February 10, 2011 – 11:11 am
I know it’s the wet season. I know that parts of the country are suffering from devastating floods. I know that getting a bit damp while on holiday is totally a #firstworldproblem. But still I found myself getting frustrated as I spent a week locked in battle with Sri Lanka’s rain.
February 1, 2011 – 8:25 am
Most of the best meals I can remember while growing up were eaten at my grandmother’s house. Sometimes it was because a couple of branches of the extended family were sitting around the table eating together and chatting, and sometimes it was just because of the love and care transmitted to us by the cook [...]
January 27, 2011 – 8:25 am
For $20 more I could’ve flown direct from Doha to Colombo. But I’ve already got a bunch of flyer points with this other airline, you see, so I flew with them instead, saving myself the price of five lattes and copping a ten hour stopover in Dubai. I’ve become a bit of an expert at [...]
September 17, 2010 – 11:56 am
My Back In A Bit colleague Kevin O’Faircheallaigh recently wrote a stinging piece about camera-wielding tourists – very much worth a read if you haven’t already done so. While I agree with a lot that Kevin said I’d like to partially defend myself and other travelling photographers, says Scott Bridges.
September 2, 2010 – 8:25 am
When you’re travelling almost every single day involves at least one experience that is amazing, interesting, challenging, disappointing or exciting. And some days are packed with them from start to finish. I’d like to share one of those days. I was in Petra, Jordan, after burning south along the tourist trail: Jerash, Amman, Madaba, Dead [...]
August 19, 2010 – 12:20 pm
I’m going to jump ahead a little with this post. I’m a bit behind on my writing (pages and pages of notes waiting to be typed up into articles) so the last time you heard from me I was in the Iranian city of Mashhad and still a week away from leaving Iran. However, right [...]
August 16, 2010 – 7:18 am
Meet Vali. Vali – homestay proprietor, carpet merchant, tour guide, polyglot, and all-round awesome guy – is the reason I stayed in the north-east Iranian town of Mashhad for four days instead of one. Mashhad is the second-largest city in Iran, boasting three million people and the second-holiest site in Shia Islam. For this reason [...]
After a week or more stuck in cities – charming as they were – I was really keen to get out of the sightseeing loop and go do something a bit more adventurous than walk through a museum. After Shiraz, the next destination on my itinerary was the south-eastern town of Kerman which I was [...]
These three large central-Iranian cities form somewhat of a golden triangle for visitors to the country. Full of tick-the-box must-see sights, they may not have the charm of other activity-based (rather than attraction-based) destinations around Iran but they should be on every visitor’s itinerary. Esfahan Truly a global city that deserves to be mentioned in [...]
On my third day in Esfahan I was sitting in the hotel courtyard with the Lonely Planet trying to map out the rest of my trip. My rough plan after Esfahan was Shiraz, Kerman, Yazd, Mashhad, Kashan, and then back to Tehran for my flight out of Iran. However, this left me with a few [...]
