Travel

Julia Gillard wanted her huge compensation package to give the carbon pricing scheme a soft landing in July. But Qantas has shot down that hope with February price rises.

The carbon scheme pushing up Qantas fares is the European version. But their penalty on emissions is much smaller than our $23 a tonne will be. The impact here could be greater. Opposition leader Tony Abbott will use this to further underline his claim that carbon pricing will hurt the economy, and to question whether families will be fully protected from rises in expenses.

The airline has preempted by two months the start of the Government’s carbon pricing compensation, $1.5 billion which was to go to welfare recipients in May and June as advance payments.

Continue reading "Fuelled by carbon tax, plane fares have lift off" »

FOR a year now, I’ve had a little quote pinned above my desk. “Tell me,” it says, “what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” On a particularly joyless day, I scribbled a response: “Make lunch boxes.”

But even doctored with my smarty-pants cynicism, that scrap of paper winks at my soul. Some days, I try for ‘wild’ by blasting The Buzzcocks through my office after dropping the kids at school. Other times, I aim for ‘precious’, tinkering with words in the hope they’ll flow from me to you as naturally as breath (they don’t).

Now, I’m not one for malcontent. Live well, love well, don’t leave a mess and “yes, please” to another piece of cake is generally my motto. But, recently I’ve felt disconnected, which is absurd because last year I received 13,506 emails, sent 432 tweets and became Facebook ‘friends’ with someone I kissed in 1989.

Continue reading "Reconnecting by getting totally disconnected" »

She checks what the time is in their far-flung time zone and then looks into the distance. It is so long since they have been back in this city, back at home. What exotic locale are they exploring today? Who are they spending time with? Are they safe? 

These could well be the musings of a parent surveying a nest emptied of backpacking children. But they are in fact the reflections of a child, a middle-aged child left in the wake of the fastest growing class of traveller – The Silver Mobility.  The Silver Mobility are superannuated, silver-haired (underneath) and they’ve got very itchy feet.  It’s not only pneumonia that hits seniors hardest - wanderlust is just as bad. 

The Silver Mobility sweated it out for over 40 years. They sent more of us than ever to private schools, supported more of us than ever through tertiary education, funded unprecedented material comfort, and then they waited for us to move out. And then they waited some more for the ones that moved out, and then moved back, to move out again. But finally, we’re gone. Which means it’s time to dust off the suitcase, fill a few prescriptions for Brufen and Lipitor and get the hell out of there.

Continue reading "Grey Nomads choosing Bordeaux over Play-doh" »

The ugly Australian is alive and well and holidaying in South East Asia.

Right now he or she is probably bashing someone, taking drugs, or stealing stuff. 

Of course, it’s never their fault. It’s always the “harsh” or “draconian” laws of the country in which the crime is committed, which is inevitably described as “primitive”.

Continue reading "Meet the Ugly Australian" »

It is one of life’s rich curiosities that the primary function of any government department is to make its citizenry despise it. This is most pronounced at the national passport office, where prior to confirming you are a citizen of Australia the bureaucratic apparatus feels it must first provide you with a host of reasons why you would not want to be.

Australian passports last for 10 years, because that is how long it takes the Department of Foreign Affairs to process a new one. But recently there have been some great breakthroughs in this area.

Now it only takes them two weeks to renew your passport - still slow by real world standards but the blink of an eye in the public service.

Continue reading "I fought the public service and the public service won" »

Over the next few months, countless Australians will be forced to listen to their friends and co-workers ponder holiday destinations.

Many factors will be considered during this process - from the number of recognisable landmarks that can be used to create obnoxious Facebook profile pictures, to whether the guy will believe them when they say the scooter was already dented when they got it.

Chief among these considerations, however, will be whether or not their chosen destination will be overrun with other human beings, who intend to use the same chunk of land for similar recreational purposes. It is this exact concern that drives so many over-confident Australians, particularly Queenslanders, to embark on ill-fated outback adventures every holiday season.

Continue reading "Go on a holiday to the middle of nowhere and you’ll DIE" »

The global elite are on the move.

There’s a much larger globetrotting, “international” class of people than ever before, a BBC News report has found.

This leads me to the question: where would you go if you had all the money in the world, and all its opportunities at you fingertips? Where would your dream life take place? And what would you do there? It’s Tuesday. So hey, what else is on your mind Punchers?

When I was working at Melbourne’s Herald Sun, I reported on an MP who’d used taxpayer funds to fly herself and her partner to Europe for a guided bus tour of the Continent.

The trip was justified as a fact-finding mission on the use of public rubbish bins, which she’d dutifully photographed out of the window of her comfy Trafalgar bus.

Needless to say she wasn’t too happy with the story, which ran with a headline along the lines of “MP’s tour of rubbish”. And when Victorians next went to the polls, democracy left her on the heap.

Continue reading "Time to junk the junkets" »

The Punch loves a good travel trend. Especially when it involves camping. News.com.au reported yesterday that camping in other people’s back yards is the hottest thing to do when you’re not at work. Ah, holidays.

According to their sources 350 homeowners from the UK and Europe are renting out their backyards to people who’d like to camp there. Don’t believe us? Then check out the website campinmygarden.com. Organisers say the holiday would suit people who are keen to “experience the local community and go back to traditional and modest forms of accommodation”. But travel agents will say anything to get your money, won’t they?

And so it’s Tuesday, what’s happening in your backyard?

A month or so ago an electrical storm over Melbourne had my 2.30pm flight from Sydney in all sorts of trouble. After two bouts of circling, a diversion to Canberra and a compulsory park on the tarmac long enough to watch a film, we finally disembarked at 9.20pm.

