Travel Stories

Kunming, China: People, people who need people . . .

3 Feb 2012 | 2 min read

Sometimes it is the small things rather than the grand sights you remember after a trip. Around the bustling city of Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, there are certainly sights to be seen – the expansive Yunnan Ethnic Village to the south, the wonderful landscaped gardens at the World Horticulture Exposition in the north east. But my recollection was also of the small... > Read more

Jasmine

Guizhou province, China: A face in the crowd

21 Jan 2012 | 2 min read

It is curious how a single photograph, snapped suddenly and with little thought of the result, can bring back a flood of memories. Among the 1024 photos I took in south west China in just eight days eight days – true, there was so much to see and too much to retain without the prompt of a picture – there are inevitably many which bring back a flood of recollections. But a... > Read more

Beautiful Woman Thinking of the Moon

Cape York Peninsula, Australia: Land of myth and wonder

4 Dec 2011 | 7 min read

No more than a few minutes south of the tiny settlement of Bamaga in Australia's remote far north, Dean hauls our sturdy four-wheel drive Oka over and somewhere off the map and we climb out. Watching for snakes, I walk between dust-dry scrub and spindly trees and there, bent and misshapen, is the rusting skeleton of DC3 which crashed at the end of the Second World War. It exhausted its... > Read more

Ubud, Bali: Sinking into luxury

4 Nov 2011 | 4 min read

The printed note on the bed in our room in Bali could not have been more polite. Tomorrow, it told us, would be a special day for Hindu people and the temple in the complex would be decorated with colourful cloths and ornaments. And the management apologised if the sound of the Balinese instruments would disturb us. Given we had been enjoying the quiet trickling sound of gamelan... > Read more

Somerset, Far North Queensland, Australia: Didn't build it, they didn't come

9 Oct 2011 | 2 min read

So this was to be the site of a city to rival Singapore, this short crescent of white sand fringed by palms and mangroves, and looking onto a deep channel towards a nearby island? On a quiet day – and every day is quiet at this place at the tip of Queensland not far from Cape York – this place has a certain escapist appeal. A few come to launch boats warily in the... > Read more

Far North Queensland, Australia: To the top of the tip

23 Sep 2011 | 4 min read

As our lumbering but comfortable Oka – a massive, industrial-strength 4WD which has taken us along unsealed “roads” in Far North Queensland, the pointy bit up to Cape York – hits a piece of smooth highway, the brightly illuminated high-rises of Cairns come into view. I lean over to Dean, our guide and driver, and say, “Ah, the lights of civilisation . . .... > Read more

Far North Queensland, Australia: Rock of ages

17 Sep 2011 | 1 min read

By the time we get to the top, and it is only a slight uphill walk for 15 minutes, we are breathless in the dry heat and reaching for our water bottles. Below us the smooth sealed Peninsula Development Road leads south to Cairns some 180km away, but up here on the top of this valley near Laura, where a sign indicated the population was 70, we are back possibly 15,000 years. Yes, the... > Read more

The Alamo, San Antonio, Texas: Don't Forget to Remember

12 Sep 2011 | 6 min read

A hot Monday morning and I'm sitting outside of what remains of the old Alamo in the centre of San Antonio, Texas. From here the Crockett Hotel looms above the old mission, and street cars and taxis rumble across land which was once splattered with the blood of hundreds. Tourists, few of them international if the visitors book can be believed, waddle through the old barracks where the worst... > Read more

Venice, Italy: The face of a footnote

12 Sep 2011 | 3 min read

The narrow lane leading from Venice’s Piazza San Marco -- the Merceria as it is called -- is narrow and crowded. But it has always been so. This was once the main street in this city of eroding beauty and remains the shortest route between San Marco and the Ponte di Rialto (Rialto Bridge). That means lots of tourists, designer label stores, and shops selling glass from Murano. And... > Read more

New York, USA: Woke up, it was a Chelsea morning

21 Aug 2011 | 3 min read

Stanley liked to talk but, to be fair, he had a lot to talk about. Stanley -- portly, smiling, intense -- was the manager at New York's famous, notorious even, Chelsea Hotel at 222 West 23rd St. He had inherited the position from his father David Bard who bought it in 1940, and Stanley had grown up in the corridors of this building which was the tallest in Manhattan when it opened in... > Read more

Edinburgh, Scotland: Lauriston Castle and New Orleans

18 Aug 2011 | 3 min read

Although separated by culture and the vast Atlantic Ocean, there is a curious link between the multi-cultural, musical city of New Orleans and an antique-filled castle in a leafy suburb of Edinburgh. Lauriston Castle – more a refined stately home than a castle with cannons – is one of those fascinating places where cultural history, oodles of money and interesting... > Read more

Bali: Turn off your mind . . .

