Father's Day 2012

Seems appropriate to come back to the blog today as it is Father's Day. I've already received some lovely cards from my daughters, created at child care, and their Mum has made me a mug of tea. We are heading off to do our favourite walk this morning as a family - over the Booti Booti Hill in the National Park of the same name. It's a lovely day in Pacific Palms. In the time between my last entry about ten months ago and now, I've managed to turn 50 and to do some wonderful trips like cycling around Sri Lanka in May, travelling through the Greek Islands with my family in June and spending about five weeks in pre-Olympics London. In the meantime my eldest Mila has been busily learning to read and to write and is now preparing for her first year at school. How time flies. She is so grown up and travelling over to Europe really made her thrive, so much so that she cried when we left England and said "I miss London town". I don't think you can underestimate the effect of travel in broadening a child's outlook and I would have absolutely no qualms about taking both girls out of school to do longer trips, particularly to Europe and around Australia.

Freya is, at nearly three, turning into a funny little chatterbox and is just a bundle of smiles and cuddles. Gorgeous age this. There is a lot on in my life at the moment. Will I change career after than a less than wonderful year as a travel writer? What will I do? I have irons in the fire so to speak and one of those could yield a new start as a trekking guide which could be exciting. It's going to be hard to find any job that will reward my wanderlust like travel writing but it simply doesn't pay the bills when you have a young family. So, at the age of 50 and with twenty years of experience I have to throw everything up into the air and find a new direction, while no doubt still attempting to keep my hand in at travel writing. Today is a mixed day as four years ago in Barcelona I was by my brother's bedside as he died from cancer. I miss him of course. Over the last few months I have become more involved in my local community, Pacific Palms on the Mid-North coast and have become chairperson of a committee to create a Great Lakes Bicycle Path. I am also standing for council in the elections that take place next week. After years feeling a bit on the outside of the community - isn't that always the lot of the writer - I now feel much more part of it. This feeling was epitomised by a lovely party last weekend held at our home. We had seventy adults and children here, a huge bonfire and a perfect late winter night. Unforgetable.

TREKKING THE KANGAROO ISLAND WILDERNESS

I can’t believe my week on Kangaroo Island is nearly at a close. Just one more walk to complete the five days trekking, up to Kelly Hill Caves tomorrow from our base at the truly excellent Hanson Bay cabins – www.hansonbay.com.au.

My time on the island started extremely well with a weekend at the Sky House, one of the Lifetime Private Retreats () properties at Snelling Beach, in the north. This is a luxurious and intimate experience of KI, beautiful accommodation with extraordinary views over the coast and some special local food and drink thrown in. My favourite part of the visit was on Sunday evening when owner Nick Hannaford presented some marron (yabby), prawns and barbecued whiting at their taverna on Snelling Beach.

Then I met up with Richard and Holger from Australian Wilderness Adventures (www.australianwildernessadventures.com.au) for my walking tour here on KI. We began benignly, with a short walk to the top of Prospect Hill (514 steps, a schoolboy who was counting claimed) and then a hike beside Murray Lagoon, the island’s bird magnet. Here we saw a stack of Cape Barren geese, black swans, heron, plovers and other birds that twitchers would get excited about.

Our base for the week has been the simple but absolutely delicious cabins here at Hanson Bay. They have everything you need, are situated above a calm turquoise coloured bay where (if you’re game) you can swim in the Southern Ocean and are close to where we’ve been doing our serious walking along the south-west coast of KI.

Oh boy, my body (especially my legs) didn’t know what it was letting itself in for this week. I idly read the itinerary, saw a couple of 15 kilometre days and thought “that’s only twice as long as my favourite walk” and should take no time at all. How wrong I was.

