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When Itchy Feet Turn Cold
Uncomfortably curled up between two armrests, I hear the pilot announce that in just under seven hours, I’ll be landing back home. The weight of a month’s worth of travel weighs on my shoulders and eyelids, forcing me into a much-needed but interrupted sleep. Each time my eyes flutter open, I’m a few minutes closer…
Finding Love in Lisbon
Following a few blissful weeks of drinking more cheap spirit mixers than water and eating nothing but pastries from some of Europe’s finest bakeries and hostel breakfast tables, I’ve come down with an inevitable bout of sore throat and laziness. I’m sitting in the hostel common room playing Jenga while the sun beams onto Lisbon’s…
The Fiestas of San Fermin
The Running of the Bulls is what put the sleepy Spanish town of Pamplona on the map, but this pub dare gone way too far is merely the pointy end of a larger fiesta held there annually. Ernest Hemingway, Pamplona’s favourite backpacker, wrote of San Fermín in ‘The Sun Also Rises’. He said that by…
Leave Us The Fuck Alone
A mere four days after I set off on an adventure to the other side of the world alone, a woman was killed in her own town. In my town, actually, metres from her home, a few hundred from mine. Before my trip, people kept telling me that I was brave for embarking on a…
How I Decided
It's a Sunday afternoon. I'm home in Milan rolling in bed after my Saturday night shift. I receive a message: it's my best friend Tommy, who lives in Australia. He's texting me and Ivan, who lives in Berlin. 15:36 – Asia on the 6th of January? I answer instinctively. Yes, I wish. Same, says Ivan.…
A Gringo Goes to Salvador’s Carnival
When you hear 'Ziriguidum', you’re required to put both hands on your knees and bend down like you’re addressing an imaginary, ground-borne squirrel. Once you’re in that position – knees bent 45 north, waist 45 south – you extend your right arm to full, then the fingers on your right hand totally, as if hand-gesturing to…
I Bought an Amazonian Toucan in Peru
I've never really been one to take to guts and gore. I fainted dissecting cane toads at school, cried for three hours when our van in Khao Lak hit a chicken and made a former boyfriend refund an African Safari video game called Big Buck Hunter. But it wasn’t really my fault – I just…
A Lonely Planet Surprise in India
My stay in Rajasthan’s Royal City of Udaipur was intended to be a Lonely Planet special: accommodation, eating and sightseeing all planned out by an expert travel writer. But, as is relatively common knowledge, Lonely Planet mostly tends to be a collection of drab instructions written by someone whose idea of a shoestring budget is…
My Egyptian Dentist
I remember those little details of our first meeting so clearly. The way he stood over our little group, a mix of misfit travellers and local Egyptians. I remember first taking in his tall, lean body, long, wild hair and straight, perfectly white teeth and thinking he was the most beautiful human I had ever…

Astray is a storytelling project centred on travel, place, culture and identity.

We’re run by a team of writers who mostly live, work and play in nipaluna / Hobart. With reverence, we acknowledge the Tasmanian Aboriginal people as the traditional and ongoing custodians of trouwunna / lutruwita / Tasmania: land that was stolen and never ceded. We pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging.