Tag Archives: transport
Kayaks and chaos on Halong Bay
For the duration of my time on Halong Bay, I only drank a can of Coke. Ice cold, full sugar, and I didn’t even finish it. I felt nearly every bubble creep down my throat as I drank, absorbing the sugar but avoiding the very thought of anything else while my kayak partner dripped ice […]
Flying Solo
It’s been a long time since I’ve lived on my own; some five or six years now. Back then, I had a flexible schedule: a blend of university classes, office work and eons of study. I had a townhouse to myself, my own car, and still managed to maintain a gym membership. I shopped, washed, […]
Mud baths and motorbikes
I’m not sure about you, but I’d never shared a bath with seven others before. I’d opted out of the onsen experience in Japan, ardently avoided the hammam in Turkey and generally try to make my bathing experiences a personal affair. And yet, there I was, with all these newly found travel companions, sitting in […]
The Challenge of Travel Photography
Seven heads bobbed along with mine in the back of the minibus. There was a rare word spoken among us despite our guide’s attempts to draw out some semblance of conversation, which is to be expected at 4.30 in the morning. All eight of us were too busy looking at the light starting to paint […]
How to cross the road in Vietnam
When you’ve been travelling for a few weeks, covering a lot of ground, it’s easy to get very, very tired. I’m sure it hits me at about the three to four week mark. The camera starts to feel too heavy, the starts too early, and the nights so long. As a result, when we hit […]
Monday Moment: Do you think it will rain?
I think I got used to the fact that it might rain more than I got used to the rain itself. I mean, how can one truly say they can be used to a torrential downpour while they’re trying to ferry their luggage across no-man’s land between the Thai and Cambodian border? How can one […]
Awesome and not-awesome things about my travels
So, after seven weeks traversing the landscapes of South East Asia, I am back in the sandpit of Dubai. As you may have noticed, I got about five posts into my Cambodia leg before internet went haywire. There are controls from the government in Vietnam that restrict access to some personal blogs, and generally I […]
Dreams of driving in Dubai
This is a rollover from my old World Nomads travel journal. Funny how another year’s gone by and very little has changed. I can drive to a mall now. Only the local one. Supervised. On a Friday morning. Sigh. At 5.20pm tonight I was chopping baby chat potatoes in my kitchen, loading up a tray […]
How not to go hot air ballooning
I dragged my heavy legs down the staircase. It was the second day of the elevator not functioning and I didn’t have any hopes for it being repaired during our stay. What made it most evident was the way that the doorman would run along and switch the stairway lights on each time we went […]
Monday Moment: A little ray of sunshine
It was six thirty in the morning when I threw my hand in the air, hailing the taxi to my side. It was, indeed, earlier than my usual start to the working day, but something I like to do when Andrew is not driving me to work. Get in, get it done, and get out. […]
Armed convoys and crimson gypsies
We had only a minute minibus and were dwarfed by the large tourist buses filled with Japanese travelers and Nile cruisers in from Europe. There were just five of us in our vehicle, including our driver, and upwards of fifty in the others. We were a small and seemingly insignificant part of the armed convoy […]
A day trip to Petra means…
I sat on the cracked vinyl chair biting my nails voraciously and staring down at the linoleum tiles across the floor. It took me a while to work out that it was linoleum, as I was perplexed by the haphazard nature of the tiling and the overlapped segments. I considered it ironic that in a […]
