Term: 2017
Explore all pages categorised under the heading 2017 below.
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Fullers, Flowers, and a Fish Knife
London, the city chained to the word “grey,” is rarely described in the context of colour, its industrial history cementing its reputation for dirty air....
A Few Seconds of Stillness
There’s a bench in London perched on the head of a hill like the Queen’s crown. It is a swelling of the land, a gentle...
London, My London: A Town of Contrasts
East London reminds me of the ingredients of a casserole, different elements in the pot with some of them blending quickly while the others take...
The Price of Redemption
Guilt is an opinionated dream crusher with better stalking skills than a student loan bill collector. It caught me one January evening as I sat...
On Filmmaking and Travel
I don’t remember when I developed the urge to travel. Did it start when I took my first film job in 2008, which saw me...
Triptych: London
East London reminds me of the ingredients of a casserole, different elements in the pot with some of them blending quickly while the others take...
Bitter Melon in Oregon
A tropical to subtropical vine, bitter melon (Momordica charantia) is one of the more challenging plants I attempt in our short growing season in northeastern...
Adventures in the French Digestive Tract
The cliché is that the French are obsessed with sex. But I would argue that if the French, and Parisians in particular, are fixated on...
Riverside
I walked down the ramp, to the edge of the river, and sat on the quay, my calves and feet dangling above the water. I...
High Hopes on the Cotswold Way
The plan was to quit my job then walk the Cotswold Way, a 102-mile path along a Jurassic-age escarpment in southwest England. Beyond that there...
This is What it Sounds Like
I touched a Beluga whale when I was twenty years old. My fingertips slid across its salt-kissed melon forehead that is understood to change shape...
Leaving to Go Home
I had just stepped into Malaysia. Thailand was behind me. The customs officer beamed and nodded, recognising immediately that I was a fellow Malaysian. “Hello,...
Swimming with the Fishes
‘If you go to Caye Caulker, see Juni.’ The Australian woman whose name I never caught shouted this tip as she waved goodbye and got...
My First Visit to the Trans-cultural Health Improvement Center
A few hours ago, in the middle of doing the laundry, I get a call from my friend Damien. He’s on the edge of death...
Hanoi
The lady with the good squid came to bake it on her clay pot stove in front of our low plastic chairs at the corner...
On Not Seeing Rocher Percé
Expectations. Absences. Out there—somewhere in the fog—a chunk of rock we’ve come all across the country to see. What we believe is there—have been told...
Witch
She, of the ellipsis flying broom night witch sun-dance seas breathing sky cruise liners panting smiles white teeth the allure of a travel case packed...
Directions to the Six Virgins
Pause while crossing the Ponte del Diavolo. Look into the ravine of stone walls set by Caesar’s orders. A hundred feet below, the Natizone crawls...
Mattituck 1980
When I was four years old, my dad snapped his Achilles tendon playing volleyball at his company’s summer picnic. For two months, the best months...
At the Edge of the Earth or its Centre
How many people have ever confronted an animal – not roadkill, not a beloved and ailing pet, but an animal – how many have looked...
In Flight: Her First American
I first noticed her in the Athens airport. I was sitting outside security, trying to finish a water bottle full of Airborne that wouldn’t be...
We May Never See Penguins
When I quit smoking the night before we left, it felt like a joke. My first attempt, in Korea, had been cutting down to five...
Philippi
“There’s a story here,” she said. I told her I didn’t doubt it. “Each town has at least one or two stories behind it, right?”...
Repeatable Sequence #5
The dangerous ingredients are all there. Baja California and everything that conjures. Sun, ocean, tequila, rip tides. A handsome, young couple in the throes of...
What Better Way Than This
I’m slowly making my way south. Today I watched goats, grape vines and sunflowers from the train to Sicily. The sunflowers were enormous—elephant stalks, brown...
Four Days
The International terminal is a bustle of activity. Strong lights illuminate a massive stone sculpture, with a dazzling effect because of all the sand particles...
Kabul
I know a city with tall trees as tall as the tower of Babylon cursing each other. Water flows on the shoulders of the city...
Adlewyrchiad Mewn Ffenest Trên (Reflection in a Train Window)
Vineyards streak across my facelong rows of vines in river-green and grey-green plough furrows on the plateaus of my cheek.
The Cotswold Way, England
I am standing barefoot on the soft green brow of Cleeve Hill, the highest point in Gloucestershire, holding up a faded cream-cotton parasol against the...
Adelaide
My husband’s friends lived east of the city, and whenever we visited, I was jealous of their space. Their living room was wide, the backyard...
On the Precipice of Flight
When I was a girl, I didn’t think much of road trips. For one thing, we just didn’t take them. The only real one we...
Deep Respect
John Wesley Powell and his crew of battered boatmen spent the morning of 14 August 1869 rowing through one rapid and carrying their boats around...
Snags
A few weeks after giving birth to our second, I stood on top of a mountain. Denali, the highest peak in North America, hid behind...
A First Hike
As I picked my way carefully around the rocks on a trail that meandered in and out of a dry streambed I marveled at two...
Summer of the Bears
A ptarmigan squawked from the nearby willow bushes. Squatting by the pan of water on the Coleman stove, I called my husky, Paris, and did...
Brooklyn, New York
About a year before I was born, my parents and six-year-old sister moved into a house in southern Brooklyn, in a neighbourhood that is often...
