Surviving backpacking with your beau

So you’re planning a grand adventure with your beau. Perhaps you’re picturing lavish hotel rooms covered with rose petals or long kisses in front of the Taj Mahal. If so, stop. Although backpacking will bring fond memories, it also means you’re more likely to share the sheets with bed bugs than your man.

To make love last, follow these tips.

1. Think up a Game Plan

Before you set out to discover the world, discover what you both want. This will avoid screaming matches when he’s more interested in checking out the local brews then a tour of the temples. As long as you’re up for the same adventures, you’ll be smiling in all your travel pics.

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CLEO Magazine, October 2009

Let go and enjoy the chaos

“You can’t go up there, the tourist desk has moved. You have to go here,” the man says pointing to our Lonely Planet map.

He appears so helpful, hustling us into an auto rickshaw and bartering with the driver for a lower price.

But as soon as another person appears to accompany us I become suspicious.

I read the guide: “Do not believe anyone who tells you the tourist desk has shifted, closed or burnt down. This is a scam.”

It’s our fifth day in India’s sweaty and sense assaulting capital, Delhi, and it feels like we are being fed to a pack of hungry wolves.

Published Manly Daily (Cumberland Newspapers, News Ltd) June 4, 2009

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Seeking some monkey magic

Spending three days flying through canopies and sleeping in tree houses was not what I had in mind when I packed my bags for Laos recently.

I was not prepared for the cold weather in the northern province of Bokeo.

The only thing I brought was a general fear of doing it rough. But I threw caution to the wind when I hopped on a boat from the former capital Luang Prabang, on a river journey north, seeking some monkey magic.

After two long days, a collision with a Mekong rock and some general fears about pneumonia, we arrived in Huay Xai – a major port town, which attracts tourists looking to cross into Thailand.

Other than that Huay Xai, with its tacky temple and bad food, isn’t a show stopper. But a handful of travellers do stay there for the Gibbon Experience – an ecotourism project that takes eight people into the nearby Bokeo Nature Reserve to hear the sounds of the wild.

Drummoyne Village Voice, March, 2008.

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Take a trip to heaven, earth and hell

Travelling through Laos is much like taking a hike through heaven, earth and hell.

Heaven because it’s one of the least developed countries in the world and as a consequence has thick, lush forests.

Earth because you are constantly reminded about the food chain, with chickens, goats, cows, dogs, cats and their offspring running around everywhere.

And hell becuase you can see heaven being destroyed through plans to build environmentally destructive hydroelectric dams an the stringent (albeit hidden) role communism plays in people’s lives.

These contradictions are summed up best in a park 24 kilometres out of the country’s capital, Vientiane, which has a population of around 235,000 and is the laziest, calmest capital I have visited.

Balmain Village Voice, January, 2008.

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