Madrid

This is Cine Dore, an old theatre run beside Spain's national film library. My assignment was to go and take a few photos, maybe grab some pamphlets. It took me about half an hour to find the place and it was situated behind a high road in a somewhat suburban area which is always a pleasure to visit in another country (see if the grass is really greener).

Sadly, by the time I found the place I realised it wasn't open until 5.30pm. Still not realising I was actually visiting a theatre , I came back after a few glasses of vino tinto at a nearby cafe, to find a looong queue snaked around the building. Out of morbid curiosity I too queued up, not believing that this many people had come to see a library. And of course they hadn't. The filmoteque sold tickets to evening screenings of old films for two euro. Sensing a bargain of course I paid, only to find I was watching a Russian film with Spanish subtitles.

I ended up falling asleep (the wine had done me over), and only woke because my own snoring was so loud.

In my defense, sightseeing all day is really tiring.

Edinburgh

If there is anything I miss about New Zealand it's my best friends and wide open spaces.

This is Georgie and I at Loch Ness, after about six hours of driving through Scotlands's Highlands. Our tour guide was the bus driver and apparantely an unofficial radio DJ as he commentated the very minuate of our driving experience through the countryside, laughed at his own jokes and played Scottish music for the whole 12 hour tour. No silences allowed.

This is before Georgie and I took off on an unbeaten path around the lake (can you tell we're New Zealanders?) in search of Nessie.

If we look tired it's because we went to bed at 2am to rise two hours later for our flight. Luckily the beautiful weather had the endorphins kicking.

Vienna

Despite being a frequent traveller and a frequent writer, I very rarely collaborate the two. Rifling through my blog I've realised I don't actually write about any of my trips. In actual fact, I think I've subconsciously decided that writing about the minutae of travelling and exploring is boring. Which is ridiculous.

Tonight I ran a hot bath and bought two pieces of reading material with me- Lonely Planet's 'Tales from Nowhere' ( a collection of short stories). And the diary I kept while I travelled around the U.S and Europe last year.

Lonely Planet stayed on the floor.

So here is my challenge- pick a favorite photo from each of my trips and explain it to you. Not in a Times section , this is where we went, this is what we ate and this is how much it cost kind of way, but hopefully in a way that sets the scene and sums up what I love about exploring.

Here goes.

Oven mitts- embarassing unprepared travellers since Winter 2011. This is what I think of when I look at this picture. So my friend Renee, from Chicago, travelled with me to Vienna in late November this year. Renee tried explaining the temperature to me, but she was talking Farenheit so I failed to grasp that 30 degrees Farenheit was ZERO DEGREES.

So I had a small heart attack on our Easy Jet flight when the pilot introduced Vienna to us and I realised that it was going to be a cold, possibly snowy weekend. These mittens were a desperate purchase from H&M at Stephanzplatz which is the main shopping area in Vienna. I purchased the most obnoxious, warm looking mitts I could find.

Nevermind the fact that I had Edward Scissorhand type situations for a few days as I tried to pick things up with my mitts.

After this photo was taken Renee and I braved the cold through the swankier area where rich husbands were taking their fur-clad wives to buy jewellery at Tiffany and handbags at Chanel. To be fair, this trip was mostly about eating and each small walk or sightseeing venture was immediately intertwined with a trip to a cafe where almost every single waiter wore a suit and strudel and chocolate cake were lunch. So we went to a cafe after this and had baileys coffees and cake.

How to travel

There is always a story, a photo, a holiday package, a top ten through to 100 list there to make you feel bad about your own travel experiences. The friend who found frog's legs in France while you ate pizza every night, the yoga retreat you can't afford, amazing photography that makes your digital memories look childish and travel magazine bucket lists that surmise what you should want to see and disregard everything you loved but nobody has ever heard of.

While travel envy is always somewhat of a motivation to keep exploring it should by no means influence your own choices. The best part of travelling is that there are minefield of choices. Freedom of exploration and instinct.

