Wake Up! We’re being attacked by pirates! It was 11.00 pm. Being the boring person I am, I was asleep in my cabin, others were drinking cocktails on the after deck, sampling chocolate at the late night chocolate fountain and generally being and having lots of fun. I later learned that the cocktail drinkers on the after deck had by chance seen a small, open … Continue reading Just Over the Horizon
The only way to get across The Drake Passage I’ve decided is to lie on your bunk and will it to all be over as soon as possible and the only thing worse than hugging your bed to stay on it through the relentlessly enormous waves is the crawl on all fours to the bathroom. It really can be anywhere between ghastly and absolutely terrifying. … Continue reading The Great Southern Ocean
Yes! Of course I’ll be able to sail her! I had been sailing and racing yachts most of my life in Auckland, I wasn’t too keen on going up onto the yards to release the sails, but if someone else did that I would be fine! HA! WHAT A JOKE! We were living on board the 140 foot Brigantine “Esther Lohse” built in 1949 in … Continue reading Walking the Plank
The incredible sound of Rajasthani musicians singing about their camels in the sunset of the Thar Desert. The day has cooled and we are sitting around a camp fire after dinner, tomorrow we will visit a Bishnoi village. The Bishnoi people have been following their ideals since the early fifteenth century, they are Hindu but follow a set of teachings which among other things bans … Continue reading The First Tree Huggers
The thought of renovating a 300 year old apartment in Venice had even me, who had renovated three houses in New Zealand, feeling slightly overwhelmed. Mind you, 100 year old wooden, single story villas are rather more manageable than a handmade brick apartment in a five story building, on a canal, built on top of timber posts from the Balkans at the time when Antonio … Continue reading A Venetian Renovation
The first glimpse inside a dreamily perfumed, heavily carved, sandalwood Kashmiri houseboat on Dal Lake, Srinigar is one of chandeliers, pink and red silk furnishings and carpets, sumptuous silk sofas and cushions and a silver samovar of cinnamon tea waiting for us. We collapsed in fits of giggles. It was so exotic and beautiful, so other worldly we couldn’t think of anything to say. We … Continue reading Sandalwood & Samovars
Flying in our DHC 3 Otter we landed on the ice pretty well exactly at the Arctic Circle on the edge of Hudson Bay in Manitoba, Canada. We had flown from Churchill, about a one hour flight over tundra and snow. It was late afternoon and we settled in to our warm, comfortable cabins before enjoying a lovely dinner with excited, convivial like minds. The … Continue reading Polar Bear Guests
My first major trip was in 1975 to Nepal and in to the foothills of the mighty Himalayas heading towards Everest. There were no roads into the mountains and although Lukla Airstrip (Tenzing, Hillary airstrip) had been built, we wanted to trek all the way in to acclimatize to the altitude gently and then fly back out to Kathmandu. Lukla Airstrip was built by Sir … Continue reading An Airstrip at 9,000 Feet
Little girls giggling – and little boys giggling for that matter – are delightful all over the world. I would love to know what was so funny for these three, I knew it was us, with our big boots and shorts puffing our way up yet another seemingly vertical hill. Was it our white skin? Was it simply that they couldn’t understand why all these … Continue reading Giggles at 8,000 Feet
TRAVELS PAST & PRESENT 