Travel stories for freedom chasers
It’s all about the table. If I find the table, the food will come. My hunt is specific and single minded. Down alley ways that are loud with activity, past doorways in which women crouch low to the ground to peel vegetables, between street stalls that smell of salt and fire, clouds of steam released into the air every time…
I don’t remember the first words I said to him, or him to me. I remember how deliciously warm the night breeze was as it ran gentle fingers through my hair, how strange it tasted; that other-worldly air, thick with frangipani and incense. I remember that the stairs down to the hostel bar were painted purple, and I remember how…
The road was slick and steamy with morning rain as we rode out of the city into rural Can Tho province on An’s cherry-red motorbike. Turning sharply, we zipped down a narrow path alongside the river, bright gold sunlight flashing through emerald leaves as big as elephants’ ears. Long grasses swayed and bent like dancers in the rice paddies, iridescent…
July is restless, rushing, full of people and parties and movement. It shifts in golden and grey, streaked with sunlit shadows; shifting smiles and shifting sighs, shifting curtains by an open window, stirred by gusts of summer breeze. The world lies verdantly green beneath a fathomless, inky bowl of sky that crackles with summer storms. I learned a new word…
The map blurs as I gaze at it, countries bleeding pale green and yellow into a blue painted sea. Piles of books scatter across the floor around me, Lonely Planet guides and travel fiction tumbling together, stories of people in foreign lands mixing with pages of information, so many words that I wouldn’t know where to begin. My Macbook blinks,…
The first time I set foot in Vietnam was 2 months after my 19th birthday. I had left college the previous summer bored and itchy, anchor less, wrestling with Sylvia Plath’s green fig tree and it’s too-many choices. Unable to bring myself to apply for any universities, I found a teaching placement in Thailand and applied for that instead. They…
I hadn’t prepared for the rain. It fell endlessly, relentlessly. The sky was bruised by it, grey and rolling with an underbelly of thunderous clouds, the air heavy and thick with the scent of overripe durian. Myanmar in low season was a drowned world, it’s emerald jungles and golden pagodas blurred by a perpetual sheet of water, as though the…
I can always tell when summer has arrived in England by the smell. It’s a particular evocation that hums in the lazy stillness of the evening air – a physical memory, like the way that coconut sun cream always reminds me of summers in France. It’s a hot, salty smell of chips and cigarette smoke and hot tarmac; wet grass,…