My travel rules-

1. Don't make any major plans.
2. Walk everywhere.
3. Venture off beaten paths and down random alleyways. (Just not dark ones.)
4. Don't be put off by a lack of money, time or energy. Get up early, go to bed early, buy an espresso, sit and watch.
5. Don't go where everybody else does.
6. Don't pay to get in anywhere.
7. Take as many photos as possible but know when to put your camera down and stop living life through a lens.
8. Try not to make lists, be spontaneous and let your mood decide where you are going.
9. Don't be afraid.
10. Keep dreaming.

Stories about flying

Rather ironically, I've never been a very comfortable flyer. Take off and landing is always the worst but loud noises, strange smells, odd angles and dizzying heights will make my palms sweat and turn me into one of those crazies who scream at nobody in particular, "We are all going to DIE!"

In recent months my discomfort on aeroplanes has become dramatically worse. I blame it on a fairground ride a friend and I recently took in Hampstead Heath during which the ride literally malfunctioned mid-air, heightening my self-awareness of gravity and mortality.

After that episode, my first realisation that I was going to die on an aeroplane came on a flight to Barcelona from London. Cabin crew were brewing coffee near my seat and I told my friend that something wasn't right with the plane because it sounded to me like the engines were peetering out.

From Barcelona to Ibiza, at about 10pm, while many of my fellow passengers were dressed to the nines, ordering as much booze as possible on a 45 minute flight, I became irrationally angry as everybody talked over the safety demonstration and seemed glaringly oblivious to the fact that a freak storm was going to drive our plane into the ocean, like Lost. I literally bristled with anger, unable to read my magazine, because everybody but me was in such high spirits.

Again, Ibiza back to Barcelona, as the plane flew a half-circle preparing for descent, I became convinced that the plane was going to fall out of the sky... Auckland to Sydney I could smell petrol in the cabin and decided the plane was going to blow up once we got into the skies. Madrid to London and the plane seemed to be travelling too fast for landing so I prepared myself for the fact that we were going to slam into the ground and then probably overstep the runway and crash into a building. Or another plane. And so on.

So you see, I have become rather preposteriously paranoid and have even deliberated for months about whether or not I should jinx myself by writing about this.

However, in an effort to overcome what I perceived to be a major obstacle in mentally surviving a 24 hour flight to New Zealand I decided to do what any other slightly crazy person in my situation would do- I started watching Air Crash Investigation in bulk, late at night.

And, in actual fact, while this has brought home the fact that air crashes aren't usually a survivable feat, it has eased my fears somewhat. I've learned a few things.

Number one- planes don't really fall out of skies (my biggest paranoia). They just don't. And if they do, if the pilot is a smart cookie, he should be able to reverse a stall. Which brings me to my second point.

Number two- Planes don't crash. Pilots do. In every episode of ACI I watched, the reason for each crash was pilot incompetence. Every. Single. Time. So the mind boggling feat of how a plane manages to get up, and stay up in the air is negligible, compared to some of the mind boggling mistakes pilots make under duress or pure tiredness.

Which brings me to number three- if something does go wrong with the plane or the flight, the pilot has been trained to fix it. And if he can't fix it, he can contact ground team who can tell him how. Usually, if something goes wrong, there is generally plenty of time to be able to correct the problem and continue a safe flight.

So everytime I fly I now run these three points through my mind, over and over. To be honest, they don't help much. But memories of past flights do - in spite of my fears I have to admit I have had some amazing, life-changing experiences that have all begun with a flight. For example-

- Flying in a helicopter over the New York City skyline (incidentally, this helicopter later plunged into the Hudson River, killing everybody on board, including the Kiwi pilot, mere months after my trip).

-Flying from San Francisco to London for the first time. We swooped over the Golden Gate Bridge which was the perfect ending to my time in California, paving way to an exciting new beginning in London.

-Verona to London and witnessing a truly beautiful sunset from 37,000 feet high.

-Taking off during an electrical storm, Brisbane to Auckland. 

-After a week in third world-like Vanuatu, stepping onto an Air New Zealand flight with all it's high-tech gadgets seemed the height of luxury and reminded me of how lucky we all are to have the things we do. 

