Not many people stop in Reefton. At first glance it’s just a blip on the highway, a place you pass through on your way to or from the West Coast, a one-street town with not much going on. The highway goes right through Reefton. It doesn’t look like much! Except that’s not true.…
Details
My bag was stolen in Oamaru. A street in the Victorian area of Oamaru. Not recently; this happened back in 2002, when I came to New Zealand for three months before I went to Australia for a year’s working holiday. When I tell people my bag got stolen in New Zealand usually…
Details
I’m sick. I mean, not seriously sick, but I’ve had a cold for more than a week and I’m still a coughing, spluttering, phglemy mess of a person. And I’m somewhat miserable, because I’m in Wanaka and it’s beautiful and I thought I’d be out hiking and taking advantage of the multitude of activities available…
Details
I look to my right, centre, left. Mud domes, hundreds, maybe thousands of them, stretching off just about as far as I can see into the desert haze. This is the incredible Zawiyyet Al Mayyiteen, the City of the Dead, a massive cemetery just outside El Minya, Egypt.
Details
It seems like just last week that I arrived on the Banks Peninsula, stunned by the natural beauty of this place and completely overwhelmed by all the things to do! But alas, it has been more than six weeks now, and sadly, the time has come for my departure. I’ve gotten to know the fantastic…
Details
I have a friend who hates giant pandas. And I don’t mean she just kinda dislikes them; no, she actively HATES them. But how could anyone hate this gorgeous face? It’s something to do with pandas being an evolutionary dead end, useless creatures that can only subsist on an extremely limited…
Details
When I’m trying to choose where to travel to next, I don’t often pick somewhere that I’ve already been. There are so many places to explore, my list keeps getting longer and longer, so with such little time and money, going back to a destination seems like a waste. Why not spend that time and…
Details
“Oh crap crap crap crap crap….” was going through my head as I lost my footing and swung into the water pouring over the cliff face. I was dangling 20 metres above the river, with water relentlessly pounding down on my head from above. “Must…get…out…of…water……..need…to…breathe!” And that is why it was the scariest day…
Details
I’ve put off writing about Tibet for a long time, mostly because I quite simply did not know where to begin. It was an intense time; the anticipation building from my first arrival in Chengdu a full week before our departure, and then two weeks of dealing with the emotional highs and lows that come…
Details
Sometimes you make a plan. You consider every detail carefully, you dedicate time to researching and investigating all your options, contacting the right people and arranging everything just so. Everything is going to come together and work out just the way you want it to, and then….you can see where I’m going with this, right?…
Details