This has been true wilderness trekking. We have been walking along the west coast of the island, largely along scrubby, rocky, cliff-strewn shores that very few venture along in a given year. It’s been hard work but I mean that in the most positive terms possible. We have been along beaches that have rarely seen a human foot, we have bush-bashed until my legs (after I eschewed using gaters) bled from ankle to thigh with branch and grass cuts, we have scaled cliffs and walked over huge granite boulders. All within fifty to a hundred metres of a sometimes translucently turquoise and occasionally growling and tantrum-throwing Southern Ocean. It has been superb and made all the more superb by the magnificent guiding skills of Holger, who, despite skewering his foot on a sharp stick on the second afternoon, has led us with humour, intelligence and great skill along this largely unchartered coast. Business partner Richard Mayne, who is an old chum from a trek through the Flinders two years ago, meanwhile has kept us royally fed here at Hanson Bay using produce from across the island. He’s so good he was just about to audition for Masterchef. He’s even inventive with the scroggin (or doggerel as I misname it) that he sends us off with everyday: this has every energy food known to man – nuts, seeds, M and Ms, dates, chocolate covered liquorice – thrown together in a delirious tizzy. Well done, sir!

So, at the end of the fourth day of walking the magnificent coast of cliffs and caves, bays and boulders, I am a gloriously happy wreck. My legs throb, my face is wind and sun-tanned, I am scratched to buggery (to the great satisfaction of the self-flagellating Englishman that I half am) and I am ready to pronounce this untouched part of Kangaroo Island one of the country’s great wilderness areas. In 45 kilometres of trekking we have seen no other human being other than when we arrived at Admirals Arch yesterday afternoon, where the New Zealand fur seals hang out. We even had the Remarkable rocks to ourselves by making an early start this morning.

I can’t speak highly enough of Australian Wilderness Adventures. It’s a new company with its heart bang in the right place and with some heady ideas for future treks, including an off-trail Kakadu walk that I seriously hope to do. In the meantime they are booking up fast for their Larapinta trek in central Australia, beginning in April next year. I can’t think of better hands in which to find yourself doing any walk but if you are into to getting off the beaten track then this Kangaroo Island trek is a ground-breaker. Holger and Richard have only just walked and devised the route. How exciting is that?

Pictures will come as soon as I can get them off the camera and into the computer

Onwards and downwards (to Kangaroo Island...)

I'm on my way to Kangaroo island today and have got tangled up with flight delays (Virgin, not Qantas surprisingly) which mean I have two hours to kill at Newcastle airport. It means I'll be spending the night in Adelaide tonight too rather than on the island which is a shame but no big disaster.

Wow, the reaction to my last blog was quite overwhelming. Thank you especially to those of you who've posted comments both here and on the Iguana Freelancers Facebook page. It is so comforting to read the kind messages of support and as you can see from the post from my brother in law Sam, I am very fortunate to have a great Aussie family through my partner Sarah. I can't overestimate the wonderful support and friendship of my travel writing colleagues. I do think the job attracts mostly lovely, open-minded people so I am not exactly surprised.

I felt sick to the stomach after posting the last entry and making it public. I felt guilty about burdening the world with my condition, about exposing my partner and kids to scrutiny and for what many may see as "bleeding heart look-at-me" behaviour. When your brain chemistry is all mucked-up you think of every scenario. You imagine your worst enemy looking at what you wrote and saying "you absolute prick, you've got a great family, a wonderful job that most people would kill for etc etc and you can't even be unselfish enough to be happy". They're right of course and that thought has given me sleepless nights and even that is pointless because why worry about something you can't change. Some people will applaud my opening up and others, used to playing their cards close to their chests or understandably sick of how the internet seems to be giving everybody the chance to display their misery/sickness/paranoia or whatever so publicly, will not.

On the other hand I had a wonderful chat with Pam Macintosh from ABC regional radio about what I'd written and will be going on her show on Wednesday November 16th at 9.35am to talk some more about the issues it raises. I really hope that I can help other people with my condition through further publicity and will have to toughen up to accept the inevitable criticism and even possible vitriol that may come my way as a result.