-Greece to London and because our flight was early we had to fly in circles above Heathrow for about 20 minutes, along with about five other flights. Absolutely bizaare sight.

-Leaving Auckland in 2010, after an emotional good-bye with friends and family, unable to stop crying, not knowing when I was going to be back, but very, very excited. And then landing at the same airport, exactly a year to the day later, feeling unbelievably excited to be back.

These days, my life seems to be all about the airports, the travelling, the flying. If I'm not departing Gatwick or Stansted, I am waiting for my latest visitor at Heathrow. The arrivals area is always the happiest part of flying. Which I guess is why I keep booking them.






Auckland to Brisbane, 2009




San Francisco to London, 2010




London to Marseille, 2011




London to Auckland, 2011



London to Verona, 2011

Vanuatu, 2009



EasyJet flight deck, Barcelona, 2011




London to Madrid, September 2011



Fear

On September 11 2001 I was at home, in bed, sick. Earlier in the week I had picked up some kind of stomach bug, I remember counting the number of times in one day I vomited- 13, if you're interested. It was a weekend and my younger brother came into my room to tell me some planes had crashed into some buildings in New York City. I remember thinking what a stupid pilot , how could he not see the buildings?

Later, I watched the news and for the first time in my life, realised what a horrible place the world is. The horror was just unimaginable. It physically hurt to think of the terror these thousands of people must have felt. For years afterwards I used to have nightmares about flying to America. In my dreams there were no crashes or terrorist attacks, but the idea of simply flying anywhere was scary to me. The risks seemed then, and still, impossibly frightening.

I visited New York for the first time in 2008. We visited Ground Zero and several church memorials. I expected to feel sad and sick, but truthfully I didn't feel anything for what, to me, was just a construction site. I had no emotional attachment to that place, it was only the images of people jumping from tall buildings that would make the hairs on my arms stand on end.

Being Thanksgiving at the time, the New York City police started issuing terror alerts. News reports warned us not to use the subway if we could help it, and to report any suspicious behaviour. Needless to say, coming from a small town in New Zealand, the warnings frightened me and I wanted to stay in the hotel. Australians on my tour just laughed- we get warnings like that all the time in Sydney and Melbourne they scoffed. You can't live your life in fear, or the terrorists will win. And so we do all continue to live our lives. We continue to ride the underground and take flights overseas.

I am still frightened of being a statistic. I look at people on the tube with backpacks and wonder if I should take a different train. I've sized people up at the departure gate and I jump at loud noises. But nothing will stop me from continuing to book these tickets, to embark on these adventures. Life is short. Health, money, ability and opportunity won't always be there tomorrow. Let's roll.

Where are all the other travellers?

I know very few people who share my need to keep moving. I know people who like holidays, people who like Paris and people who have been to lots of places. I don't know anybody who would spend their last 40 quid on a one way ticket to Moscow. Nobody knows what it's like to look at a world map and think, 'Well, I guess I better get cracking.'

The beauty of friendship is that sometimes people can point out things you can't see for yourself.

Today, after a particularly agonising week of dissecting my finances, re-writing budgets, looking at a map and then re-writing them again, somebody said to me something along the lines of, "I would think travelling is the key to becoming a travel writer." 

Which is kind of obvious really isn't it? But I've spent so much time trying to be responsible, squirelling away money and trying to put a lid on my overwhelming desire to explore Europe's best cobbled streets, that I've missed the point of it all- to write well, you have to write what you know.

Last week my favorite partner in crime, who is currently exploring Canada, told me she was going to keep travelling until all her money ran out. And my first thought was, 'thank god somebody else understands.'

That is, understands the complete indifference to owning homes, settling down with hubby and children, having a high paying job that pays for a home in Notting Hill and numerous trips to Dior but doesn't allow for any real time off.

When did vivir suddenly mean to become part of a rat-race, a statistic, a bore? When did we stop living and start dreaming, instead of the other way around? Where are all the other travellers?