August, 2011

My fellow volunteer buddies and I decided the best way to see Laos would be by motorbike. I’m not talking scooters, I’m talking off road monsters — 250cc Honda XR beasts. Ten days of dirty, filthy riding through northern Laos.

“You’ve got to have a different mindset.  You are not unemployed, but self-employed,” my English friend Michael said after I told him about my first ‘Tilting Head Episode’ a couple of years ago. A tilting what? Let me explain. The episode happened when The Englishman’s Ex came over to drop the kids off at his [...]

When Brigham Young stopped in the Salt Lake Valley in 1847 and said ‘This is the place’ to his Mormon followers, thank goodness he was too worn out to head south. For the quite beautiful but heavily populated valley in northern Utah, home to the largest community of Mormons in the US, pales in comparison [...]

At their closest point England and France sit a mere 34 kilometres apart, a journey easily travelled by plane, train or hovercraft, if you have one. We opted for an overnight ferry when on a recent trip to Normandy, and it turned out to be a remarkably relaxed way to travel. I’m becoming increasingly anti-air in my old age.

Can cycling help to boost the tourism industry here in Queensland and around the world? Rachel Smith thinks so…

Midday, July 6 may be the official starting time for the world’s most insane party, but semantics like time matter little to the locals or throngs of tourists in Pamplona for two weeks of fiesta known as San Fermin.

If intense colours, imposing mountains and rich indigenous histories are your travel must-haves, then the 260-mile stretch between Taos, New Mexico and Cortez, Colorado will deliver your dreams in spades.

In this redundant wasteland, I have developed some very bad habits. One of them is to refresh my emails all the time in the hope I would receive one that will magically transform my life somehow.

If you come to visit me in Warsaw, it’s likely I’ll suggest visiting the Jewish cemetery in Bródno. And we’ll get on a tram and head to the entrance, on Sw. Wincentego Street. And there, you may start to wonder if I’ve got the right place. Isn’t that just an old, overgrown forest of silver [...]