We had just spent the equivalent amount of time on that plane as a flight to Jakarta.

You can perhaps put this down to the normal vagaries of flying. But when you add in an industrial campaign and a twitchy company, it is fair to say that recently Australian flyers, or at least those who frequent the flying kangaroo, have tapped a rich vein of material for their almanac of aeroplane war stories.

Continue reading "Air-raising stories of flights I didn’t fancy" »

My sympathy to all those travellers stranded at various uncomfortable airports over the weekend.

But as the nation echoes with complaints about the difficulties involved in getting from Point A to Point B, I can’t help but wonder whether our expectations about the ease of flying are becoming a tad unrealistic.

After all, air travel is supposed to involve gross inconvenience and burlesque mishap. That’s air travel’s job. And no amount of insurance, meticulous advance planning or industrial relations tranquility will protect you.

Continue reading "Waiting for God only knows what, in an airport from hell" »

Update: In the very early hours of this morning Fair Work Australia terminated the chaotic industrial action between Qantas and the unions.Qantas says they expect flight to be grounded till 12noon today. With Alan Joyce telling the media flights may be back in the air by early afternoon today. Almost 70,000 passengers have been stranded in Australia and around the world.

“It’s good to fly Qantas,” said Tony Abbott, meaning to be heard, as yesterday afternoon he stepped from an aircraft at Canberra airport.

Actually the plane belonged to QantasLink, a related combine of three regional airlines, diverted from Mildura to pick up passengers in Melbourne.

But it was the closest any of us got to a Qantas service yesterday. And Tony Abbott is the closest that Qantas CEO Alan Joyce has to a friend in Australian public life at the moment.

Continue reading "More blood, sweat and tears before Qantas show is over" »

Life can be very cruel sometimes, particularly when it comes to middle class white people and their admirable struggle to find somewhere exotic and worldly where they can just relax while enjoying some budget cocktails and the occasional Unique Cultural Experience™. Poor Carolyn Webb learned that the hard way this week when The Age published her thoughtful, well considered and entirely well researched travel piece on Bali, a place she’s never wanted to go to.

You know how it is. You work tirelessly all year round, saving enough pennies so you can board a budget airline to one of the cheap, tropical paradises dotted around Australia in the hope that you can just let it all hang out, catch some rays and for one brief moment forget how hard it is back home with a stable economy propping up your solid income.

Of course, you don’t want to go to one of those shitholes like Bali or Thailand, because you know from fourth hand anecdotal experience that other people have been there and hated it, plus got bum sick in the first three days because the natives didn’t bother posting signs reminding them not to drink the tap water. Rude.

Continue reading "Bali is Paradise Lost for middle-class white people" »

Welcome to this, the first piece in The Punch’s Festival of Obvious Ideas, which will be running all week. The festival is our salute to those ideas which are so bleedingly obvious, you’ll wonder why someone didn’t write these pieces ages ago. First up this week, why we should all avoid Bali.

Australia has an ongoing romance with the small Indonesian island of Bali dating back to at least the 1970s. But all romances turn mundane and predictable over time. Or worse, they turn spiteful and malicious. When that happens, it’s time to end things.

In recent years, Australians have been detained, poisoned by dodgy drinks, rocked by earthquakes and killed by militant Islamists in Bali. In some cases, we’ve arguably put ourselves in harm’s way, but in the vast majority of cases, we have been innocent victims. Yet like the woman who stays with her abusive partner, we somehow can’t stay away from Bali.

There is a perfectly good argument that Bali is a tropical paradise. You can go there and have a wonderful escape without stupidly buying drugs or going to bars where ugly Australians carry on like sambal pork chops. You can also do that in, oh, about a million other places in south east Asia.

Continue reading "Festival of Obvious Ideas #1: Don’t go to Bali" »

Kevin Rudd jet setting around the world partying with some of the world’s most powerful people might look like fun. It might even look like a waste of our tax dollars. Then again, it’s his job as foreign minister.

Suck it up, people. You might not like the guy but he’s got a job to do and he’s doing it. So what’s the problem?

Today The Daily Telegraph delivered a damning report of Kevin Rudd clocking up over $1 million on travel in his first nine months as foreign minister. Some will say it’s his revenge against Gillard knifing him in the back, making a big note of himself around the world. That’s rubbish.

Continue reading "Who gives a flying buck about Kevin 747’s expenses?" »

In this great age of cheap flights and package holidays, we’re all travellers. We’re on life’s journey, seeking our destinations and finding ourselves along the way.

The mere mention of travel should conjure images of the well-to-do, flitting off around the globe, sipping cocktails in first class, and then floating through immigration to a waiting limousine, all the while looking as if they’ve just stepped out of a salon. Or at least that’s what travel companies want us to believe.

All too often, reality falls short. There are delays, screaming babies, long queues, security checks (my belt doesn’t usually “go off”), cancellations and airplane food. And that’s before you arrive. You deplane to find the air conditioning in the arrival hall is dead, only two of the fifteen customs booths are staffed and you smell like a nightclub in the daylight.

Continue reading "Cheap travel is only as painful as you make it" »

So we’re a step further down the track to blowing $110 billion of taxpayer’s money on a new high speed rail network which will do exactly what planes do, only three times slower. Woohoo for progress.

Yesterday’s $20 million feasibility report was enthusiastically greeted by many, even though Infrastructure Minister Anthony Albanese admitted our relatively small population meant the price tag could be hard to justify.

He’s not wrong. Every other country with high speed rail, like Japan and China and France and Spain, has a far denser population than ours. In Australia, economies of scale mean this thing would be unlikely ever to pay for itself.

