5 April, 2024 · 5:29 pm

Marvellous Marlborough

This trip is to celebrate the beginning of my long service leave, a nice chunk of time where I can focus on things other than work. And what better to do than travel?

I’d originally planned to be in the UK at this point, but decided that a quick jaunt closer to home was in order, especially since R and I will be heading to Europe together in June. I hadn’t been to NZ for a while, so it seemed like the perfect opportunity to tick off a couple of bucket list items, the first of which was to visit the Marlborough wine region.

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8 January, 2024 · 8:17 pm

Happy Hoi An

Posing in front of a popular wall
Poison Cafe
Walking along the river

(Posted retrospectively) We love visiting Hoi An. This is the fourth time and it’s not lost its shine, although every time we visit there is more development and bigger resorts and hotels. I’m glad it’s bringing money into the town.

Since R was leaving after three days so he could go back to work, we started our tailor stops with his requests, starting at Bebe. Since we were staying on the east side of town this time. we stopped at the flagship Bebe shopfront, which was very busy and businesslike. R ordered his items, but I didn’t really feel the joy so left it until the next visit.

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6 January, 2024 · 10:14 pm

Fun in Da Nang

The Dragon Bridge

We’d been through Da Nang three times on our way in and out of Hoi An before, but not spent any time there, so this trip we decided to make a stopover before hitting Hoi An again. Good choice! Da Nang is similar in character to HCMC and Hanoi, and given it is the biggest airport in the area, it sees a lot of tourism (so it’s pretty well set up for people like me who don’t speak much Vietnamese.)

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3 January, 2024 · 11:53 pm

Happy New Year in Quy Nhon

Breakfast of champions

When we were planning our stop in Quy Nhon, we found out that it was a beach town kinda like Nha Trang, but less touristy, and they had great seafood. We didn’t realise this meant that very few Western tourists went there, so we were a bit of a spectacle. Walking down the street, people turned and watched us, and children and teenagers practiced their English by saying “Hello” and giggling. We even had one lady ask to take our photo. We felt very famous.

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31 December, 2023 · 5:07 pm

Ho Chi Minh City

The last time we were in HCMC was in 2014 and I got pretty sick, and that coloured my impression of it, unsurprisingly. Happily, this time I was able to enjoy it much more and revise my first impressions.

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20 July, 2023 · 1:14 am

Antwerp – a week of uni life

Antwerp

I was in Antwerp for the week to attend the University of Antwerp Summer School course in Children’s Literature, in the Ecology stream. It was part of the scholarship and was a really amazing week. If you’re interested in literature for young people and you happen to be in Belgium at the right time, take the opportunity and go along. It’s primarily a course for academics, but there are also a lot of people who are involved in lit in other ways – teachers, librarians, booksellers, all passionate and interested.

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2 July, 2023 · 4:34 pm

Germany stopover

Gelnhausen

I decided to spend a couple of days in Germany on my way through to Antwerp so I could catch up with some of my family there and there happened to be a couple of bands playing on convenient days. This meant I didn’t see much of Germany itself in the three nights I was there.

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30 June, 2023 · 3:51 pm

Halcyon Helsinki

Flying Finnair

Back at the beginning of the pandemic, I had to cancel a trip to the Baltics that I’d had booked. I’d planned to resume that trip these holidays, but I was lucky enough to win a scholarship to attend a summer school and conference in Europe this month, so I cancelled the Baltics again… but kept the first leg, which was Helsinki.

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19 December, 2022 · 12:23 pm

Phuket (delayed post)

Seafood dinner at the beach

After the great time we had in Chiang Mai, Phuket was a more subdued way to finish the trip. It rained quite a bit (unsurprisingly) and the hotel I’d booked was gorgeous and right near the night market, but also right across the road from a bar featuring live music… until midnight every night.

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17 December, 2022 · 1:10 am

Chiang Mai

The night train to Chiang Mai was pretty uneventful – hard beds and smelly loos, but nowhere near as difficult as the last night train I was on (the Sofia-Istanbul Express). We arrived in CM not too far from the scheduled arrival time and headed off to leave our bags at the hotel, the Movenpick right near the Night Market area.

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