Archives: Guide

"Are you afraid of heights?" he asked. Had I learned nothing? A month earlier, when asked that same question, I got strapped to a cable, ziplining above traffic. My stubborn streak finds trouble for me.

‘I am Joseph, Duck Daddy,’ a voice booms. A spectacle covered in silt emerges like Neptune from the mud in Malta’s Sliema creek, clutching a rake.

“I don’t love you,” Anna started one typical warm, sunny, Goan day. My lean-to stood on the bluff. Overlooking the beach and the Indian Ocean, it faced west.

Arriving in New York can feel rather overwhelming. With hurried people, noisy conversations, cars and skyscrapers surrounding you. You may start to feel as though you’ve stepped into a whole different universe.

It sounded like trains rumbling through the quiet of night, only you never quite knew when to expect them. Most of the time my heart was beating as if I’d been running away from these invisible trains...

"Money comes and goes, but a carpet you have forever" according to Mohammed, the smoothly spoken owner of the carpet emporium I chanced on in Marrakech. "You know Paul McCartney and Brian Ferry? - Well they've bought carpets from me"...

Sami is a Turkish waiter who persuades my friend Jane and I to go night-fishing on his restaurant's boat.

It was a balmy night in Mandalay. (Sometimes it’s hard to avoid clichés, especially when writing about exotic tropical locales that evoke nostalgia.)

The cold, hard all-night unforgiving concrete of the North West Australian Main Roads Department depot floor, told him more about his real condition than any guide, best friend or philosopher ever would.

It was with some confidence that I parted the blue noren obscuring the door of the Tokyo bathhouse, slipped off my shoes and strode up to the 'bath mistress', a formidable woman of middling age, with forearms like a sumo wrestler who was staffing the counter.