Category: Travel

Central Sydney

To be honest I wasn’t fussed about the centre of Sydney. I was staying close to the harbour, but it all felt very bland and glossy, like living in a Westfield shopping centre. I was there to visit friends more than anything.

Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania

MONA was one of my main reasons for visiting Tasmania. It’s basically in an underground bunker like a Bond villain’s lair, and requires a boat ride to get to. The owner David Walsh, is the richest man in Tasmania and a very strange character in his own right- he grew up in a rough area of Hobart, and made his fortune by using maths to outsmart the gambling industry, and then spent it on this museum. He’s simultaneously “mathematical genius” and “13 year old edgelord”.

Hobart, Tasmania

Hobart is the capital of Tasmania, and one of the oldest cities in Australia- lots of old buildings. Even by Australian standards it has a really grim history of genocide and massacres against the original local people, with lots of explanatory plaques and signs around as memorials.

Sandy Bay and Battery Point, Tasmania

Here’s Australia continued- my trip to Tasmania and the pretty seaside town of Sandy Bay, hometown of Errol Flyn. If you have any idea from the cartoon that Tasmania is a hot desert place, it’s not think. Think more New Zealand.

Fitzroy Gardens, Melbourne

Fitzroy Gardens is a park in the centre of Melbourne with a model village, lovely botanical conservatory and some fairly strange sculptures and tree carvings.

Sticky Institute

Sticky Institute is a Melbourne institution- a zine shop in the basement of Flinders Street train station that’s been there since 2001

Assorted Melbourne I

Here’s some photos from around Melbourne in Sept 2018 (yes, it has taken me that long to sort them out), they’re mostly phone photos taken as I wandered around. Melbourne is a mix of Victorian terraces very similar to those in the UK (with the addition of sunporches), gleaming new blocks, and wild west saloon type streets like this.

St Kilda, Melbourne

Here’s a few photos from St Kilda in Melbourne. It’s a fancy coastal suburb of Melbourne filled with interwar bungalows, with a pier and esplanade. In the 1960s it was run down and where all the hippies lived, but is now back to being fancy. I went there because there are wild penguins living on the pier and I hoped to see some. Unfortunately I didn’t manage to spot any that day.

Singapore

Last year I went on a trip to Australia, with a stop-off in Singapore along the way. I’ve finally started sorting out the photos and writing a zine about the trip. Here’s some photos from Singapore- they’re all phone photos as I left my suitcase at the airport for convenience as I had to fly to Melbourne the next day and I realised the battery charger for my camera was in it too late.

Louisiana Art Museum, Denmark

I was tidying up some old photos and found some from my trip to Denmark in 2015 that I never posted. These are of the Louisiana Art Museum. It’s a modern art museum and sculpture park just up the coast from Copenhagen.

Roskilde Viking Ship Musem

It’s very unlikely I or anyone else will be travelling much this summer (I’ve not been more than a mile away from home for months now), so I thought I’d sort out and post some old travel photos. Here’s Roskilde from 2015. I posted photos of Copenhagen and Malmö at the time (you can see them here and here), but I forgot to do these ones.

Bulgaria- toy camera vision

In the fuzzy zone between Christmas and New Year I scanned a lot of old negatives. I’ve recently started going through them and editing the photos. It’s not like travel is going to be much of an option this year, so might as well sort out all my old travel photos that I overlooked.

Schloss Belvedere, Vienna

I realised I still had a few photos from February in Austria left unposted, so here they are. Strange to think that six weeks ago I was travelling around Central Europe for work, and now I don’t venture more than a mile or two from home.

Japan Zine- digital edition

A couple of years ago I won some plane tickets to Japan, and went inter-railing around Western Japan with my friend Vicky. The whole trip was short notice and on a very low budget, but we had fun. When I came back I made a zine about the trip. The paper edition is still available here, but for the foreseeable future I can only send physical copies to the UK. So I’ve made a digital edition for people to read.

Amstetten

Amstetten is the most extremely average place in Austria. It’s a largish commuter town in between Linz and Vienna. You have no reason to visit it. Its main claim to fame is that Josef Fritzl lived there. I was there to teach in one of the schools as a visiting teacher.

A less than exciting walk around Salzburg

I was supposed to be back in Austria right now, running more school workshops. Obviously that’s not happening now, due to the Coronavirus lockdown. Here’s some photos from Salzburg a couple of weeks ago, where I flew en route to Amstetten.

What’s in the box?

Austria Post does an excellent fixed price box within Europe which is extremely handy when you’re travelling around for weeks on end with a 20kg luggage restriction and needing to dress nicely for work and no access to laundry.

Assorted Deutschlandsberg

Here’s some assorted photos from Deutschlandsberg. It’s a very ordinary small Austrian town near Graz. Although it’s a pretty and nice place, it’s probably not where you’d pick for a holiday in Austria (although they do get hikers and people coming for the wine trail in the summer).

Arrival in Deutschlandsberg

My next work assignment was in Deutschlandsberg, a small town at the foot of the Koralm Alps, near the Slovenian border. (Austria is a lot further south and east than people imagine). I was there three years ago (at a different school), when it was snowing heavily. This time I arrived to brilliant sunshine, and went for a walk up in the vineyard filled hills with Jemeala, one of the other teachers.

Graz

En route to my next work assignment in Deutschlandsberg near the Slovenian border I stopped off in Graz overnight. I’ve been to Graz loads of times. It’s a really nice city, even if everyone does have a thick Arnie accent. 

Crossing the Alps playlist

To travel in between Vienna and Graz, until the never-ending tunnel under the mountains is finished later this decade, you have to take the train over the top of the Semmering Pass, going up and down over the Alps. You get some spectacular views, and the trainline itself is a UNESCO site. It’s hard to take good photos out of the train window, so here’s my playlist for over the mountain.

Assorted Fertőd

Fertőd is the village in Hungary just across the border from Pamhagen. It has a huge Baroque palace there (which we also visited) and therefore more places to eat than Wallern (and the exchange rate is very favourable). The train takes about five minutes, but only runs every four hours. In fact the train journey was so quick a lot of the time the conductor couldn’t even be bothered to sell us a cross-border ticket.

Wallern Carnival- home of the Party Tractor

A lot of small towns in Austria have a Mardi Gras carnival, and they often organise them to be on different days to not clash. This means that if I’m in Austria doing school workshops in February I often see multiple carnivals. Wallern-im-Burgenland is still the most surreal I’ve seen.

Pamhagen and Wallern-im-Burgenland- the Kansas of Austria

My next work assignment was in a small village called Pamhagen on the Austria-Hungary border. The main hotel in the village was closed, so we were put up in a neighbouring village called Wallern-im-Burgenland. Pamhagen is only about 70 miles away from Vienna, but it’s a million miles in reality. Until 1989 it was pinched between the lake and the heavily militarised Iron Curtain. The border is open again now, with no passport controls (thanks Schengen Agreement!) but the area still feels like the end of the line.

Receive new posts via email. Your data will be kept private.