Continue reading "Hugging the rails on a fast track to nowhere" »

You are heading for a rendezvous with an old school friend - a celebration in the destination of her choosing. You know the name of the city you’re landing in, but it’s not until the cabin crew are told to prepare for landing that you realise you do not actually know the name of the nation you are descending into.

You recall that there was a time when you would carefully select, and then devour, real paper guidebooks for months prior to an international departure.  What happened?

Then you realise that there is no relevant comparison.  The person that read the guidebooks was a tourist - seeking immersion in something new.  The person who will need to Google the name of the nation we are landing in is an escapee – seeking extraction from something known.

Continue reading "Modern McTravel an exercise in escapism" »

They waited for the plane to land before it happened. Given the violently bumpy landing that was definitely a good thing. But not such a good thing for the woman three rows in front with the toddler and the baby, who projectile vomited in unison all over their seats.

Mad Men ´The Carousel´ from Emilio on Vimeo.

“Great way to end a holiday,” the mother announced mostly to herself as we stared, opened mouthed, watching her and vomit-covered husband as they jostled with their kids and attempted to deplane before their fellow passengers. The rude air hostesses didn’t even offer a sympathetic smile. But that’s another story.

As we’ve seen this week, air travel can go wrong for all kinds of reasons. But what if the ash cloud never went away? What if we reverted to a world without aeroplanes and overseas holidays? Maybe this idea fills you with dread. But think of the positives…

Continue reading "What if the ash cloud never left?" »

Keep your clothes on mid-flight, enjoy the robust Aussie dollar (while it lasts) and invest in a real life travel agent.  That’s advice for the modern traveller, care of Anthony Dennis, aka, Doc Holiday.

He’s a travel reporter for News.com.au, who’s compiled ten new “travel commandments” for the new era of travel.  You know, the one with the crazy weather patterns and cheap,  yet unpredictable flights. Not to mention the costly-on-board everything. It’s almost enough to make you not want to go on holidays. Almost.

Have you taken a flight anywhere lately? What was your biggest travel gripe? Welcome in Tuesday and share it (or anything else) right here.

You would think after the recent happy news that Osama bin Laden had been shot, placed in a bag and thrown into the ocean that the world might have lightened up a bit. Sadly this does not appear to be the case. In these troubled times the price of freedom continues to be eternal pedantry.

A clean-living colleague emailed on Tuesday asking whether, as a smoker, I knew whether it was permissible to board a plane with a cigarette lighter on your person. It was, I replied.

His curiosity was piqued by the fact that he had just been accosted by security guards at the Melbourne Airport for having a miniature can of shaving cream in his hand luggage. Not the big type you’d use for school muck-up day or to shave a mammoth, just one of those tiny travel cans.

Continue reading "Another close shave in the humourless war on terror" »

According to new research, by the year 2090 the principle cause of death in Australia will be boredom.

The cumulative effect of ten decades of social engineering will have turned us into a nation of risk-averse robots who enjoy brisk walks and pepitas and have never done anything foolish or dangerous.

We will be so permanently alive that we will wish we were dead. The days will merge into one, free of fortnightly hangovers, monthly food binges and occasional days spent entirely on the couch, nothing but clear-eyed wellness and crisp outside air.

Continue reading "Every teat-pipette of alcohol is doing you damage" »

Soaring fuel costs are driving airlines to come up with increasingly novel, and amusing, ways of lightening their loads.

There have been reports of the carriers washing their planes more often to reduce drag, cleaning cabins of dropped coins and cutlery, and even pondering the use of thinner paper in their in-flight magazines to drop weight.

But it’s pretty clear they’re ignoring the elephant in the aircraft here: Fat customers.

Continue reading "Frequent fatties should fork out for their flying" »

The worst place in the entire universe is any of the smoking rooms at the otherwise spotless new Hong Kong airport. In these tiny glass cells, dozens of travellers squeeze in for a desperate last puff before they fly out. If you’re foolish enough to step inside, you emerge instantly reeking of ashtray. Bleah.

As these loathsome smoky dens are to Hong Kong airport, so is the airport to the wider world. Airports themselves are captive hell holes, where we can no more escape the check-in queues, the over-inflated prices and the smug frequent flyers heading off to their poncy “lounges” than a smoker in the Hong Kong cubicle can escape the smoke cloud.

And Australian airports are among the worst, as a “leaked” survey yesterday confirmed. Leaked schmeaked. Like that was some kind of secret. Anyone could have told you our airports are shocking. All airports are shocking, even the supposedly good ones. Quite rightly, we hate airports… but not as much as we secretly love them.

Continue reading "Our secret shame: We actually love airports" »

An upstart Thai airline recently revealed that it had begun hiring “third sex” staff. By third sex, the airline means trannies. Pre-op, post-op, they don’t appear all that fussed; apparently they’re an inconclusive mob over there at PC Air.

A win for the rights of transgender and transsexual people the world over? Hmm. I’m 30. Not so young, but certainly so, so cynical.

I’m guessing that the airline name comes from the initials of the founder, Peter Chan, although in the West, PC has connotations centred on computers. And politics. The later, no doubt, underpins the temptation to rejoice.

Continue reading "The mile high club just got a whole lot weirder" »

As of next month Air New Zealand passengers will be allowed to use mobiles while on board, enabling Kiwi jet-setters to advise their loved ones that their flight is on schedule and they’ll be home by sucks.

What really sucks about this move is that it will destroy the sole remaining bastion of public peace, the sanctuary of the aircraft, which in this hyper-connected modern world is the only escape from texts, tweets, emails, and the sheer horror of the loud and long-winded conversations of strangers.

