mike?“It was the biggest cash cow the cathedral had known,” laughs Mike Evans, one of the guides at Canterbury Cathedral, the spiritual home of the Anglican Church and where Thomas Becket was murdered in 1170. Evans, who retired from a sales career in London and returned to his childhood home of Canterbury some years ago, mixes... > Read more

Canterbury, England: Some different tales, bear with me

17 Feb 2013 | 4 min read

Although the famous cathedral is rightly considered the physical and emotional centre of Canterbury in England, the historic old town holds other delights and diversions, especially if you are there with children who might not see the point of dead people made of stone and really big stained glass windows. And, after a few hours of peering at strange inscriptions about people we never... > Read more

Essaouira, Morocco: Light at the end of the day

6 Jan 2013 | 5 min read | 1

He was offering cakes, small dry round things which looked pretty unappetizing, but that wasn't what he was really selling. After the tray had been presented and I'd waved it away, with a flash of his hand he opened his palm and whispered urgently, “You want?” There, in a tight dark ball, was a lump of hashish. In earlier times we might have done the deal, but these days .... > Read more

Kunming, China: The song of the stones

16 Dec 2012 | 2 min read

At one point Lily, our guide from the Yi people -- a prominent ethnic group in this area of southwest China – stops as we visitors negotiate our way through the surreal formations of the famous Stone Forest near the city of Kunming. As the four of us stand beneath sky-pointing fingers of blue-grey rock, Lily says this area is the traditional home of her Yi people (pronounced... > Read more

Stonehenge, England: Everybody must get stoned

17 Nov 2012 | 3 min read | 3

A couple of years ago when Britain's English Heritage was again getting fretful over the increasing number of tourists arriving at Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain, a wag wrote a pithy one-liner to a major daily. If whoever erected those monolithic stones was so smart, he asked, why did they build it near a motorway? Certainly if you wander around the site in Wiltshire of this... > Read more

Kunming, China: Escape from the haste

14 Oct 2012 | 3 min read

Kunming – the capital of Yunnan province in south west China – doesn't do quiet. With a population around 6.5 million (and, improbably, a sister city to New Plymouth since 2003), Kunming delivers confusion, haste, noise and its own peculiar order in the apparent chaos of motorcycles and scooters which flit between buses, tracks, cars and pedestrians. Crowded buses wheeze... > Read more

Amsterdam, Holland: Ink on skin

14 Sep 2012 | 3 min read

Three days before he was sentenced on firearms charges, I was looking Tame Iti directly in the eye, his stare unblinking. The room was all but empty, just my wife and me, and his was the first face I'd seen when we walked in. Oddly enough, his familiar, assured but also rather gentle gaze seemed welcoming, given we were in the Amsterdam Tattoo Museum on the other side of the world... > Read more

Diabat, Morocco: And the wind cries, Jimi

24 Aug 2012 | 3 min read | 1

A few kilometres south of the busy and breezy port town of Essaouira on Morocco's Atlantic coast is the dusty village of Diabat, famous for one thing. In mid 1969, Jimi Hendrix didn't go there. Not that the owner of the local cafe would admit to that. Quite the opposite in fact. The cafe – which played an endless loop tape of Bob Marley while we had coffee and cake on a warm... > Read more

Castles Made of Sand

Marrakech, Morocco: When night comes falling

29 Jul 2012 | 2 min read

As anyone who has had the good fortune to go will tell you, Marrakech is a city of noise, especially in the grand central square. Here by day snake charmers and fortune tellers call for attention, motor scooters blat past, cars on the unmarked road around the perimeter sound their horns, fruit and vegetable sellers shout invitations at you to sample from their attractive displays, Berber... > Read more

Stockholm, Sweden: Ghosts ships back from the depths

11 Jul 2012 | 4 min read

Compared to the maiden voyage of the Vasa, the ill-fated Titanic enjoyed a pretty good first outing a century ago. At least it got in four days of plain sailing before hitting the iceberg. The ornately decorated warship Vasa set out from Stockholm and was little more than 1200 metres into the harbour when it was caught by a gust or two, rolled onto its side, took water through the... > Read more

