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…
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 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…
"Fuck Air BnB".
"Tourists go home".
Confronting messages sprayed across crumbling brick walls on the outskirts of Venice put a pit of guilt in my stomach.
Oh. Sorry.
Venice was not somewhere I'd ever really desperately wanted to go. I'd read more about the city's issues with rising sea levels than the best sights…
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…
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.…
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'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…
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…
It was a Friday afternoon in Florida; I had a couple of beers in me and a vague idea of a good deal and an adventure. "This is the kind of challenge I´ve been looking for," was how I reassured myself as I handed over the first cash instalment. I didn't even know how to…
With the situation that has been underway in America until today’s executive order – children being taken from their parents at the border as part of the Trump Administration’s new immigration strategy – we’re hearing the phrase, “They should have just come here legally!” getting thrown around a lot.
While the people making this statement…
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…