I want to stress that while I am sad more often than I should be (or want to be - christ this is what I want to overcome as it has ruled my life for way too long) - I am also capable of great joy and happiness. Believe me too when I say that I know that the world is a wonderful, extraordinary place. Better than any drug you'll ever take. My work has given the most amazing opportunities and I am so grateful for that. I am so exceptionally lucky to have travelled through the Arctic, through Africa, flown over Antarctica, seen more of Australia than most people do in a lifetime and enjoy superb times throughout Europe and the US. People may well want to ask how somebody like me, as they once asked about a famous footballer earning squillions and with a model girlfriend, who had depression, possibly has the hide to claim that they are depressed? Good question and I don't have a good answer.

Most people with depression don't want to feel the way they do and I must stress it is chemical. What causes it I don't know for sure but I am the most unwilling recipient of the feelings it delivers. When all I want to do is bubble with joy and the feeling that life could not be better, I look at myself and think "you self-engrossed, talentless, try-hard tosser"! It's hard enough for me living with that feeling but it's everybody that has to live with me that I feel sorry for, as I am sure you will do. It's like being an alcoholic- bad enough for you of course but a fucking nightmare for anybody around you. I know, my brother died a rampant and unapologetic alcoholic just three years ago, and all my attempts to "save" him were hopeless. But then I was needlessly cruel to him when he let me down too. He hurt me beyond repair with his self-destruction but I hurt him too with my frustrated anger with him. That's another story for another time.

Enough, enough. Hopefully there will be joyous reportage from KI, as the locals call it, and once again thanks to those of you that have followed this to the end.

And for anybody who might have read what I've written and feels very uncomfortable about it, I'm sorry. But please if you know somebody with depression don't treat them with distance or disdain. They can be pretty amazing people - Winston Churchill, Richard Burton, Stephen Fry and David Attenborough are just some of those I know to have had the illness - and their depression is just one part of the character, not the whole sum.

An award, a birthday and a confession

Horse riding in the Belrowan valley, near Wauchope


Hi there

another long break in posting, sorry but it's been fairly non-eventful around the tracks here. Had a couple of interesting trips around New South Wales, one to the Port Macquarie hinterland with my family and another to Parramatta, outside of Sydney, but other than that it has been nose to the writing and fathering grindstone.

During the last couple of months both my daughters have had their birthdays. I can hardly believe that my eldest, Mila, has just turned four. It seems like only yesterday that I held this tiny being in my arms at Newcastle hospital. I was so scared of hurting her, when she was a few hours old, that I trembled incontrollably while I changed her first nappy! Likewise little Freya, our baby, is suddenly no longer a baby. She was two on Saturday October 29th and is turning into quite a fiesty, funny little character.



As it happens, and I write this with great reluctance as it seems immodest to mention it, Freya's birthday coincided with my winning the Travel Writer of the Year award at the Australian Society of Travel Writers conference in Rotorua. I missed the event to stay home and entertain twenty under four year olds at Freya's birthday party. Maybe I should stay home all the time!

I have to say that I am shocked that I won and tickled pink. It is an award I've been striving for ever since I first started travel writing in 1994 and while not all the best travel writers in Australia are eligible for it, as they're not members of the society, it is some measure of success. There are several really esteemed and wonderful writers in the organisation such as Kerry Van der Jagt (who is also a great friend and won her second individual award at the event), Louise Southerden (who has deservedly won the award twice and is the most graceful and lovely human being), Marc Llewellyn (whose books "Riders to the Midnight Sun" and "Finding Nemo" are superb), Rob Macfarland (another great guy who has won the award before), Sue Gough-Henley (an amazing all-round talent), Roderick Eime (same again and Photographer of the Year this year) and Brian Johnstone. There are many other great writers but the ones that set the standard for all of us younger ones were the irrepressible Glenn A Baker and John Borthwick, not to mention the magnificent Susan Kurosawa, the Australian newspaper's travel editor, who is an ex-president but no longer a member.



