I had been to our last stop, Shanghai, a few times when I lived in China. The city had never grabbed me, seemingly just another big Chinese metropolis, though admittedly one a bit more full of itself than most. I will confess to enjoying it a lot however with Hannah, perhaps in part due to… Read More Once More Unto the Breach
The almighty Cloud has, unfortunately, let us down. In lieu of saving and securing photos sent off into the supernatural ether, it has decided that removing them instead was the better option. As a result, this particularly entry will have to rely on the strength of my ability as a writer to describe a scene.… Read More Everybody Knows This is Nowhere
It had been five years since I’d last been to Hong Kong, nexus of east Asia. The city remains the same outwardly, spindly concrete jostling each other to crowd out the sky, hemming in narrow pavements thick with people walking and carrying out their commerce. The same calls for copy watch, copy suit, copy handbag… Read More Hong Kong & Shenzhen: The Reboot
Taipei served as the brackets to the 2017 trip to Oceania, a day-long layover both to and from Australia. In each instance, this meant an early morning arrival and late evening departure, with a full (and at times long) day in between. I had been to Taipei only once before, in 2008, for a few… Read More Parenthetical Taipei
After a long day of airport and planes (did I mention the Tasman Sea is wiiiiiide?), we touched down in the penultimate stop of the three-week tour, Melbourne. It, like Sydney, is one of largest cities on the continent, a diverse and thriving city with a variety of neighbourhoods and more things to do and… Read More Melbourne – 2017
Greymouth is quite aptly named. The little town, one of the larger outposts on the more rugged west coast of the island, is situated at the mouth of a river and is largely overcast and, indeed, grey. It served as a launching point for our explorations of the western coast, including an old gold mine… Read More From Green to Red
Leaving Wanaka was one of the longer drives of the trip, heading cross-island and over the mountains. We generally drove straight through, stopping for lunch in a pretty small town (for a lamb mince burger with mint, because what else down here?) and then treated to a beautiful view of Aoraki (Mt. Cook), the highest… Read More Roaming Aotearoa
New Zealand is far away, far from pretty much everything. I’d always naively figured that once you’re in Australia, it’s just a quick hop between the two. Nope. Three plus hours on a plane from Sydney, which is basically the closest point. No wonder then that it was one of the last landmasses settled by… Read More A Rough Welcome
The sky was clear and blue arriving into Sydney, the plane describing a wide, low arc before descending down over Botany Bay. It was here in 1788 that the First Fleet arrived to Australia, setting up the national founding myth of the country with the offloading of boatloads of convicts. It makes for a poetic… Read More First Fleet, First Stop
Zak Abroad 