I’ve never been to New Zealand but from what I can gather it consists of two islands, each of them about 500km long, with a large airport in the middle somewhere so that its citizens can emigrate to Australia to find work. Based on this rough estimate the longest domestic flight in NZ would take about 40 minutes and the extremely popular one-way flight to Bondi only marginally longer.

Continue reading "Texts, tweets, emails and other inanities at 36,000 ft" »

Over the past fortnight Kevin Rudd has monitored two major Australian issues from vantage points which don’t seem perfect for the task.

When Australians were reported to be trapped and in danger in Egypt, he was in Switzerland. When a massive cyclone hit his home state, he was in Lichtenstein.

Today, he will be back in the country for the first time in those two weeks, arriving just before the resumption of Parliament for the year.

Continue reading "Kevin 707: Rudd’s travel starts to raise eyebrows" »

They reckon the world is shrinking. It’s not. Far-places are still far-flung, no matter how fast your laptop starts up.

The Greyhound Bus trip from Darwin to Tennant Creek takes 13 hours and 50 minutes. You can get from Sydney to Dubai in the same time. 

It’s a drag, but the options are limited. The plane used to fly daily; now it’s twice a week. There’s a train, the one John Howard built back at the turn of the century, but it’s slower than the bus. It doesn’t even stop at Tennant unless you slip the driver a carton.

Continue reading "Dog of a trip on the Greyhound to Tennant Creek" »

A twelve-hour round trip is a fair distance for a weekend in the country, but there are few things you won’t do for good friends when they get married.

And that includes the threat of a locust plague.

It was a stifling thirty-something degrees across the New South Wales’s Central West last weekend.

Continue reading "Top Aussie traditions we’ve left to the country" »

On the course of a trip home for Christmas from Melbourne to the Central Coast in NSW, I had ahead of me what many others can sympathise with, a long trip dragging an uncomfortable amount of luggage and a collection of presents from one state to another.

On my journey I had a bus trip (to the airport) a plane trip (to Sydney) and a train trip (to the Central Coast), so like many I decided to grit my teeth and try and make the best of it. This is where the ‘slow movement travel’ philosophy comes to play.

Much can be commended for the philosophy of slow movement in travel - the idea that part of the fun is in getting there, to take your time and enjoy the trip, rather than racing towards the destination.

Continue reading "A fruitless search for the romance in modern travel" »

The key take out that everyone in Australia got from the recent Qantas incident in Singapore is that pilot experience is critically important. 

As more and more information filters about just how serious the situation was with QF32, pilot training and experience are being widely acknowledged, from the CEO of Qantas down, as having arguably made the difference.

Given the travails of Qantas over recent weeks, you would think that Jetstar would think twice about its absurd plans to put less and less experienced pilots in the cockpit of its aircraft.

Continue reading "How Australian is Jetstar?" »

Australians are often proud of our relaxed, easy-going, “she’ll be right” ethos.

In fact nothing could be farther from the truth.

Most of the time she will not be right and on the rare occasions that she is right it’s only because someone more industrious – say a Scandanavian for example – has gotten off their arse and done something.

Continue reading "On second thoughts, she probably won’t be alright" »

By now there should be a persistent warning light flashing in the cockpit of the good ship Qantas. It’s indicating that a large mass of brand confidence among the Australian public is smouldering strongly, emitting smoke and may be about to drop off the starboard wing into the sea.

It used to be welded on but there’s definitely a crack appearing.

This week at Auspoll we thought it would be fascinating to test whether the recent run of technical problems which have plagued the Flying Kangaroo have made any tangible dent in our perception of the airline’s hitherto ‘safe as houses’ image. And it set the red light flashing.

Continue reading "Most people prefer planes when bits don’t fall off" »

The island was tiny, accessible only by boat, populated by just seven guests and rained in for the entire weekend.

It was the sort of Agatha Christie setting in which someone almost certainly had to be murdered and by the end of the trip somebody almost was.

But let’s get to that later.

Continue reading "My island in the sun" »

Very few people will admit to having a crap time on holidays.

Maybe it’s all the time and effort that goes into making one happen or the excruciating holiday countdowns you have with friends and colleagues before you leave or perhaps it’s the soul-destroying realisation that if “getting away from it all” doesn’t make you happy than nothing will.

Whatever the reason, no matter what happens on holidays, we’ll always say what a great time we had. And usually this is just a big fat lie.

Continue reading "The five worst things about going on holidays" »

There was always something exciting about buying a guidebook for a destination I was about to visit.

Long bus rides to work and lunch hours were spent poring over the pages, highlighting the “don’t miss” destinations and circling hotels to call when I got back to the office (when no-one was looking).

The guide was a status symbol, something I would flaunt in a “Look at me, I’m going off to some exotic location while you suckers will still be working” way whenever I was out in public. But it would also freak me out, that my entire trip’s success was so dependent on it.

Continue reading "Why the big, chunky travel guide book is dead" »

I have not read the book Eat Pray Love, nor have I seen the movie Eat Pray Love.

In fact I rarely eat, rarely love and haven’t prayed since the third quarter of the AFL Grand Final.

I am therefore in a uniquely untainted and unbiased position to be able to say that this deformed abomination of fertiliser-grade horsesh-t should be blasted back into the hellish furnace of retardation from whence it came.

Continue reading "Pray for salvation from this banquet of self-love" »

Does travel broaden the mind or is it a merely a generally pleasant meandering about in search of the least untrustworthy taxi driver?

While preparing to return home from a 7-month round-the-world trip spanning 21 countries and five continents I have been pondering this question.

