It was 8 AM in the Sumatran village of Lempur. I emerged bleary-eyed from my homestay bedroom to find myself surrounded by high school beauty queens, giggling and chattering as they sparkled in colourful dresses and elaborate headscarfs. They all wanted selfies with me so, despite my dishevelled state, I dutifully complied. It was graduation […]
Since I was little, I’ve been drawn to rainforest. The way it drips with life. Like a promise that organic life on this lonely planet will live on forever. And anyone who loves rainforest dreams of going to Sumatra, a place where the romantic jungle of storybooks still exists in this age of the anthropocene. Most […]
From the dry, cool confines of Canberra in spring, the idea of spending two weeks hiking in tropical Kakadu National Park seemed like the adventure of a lifetime and I signed myself up excitedly. As the hike drew nearer, however, I started to get nervous about hiking in the tropics. Now that I thought about […]
Every traveller dreams of a place untouched by tourism. But in our globalised world where ordinary people can be in another continent in mere hours, the search for the ‘authentic’ often turns out to be an Eldorado, always glittering just out of reach. If untouched places do exist, it is usually because war and the risk of being […]
The tail of a cyclone was headed our way with heavy rain forecast. This was inconvenient as we were starting a three-day hike in the Whirinaki forest tomorrow. The Whirinaki is only two hours southeast of Rotorua on New Zealand’s north island, but to describe the area as off-the-beaten-track would be an understatement – we had possibly travelled backwards through time to […]