TRAVEL BLOGS PREVIEW
Fascinating tales
from around the world
Thirty minutes reading or less
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Australia
As well as the cute animals such as the koala, kangaroo and kookaburra, there are plenty of creatures that you wouldn't want to find at the bottom of your sleeping bag after a night out in the bush…
Ned Kelly spent a mere eight days in that cell at the Old Melbourne Gaol, before being hung right outside, up a short flight of stairs, while his mother, also a prisoner, worked in the nearby laundry…But nothing could kill what many felt he stood for…
I placed my hand flat on the rock, almost expecting to feel its heart beat…
In about 1200 AD Polynesian, sailors fleeing conflict with other islanders, using only the stars and the flight of birds to navigate, sighted a triangular island formed of three volcanoes which they were to call Rapanui, meaning “big Rapa”, or Te pito o te henua, “The Navel of the World”. It was a momentous occasion in the history of mankind - the last step of our sixty-thousand-year journey out of Africa to inhabit the whole planet…
Patagonia is a million square kilometres of wild, sparsely-populated landscapes at the southern tip of the world, holding the mighty Atlantic and Pacific oceans apart. Where the Andes meet the Southern Ocean the land curls like the tail of one of the dinosaurs that once roamed there, and is home to penguins, killer whales and Welsh tea shops…
Here there is another frontier, where blinding lights meet the all-enveloping darkness of the ocean. Where the whirring, beeping and screeching of giant trucks and the quiet silhouettes of container ships meet the gentle squawking of sea birds, who have also travelled far across the southern seas…
For many the word Madagascar conjures up images of a group of animals who escape from New York Zoo to an island in the Indian Ocean, where they encounter lemurs singing, "I like to move it, move it!"
Corn-on-the-cob and eggs for sale, a pig butchered by the roadside, but always hungry children calling out as you pass…
Gliding along in the cucumber-scented air, feeling the flow of the chocolate-coloured water in your hands, escaping from the sun under an umbrella like some genteel missionary of times past, was to live at a different pace…
One stormy night in 1969 someone picked the lock on the door to the chapel and rudely cut Caravaggio’s Nativity from its frame…
In a scene worthy of a grand Romantic opera a huge, frenzied crowd gathered in front of the cathedral, accompanied by a cacophony of bells and piped organ music. All the priests of Catania processed past in homage to the city's patron Saint Agata, while inside Bellini and long-dead kings slept soundly in their tombs…
All-of-a-sudden you enter the world of the dead…