I would be loathe to press the case that touristic travel bestows anything more than a passport full of visa ink and a credit card more overworked than Ian Thorpe’s personal stylist.

Continue reading "Travel lessons: a broader view on fat dumb Americans" »

It’s a very first-world picture of human misery: a packed airport terminal filled with thousands of delayed travellers.

There are frazzled parents at the limits of their patience, looking after bored kids giddy at being on their school holidays but frustrated at having nothing to do. Passengers milling around, trying to nap on a hard floor, anxious that the next announcement on the public address system will be the one that cancels their flight.

And all because of a computer problem.

Continue reading "Virgin blip gives a glimpse of total digital chaos" »

So there I was last week listening to the radio and on came Rob Oakeshott with the most intriguing news.

According to the Port Macquarie-based Independent: “I come from an area of Australia where people look at each other in the eye and tell the truth.”

I’ve got to see this place! I thought to myself. So I booked a ticket in search of this magical land that was apparently so unlike the rest of Australia.

Continue reading "Oakeshott country: where people tell the truth, mostly" »

No one ever said it was easy being a multi-billion dollar airline provider.

The rise of low-cost airlines has lead to the cost of airfare plummeting as competition becomes fierce – prices become transparent, comparisons are easier, fuel costs are up, and airlines have been cutting as much cost as possible in order to both make trafficking people cheaper, and keeping ahead of the competitor by offering the cheapest prices.

I still fondly remember my first flight, where at the tender age of fifteen, I was on a plane from Sydney to the Gold Coast with a complimentary muffin and watching episodes of Mr.Bean on the screens. Those days are long gone.

1. Everything is now an optional extra:

Continue reading "With airline travel like this, I’d rather swim" »

Everyone’s got pet hates.  Mine include sniffing milk to “see” if it’s still ok to drink, spitting in public streets, couples who refer to themselves in the third person and people that persist in holiday countdowns on their Facebook updates.

But just because this is my list, that doesn’t mean that all Australian people want to throw up when they watch someone’s nose nestle into the lid of a communal carton of milk or clears their throat and deposits the contents onto the street.

Continue reading "Olympics 101: How to be nice to foreign people" »

Dubai was, for me, one of those places that held an almost mythical appeal. Never one to shy away from retail therapy in fairly healthy doses, I had imagined the Emirates jewel to be a heavenly oasis filled with cool, crisp shopping centres, stocking anything and everything you could possibly need. Okay, want.

There would be miles and miles of clothes, shoes and accessories ready to be snapped up by those eager to sate their consumerist urges. The odd sale, too, to tantalise the bargain hunter within, each store complete with kind and considerate multi-lingual assistants waiting to produce anything your heart desires in an instant.

Well, having arrived in Dubai for the first time recently I can confirm - I was 100 percent right.

Continue reading "Postcard from Dubai, where shopping has no soul" »

Travelling in northern Europe, ‘the War’ is never far away: from the way that people feel about Germany’s performance in the World Cup, to the bullet scares on churches and town halls, the designs of cities such as Rotterdam that where flattened in air raids, to more in-depth conversations about identity and nationalism.

As an Australian who has not spent much time in this part of Europe until recently, this is quite surprising. Like most Australians, World War II feels to me in the distant past and rarely thought about, whereas here, its memory is alive and present.

A friend of mine highlighted an example of just how nearby the War is for many Europeans even of more recent generations.

Continue reading "How to learn from history while letting go of the past" »

Among the many hazards that you might encounter during a long overseas trip, perhaps the worst one is starting to sound like the Lonely Planet.

I don’t mean just quoting the guidebooks’ neat little factoids and pat judgments in place of any other real conversation or insight, something my wife and I have been reduced to doing for the past few months of our world trip.

A more serious sign of the malady is when you start to refer to yourself as an “independent traveller”, the standard description the books employ for their readership.

Continue reading "There’s no more nobility in travelling on the cheap" »

It all started with Bob.

Sorry, I mean, “Bawb….”

“Baaawwwwwb…!”

Even if you really didn’t want to listen, there was very little choice, the American woman’s voice rang out across the terminal in a short, high pitched southern Florida squall.

Continue reading "Don’t pack your accent when you go overseas" »

I was sitting in a French brasserie the other evening and I noticed something very odd. My sons were behaving impeccably.

To put this in perspective, they are eight and ten year old Australian boys. Their normal behaviour in cafes, let alone restaurants, throws down a large gauntlet to animals summoned to feeding time at the zoo. (My apologies to the higher apes).

We’re on our first extended family vacation. We chose Paris because my husband speaks excellent French, I love the city and we wanted to stay in one place for a month. Part of me dreaded bringing the boys here.

Continue reading "The influence of environment on our behaviour - fantástico" »

Matthew Clayfield is a freelance journalist, critic and screenwriter travelling through the US and Mexico. He is filing weekly postcards for The Punch.

I am writing this postcard, my first dispatch as a freelance travel writer, from a bar in San Francisco. Arguably, this is the greatest workplace in the world for an alcoholic typist like myself: the gin is cold, the pianist’s songs are old, and the tips are necessarily low. The San Francisco Chronicler’s Charles McCabe, who died in 1983, was once asked:” If San Francisco is such a great place to live, “why does it have the nation’s highest rates of alcoholism and suicide?” McCabe responded almost instantaneously: “Why, for the simple reason it’s the finest place on earth to drink yourself to death.”

It’s also the finest place on earth to throw yourself into the ocean, as cinephiles everywhere are only too aware. In Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Kim Novak famously throws herself into San Francisco Bay underneath the Golden Gate Bridge, only to be rescued moments later by Jimmy Stewart, who suffers from the film’s titular affliction. Vertigo contains a number of Hitchcock’s most famous scenes, not to mention some of cinema’s, but this one more than any other has always had an indelible effect on me. For many people’s money, Vertigo is the quintessential San Francisco film. For mine, Novak’s leap into the bay is the quintessential San Francisco scene.