Singapore: Welcome to Hell

5 Jul 2012 | 2 min read | 1

As travellers or tourists we often go a long way to see the beautiful, the breathtaking and sometimes the just plain bizarre. No trip to Tucumcari in New Mexico is perhaps complete without a peek at the museum with its collection of barbed wire, or in Rome a quiet wander around the crypt of Chiesa di Santa Maria della Concezione where the altars, candleholders and wall sculpture are... > Read more

Kunming, China: The pleasures and pitfalls of a pipa

9 Jun 2012 | 4 min read

Sometimes, if you don't have a friend in an unfamiliar city to get you off the tourist trail, it helps to have a project which may lead to unexpected places. So in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province in south west China, I decided to buy a pipa, a traditional lute-like instrument played by women, coincidentally the most notable being Kunming's own Liu Fang who now lives in Canada.... > Read more

Cooktown, Far North Queensland: Life with the dead

2 Jun 2012 | 4 min read

It's a curious thing, but the quiet of a cemetery can tell us as much about a town as the living residents gabbing over drinks in a late night bar. There on moss-covered and often damaged headstones are the spare, telling details of lives which can speak to us of long-gone days. Even more than a chat over over schooner in a local pokie bar, at pleasant, orderly and somewhat sleepy... > Read more

Desert Door

South west China: Give me land, lots of land

19 May 2012 | 7 min read

In Guizhou province they move mountains. Literally. Here in this vast region of south west China – two thirds the area of New Zealand and with a population around 40 million – mountains are moved for motorways and housing, shaped into terraces for crops or highrise apartments, bored through for lengthy tunnels and have enormous bridges strung between them. Beipanjiang... > Read more

Autumn Moon Over Still Lake

Florence, Italy: The passing strange parade

15 May 2012 | 1 min read

Ever been in a place where everything is the same, but different? Let me illustrate. It was close to midnight in Florence and after a fine dinner I went for a lazy stroll through the lamp-lit streets, then stopped at an outdoor cafe in Piazza della Repubblica for a nightcap of grappa. From across the broad square the distant sound of a woman singing opera mingled with the disco-dance... > Read more

South west China: Everybody must get stoned . . .

22 Apr 2012 | 4 min read

The provinces of Guizhou and Yunnan in south west China wouldn't seem to be the places for recreational stoners, but . . . Those of us who are recreational stoners – although perhaps I should more correctly say, “amateur geologists” –- will go a long way for an odd rock formation. And you can get weirdly stoned in south west China for days. Although Guizhou... > Read more

Far North Queensland, Australia: The Jump Up . . . and down

15 Apr 2012 | 5 min read

We are about 20 miles south of coastal Cooktown in the far north of Australia when we pull off the main highway onto a side road. I glance at my map and notice a place name further down this less traveled route: The Jump Up, just past Wajul Wajul. I have to ask. Dean laughs. “You'll know why when we get there. Anywhere out here where to road goes up to another level... > Read more

100 Smokes to Kununurra

Belfast, Northern Ireland: Ghosts of the old missing shippery

6 Apr 2012 | 3 min read | 1

For many decades, out of some kind of misplaced shame, many simply didn’t want to talk about it. In Belfast’s shipyards the name of the vessel once so proudly built there -- but which sank in 1912 to become the world’s most famous shipping disaster -- simply went unspoken. Even today, a century after the Titanic was being constructed and although there are over 300 Titanic... > Read more

Martin Winch: My Heart Will Go On (Theme to Titanic)

Strokestown Park, Republic of Ireland: A feast for the historian

17 Feb 2012 | 2 min read | 1

The Celtic Tiger may be limping right now, but in the great wheel of Irish history, everything becomes relative. You need only pull into beautiful Strokestown Park in County Roscommon, two hours northeast of Galway, to see history in stark contrast, and the rise and fall of people's fates. Strokestown House is a Palladian-style 18th-century mansion, with all its original furnishings.... > Read more