May, 2011

If you want to rock ‘n’ roll like a true Hong Konger, just sit back and listen. And when a Hong Konger talks about Hong Kong, food comes first.

Landing in San Francisco always makes me feel like I’m emerging from the Australian Stone Age as suddenly we are encompassed by a proliferation of high tech, and even more so as I wonder in slack-jawed awe at the hilly city’s incredible green consciousness.

When my housemate came home from work with a human tooth lodged in the sole of her shoe, it confirmed what I had come to know in my time as a volunteer in Accra, Ghana: I definitely wasn’t in Kansas anymore.

Can you ever go home again? For most expats, home is a humble little word filled with a wealth of meaning.

Azerbaijan — a country that was on no one’s mind a mere week ago until a television audience of millions watched it soar to glory in the 2011 Eurovision Song Contest on the weekend. With the ink on its name barely dry on the victor’s podium, Crikey gets the jump with the following definitive list of some of the greatest things about visiting the country.

Pleasure-seeking humans are invariably drawn to sunny skies and welcoming climes. Which would explain the absence of fellow tourists in Turkey when I visit in February, writes Nicola Heath.

It’s been a long time between drinks for Slide Night here at Back in a Bit, but this one is worth the wait. It’s time to get out the travel snaps and explain the quirky stories behind them. Today we’ve got a Crikey reader who was lucky enough to visit an elephant orphanage in Sri [...]

From quiet life in the mountains, to headlines around the globe, the town of Abbottabad, Pakistan, has found itself blinking in the media spotlight this week as the perfect spot for a murderous terror leader to leave in relative peace. Yet Pakistan may demolish Osama bin Laden’s hideout for fear of it turning into a tourist attraction [...]

Part two: natural disasters are inevitable; those of the fashion variety are not. Freelance journalist Laura Burgoine writes: The recent spate of natural disasters casting a path of destruction across the planet with the same vigour as Lindsay Lohan on a bender reinforces two things for me. Firstly that we can’t ever truly be prepared [...]

You can imagine my horror, then, when I arrived in London last year, bought myself a wine in the nearest pub, and was promptly labelled JAFA — that’s right, Just Another F*cking Australian — by the proper local geezer sitting next to me.