Continue reading "Postcard from San Francisco: cocktails and suicide spots" »

Could Australian air travel be affected by a similar event to the volcanic eruption in Iceland which shut Europe’s skies? The short answer is yes.

While it’s unlikely domestic flights could be severely affected, beneath the aviation corridors linking Australia to Asia and Europe lies Indonesia, which has more active volcanoes than any other country. A cataclysmic eruption there would cause major disruption to international air traffic, and tourism and some trade as a result.

Darwin is home to one of nine global ash monitoring centres which track volcano activity and advise airlines on current risks around the world. The Bureau of Meteorology specialist who runs it, Dr Andrew Tupper, says it is “virtually impossible to fly in and out of Australia without going over volcanic activity”.

Continue reading "The volcanic ash threat to Australian flights" »

Next year, airlines plan to charge passengers to breathe.

It will be 36c for a short, sharp breath – the type taken by those who fear flying – and 54c per deep inhalation, for those who excise that fear through meditation.

All that oxygen pumped into the cabin costs money. And the less you breathe, the less it costs cash-strapped airlines – many of which are on the brink of bankruptcy.

Continue reading "Speaking of airlines: Up, up and away" »

If ever there was a sign we’re pretty powerless in the face of Mother Nature it’s thousands of tonnes of ash and molten lava spewing out of the earth and making air travel impossible for millions of frustrated would-be travellers.

The eruption of Eyjafjallajokull (according to the New York Times it sounds a little like “Hey, ya fergot La Yogurt”) has been greeted as a mass inconvenience.

Holiday makers and business people the world over have nodded sagely while being told their plane has been grounded because of the real chance it could come hurtling towards the earth with its engines disabled by airborne rubble and sighed: “yeah, but I really need to get to that meeting/I’ve been saving for this holiday for years/but it’s Anzac Day on Sunday!”

I’m half expecting to see footage in the coming days of Aussie backpackers in Frankfurt demanding Kevin Rudd send in the Air Force to rescue them, such is the sense of entitlement we have about our ability to flit around the world unhindered by anything as pesky as a major natural event.

Continue reading "What’s Kevin Rudd going to do about Eyjafjallajokull!" »

When nature decides to ruin an entire continent’s day it’s a great reminder of how far technology has come in recent decades. The last time this Icelandic volcano let rip like this there weren’t jets noodling around the skies over Europe.

Associated Press has provided a handy syllable-by-syllable guide to pronouncing the name of the volcano responsible. Eyjafjallajokull: ay-yah-FYAH’-plah-yer-kuh-duhl. A doddle. Probably worth tuning into the 6pm TV news to see how it goes.

European airports have had to shut down as aircraft could literally fall out of the sky because of the ash plume spreading over the continent. More than half a million travellers are affected and some estimates put the economic cost at around half a billion Australian dollars. You may mention climate change in the comments.

Continue reading "Volcano: Whole continent goes for a smoke (pics)" »

It’s finally happened. I never thought I would encounter a form of junk food which repulsed me. But on a holiday to the US last month I was confronted by a foodstuff so disgusting, so evil both in design and execution, so incredibly, inedibly putrid that my entire value system has been shocked to its core.

Despite generally having a healthy diet, and spending hours flitting about the kitchen knocking up all sorts of effeminate dishes, such as a deeply suss saffron risotto with home-made chicken stock, or pesto with basil gathered from the garden in a poncy basket, I’ve long held a perverse enthusiasm for eating crap.

The crapper the better. Dodgy kebabs, late-night chiko rolls, shallow-fried at home out of the box hidden in the back of the freezer, even those mysterious Hot Pizza Heroes from the local servo, turbo-charged before microwaving with the addition of extra cheese and half a handful of jalapeños.

Continue reading "Breakfast from hell on the highway to heart disease" »

AUSTRALIA needs to overhaul its travel warning system or end up looking like the boy who cried wolf.

We found out last week that 567,000 Australians visited our neighbour Indonesia last year.

This means more than half a million Australians either didn’t know about - or, more likely, happily ignored -  the Australian Government’s travel warnings when they flew off to Bali for a week of sun, surf, beer, braiding, tattoos and tummy upsets.

Continue reading "Our travel warning system is the boy who cried wolf" »

Wondering how to take great holiday snaps? Ben Groundwater has tips from Richard I’Anson, professional photographer and author of Lonely Planet’s Guide to Travel Photography, on how to take the perfect pic.

Except he’s forgotten the best tip on taking travel photos. Don’t. Put the camera down and go do something.

As Ben says, many travellers fancy themselves as photographers and “like to take the odd snap to show off to their friends back home”.

Continue reading "Those who can, do. Those who can’t, take photos" »

Think you’re a normal weight? So did I, until I got stuck in lift at 2am.

A big group of us piled in and it promptly broke.

After the shock of screaming to a halt between floors, we were indignant. The lift said it could hold 12 people. There were only 11 of us.

Continue reading "Fat tax useless if overweight is the new average" »

New York City is immortalised in pop culture as the place where anything can happen and dreams come true.

Frank Sinatra reckons if you can make it there you’ll make it anywhere. The Sex & the City gals have made us believe there’s an endless pool of dreamy bachelors waiting to show us their skyscraper. Fame promises that any over acting, annoying teenager in a leotard can crack the big time. Home Alone 2: Lost in New York proves that NYC is just a giant playground. Even Ugly Betty and 30 Rock show us that book smarts and quick wit can get you just as far as big bucks and good looks.

