Travel Writing Library

I landed on my ass – HARD. Jet lagged and grumpy, I was jolted out of my sleepiness with a rude bump – Literally! I had barely arrived in New York before my grandiose plans of living it up in the Big Apple unraveled.

I’d imagined being greeted by a group of young, upbeat travellers excited to experience a place renowned for its anachronistic politics, its managed poverty and its thrusting, fluid hips.

She was the Scarlett Johansson of buses, glamorous, curvaceous and beautiful. Her silver skin glimmered in the high Andean sunshine, the interior oozed opulence, from the fully reclining leather seats to the over stocked bar.

You know the feeling. It is late in the afternoon; you have just spent several hours on your feet and you are simply exhausted. All you want to do is get home. Now.

The land was so uniformly flat I could see the foreign contractors a mile to our right. Even flatter than the landscape, the dark tar that spread behind them would become the main route through the ever dryer...

This story happened in Romanian town Sinaia where after seeing the local sight – Peles Castle my friend and I decided to come back to the seacoast. We chose the bus which would arrive in town at 3.20 a.m. and then...

“Salaam aleykum.” He paused. “Salaam aleykum.” I awoke to a man standing over me, his silhouette distorted by his traditional Mauritanian bou-bou flapping in the wind.

The place looked idyllic. The green mountains across the water on the Fijian mainland, created a false reflection, as the clouds swirled like cigarette smoke above them. The name of our destination, Nananu-I-Ra.

Some journeys are just longer. To others, there’s simply no end. My thoughts exactly as our train halts for the third time in the last three hours in a station which is still not our final destination.

We would be travelling by ship between the Indonesian islands of Flores and Sumba. I and my wife, Lobo, were imagining ourselves to be Magellan. Several unfortunate accidents happen every year in these seas...