Hi! I'm Kat and I like traveling. I also like, in no particular order, films, graphic novels, basketball, capoeira, well, any kind of sport really, reading books, eating good food and spending time with my friends. I guess the place I call home is Crete, Greece but most of the time I'm based in the UK.
Update: That was me in 2007. What's changed? I'm married to the most wonderful man in the world, Guy Dominic Machito Morris and I live in Fiji! My sporting passion at the moment? Outrigger paddling. More on that in the blogs!
Hi to anyone who has been reading my travel blog. I stopped writing in 2007 but I didn't really stop travelling. So I've just decided to go back over the last two years and retrospectively write about my travels. It'll take a while but I think it will be fun to think and write about places I've been the last 24 months...
... read moreThis is all about my little trip to Edinburgh for Christmas, to visit my darling brother. I couldn't wait to see him, so the 8 hour train journey up north was a particularly long one. But meeting up at the train station was a great feeling and then we walked back to his place, chattering non-stop. Scotland was of course even colder than where I had started from in Southampton, and I really was finding it cold. I think my body had really got comfortable in the tropical climate of Fiji over the last year and was refusing to adjust properly to ice and snow. Sadly mainly ice, as it did not snow a lot while we were in Edinburgh. It was such a dramatic change from Fiji, I could hardly believe where I was and
... read moreI think I have started using the term "home" in an increasingly flexible sense lately. Is England really home for me? Or is Crete...or is Fiji, as by December I had been living there almost a year. Well, I think I can have many homes, as many as I like in fact, as long as there is a reason to call somewhere home, and it feels like home, then home it is. In this instance I was coming home to England to see my parents, my brother and a whole load of friends. I wasn't coming back to England for the weather, that's for sure. In fact, even before my arrival at Heathrow I was bracing myself for what I knew was going to be a bit of a rough start. My body was going to
... read moreI visited Nauru for the second time about six months ago and this is my much delayed account of that visit. I wanted to write this short description mainly so I would have an excuse to also post over 15 photos which I think show a different side of Nauru than my first blog entry. There is a lot of beauty on this island, despite everything. This entry is dedicated to the beaches, the ocean and the simple things, both natural and man-made that surprised me and made me smile. My second visit to Nauru was quite a different experience to the first, largely because this time I knew the story and I knew what to expect. So this time, when work allowed, I decided to try and discover more of the natural beauty of this
... read moreThis was my first trip to Samoa and I was determined to make the most of it. I was rapidly realising that even though I lived in the Pacific, visiting the many hundreds of islands in it within the next year was going to be tricky, so every opportunity had to be grabbed by the horns (so to speak). Samoa for me conjured up images of fierce warriors, tribal tattoos and, more recently, a pretty decent rugby team in the World Cup. I had this image of the ultimate Pacific experience, a quite undefined and vague concept and yet I was not disappointed; Samoa more than delivered on my vague day dreams. Before I get into the nitty gritty, maybe a little background is worthwhile to set the scene. Samoa gained its independence from New Zealand
... read moreRafting down the Upper Navua river was excellent! I don't know if there's that much more to say really. Well, OK, here's a little bit more... This was another one day expedition with Rivers Fiji. It was great fun and I would recommend it to anyone. I guess it’s not the cheapest but in my opinion well worth the money. We set off from the Rivers Fiji office in Pacific Harbour and again (see the Luva River kayaking trip in September) headed into the Namosi highlands. It took a couple of hours to get to the starting point and then we had to grab a paddle and do a short hike down to the place we would be setting off from on the river. It was quite muddy and a reasonably hilly short walk, so I
... read moreWell, conquest may be a tad of an exaggeration but still...it was a long way to the top! After 7 months of residence in Fiji, finally, in September, I embarked on my first proper hike up a mountain. This was Mount Koroyanitu in the North West of Viti Levu. The trip was organised by the Rucksack club, an organisation that has been a lifesaver for me. Without them, I don’t think I would have seen any of Fiji at all, as with the travelling I do for work I hardly have any weekends to myself and it gets almost impossible to organise trips round Fiji itself. The Rucksack club is basically a group of people who give up their time to organise trips around the main island of Fiji and some of the nearer small islands.
... read moreThis is my day kayaking down the Luva river in Viti Levu (the big island of Fiji). It was a blast. I had probably hoped for a sunnier day but in Suva and the environs, that is all you can do. Hope. Then you just have to wake up in the morning and go with the flow. As it was, a cloudy day looked in the offing but at least it wasn’t raining. First things first, I had to find a packed lunch to take with me. I knew the fridge was empty - I had checked the night before and of course, in the morning when for some illogical reason I checked again, nothing had changed. In any case, I had already formulated my plan. Get out of bed an extra 10 minutes early and
... read moreI had another opportunity to visit the Marshall Islands in August for the Pacific Power Association's Annual Conference. Doesn't sound like a holiday, does it? Well, yes, it was mainly work but there was time for a little hanging around on the beach too. As there always is when you are on a pacific island! The occasion was a networking picnic - or whatever you would like to call it. The substance of the matter was that we all headed out to the other side of the atoll - the side with no roads, no houses, no people, lots of palm trees, lots of sand and lots of sparking blue clear water. For the whole day. It actually took a good 30 minutes to get around the atoll. As soon as we got there, I grabbed
... read moreEnd of July and time for a trip to Palau to sort out some work stuff. I was also planning to take the opportunity to do a little more exploration around the island of Koror and hopefully some sea kayaking. But low and behold, the day before I was to set off for the 1.5 days of travel just to get to Palau from Fiji, I came down with the most horrible cold ever. My nose was, well, disgusting, and I had a very charming I-am-just-about-to-die cough. Great, I thought. But I was not deterred. I was going to Palau because I wanted to do that damn sea kayaking and it was all organised. So there. All that just to say that it was not a particularly pleasant trip over to Palau from Fiji, although I
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