But after living and studying in the Big Apple last year, I discovered the city is less like Gossip Girl and more akin to Sylvania Waters with rats. And cockroaches.

Continue reading "New York, the Rotten Apple" »

Having survived the recession, swine-flu and my affair with Tiger Woods, it chills me to find out there’s a new threat - airport scanners.

Now, I’m used to scanners. Used to queuing for ages behind people who empty their pockets only when they get to the scanning belt. Used to my (completely non-metallic) shoes setting off the alarms. I’m used to getting through and then being stopped for an explosives scan because I just love being scanned that much.

But these new scanners, recent coverage suggests, are different. A perversion of the metal scanner I know and love.

These scanners emit x-rays that pass through my clothes and then flash up a monochromatic image of me, denuded of clothes and hair, for security officials to leer and peer at my bits.

Continue reading "If it gets me where I’m going, bring on the X-ray scanner" »

So much for modern hotels being soulless. Below are some edited highlights from a survey of guest habits from Novotel released today.

A guy’s girlfriend liked farms. So he asked for their room to be filled with hay.

A guest in Australia’s great shiraz-producing Barossa Valley heard about the hotel’s signature red-wine spa treatment. He asked for a bath full of red wine in his room.

Continue reading "It’s room service! Did you order the 33 rubber ducks?" »

You meet a lot of interesting people on holidays. Well when I say “meet”, I mean observing people from a safe distance and mercilessly taking the piss if warranted.

I stayed at a rather nice beach resort in Malaysia over Christmas and it was simultaneously a pleasurable and fascinating experience. I think the five stars were awarded for the characters
that were staying there.

It really was a microcosm of humanity, mixed with sand and the odd Pina Colada. In no particular order we had the delightful Poms from Bogan-On-Trent who thought the dress code in the restaurant where breakfast was served was footwear optional. I love the look of tinea in the morning.

Continue reading "We all turn into cliched stereotypes on holiday" »

It was one of the more disgusting experiences of my life and one which could only have been approached with the support of strong liquor to dull the palate and senses.

About 10 years ago while working as a journalist in Indonesia I spent a largely blissful week in the city of Manado, the capital of the strange, starfish-shaped island of Sulawesi.

Manado is about the closest thing to paradise on earth. It’s surrounded by pristine ocean, a haven for snorkelers and divers, populated by beautiful fish of every hue, and the air is scented with vanilla and clove from the trees that grow everywhere in this part of the spice islands. Manado, however, is let down badly by its restaurants.

Continue reading "Weird stuff I’ve eaten" »

Are there any men out there who feel genuinely aggrieved at the idea that a travel company might offer packages specifically for women?

And no, I’m not talking about those of you who wish you could significantly increase your strike rate by being the only bloke on the Contiki bus. I mean men who really feel your human rights are violated by a group of women planning a chicks-only trip.

In general most people are in favour of legal protection against discrimination - if it’s the kind of discrimination that prevents someone having the same opportunities as everyone else because of some arbitrary barrier such as sex, race, or a disability. But sometimes the application of that principle is more arbitrary than the discrimination it’s trying to address.

Continue reading "Sometimes principle is just stupid" »

Could you imagine a newly elected Australian Prime Minister taking five months to form a Cabinet?

In our functioning democracy the notion is hard to fathom but that is exactly what has just transpired in Lebanon.

Saad Hariri led the pro-western March 14 alliance to an emphatic electoral win back in June but not until now has he been able to form a Government.

Continue reading "Little things count, like speed limits and Cabinet stability" »

What is it about air travel that evokes in people such morbid fascination?

In his recent essay, A Week at the Airport, philosopher Alain de Botton reckoned that, basically, we’re all both petrified of, and obsessed by, air travel because our various religions have successfully instilled in us a prevailing awe of the skies, of the heavens and of whatever else goes on above the clouds:

“Despite its seeming mundanity, the ritual of flying remains indelibly linked, even in secular times, to the momentous themes of existence. We have heard about too many ascensions, too many voices from heaven, too many airborne angels and saints to ever be able to regard the business of flight from an entirely pedestrian perspective, as we might, say, the act of travelling by train.”

Continue reading "Terror in the skies: it’s a Judeo-Christian hang up" »

When I was a hare-brained 25-year-old travelling around the world, I decided to climb Alaska’s most northerly mountain range, alone, with winter approaching and with almost no comparable experience.

I got into trouble thumpingly quickly. Two hours out from an Inuit village the polar wind came thundering up the valley like a great icy bowling ball, the wind-chill factor dropped to about minus 20 and my fingers burned just short of frostbite as I struggled to peg my whip-cracking tent into the snow.

By morning I wanted to abort, but I went on up into that white morass of mountains. It was painful, it was terrifying and it was unwise, but the experience was a perfect instance of the paradoxical payoffs of exposure.

Continue reading "People everywhere, expose yourselves" »

It’s no doubt a mark of my innate stoicism that I have until this point lived mostly happily without the benefit of The Remote Controlled Beverage Buggy ™.

Fortunately the Sky Mall catalogue alerted me to the life-enhancing possibility of having liquid refreshments “secured” in a miniature dune buggy’s mounted drink holders and ferried from the fridge without me having to move a muscle aside from thumbing the console commands.

Candidly the catalogue does note the one potential flaw in this scheme, that the “willing accomplice is not included”. Luckily I am married so getting the Beverage Buggy restocked for frequent journeys back to the couch should prove no problem.

