We wait at the luggage carousel at Tanzania Airport. My backpack appears first. Dee’s topples out a bit later but the sleeping bag which was attached to it is nowhere to be seen. We make our way to the lost luggage office to file a report. Little do we know that there is a lucrative black market in camping gear in this part of Africa. Wayne (our self-appointed tour guide) suggests that we head to the airport lounge to wait for the rest of our party. There will be eight of us

(Parts of this narrative also appear at Canadian Geographic and Nanaimo and Voyager Magazine) A yellow-brick sunset shimmers ahead, paving our way to the west. Standing alone at the bow of a small ice-class ship, my only companions are a scatter of fulmars hanging next to the sun. There’s a ripple of wind and soft whsshhh of wake as we carve through a jade-coloured sea. The ship is the Ocean Endeavour, part of a compact fleet designed to haul explorers into the Arctic. Half o

The most memorable cup of tea I’ve had was in an observatory on the outskirts of Vienna. I caught three buses into the suburbs with a guy named Collin who I met in a hostel. He was part of the American military stationed in Finland and was in Vienna for a two-week break. It was our first time in the city, and we spent our days eating breakfast at Café Central and roaming palace gardens. Collin had read about Kuffner Observatory on a blog and heard that on Tuesdays you could g

Another snake in the playground I was the teacher on a dam site in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province in northern Pakistan. There were...

Holidaying in the south of France felt like stepping into the pages of Mary Moody’s memoirs. Long before I boarded my flight, I had...

A crisp morning. The ground soft underfoot. Lost in my own thoughts when Dee, my walking buddy, asks:  “So what do you wish for today?”...

Amid the vastness of South Africa’s Kruger National Park – at almost 20,000 square kilometres, it’s roughly the size of Slovenia – we’ve...

We wait - bound within the tracks amidst a hundred bodies. The roof keeps snow off our faces but the cold has a different, piercing aura...

I never was a good student. All things considered however I was a pretty good wanderer. In 2021 I found myself in L’Aquila, a beautiful...

Because in the end, all travel is about memory. Mine, yours, our families’, everyone’s – distant memories, recent, for all time. Take,...

We stumble from plane to blending corridors and clear yellow signs of arrival processed in a surprising minute we're clutched from what...

A friend reads aloud words he wrote in his mother tongue, translating in the twilight as he goes, for an audience foreign and tipsy. In...

Cahors in December is three things: it is the grey-green clouds over Mont Saint-Cyr that cast turquoise shadows on the river; it is my...

A cushion trembles in front of me, lodged somewhat uncomfortably geometrical between its couch and the tea table my legs were stretched...

Do you know what it’s like to be an ant underneath a kid’s magnifying glass, being burnt to a crisp in the backyard? I do. It’s the only...

The crows are in flight, reminders of omens and overcast skies. But this day is different, a horizon layered in gold as the birds start...

Our Jetta died when we stopped to answer the call of nature. A text to AAA yielded the prospect of a two hour wait for a mechanic. Our...

The morning mist has ended. Now the hammering of a new house being built and the crowing of a cock echo through this Saturday’s streets....

A slosh of cool sea sussed a watery score as I shuffled through shallows, a thousand-year pilgrimage trail. In fact the route I was on...

I was in Tangier only briefly, and as one with nowhere to be, nowhere to go, no one to meet, I chose the path of the flâneur. I woke...