Roaming Tales

Avoca, Tasmania; February 2007

In Avoca on the east coast of Tasmania, you might run into fairy penguins - also known as little penguins. When I was there on a family holiday in 2007, we watched them huddling on a little rocky island about 15 metres off shore.

Longyearbyen, Svalbard; August 2006

Up in the Arctic, the traffic warning sign is for polar bears. ‘Gjelder hele Svalbard’ means ‘Valid for all Svalbard’. We did see polar bears too, though thankfully not near the main town of Longyearbyen on the island of Spitsbergen.

Despite the Coca Cola advert, polar bears and penguins do not live side by side. The polar bears would eat the penguins in a heart beat.

Both animals are cool creatures but I know which one I’d rather meet face to face.

This post is part of Photo Friday, a weekly photo blogging feature hosted by Debbie at Delicious Baby. Click here to see all the other submissions this week.

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The November issue of Australian Women’s Health is out, with my article on kayaking in the Arctic in the travel section.

The idea was to write a blog-style piece with plenty of humour focusing on the wildlife. The photographs (with the exception of the one that I’m in) are mine as well.

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Southern Highlands, NSW, Australia; January 2006

This is my sister Emma, age three, at the family farm in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales, Australia. It’s a beautiful part of the world with rolling hills and is quite evocative of parts of England and Ireland - although in this photo the drought is much in evidence. Emma is sitting on the hay bales, about 100 metres from the house, dressed her favourite pink dress and boots. You can also see my father striding down the field on the left hand side. This was a weekend property when this photo was taken but my dad and his wife and my small sister and brother have now moved down from Sydney full time.

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I didn’t need 80 days to travel around the world but the last month still feels pretty epic.

Since leaving London in early March, I have been to eight countries on four continents. First stop was Australia, where I spent a couple of weeks visiting friends and family in and around Sydney and Brisbane. I then flew to Houston via Los Angeles to make connections to Nicaragua for a week researching a travel story. Back to Los Angeles for one night, and then a 15-hour flight to Hong Kong. Still on assignment, I went from Hong Kong to Thailand, then a loop around South-East Asia that also took in the Angkor Wat area in Cambodia and a day in Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, before returning to Bangkok. I flew back to Hong Kong for my flight home to London (the itinerary had changed but the ticket didn’t).

I was only in London for one day - just long enough to visit the laundromat since the washing machine had packed it in during my absence. Then I caught the train down to the Arvon Foundation centre in the Devon countryside for a fiction writing course. It felt like a retreat after all that time on the road, staying in a pre-Domesday thatched cottage, with lots of time to be creative and go on long rambling walks across the fields. The hope of seeing otters in the river did get me down there at 6.30am - I didn’t see the otters but I did see this beautiful sunrise.

Now I’m back in London, very glad to see my partner and looking forward to getting back to normal life - and the eight stories I have to write from the trip. Travelling is fab, even though the schedules can be intense, but I’m always happy to return, knowing that the next adventure is not too far away. Mongolia might be next.

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Europe to Australia in under five hours? It sounds too good to be true but this might be reality for future generations. Scientists have come up with the A2, a supersonic plane they believe could carry up to 300 passengers at a top speed of more than 3,000mph. It’s funded by the European Space Agency and uses technology more commonly deployed in space than air travel. Apparently it’s also eco-friendly because it uses liquid hydrogen instead of conventional fuel, and flight noise could also be a relic of the past since it’s almost silent.

Of course, the thing will probably never get made since the demise of the Concorde will make any potential investors wary of futuristic flight concepts. And if it did get made, it would cost the equivalent of a first-class fare today - about £7000 or close to $14,000. The lack of portholes might also be a challenge for anyone who is claustrophobic.

Still it’s exciting to see the boundaries of air travel being pushed. Obviously safety and price are key but beyond that, anything that is simultaneously faster and less polluting gets my vote.

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