My Travel Reviews

Here are some of my travel reviews, which I admit are sporadically updated.

As I write this, I am sitting in a hotel room overlooking Darling Harbour in Sydney, Australia. The brush fires that have been burning for more than a month are still burning, but the smoke that caked the atmosphere seems to have dissipated. Perhaps the wind has started to blow a different direction.

But you can see from the photos, which I took from 35k feet as we approached Sydney, they are tragically immense fires. I can't imagine the devastation these have caused people in the country. 

My wife and I had spent a week driving around Tasmania. We took in a vineyard or two. We stayed on the Tarkine Coast for one night and spent an evening listening to nesting Fairy Penguins who had picked our garden shed as a rookery. We watched some very barely visible Australia Boralis dance across the sky, but mostly only discernible in photos, which I will post later. And we spent an evening on a farm on the east coast, surrounded by Wallabies, and Tasmanian devils fighting in the grove. 

It was a definitive wild Australian Christmas week. Now we are in Sydney. 

It's New Year's Eve and we are headed into a new decade. I am not sure what this blog will produce, but I have realized after writing for a bit that travel writing is something I quite like, and it suits me, so, perhaps a journey I tried to start over 15 years ago -- to move to Asia and become a travel writer and correspondent -- will happen. I am putting my faith into practice. I think that if I put my mind to it and keep doing what I feel passionate about, it will produce more of what I want. 

And what is it that I want? I think it's time to produce books, and to write more articles for the public. I have always enjoyed the experience of being in a place, and then mixing my memory up and my emotions, and finding new purpose through writing of the place. You will always discover something when you put thoughts to the digital screen. And with them, you will grow. So, I guess I seek growth through travel. 

These are going to be my Explore Rations. 

I think, if I remember this correctly, that I started a blog a long time ago called Mind Rations. I can no longer find it online. I may have deleted this. It was my attempt while living in Hong Kong to write down my new experiences and to show others what it was like to live in Asia. 

It's funny. As I start this again, it does quite feel like all new experiences are just the old experiences in a new packaging. This packaging is now 44 years old, married to a Hong Kong woman, and traveling around the world for work and for pleasure. I work in a venture capital firm now, and not in journalism. I live in Taiwan, and commute back and forth once or twice every three months, to Hong Kong, where I have another house and where my wife lives. 

Soon, we will be living in Leeds, England, where we bought another house a few months ago, and where I quite fancy myself being a David Attenborough of travel. I imagine myself as a kind of explorer, or an old adventurer, like a Stanley or Livingstone of old. But in this decade, with the hyper connectedness, perhaps that brings with it a dialogue. 

So, in the hopes there are other travelers out there with the similar mindset, I begin. Again. Heading into middle age, and heading back into the world. 

From Sydney on New Years Eve, thus ends this first post of mine in a long long time.