Tag Archives: wandering
Saved from myself in Sapa
The difference in less than twenty-four hours was utterly astounding. As I walked, all I could hear was the rushing of water in the river beside me heading towards the crashing waterfall, heavy from the rains. I plodded, one foot in front of the other, in no hurry, savouring the sound of the rain hitting […]
Citadels, Imperial Cities and a Hefty Zoom
I’ll admit, the lens had been a little clicky of recent past, jamming up a little if I was swinging across its full range. I felt a little guilty for a few moments, knowing that my camera does not live in a case, but often lens cap-less and fancy free in my backpack. Sometimes it […]
Tailoring Time in Hoi An
I didn’t bank on visiting the tailor when I was in Hoi An. It was promoted as the place to have clothes made in Vietnam, but I had told myself that I was on an adventure, didn’t need the clothes, and I was looking ahead to stocking up on work clothes once I had returned […]
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 […]
Photo Essay: Bến Thành Market
Any traveller would support me in this claim: the heart and soul of any city exists within the marketplace. The level to which a community relies on this varies across the globe, but one will always see the rituals and lifestyles of a culture embedded within the processes and produce of the market. One of […]
Welcome to Vietnam
When you travel through Cambodia, you learn more about what it means to simply survive. To take what life gives to you, deal with it and carry on. Opportunities are limited, as is education, and a plethora of international support programs continue to work solidly to get Cambodia on its feet independently once more. With […]
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 […]
One more year of it
When I went hiking in Sa Pa, I met a writer – a real one. Admittedly, he’d spent the last two years teaching English in rural Japan, something else I would give a limb to do, but his actual field of work and study was to write, rather than teach. He was writing a book. […]
Security Office 21: Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum
Warning: This is a long post with some fairly graphic reflections. It was hard to see and harder to reflect on, with my further comments on the difficulty of this at the end. All the same, I still wanted to communicate the nature and the history of a place that affected me in such a […]
Monday Moment: Landmines in Cambodia
Of the sixteen on tour of Cambodia, only five of us jammed our booties into the back of a tuk tuk to make our way to the Cambodia Landmine Museum within the Angkor Complex in Siem Reap. Unbeknownst to us, the wonderful American gentleman guiding a tour around the museum was actually hired as a […]
Eat your heart out
I make no excuses: I travel to eat. I love the flavours of Asian cuisine, the unique blending of salty, sweet and sour, and the way that new ingredients all seem to come together in a way that somehow seems cleaner and leaner than anything we might encounter in Europe, even when it’s deep fried. […]
