Travel Stories
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Maharashtra state, India: Riding the rail, Part Two
18 Aug 2013 | 4 min read | 1
It's strange but true: Some of the most important discoveries of historic sites have been remarkably recent, and have often come about by accident. It's hard to believe, for example, that it wasn't until 50 years ago when a couple of road workers near Laura in northern Queensland decided to climb a hill for a bit of a look-around . . . and discovered Aboriginal rock painting dating... > Read more
Savannah, Georgia: Midday in the Gardens
11 Aug 2013 | 12 min read
Mary's words float, wisps of cloud in this hot Georgia afternoon. She speaks in a charming, slow drawl, her voice rarely rising with inflection. We walk through Columbia Square in the old heart of Savannah where Spanish moss hangs like whispers from dogwood trees. "Now, we had a gennel-man down he-ya one tahm recently," she says, her words dragging like slow woodsmoke in the... > Read more
Holly Springs, Mississippi: A Little Less Conversation
28 Jul 2013 | 6 min read
Holly Springs in north Mississippi has some interesting historic attractions. Probably. I wouldn't know. I didn't bother looking for them. Holly Springs is a bit out of the way even if you happen to be in the state, but this picturesque town -- which apparently changed hands 62 times during the Civil War -- is a useful midpoint on the Elvis Trail between his birthplace in Tupelo... > Read more
I Was the One
Southeast England: Rye, wry and makes you cry
7 Jul 2013 | 3 min read
While in Winchelsea in south east England, I went to pay my respects to Spike Milligan at his grave in St Thomas' churchyard. Unfortunately, Spike was out. More correctly, his famously funny headstone had been taken away – they left Spike down there – because, when his third wife Shelagh Sinclair was buried beside him June 2011, her family wanted her name and dates added to... > Read more
Morocco: You want nuts with that?
23 Jun 2013 | 4 min read
So you will be seeing the goats in the trees, said the man in the marketplace. I laughed because I'd clearly misheard. I thought he'd said, “goats in the trees”. The other man patting a pile of bright yellow spice back into an attractive pyramid stopped and turned to me, “Oh yes, there will be goats up in the trees. You will see them, I guarantee.”“You... > Read more
Maharashtra state, India: Riding the rail
9 Jun 2013 | 6 min read
In the historic, temple-filled and rather wealthy Indian city of Kolhapur a couple of hours north of Goa there's a glimpse of a past which is appealingly distant but also curiously contemporary. The day I arrive at the New Palace – an imposing 150-year old building in the Indo-Gothic style commanding spacious grounds – it is the day of the famously crazy and colourful Holi... > Read more
Canterbury, England: Murder and more in the cathedral
25 May 2013 | 2 min read
So the murder was good for business then, Mike?“It was the biggest cash cow the cathedral had known,” laughs Mike Evans, one of the guides at Canterbury Cathedral, the spiritual home of the Anglican Church and where Thomas Becket was murdered in 1170. Evans, who retired from a sales career in London and returned to his childhood home of Canterbury some years ago, mixes... > Read more
Canterbury, England: Some different tales, bear with me
17 Feb 2013 | 4 min read
Although the famous cathedral is rightly considered the physical and emotional centre of Canterbury in England, the historic old town holds other delights and diversions, especially if you are there with children who might not see the point of dead people made of stone and really big stained glass windows. And, after a few hours of peering at strange inscriptions about people we never... > Read more
Essaouira, Morocco: Light at the end of the day
6 Jan 2013 | 5 min read | 1
He was offering cakes, small dry round things which looked pretty unappetizing, but that wasn't what he was really selling. After the tray had been presented and I'd waved it away, with a flash of his hand he opened his palm and whispered urgently, “You want?” There, in a tight dark ball, was a lump of hashish. In earlier times we might have done the deal, but these days .... > Read more
Kunming, China: The song of the stones
16 Dec 2012 | 2 min read
At one point Lily, our guide from the Yi people -- a prominent ethnic group in this area of southwest China – stops as we visitors negotiate our way through the surreal formations of the famous Stone Forest near the city of Kunming. As the four of us stand beneath sky-pointing fingers of blue-grey rock, Lily says this area is the traditional home of her Yi people (pronounced... > Read more
