“You are a woman. And you are from...” the first man said.
“Norway,” I said to correct what I assumed to be his assumption of my origin. I had done this before, because most people do not grasp how an Indonesian-Norwegian traveller can be travelling. This was not this day and trip’s problem though.
“Yes,…
“They are here because you were there. There is an umbilical connection.”
– Stuart Hall, Black Chronicles.
The following is a reluctant journal of my time volunteering on the Search and Rescue boat ‘Mo Chara’ for Refugee Rescue off the shores of Greece. I originally wrote this so that I would not have to speak…
To the last man standing. To the big night out. The party isn’t over if the music’s still playing. Who did I get that cigarette off? Did I steal your last sip? That’s my mate DJ’ing – I can’t stop yet. Sticky toilet floors… dudes can’t aim. Did you assholes forget how to flush?
The…
Kitsune, Kyoto. A sticky summer’s night. You’ve been drinking by the river in Gion-Shijo with your friends, Strong Zeroe’s from the 7/11 down the road, but they didn’t have the sour lemon so you’re sipping on grapefruit, wondering why this flavour even exists.
In the club, you lose your friends in a haze of lights.…
He bumbles aimlessly through the station, his sandy brown hair a beacon, head and shoulders above the tide of mostly black. He has no passport and no wallet. He is a ghost - a shadow, staring with blank confusion at the tangled train timetable, buzzing his hotel room key at the turnstile instead of his…
I’m in the hostel common area and they’re all here. There’s the German solo traveller in sensible outdoor clothes; the bubbly Scandinavian girls who embarrass you with their perfect English (and French, Spanish, and already firm grasp of the language from whichever country you’re in); the perhaps unfairly labelled, perhaps not, weird older bloke who…
What a night. Thank fuck it’s nearly over.
Olivia’s sat at the empty bar waiting for the rest of us to finish. Livs works across the road, but she’s new to Liverpool, and usually spends most of her free time in here anyway, whether we’re open or shut.
It’s getting into the wee hours of…
Opening scene: Australia
A beautiful young woman sits at her office cubicle longingly staring at a photo of the La Sagrada Familia on her computer screen. In another window, she opens her online bank account.
“We’re a hundred dollars closer to freedom,” she whispers to herself.
She turns her attention to the framed photo of…
It was on a winter afternoon, during a stroll through the aesthetic architecture that Copenhagen is known for, that an impulse to cultivate myself with knowledge about an alien cult struck me. Gold typography that read Scientologi Kirken Danmark (Church of Scientology Denmark) glistened before my eyes. I stepped in to look.
Before me unfolded…
Clack, Clack, Clack. I press my teeth together as I sit on a stool in the tiny, five-person bar. The edges of my vision blur as I stare vacantly at her angelic face, stretching and tightening, as she mouths voiceless words. Is she speaking Japanese? I don’t even know at this point. Wish I had…
Enormous clouds cling to the peaks of snow-capped mountains. Winking prickly pears and violet wildflowers greet us on either side of a path that looks as if it were opened up by the gods. It’s early afternoon, the sun is low in the sky, and our bellies are full to the brim with Peruvian avocados,…
When I boarded my flight to Bali as a naïve, 19-year-old solo traveller, the last thing my mum said to me was “always wear a helmet and please, just don’t do mushies”.
The world of party drugs was entirely new to me, and the thought of them kind of scared me. My first overseas trip…