Before the Internet took over, India and Bangladesh used to be countries of letters, populated by willing correspondents, or so it seemed the first time I travelled the Subcontinent, with my school friend Lachlan in the winter of 1995-6. Nearly every day someone would ask for our address: someone we'd become friends with or someone fleetingly met at a bus stop or in a restaurant. In return they would supply their addresses, in the hope of becoming 'pen friends'. After two months in India we had quite a supply of addresses, bundled together on small chits of scrap paper. By then, when we looked through them, there were addresses of people we couldn't remember; especially when it was their village address they'd given, which gave no clue even to the town where we'd met them (sometimes ... read more

I remember those mornings confronting the rush of Sydney trains on the way to the office. Bleary-eyed and stony-faced I'd make my way to the station and wait on the platform just where the rear carriage would materialise, where there was the best chance of scoring a seat. For approximately fifty minutes, I'd sit squeezed between businessman this and businessman that, doing my best to ignore the moderate discomfort. It required distraction, something all the regular commuters knew. Some would struggle to read newspapers in the cramped space, papers half-open or awkwardly folded so as not to accidentally elbow their neighbour while attempting to turn a page. Others more practical brought books or read them on palm pilots, and occasionally an industrious lady could be seen knitting her way towards the city centre. Nobody spoke to ... read more

There are times travel itself plans a day off: days left open with not much to do between bus journey and plane booking. It was on such a day in January 1998 that I lazed over breakfast in one of those small side street cafés in the small Eritrean capital of Asmara, hoping to prolong the coffee as prelude to a day given to postcard writing and laundry. Asmara, with a population of 500,000 people, is a pretty place set among small hills atop an escarpment some 2,325 metres above and 60 kilometres inland from the Red Sea. It has fine boulevards and admirable Italian architecture, for Eritrea was an Italian colony until 1941. There’s a nifty craft market to explore and both the cathedral and mosque to visit, with the approximately five million Eritreans, speaking ... read more

‘How do they do it?’ I’d often wondered, back in the village in Hatiya, when villagers regularly seemed to know exactly what I felt whether I wished it or not. In the days when the heat was strong, without the benefit of even a fan to temper it, when homesick or down, annoyed or happy; when I’d try to do the Australian thing and push emotions deep inside so that, well I thought, there was not the smallest ripple left on the surface of my face, they knew. ‘They can see straight into your soul,’ I used to say, and it was true the day my aunt died in Australia and I’d wanted to ride for many kilometres on a rickshaw without purpose. On reaching the main town, the driver, who is my friend, took me ... read more

The vegetable market is alive! In the early morning hours, in the crush of rickshaws and carts, characters and cauliflower, amongst baskets brimming with produce of sufficient variety to tantalise a distinguished chef, in the confinement of the rough laneway between Shaheb Bazar and the riverbank, Rajshahi plays its charade as a city much bigger than its actual size. The enthusiasm of sellers, energy of transporters and the discerning inspection of buyers is a strange antidote to the bustle of Dhaka, but its how a random weekend out of the capital begins. Like any such market in Bangladesh it’s photogenic, and there’s real milk tea from that seller on the main street corner to fuel the brief exploration, for though congested the market isn’t big. In some countries people mind it if you snap their picture, ... read more

There was enormous freedom when I was young, nine or ten years old. My friends and I, we’d dump our bikes in a park somewhere and head off into the bush for daylight hours, exploring overgrown tracks, spotting turtles, catching lizards, tadpoles and small fish called guppies. When we came back our bikes were right where they’d been left. Life was largely carefree. In northern Sydney there are patches of eucalypt forest everywhere; the topography is of small hills and contaminated orange-tinged creeks. We’d make mud jumps for our bikes; or slides down a muddy bank into the polluted water. We’d do dangerous things like exploring the network of large stormwater drains armed at best with a torch. It did for spelunking adventures. On weekends, our parents rarely knew where we were, expecting only that we’d ... read more