Travel writing for a living is an increasingly precarious profession. Opportunities are opening up such as Apps and blogs while traditional forms, like newspaper stories and books, are under threat. I've tried to embrace the new forms and have been an avid blogger for professional sites like www.ninemsn.com.au and www.ourpatch.com.au but my heart lies with well-written travel narratives that take the reader on a journey. I am very fortunate that for the last five years the prestigious Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age travel section has published my work and I certainly wouldn't have won had that not been the case. In fact it's debatable whether I would have continued travel writing if I'd not had that outlet.

As i've mentioned many times before here, the tension between being a Dad and a travel writer is not always pleasant. I have to travel for work and love it while I am doing it but hate leaving the girls and miss them like mad when I am away. Plus while this was always a wonderful job for a younger person with no responsibilities it is not well-rewarded enough financially to enable one to provide for a family properly. I may be near the top of my profession here in Australia but honestly I'm near the bottom of the country's earnings table. As are many of my colleagues. You can see why this happens, many people in the world would kill for our job and so paying us handsomely for what we do just probably seems too much. Instead we get thrown crumbs and often don't get paid for supplying photographs. Does that mean we don't work hard and bust a gut to meet deadlines and provide what our employers want? No.

So I am Travel Writer of the Year and immensely proud of the award and the recognition but as my father-in-law succinctly put it - his measure of success being how many dollars you earn - "if enough people know about it it could be useful". Yes, quite.

Thank you all 24 of you that have followed this blog, it's much appreciated. I've been reading the second part of Stephen Fry's auto-biography over the last few days and have been struck by his self-deprecating frankness. As he rightly says what is the point of such writing unless it is scrupulously honest?

In that light and although it's a bit of a cheat as probably nobody has had the patience to read to the end of this, I have something I want to get off my chest. I have depression. Real, nasty, wear-you-down to the bone depression. The kind that wakes you up in the morning with a "what's the point?" and drags you down from any triumph, any glimpse of longterm happiness. It's being going on all my life and stepped up its dirty work over the past year. I've resisted them all my life but this year have been on anti-depressants. The first one had limited success, the second was so debilitating in its effect and so alarming that it sent me to hospital on a couple of occasions and the third, Valdoxan, has helped considerably but is not eradicating days of self-hatred, frustration and total lack of motivation. Productivity has plummeted and every single story that I've managed to finish has been a huge, titanic struggle. If it weren't for the support of my partner Sarah and writing buddy Kerry I probably wouldn't have managed to write anything. So you can see that this award would mean a lot to me.

One thing that has improved with the Valdoxan and with quitting alcohol altogether over the past seven months is family life. I am much more even-tempered and easier to be around and I am very thankful for that because frankly, my little girls are my life and understandably my partner was on the verge of leaving with them. I don't blame her whatsoever - I have been the most difficult of human beings to share a space with - and am glad that she has stuck with me. The kids are a challenge of course, especially as they add sleeplessness into the mix for both their parents, and don't exactly make it easy to write some days. For instance during the forty minutes or so it's taken to write this I've had to break to clean teeth, attend to my youngest twice as she went for a phantom pee, help my oldest choose clothes for the day and comfort both of them for one reason or another. Concentration is at a premium.



And yet. And yet. A single smile or cuddle from either Mila or Freya is more sustaining than any other thing on the planet. I just pray for their sake that this illness is not necessarily genetic and that they get her Mum's happy genes instead. A loving, uncomplicated environment is also important I know in generating happy people so that is why I have been so determined to get on top of my depression.

I can't blame my condition for all my difficulties or indeed for all my many character flaws. I can, I'm sure, be the most difficult and unlikeable of people both personally and professionally and I know I have not behaved well in the past. I'm sure some people just wouldn't want to take the risk of working with me, travel writer of the year or not, and some that have probably regret it. Others will be well-pleased with what I've managed to produce for them and I've forged some really lovely and sustaining friendships in this industry. I am hugely grateful to the open and welcoming nature of Australia and Australians for giving me my break.

