The subtitle to this essay should be ‘how I went to India and came back with a lot less money than I expected’. India is a wonderful country which is different in many ways from the rest of the world and definitely worth seeing but it has a bad reputation. I think that is caused […]
Category: Travel
Places I’ve been
China
In China, everything is big. Tiananmen Square is as big as a city block. If it were up to me to mow down protestors I would have gotten lost, even in a tank. The Chinese are probably used to big things, at least in their public areas; when we got to more private areas, things […]
Cairns
Palm Cove, north of Cairns, was every bit as beautiful as my friend Pam said it would be, though not quite as unspoiled as the beach at Bawaka. I’d booked into the Peppers Beach Resort and Spa because I really did intend to spend a few days relaxing before returning to Sydney. When my room […]
Nhulunbuy
Jenny met me at Nhulunbuy airport and drove me on the grand tour through the town. It has a Woolworths, Westpac and chemist, a bunch of tourist gift shops, a Toyota dealership, IGA, a post office, library and three bottle shops. There’s also the surf club, yacht club and Arnhem club. There’s a Mitre 10 […]
Darwin
I ran into a little trouble with souvenir trains transferring my luggage from the train to the hotel in Darwin. I packed them carefully but each time I moved my bag or searched for something, one of the trains would start up chuff, chuffing down an imaginary track (whoo whoo). It happened putting my bags […]
The Ghan
I woke up at 3.30am on Sunday morning, ready for the plane to Adelaide. I was staying with my friends Clare and Bob. Bob, who’s an engineer with Qantas, was taking me to the airport on his way to his morning shift. I was already awake before he knocked on the door. I used the […]
Northern India
When I told people I was going to India I met with a variety of comments. My Indian friends encouraged me, my yoga friends were excited for me and some people said: ‘Buy locks’ (always good advice) and ‘Trust no one’ (as if I was going to the X-Files). I do remember thinking: ‘Indians probably […]
Vietnamese Kindness
All the time in Vietnam I kept thinking about the war. I remember the last few years of high school and our worries that boys we knew would be forced to mobilise and spend army years in Vietnam. We comforted ourselves that very few Australians were killed but went to protest marches anyway. My parents […]
Seas I Have Swum In
I sat in the pool in Vietnam and enumerated to a friend all the seas I had swum in and why there was no need to add the South China Sea to the list. But it was just there, on the other side of the pool so eventually I did. I kept thinking how somewhere […]
Cambodia and the Vietnamese
I got on with my guide in Hanoi, he was laid back and willing to exchange information more than impart it. He let me correct his English and told me about local food and customs. He told me that, because his wife was born in the year of the tiger and he in the year […]