A Boy's Post Adolescence

New York: Defeat Smells Like Last Month

The last meaningful thing that I did in the US was succumb to hilarious and embarrassing defeat. Between Florida and Iceland I had a seven hour stopover in New York and not wanting to waste it all in an airport doing sensible things like writing up stories, I decided to venture into Manhattan and have a poke around, one last time before leaving for good.

Unlike the Perth airport, navigating your…

Iceland: Foss is for Falls.

There are signs on the sides of the road in Iceland, they have a symbol that is essentially a square with a loop on each corner. This symbol means that there is something interesting nearby, a tourist attraction of some sort. There is always a name attached to the symbol, and most of the time it is unpronounceable and built predominantly of characters that Cliff and I came to call, “bullshit…

For New Years, Cliff and I went to bed at a little after 1830. It had been dark for two and a half hours and we were both spent.

  No, I’m not kidding.

  We were in Selfoss, a town that we’d been told not to go to by the man on the Budget Car Hire desk, he essentially described the people there as having chips on their shoulders, inferiority complexes and as being thugs who go to Reykjavik…

I’ve never exactly set out to eat specific things in the places that I’ve gone to. Not that I’ve ever shied away from it, friends – well, anyone who has met me really – will be well aware of the high regard that I hold African antelopes in. A particular treat recently was wandering through the African mammals rotunda in the New York Natural History Museum and counting the number of animals in…

One of the things I’ve learnt to do over the last few months abroad is stitch photos together in Photoshop. It’s an ongoing thing and a lot of the time what I think will look good in my mind doesn’t translate quite nearly as well to screen. Below is one I took earlier this evening, in my rushing I left the tripod in the car and ended up with a wonky 12 image stitch, the images trailed down and to…

I remember the first time Dad really turned my head. It was – well, it would have been – day four of the Boxing Day Test in 2006. It was an Ashes Series, the test had finished inside of three days and in lieu of a better idea, we were drinking at the apartment he had rented in Docklands, Melbourne. I was 18 at the time and despite my age, was relatively well accustomed to putting a few beers away…

Ploughing Half a Million Tonnes of White Bullshit.

There is this story that I insisted on being told many times at my birthday last year and in retelling it now, I am bound to get it wrong, but here goes.

  A man in the US, approaching his twilight years, was arrested in Montana or perhaps Minnesota (somewhere very cold and snowy) for clearing his driveway of a lot of snow. Why you ask? He was using a flamethrower. Somewhere along the way his…

One of the first “conversations” the maid had with me at the farm in Santa Maria was mostly mimed and revolved around taking me to church. I didn’t put up any real resistance to the idea, the way I saw it I’d have two hours or so to sit down somewhere up the back or off to the side, do a bit of people watching and just otherwise hear a whole bunch of Spanish that I otherwise may not be exposed…

Iceland had sat in my itinerary for months as one of few certainties in this trip. It had been useful to have there for three weeks over December and January, occupying a neat time that would serve as a bridge from the US to Europe. Being part of my plans for as long as it had (indeed, I’d been speaking about going since the beginning of the year), I had actually had the time to get quite excited…

My first foray into South America was never meant to be this time out. I was wary of my relative absence of Spanish and it had always been something I thought I’d set out to explore in a dedicated trip that was punctuated by trekking in Patagonia then jumping on a boat and heading to Antarctica. I had a gap in my plans from early October to mid November (NYC ahead of Thanksgiving in Boston) and…

Australian Comedian Captures His Own Humans of New York Portrait Michael Zhang, petapixel.com

Here’s something lighthearted: While in New York City, Australian comedian Hamish Blake decided to create a parody of photographer Brandon Stanton’s Humans of New York portrait. “Unable” to snag a feature through Stanton’s camera, Blake decided to…

This is a post I dreamt up many months ago while in Central America (which coincidentally is where the story writing is presently stuck at, I’ll address that soon), but as it’s Christmas time and people seem bent on losing weight after gorging themselves for days at a time, here is how I’ve lost about twelve kilos…

  Head somewhere tropical in the wet season. It doesn’t matter so much as to…

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