Stonehenge, England: Everybody must get stoned
17 Nov 2012 | 3 min read | 3
A couple of years ago when Britain's English Heritage was again getting fretful over the increasing number of tourists arriving at Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain, a wag wrote a pithy one-liner to a major daily. If whoever erected those monolithic stones was so smart, he asked, why did they build it near a motorway? Certainly if you wander around the site in Wiltshire of this... > Read more
Kunming, China: Escape from the haste
14 Oct 2012 | 3 min read
Kunming – the capital of Yunnan province in south west China – doesn't do quiet. With a population around 6.5 million (and, improbably, a sister city to New Plymouth since 2003), Kunming delivers confusion, haste, noise and its own peculiar order in the apparent chaos of motorcycles and scooters which flit between buses, tracks, cars and pedestrians. Crowded buses wheeze... > Read more
Amsterdam, Holland: Ink on skin
14 Sep 2012 | 3 min read
Three days before he was sentenced on firearms charges, I was looking Tame Iti directly in the eye, his stare unblinking. The room was all but empty, just my wife and me, and his was the first face I'd seen when we walked in. Oddly enough, his familiar, assured but also rather gentle gaze seemed welcoming, given we were in the Amsterdam Tattoo Museum on the other side of the world... > Read more
Diabat, Morocco: And the wind cries, Jimi
24 Aug 2012 | 3 min read | 1
A few kilometres south of the busy and breezy port town of Essaouira on Morocco's Atlantic coast is the dusty village of Diabat, famous for one thing. In mid 1969, Jimi Hendrix didn't go there. Not that the owner of the local cafe would admit to that. Quite the opposite in fact. The cafe – which played an endless loop tape of Bob Marley while we had coffee and cake on a warm... > Read more
Castles Made of Sand
Marrakech, Morocco: When night comes falling
29 Jul 2012 | 2 min read
As anyone who has had the good fortune to go will tell you, Marrakech is a city of noise, especially in the grand central square. Here by day snake charmers and fortune tellers call for attention, motor scooters blat past, cars on the unmarked road around the perimeter sound their horns, fruit and vegetable sellers shout invitations at you to sample from their attractive displays, Berber... > Read more
Stockholm, Sweden: Ghosts ships back from the depths
11 Jul 2012 | 4 min read
Compared to the maiden voyage of the Vasa, the ill-fated Titanic enjoyed a pretty good first outing a century ago. At least it got in four days of plain sailing before hitting the iceberg. The ornately decorated warship Vasa set out from Stockholm and was little more than 1200 metres into the harbour when it was caught by a gust or two, rolled onto its side, took water through the... > Read more
Singapore: Welcome to Hell
5 Jul 2012 | 2 min read | 1
As travellers or tourists we often go a long way to see the beautiful, the breathtaking and sometimes the just plain bizarre. No trip to Tucumcari in New Mexico is perhaps complete without a peek at the museum with its collection of barbed wire, or in Rome a quiet wander around the crypt of Chiesa di Santa Maria della Concezione where the altars, candleholders and wall sculpture are... > Read more
Kunming, China: The pleasures and pitfalls of a pipa
9 Jun 2012 | 4 min read
Sometimes, if you don't have a friend in an unfamiliar city to get you off the tourist trail, it helps to have a project which may lead to unexpected places. So in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province in south west China, I decided to buy a pipa, a traditional lute-like instrument played by women, coincidentally the most notable being Kunming's own Liu Fang who now lives in Canada.... > Read more
Cooktown, Far North Queensland: Life with the dead
2 Jun 2012 | 4 min read
It's a curious thing, but the quiet of a cemetery can tell us as much about a town as the living residents gabbing over drinks in a late night bar. There on moss-covered and often damaged headstones are the spare, telling details of lives which can speak to us of long-gone days. Even more than a chat over over schooner in a local pokie bar, at pleasant, orderly and somewhat sleepy... > Read more
Desert Door
South west China: Give me land, lots of land
19 May 2012 | 7 min read
In Guizhou province they move mountains. Literally. Here in this vast region of south west China – two thirds the area of New Zealand and with a population around 40 million – mountains are moved for motorways and housing, shaped into terraces for crops or highrise apartments, bored through for lengthy tunnels and have enormous bridges strung between them. Beipanjiang... > Read more