This has gone on far too long, like many of my stories, but feels very good to have got off my chest.

What's the point of this confession you might ask? There may be none. I may have written the above for nobody other than myself and perhaps two other readers. But to those two and others that may have read on then thank you. Perhaps the fact that I have managed to continue writing over the years can give hope for others who have the condition. I'm not special - 1/5th of the Australian population has a mental health issue every year - but I do think that the more open we are in society about depression and its effects the more we diffuse its power.

I'm about to head off to Kangaroo Island and join up with an old pal Richard Mayne and his new trekking company http://www.australianwildernessadventures.com.au/ for a five day walk. Part of me can't wait. I'll try to report in from there.

All is fair in love and war

Weekend story in the Sydney Morning Herald: www.smh.com.au/travel/holiday-type/family/ambushed-and-loving-it-20111005-1l8kt.htm

Papua New Guinean travels

After an unforgivable delay while Daddy T gadded about Papua New Guinea, here's a new instalment.

We’re flying to Port Moresby after a five day odyssey that’s taken in East New Britain and a small fragment of New Ireland in PNG. We’re culturally sated, we’ve sailed, dived, snorkelled, kicked a football around with girls and boys in a village game (result 6-6) and I’m here to tell you that both Rabaul/Kokopo in New Britain and Nusa Island, off Kavieng in New Ireland are most certainly worth consideration as places to visit. I’d say especially at this time of year for Australians, who are grinding out a three month stretch of winter and could do with some island smiles and humidity to warm the heart and the bones.

The island people I have met in both New Britain and New Ireland have been the revelation of this trip. Always friendly and with smiles flashing at the slightest invocation, they are welcoming and slightly curious about their visitors. “Why you come here?” they ask, “you surfer?” “No.” “A diver?” “Well a bit, yes.” The real answer is that we’re a mix of culturally interested and ambitious to explore some less known parts of PNG. As Danny from Adventures in Paradise - - told me of their five and seven day sailing trips up to New Hanover to the north of New Ireland: “When I first went to some of the islands up there the kids had never seen a white woman before.”

But will tourism ever overcome the twin threats of widespread mining and malaria in this area? Mining, like in many of Australia’s more glorious regions such as the Pilbara, will always offer more incentive to locals (and many others who come to exploit resources) financially than tourism. Never mind that the mining companies don’t give a fig about the landscape or the local culture or the environment. In the land of the one-eyed king, money is power, money is God. As for malaria, well it’s the one reason I wouldn’t bring my small kids here – the tetracyclines don’t offer enough protection (people taking regular doses have still got malaria) – but it certainly wouldn’t stop me from coming as an individual. And I can’t imagine adventurous Aussies, Brits, Germans and French being put off either. The US and Japan are the other big markets and the former has dropped off considerably in recent years because of the GFC.

Having said all that, what the islands offer is spectacular beauty, fascinating and ingrained culture, the scars and stories of WW2 in many spots, great watersports, a smouldering volcano or two to climb (a definite must at Rabaul which is seismographic heaven) and the lovely people…



As I mentioned, one of the highlights – a break from the itinerary and the relentless needs of “Snap-Snap”, our travel photographer – was a game of football in the local village with a mixed gang of kids, aged about fourteen down to six. Myself (Big-Big) and Tim Elbra (Small-Small) the Sport Ed from Mx newspaper each joined a side and it was pretty even although our nominal captain, a young girl by the name of Tomadina was far and away the most skillfull and energetic of the players. We played for about twenty minutes while Talk-Talk (the one and only musicologist and travel writer Glenn A. Baker, for whom no name drop is too big), Snap-Snap (Bavarian photojournalist Donatus Fuchs) and our fearless English chaperone Pom-Pom (Anne Morris from Hampshire, darling) chatted away with non-playing locals. Scandalously and in spite of no small effort in the cloying mud by both the blow-ins from Australia there was no score in that time but a great many laughs were had by all.