28 Jul 2011 | 2 min read

Being a travel writer – as I have sometimes grandly described myself – means never being able to say you're on holiday. Every destination – even the most mundane or local – may hold an experience, a story, or a character you feel compelled to explore and perhaps convey in print. And so I have gone out of my way to see a bizarre museum dedicated to Elvis Presley... > Read more

Fisherman

Edinburgh, Scotland: Rosslyn Chapel and the Da Vinci Code

3 Jul 2011 | 3 min read

Given the straitened British economy you wonder if someone might bend the rules and put the name of the American writer Dan Brown forward for some royal acknowledgement come Queen's Birthday: Services to British tourism perhaps? Brown's blockbuster novel The Da Vinci Code – over 83 million copies sold – is single-handedly responsible for many of the 25,000 who annually who... > Read more

Baton Rouge, Louisiana: The Kingfish in his kingdom

20 May 2011 | 2 min read

The bullet holes from the shoot-out are still there. It's a narrow corridor so you can imagine what the gunplay must have been like: shots echoing around, one man falling from his wounds and the other shot dead, the shouting and clack of heels resonating off the marble floor . . . Today of course all is quiet, just a few people getting in and out of the hissing lifts or going about their... > Read more

Bushmills, Northern Ireland: The sweet smell of morning

18 May 2011 | 4 min read | 1

This is how every working week should start: it’s 10am on a Monday and already the aroma of fine Irish whiskey — people around here would say “the finest” — is filling our lungs. Outside the North Atlantic crashes on ragged rocks and the wind whips over green fields, but here inside Bushmills Distillery on the northern coast of Northern Ireland the air is warm,... > Read more

Brian Kennedy and Shana Morrison: Irish Heartbeat

Breaux Bridge, Louisiana: In Cajun country

15 May 2011 | 10 min read

Norbert shuts off the small outboard and pulls the propeller out of the brackish water. He loosens the weeds which have fouled it and tosses them away. We sit in the silent stillness of Lake Martin beneath cypress trees and Tupelo gums, some of which are 300 years old. They have their roots in soil more than a metre below the still surface. A crane flies low over the trees. "Now,... > Read more

Jambalaya Cajun Band: C'est Fun

Queenstown, New Zealand: And the Dream Goes On

1 May 2011 | 6 min read

Nine months ago my life wasn't like this. Everything was different. Then, the hard white sun would melt the early morning cool and the air would thicken with the smell of decaying jungle vegetation. On the cracked pavement of the town's only main street women would squat in doorways avoiding the equatorial heat as they sold their meagre produce. Men walked aimlessly in the alleys,... > Read more

Dublin, Ireland: Hold your hour and have another

1 Apr 2011 | 4 min read

The black and white image of the man on the small television screen looks like something from a remote world of more than a century ago: wearing a white shirt, braces to hold up wide flannel pants and heavy work boots, he shaves timber slats into shape, arranges them carefully and then hammers an iron hoop around them. Against the backdrop of a factory where steam wheezes from huge... > Read more

Dropkick Murphys: Peg O' My Heart

Sacramento: The Ghosts of Sacramento

1 Apr 2011 | 3 min read

In the few hours after dawn there is nothing here but ghosts. As sharp California light spreads across the empty streets of Old Sacramento the homeless who sleep under the nearby flyovers emerge, shaking their milkshake containers as they look for handouts. But there is no one around yet to bum coins off, just other ghosts pushing supermarket trolleys of their belongings and rummaging through... > Read more

Sydney, Australia: Up, up and away

20 Mar 2011 | 4 min read

The American poet William Carlos Williams had an astute and true observation about travel: “I have discovered that most of the beauties of travel are due to the strange hours we keep to see them.” There was certainly some bleary-eyed beauty at Parramatta Park west of Sydney as night wheeled towards a red dawn to the sound of cockatoos and rosellas. And on the way here... > Read more