Alaska:

Ketchikan – totem poles, brothels, lumberjacks & lots of tourists

23 July 2023 | Places

  ▲ Ketchikan, Alaska As we pull in to our final Alaska stop there are already two ships in port – the Diamond Princess, which has overtaken us during the night, and the Celebrity Solstice. Late the Niue Amsterdam, a sister ship to our Westerdam, arrives. W...

View Post

Sitka – my second Alaska stop

21 July 2023 | Places

▲ Discovery Princess at the Sitka Sound Cruise Terminal . Sitka is our second Alaska stop on my long trek from Melbourne to London. The Sitka cruise terminal is nine km out of town and another cruise ship, the Discovery Princess, arrives minutes after us. I’d woken ...

View Post

Kodiak, Alaska – my first stop on the eastern side of the Pacific

20 July 2023 | Places

▲ After our seven day Pacific crossing from Yokohama in Japan we finally made landfall in Kodiak, an island off the south coast of the state of Alaska and at the eastern end of the long string of Aleutian Islands. I’ve been to Kodiak Island once before, back in 2009 w...

View Post

Melbourne to London the long way with the odd problem

28 May 2023 | Transport

A few years ago I travelled London to Melbourne in about 28 days, all of it on flights of just an hour or two by Low Cost Carriers, airlines like Ryanair, easyJet, Pegasus, Fly Dubai, IndiGo or Air Asia. Now I’ve just arrived in London from Melbourne, a trip that t...

View Post

Souvenirs – an Australian Stammtisch

10 June 2020 | Culture

Souvenirs are an important part of travel and over the years I’ve bought some truly terrible souvenirs. Most of them, I’m glad to say, precisely because they were truly terrible. You know the process: ‘Oh my God, that is absolutely awful. I must buy it.’ Most of my re...

View Post