Sipping a chilled 333 in the window of a buzzy bar on Saigon’s renowned Dong Khoi Street I was taken by the faith and trust complete strangers place in others. The spark of this reverie was the nonchalant way many visitors stepped off the footpath into the path of a tsunami of motorbikes and purposefully strode across the road as…
Beijing
A chilly, foggy Friday morning and we made the 2 hour flight to Beijing. I know it’s 2 hours because we made that flight twice. Turned back just prior to landing in Beijing we returned to Xian airport for a long and frustrating wait in the terminal where we made deletions to our Beijing itinerary to compensate for the lost time.…
Xi’an
The first experience of Xian is an airport very similar in design to Pudong International, if not quite the same scale. We’re collected by our local guide Cynthia, and led to our people mover for the hour-long drive into Xian. On a vast plain, bisected by a number of lowflowing rivers, Xian presents as an unremarkable and quite unattractive metropolis…
Shanghai
The first-time visitor to Shanghai can be overwhelmed by the sheer scale and energy of China’s largest city, also one of the world’s ten largest. With a population touching 14 million occupying an area roughly twice the size of greater Melbourne, the inner urban core is a network of highrise apartments, shopping malls and parks inter-connected by a labyrinth of…
Pinot on the Peninsula with Giulietta and the missus
Last October I attended a burgundy masterclass at the inaugural Pinot Palooza in Melbourne’s Ormond Hall. The Palooza was a celebration of all things pinot noir, showcasing around 140 expressions of pinot from about 50 Aussie and kiwi wineries, and was the brainchild of Ben Edwards and Dan Sims of Wine Guide fame. It must have been a raging success…
Storming the Celebrity Solstice
Each June and December I join a circle of friends to celebrate the turning of the seasons for a ritual feasting and overindulgence in wine; I’m referring, of course, to the winter and summer solstice. Summer Solstice this December though, was just a tad different. This year was a get-together with 2850 of our closest chums, including around 1700 travel…
The Moki Dugway
We cheerfully bailed out of the disappointing Monument Valley Hotel early in the morning, with a drive along Utah’s Scenic Byways to Bryce Canyon City planned for the day ahead. I’d planned the route originally on Google maps, intending to capture as much of the spectacular Colorado Plateau scenery as possible. As the cellular reception was virtually non-existent, and SatNav…
Cuzco Museum of Pre-Columbian Art – Day 9
It’s a Cuzco Saturday morning; crisp, bright and sunny. The hotel breakfast made exceptionally palatable with the online news that Collingwood had given Geelong FC a thorough shellacking at the MCG on Friday night, Melbourne time. We’re an odd couple; I’m a ‘Pie’man and Mitch a ‘Cat’woman, so at least twice a year there’s a minor domestic shitfight at our…
Losing it
Last Saturday was the first anniversary of a very dramatic moment in my life. Probably not as earth-shattering as TAbbott ever saying something worthwhile, not to mention believable. Definitely not as staggering as Yoda losing his power to split infinitives. But on Saturday, July 30th 2011 at about 7pm, my smug world as I lived it came to a crashing…
Cuzco
We’re in Cuzco (Cusco) and it’s the eighth day of our ramble along Peru’s famous Gringo Trail. To recap, our journey commenced in Lima before flying, via Cuzco, to Puerto Maldonado and 2 nights in Reserva Amazonica in the headwaters of the Amazon River. We then flew back to Cuzco and, leaving our heavy baggage in storage, were immediately swept…