Travel

Latin American adventures

Spurred by a travel writing competition run by Australia Post I plundered my 1987 diary for tales about my first big trip overseas: nine month’s of backpacking around Central and South America. The 250 word limit means most of them are snippets, but I’ve added a few longer articles to the collection.

Walking the Queen Charlotte Track

The words ‘multi-day hike’ and ‘luxurious’ might seem an unlikely combination, unless you are referring to the Queen Charlotte Track. You can do it the hard way, lugging everything you need and staying in camping grounds, or you can arrange things so your baggage travels by water taxi each day and arrives well before you do at a resort featuring comfy beds, hot showers, a licensed restaurant and maybe even a hot spa to ease those aching legs.

Turkish Delights

Why a holiday in Turkey? Before going there, I could not have answered that question; in fact, I probably could not have even accurately picked the country’s location on a world map. It was Libby’s idea to gather a small group of women friends, all freshly released from child-rearing and HSC-overseeing responsibilities, and to cruise along the Turkish Mediterranean in a gulet, a traditional wooden sailing boat. Sun, sea and sailing along a shoreline dotted with the ruins of ancient civilizations. And the boat comes complete with crew and cook, she said.

Seven of us, all connected in some way to the rural university town of Armidale in northern NSW, were to converge on Marmaris in late September 2013 for a week-long walk/sail cruise with Meridian Travels and Yachting. I decided to go earlier, and celebrate my 50th birthday in Istanbul with my husband Chris. What follows are the snippets from a holiday we adored, in a place we hardly knew before we went there.

Not relaxed in Vietnam

HOME to 90 million people and more than 20 million motorbikes, Vietnam is a lively, noisy country that packs extraordinary geographical features and a fascinating heritage into a long, skinny strip of land bordered by China, Laos, Cambodia and the South China Sea.

Volunteers abroad

In 1987, I spent a month in Nicaragua helping to bring in the coffee harvest – one of hundreds of international brigadistas who went there to pick beans and build schools in support of the Sandinista revolution.