Improvisation: the London Dervish
I could be a dervish in the streets of London town. As if in rags I trod the desert ways from Baghdad on to Samarkand,...
Dr. Premachandra's St Louis Pilgrimage: Mapping the Mid-West from a Cadillac
I awoke in a state of shock on Thursday, March 5, 2015. Even though I was prepared for the events of that day, the full,...
Three Cups of Tea
Nothing is a straight line; rows are just cuts pieced together and always bending somewhere. This is the rockbed of camellia, he sweeps, to sunhat...
Everlasting
A journalist, a real estate advisor, an interior decorator, a writer, and a business woman – we are all mothers. We are all on a...
Flames and Shadows
‘I would like a coffee with milk and a sandwich with ham and cheese please.’ ‘Bitte?’ She stood there, pen and notepad in hand, her...
No One Will See Me Again Forever
The smugglers said the journey would take 24 hours max. The boat H and the other 80 asylum seekers would travel in was massive, so...
Partition, Migration and Immigration as Travel Stories: Stories of Three Women Who Wro(i)te
Where I come from, we talk about distance in memories. Remember when your mother tied the suitcase with a chain to the railway berth so...
Issue 4: Seen
Perhaps more than any other time in recent history, how we see places and one another will determine what happens next to our human family....
Bola Nuts
The sun was hot on the back of my neck. Hunger stretched and yawned like an expectant embryo needing nourishment in my belly. I unwrapped...
The Leaving
The streets were empty, as were all the houses in that village. He walked from door to door, ringing doorbells that made no sound, climbed...
Fermentation
There had been bombings, small ones that failed for the most part. A detonation in front of the Israeli Embassy that wounded only the bomber,...
Win
Capable—if unreliable—little motorcycles, a used Honda Win can be had for around US$200. Boasting 110cc engines, endlessly replaced, welded and salvaged clutches, wheels, brakes, handlebars,...
Boulevard of Open Dreams
Plaza de la Cathedral, is an open space except during special events like Liberation Day. On Liberation Day, bands, stands and volunteer hands fill the...
Looking for Joe
It is early morning and the hot winds fragranced with the aromas of sun baked earth and prairie grass blow through the car. Ahead the...
The Meek Family Ed-venture
Tim and Kerry Meek were both full-time teachers in Nottingham, England but felt that their jobs were too life-consuming and they needed to redress their...
Walking Budapest
When I think back to my trip to Budapest, I think, first, of her street signs. Hungarian street signs look like puzzles of Latin letters...
Hameen's Wallet
The wallet’s leather folds wink beneath the shuffle of feet on Tottenham Court Road. Tired feet, anxious feet, melancholy feet, sweaty feet tromp around it,...
Keisha Goes to Harvard
When Keisha wrote down Harvard University on the list her college counsellor gave her parents, it was because she knew that he would tell her...
Life Sentence
The air was cold and still, a skin-tightening astringent kiss from mother nature welcoming me back. And nothing moved. The precedent stillness before the storm....
Moscow Hometown Blues (In the Key of B)
The expansive breakfast buffet at the fancy-pants hotel helped in dismissing the fact that we’d been evicted the day before. While Emma used the free...
The Road on the Moss
There are some journeys that stay with you. They don’t need to be epic Himalayan treks or rainforest expeditions. I was 10 or 11 when...
Annaghmakerrig
We were sitting around an ancient oak table in the dining area of a mid-18th century Irish farmhouse, all seven of us: the poet from...
Ashes to Ashes
In the fourth grade, my teacher gave each student a vial of ash from the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens in the state of...
Rules of the Northern Lights
I squat on the dirt road and widen my stance to avoid the inevitable splash of pee on hard earth. When I have a solid...
Bleed and Chase
Halfway through a six-hour journey through rural Bangladesh in 2007, I realised that I might be missing a piece of myself. We were going over...
Northern Ignorance and Southern Evidence
Every time I go home to El Dorado, Arkansas, I can’t seem to fight the feeling that someone or something is trying to kill me....
What You See
I wore my Afrodelik Designs shirt by a Toronto-based designer Dezi Dee. It depicts the profile of a black woman, outlined in white on a...
Alive Among Italy's Dead
Less than 9km from Mount Vesuvius, near the entrance to Pompeii, a vendor sells bottles resembling penises. The corked bottles are red, white, blue, and...
The Queen of Doughnuts
The young homeless guy with mountain-man beard camped outside the library, his makeshift bed fenced by towers of paperbacks, asks my name. When I say,...
The Medically Important Poisonous Snakes of Malaysia
Snakes could be anywhere, which means everywhere. We kid sandwich: parent leading, kid kid, parent trailing. It’s hard to watch where all the feet go,...
Mealtimes
Everything I eat in Malaysia sticks to my back teeth as if to brand me, say I’ve finally tasted travel—the swallowing heat of the East...
The Weight of Suicide
Brambles scream to an angry sky, piles of debris are free to love, stripped stolen motorbike here, scorned forlorn unicorn there randomly scattered toys, their...
Soroche
What is the calculus of altitude and allure in this place where, until the volcano spewed ash and covered it, the old lake of the...
Issue 3: Open
We present our panoramic vision of travel literature in our Spring ‘Open’ issue. A carefully curated collection of travel poetry, fiction, and memoir, the selections...