There are loads of blogs and sites advising you on "everything" you need to know before embarking on a big hike through the Nepali mountains. I attempt here to offer a few things from my (albeit limited) personal experience that you might not find elsewhere. Of course, there will be some overlap, but [...]
It has been many months since completing my treatment for rectal cancer. My tumour is gone. I’m clear. I’m back. I have felt compelled to write about the experience yet lacked the motivation to do so. At the same time I am stuck between two approaches to this story. I could compress it into a [...]
A week after Valentine’s Day a man called Garth stuck his finger up my bum and I went from being somebody, to somebody who has cancer. Wait. Don’t jump to conclusions. The first thing you need to hear is that I’ll probably make a full recovery. It could be much worse. When I tell people [...]
Note: idly flicking through some old notebooks, I found this journal from 2010 scribbled in the back of one of them. I have transcribed it here almost verbatim, with some insignificant tweaks for flow. Some of the spelling, especially the French, has been left deliberately unchecked. Square brackets are my notes written now, in 2017. [...]
Introduction I've always been a slow reader. Someone once told me that was a "sign of genius", and he was a journalist and book publisher, so I'll take that one. The truth, though, is largely mired by laziness. Then, nearly five years ago, I discovered audiobooks. Suddenly reading was something I didn't need to make time for. [...]
Note: this was one of my early attempts to craft a single travel journal piece from an adventure. Two of my best buddies and I spent eight chaotic, harebrained days in the Middle East in the autumn of 2004. It took me more than ten years to see the opportunity to publish my writing. Jordan Waking up in [...]
Note: this is one of two unusually long posts covering the six months we worked at Buena Vista Surf Club. If I was ever going to finish it, let alone keep it to a few pages, I had to let a lot go. There are many stories and people missing (you know who you are) [...]
Note: this is an unusually long post, as it covers a six-month period in one place. And, while this post focuses on our surfing experience, it runs simultaneously with the more general piece about our lives as hotel managers at Buena Vista Surf Club during the same period. Back in my teens my best [...]
I'm specifically talking about the postcard idea of "paradise" here, something like white, palm-fringed sand under empty blue skies, or a palatial suite at a five-star boutique hotel. Whatever it looks like to you, the trouble with "paradise", besides not existing in the first place, is that we get used to it. We get used to everything, it's [...]
Here's a trivial and subjective list of some of the encounters I've had with wild animals that have, for widely different reasons, stayed in a special place in my memory. They're in no meaningful order. Albatrosses, Otago Peninsula New Zealand (2010) From within a whirling, squawking cloud of seagulls, we saw a strangely captivating bird soar [...]