Continue reading "Fill the void with a remote-controlled beverage system" »

It was the incident that gave flaming sambuca a whole new meaning, turned a young Greek woman into a national heroine and shone an embarrassing spotlight on Britain’s yob culture.

Stuart Feltham, a 20-year-old from outside London, had his genitals set on fire after allegedly dropping his trousers during a boozy night out at a bar in Crete.

Marina Fanouraki, a 26-year-old Greek tourist, admits having soaked Feltham with sambuca in retaliation for having her legs and breasts “forcefully fondled” by him, but denies that she purposely set him alight.

Continue reading "Eurotrashed Aussies almost as bad as plastered Poms" »

I’m sitting in a bar, watching the punters. One guy’s scrawny neck is poking out of a cheap rip-off Manchester United top. He’s tried to prop up his wispy hair with too much product, and his eyes bulge so he looks vaguely alarmed.

He stinks of body odour and beer. His mate has womanly, swaying hips and a soft face that melts into multiple chins. His pants are too high and his lips are big and wet.

It’s a busy bar, and every time a woman walks past, these men make a grab for them. For their bums, or their boobs. They drape their arms around the woman who brings them more beer. They leer.

Continue reading "When sex is on tap good behaviour is abandoned" »

Queensland is many ways a much more reasonable facsimile of civilisation than it used to be.

However I recently discovered a glaring deficiency that rubbed away all veneer of cosmopolitan credit.

The coffee was bad. Sometimes it was bad multiplied by awful.

Continue reading "Beautiful one day, decaffeinated the next" »

Virgin Blue has posted a $ 160m loss. I should feel sorry for Dicky Branson. But instead I just want to slap him around a bit and say “boo hoo”.

Here’s the scenario.

I’m sitting at Sydney airport experiencing two emotions that are gratingly familiar – outraged and helpless. My flight (do I really have to add “as usual”?) has been delayed. First by 10 minutes, then by another five, then by an extra 20. That’s the official line, but there’s no sense we’ll be heading skyward any time soon.

Continue reading "Your complaint is important to us and is in a queue" »

Staring out at the ocean with a surfboard under my arm, I wondered if I had truly lost the plot. This was no Surfers’ Paradise.

I could feel neither my hands nor my feet, my nose was a block of ice and even my eyelashes were freezing. Breathing was becoming a challenge, too. No, this was not some kind of extreme sports challenge - I was on a hen’s weekend on a glorious spring morning in Cornwall, England.

On this day, however, the seaside town of Newquay more closely resembled a freezing winter’s day alongside the Great Australian Bight. Confused? Let me explain.

Continue reading "Ooo-er, let’s hear it for the saucy English hen’s night" »

Staring out at the ocean with a surfboard under my arm, I wondered if I had truly lost the plot. This was no Surfers’ Paradise.

Continue reading "Pommy-style Hen’s Night the ultimate form of stimulus" »

The Hideout is a bar in the ostentatiously hip inner north western suburbs of Chicago, although its dead-end location in a sea of warehouses might not suggest that at first glance.

The bar doesn’t have a sign and they say it’s been operating legally since 1932. It’s also the bar that almost everyone who is, or has been, in the band Wilco has played in.

The night we dropped in Leroy Bach, the multi-instrumentalist but mostly keyboardist who played with Wilco from late 1999 until 2005, was playing with Dan Bitney, a dude from the experimental Chicago band Tortoise.

Continue reading "Wilco has grown up" »

Maria’s Taco Express sits on a busy expressway in south Austin, Texas, snuggled in between car yards and furniture stores. Just next door is a muffin van that promises low-fat, no-worry, health-heaven eating. But Maria’s is not just a fabulous place to have tacos, breakfast time, lunchtime or late night-dining time. It’s also a meeting place of musicians and music tragics. They love the tacos, they love the margaritas (rocks, no salt) and they love the music that appears in what in Australia would be a beer garden. Here, I reckon it’s a taco garden.

Continue reading "Star-struck in Austin: Meeting my musical hero" »

You use different muscles when you’re fishing, You find that out the hard way on serious fishing trips. Recently I was taken out on the water after the Super 14 season with the fishing gurus from Modern Fishing magazine. I was little nervous as I was out with guys who drop a line, day in, day out and really know their stuff.

By the end of the day I was casting lures, my arms stiff as a board and struggling to match the distance the other guys were getting. I had to pretend that I wasn’t hurting. I couldn’t let them know I was struggling.

Fishing is my way of switching off. I love it. It’s just good to get in the boat and do battle with nature. I am lucky to live in Western Australia where the fishing is great and the scenery perfect.  My ideal day is to head out to Rottnest Island with my family or mates and just fish and swim. Throw in a couple of beers and it’s a great couple of days.

Continue reading "I love fishing, and I’m not just throwing you a line" »

ONE of the best columns of the year to date was this week’s hilarious, bang-on rant by former foreign minister Alexander Downer, who used his regular spot in Adelaide’s The Advertiser to get 11 years’ worth of fury off his chest about our more half-witted countrymen and women who get into scrapes overseas.

Under the pithy headline “Idiot Aussies: Grow up and take responsibility”, Downer condensed more than a decade’s worth of rage into a searing piece which dealt with everything from the taxpayer-funded exodus from Lebanon, to claims of Canberra’s neglect of convicted drug dealers such as the Bali Nine, and Schapelle Corby, who stars in the above YouTube video urging her release.

Downer used as his starting point Melbourne’s so-called “Beer Mat Mum” who, having been jailed for stealing a Singha-sodden terry-towelling mat from some Thai dive bar, is surely just as compelling a bogan pin-up as the chk-chk-boom girl.

Continue reading "Saving Australians from their own overseas stupidity" »