It’s the middle of April in Quebec City, the sun is high and the sky is a cool, clear blue. Not that you’d know it was Spring. The city is frozen: framed in snow drifts, carpeted in ice. As I walked around in the early morning, I have to tred carefully, minding each step doesn’t land me on my […]
travel
Life’s too short not to drink Campari in the street in Paris on a Monday
I was probably feeling a little too pleased with myself. That must have been it. A Monday morning, up before the dawn, I had – swaddled in my faux fur coat, my comfy trainers on and coffee held jauntily aloft – sailed through all the usual scans and checks to take my seat on a Eurostar. It was a day trip to Paris; a […]
On The Edge: A Trip To The Seven Sisters Cliffs
“Today I will be happier than a seagull with a stolen chip.” So declared the sign in the pub, where seven of us filled up on fish-finger sandwiches and pints of ale ahead of a blustery walk across the Seven Sisters. I can’t believe I’d not been to Eastbourne before – especially as I actually grew up in another Eastbourne, in Wellington, New Zealand. […]
In Search of the Sólheimasandur DC-3
The plane has been there since 1973. To look at the thing now – the torso of an aircraft, riddled with bullets, left to erode on a black beach in southern Iceland – you’d imagine something sinister happened. A tragic crash, a plane shot down in battle, a Bermuda-triangle-style missing airliner. The eeriness of this rusting wreck is its greatest allure. If you’d prefer to keep it […]
The Money Makers of Paris
How often do you think about money? Currency, I mean. Those coins in your pocket. What’s their story? The first time I went to Europe, the Euro had been in place about a year. On my debut visit to Paris, half of the menus were still in francs, yet francs themselves were proving increasingly harder to come by. At the time I feigned relief […]
Tents, Tea & Sea: Surfing in Devon
I’m not sure where my love for camping first came from. Mine was not a camping family, so it was only in adulthood that I discovered great bliss in huddling under canvas, everything you need stuffed into a rucksack and the sense of satisfaction of, well, building your own house for the night. Sure, the […]
Joshua Tree National Park
I have this thing for deserts. Something to do with the emptiness of them – my life feels so cluttered most of the time, and in the desert I relish the space and clarity. Here, we’re reminded that in the big scheme of things we are a mere speck. You’d think there’s little life in […]
Ten Years a Londoner
On 29 April 2005, when I was 22, I landed in London. Fresh off the boat from New Zealand I had little more than a secondhand backpack, a new A-Z and a couple of hundred quid in the bank. Not even enough for a deposit on a room (I think a part of me was driven by […]
24 Hour Paris Cake Tour
Paris is always a good idea. So is cake. The first time my cake-fancying father went to Paris was in 2011 – his debut to Europe, in fact. That was a cold, bleak December, when the city was stripped bare of any colour. The Christmas markets sparkled and we spent almost all our money in […]
Marrakechmas
Generally speaking, travelling is about discovery… but it can also be an escape. And last month, when I hopped a budget flight to Morocco, it was definitely the latter. I was adamantly escaping Christmas and all of its jingle-bell accoutrements. And what better place to dodge the flying tinsel and faux-religious sentiment than the gloriously […]