We wake in a pile of butter-yellow blankets beside a dying fire: me and three dark heads of hair. The world outside is a snowglobe – a beautiful rarity in 逗子 / Zushi / the half-mile beach where the sun was born. In the morning light, there’s a smudge of blue on the inside…
A list of reasons why spending a month in Japan with Astray doing a writing and language workshop is an excellent idea.
Pottering through a lively marketplace in the lakeside Indian town of Pushkar, I was seized around the elbow by the firm grip of a wily old lady.
“Hello my baby,” she said.
I turned around eagerly: no one’s called me baby in a while. Unfortunately though, she wasn’t referring to me, but to an adorable…
“Dinner, madam?”
A small frame stretched up and peered into my bed with inquisitive eyes as the Aravalli Range whipped past through the window behind him. He was a dabbawala – a lunchbox delivery man – and he couldn’t have come at a better time.
For several weeks now, I had been traipsing across the…
Australians love Japan. We crave its sushi, we embrace getting pissed at karaoke, we marvel at the novelty of being naked in a public bathhouse. We also love to shred the powder that coats the mountains of the country’s many ski destinations. This is especially true of Hakuba, one of the most accessible snow resorts…
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…
“It’s a cock, girls,” Frank announced with glee.
Grace and I exchanged eye-rolls – we’ve seen our share of penises; we knew what it was. To be fair though, this one was plastic and hanging from a string around a 70-year-old man’s beefy neck.
With oily fingers, Frank gave the nob of the penis a…
On the 5th of November 2015, to the best of my knowledge at the time, I died in a small rural hospital five hours south of Perth.
I’d been camping in the bush in Karri tree country with my then-boyfriend, Jasper. The two of us had a week to kill before we went travelling, so…