Here’s what happened when I spent sunrise at Angkor Wat in Cambodia. When it comes to time of day, I don’t have too many preferences. I mean, obviously 7pm is pretty sweet, 1am needs some kind of award for excellence, and 12 noon deserves a special place in everyone’s hearts, but beyond that I’m not…
There was a man wandering up and down Canal Street in New Orleans shaking a collection tin at tourists in Hawaiian shirts. He was watching everything that went on along that road and every now and again he’d notice a traffic violation and scream things like, “No left! NO LEFT! I’ve scraped three people off…
We were looking for a bluegrass station on the car’s radio. Driving along this lush Blue Ridge Parkway highway in the Blue Ridge Mountains, North Carolina, bluegrass felt appropriate. We didn’t find anything so we ultimately settled for a Johnny Cash greatest hits CD my friend had in the glove compartment. As the outsider here…
If I get a ticket from place A to place B from a bus station, I expect the entirety of that journey to be made by bus. So when I bought a bus ticket in Peru from Puno to Cusco, I was expecting to heave my rucksack onto a bus, then curl up in my…
I spent a month backpacking from Peru to Argentina, and for a brief time I was stuck in the middle of nowhere in Bolivia. Story time! Bolivia generally isn’t known for its elegant, efficient highways and state of the art road traffic management systems. If you take a second out of your day to picture…
If you don’t know where Bratislava is, you’re forgiven. It’s the end of semester. If you sort of somehow recognise the name from somewhere but you’re not sure where, half marks. If you know that Bratislava is the capital of Slovakia in eastern Europe and a charming little place, you can come sit on teacher’s…
I’ve seen more than a few memorable things in my time – Machu Picchu, Petra, the Grand Canyon and New York City from the air – but visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau will live long in the memory for all the wrong reasons. The Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp is an hour’s train ride from Kraków in Poland. I’ll be honest,…
Back in 2009 volunteered with a conservation company in Peru. Or to put it another way, I spent three months living with cockroaches in the Amazon Rainforest. That’s where I lived for three months. No doors, no windows, no electricity, no phone lines, no hot water, no McDonald’s just round the corner. The photo shows…
There’s a big hole in America. There are many jokes I can make there but because this is a family-friendly website, I won’t. The big hole I’m talking about is of course the Grand Canyon, over which I did a south rim helicopter tour. The Grand Canyon covers a lot of the south-west of the…
I was once on a train from Salt Lake City to Denver and after midnight John Malkovich started playing a harp in the lounge car. Okay, it wasn’t actually John Malkovich but when he spoke the likeness was uncanny. And you can just imagine John Malkovich chilling out playing the harp, can’t you? He has that feel about him….