So we’re now on our final day and headed for Port Moresby, which has few fans that I know of but let’s give it the benefit of the doubt. We’re on an afternoon tour of the city highlights before the final night of what has been an excellent first visit for me to Papua New Guinea. It’s certainly a country I want to see more of, very beautiful in parts and with intriguing culture and history. It’s been a great final leg to my six week journey outside of Australia.

Another plane, another blog…

It’s now Wednesday July 6th and I’m on a flight from Newcastle to Brisbane. That’s Newcastle in Australia in case you were wondering, and the flight is taking me up to the Queensland capital a day in advance of my next press trip – to Papua New Guinea. Last Saturday I was in Denmark, then I was in London, then I was flying for 24 hours. Arriving in Sydney at 6.30am on a Tuesday morning I then took a six hour train journey before arriving at a place called Hexham and meeting with my long-lost family at a dirt turn-off near a tiny station.



Thanks to the Shoal Bay resort (www.shoalbayresort.com), which is at the edge of Port Stephens, north of Newcastle, I’ve just had the most fantastic of arrivals and recovery periods as well as reunions with my partner and daughters. We had a plush two bedroom apartment in their Breakwater Tower, his and hers ninety minute massages in their spa, a delicious dinner in their a la carte restaurant “Catch”, a plentiful breakfast and finally a swim in one of several heated pools around the resort on a warm, if breezy winter morning.



The resort, which features several styles of accommodation, including romantically luxurious and villas well suited to a group (of women) on a weekend break, is the sort of place you could easily not leave for the whole of your stay. There is everything you need on site including kitchen facilities in the apartments, a choice of restaurants and a huge games room on the ground floor of the Breakwater Tower. It’s just a shame that the family didn’t get to stay for a few days instead of a little under twenty-four hours. However, the excellent massages by therapist Zoe (through which I mostly slept, sadly), the superb food at Catch which for me included lobster as an entree and spatchcock as a main followed by a tasting plate of desserts and the feel of everything we needed being nearby meant this was a relaxing and fulfilling stay.

However, even in this short time, there was a bit of Daddy T drama, which readers of this blog are getting used to. After washing some clothes in preparation for PNG I’d just put them in the wall-mounted drying machine and having started it, closed the door to the laundry, when there was an almighty bang. The dryer had thrown itself off the wall, smashed into the washing machine below, somersaulted and landed upside down and blocking the door. Luckily, nobody was in the vicinity when it happened and the resort were kind enough to realise it wasn’t our fault. This morning, maintenance were busy checking the whole resort for other suicidal dryers!

The flight back from London was bearable, flying World Traveller Plus with British Airways, which is their equivalent of Premium Economy. You get two inches more leg room but really it’s the same awful constricting seat which is guaranteed to give you lumbago or a hernia and results in back and neck ache in whatever position you try to sleep. Thankfully, I’ve recently discovered dozile – a sleep aid you can buy over the counter at pharmacies – and found it did knock me out (without any alcohol) for one period of about eight hours and another of about two on the flight. That’s got to be a good result on such a long flight in economy, even if it is not so named. To be honest the only other advantage of the Premium Economy cabin on BA is that on 747-400’s it’s situated between First and Business class and means you can get off the plane early. It’s a small cabin too, with only about thirty seats or so and that helps, especially if it is virtually empty, as it was on the second leg from Bangkok. But would I pay the hundreds of dollars extra to sit there? Probably not.

So tomorrow another new country, my ninety-ninth I think, beckons. I’m not one for tallying up countries really but 100 is a bit of a milestone in a travel writer’s career. I know that one of my fellow travellers on this press trip, the erstwhile musical brain of the universe, Glenn A Baker, notched up his 100 some time ago so I’ll be in esteemed company.

What’s in store for us over there? A colourful mask festival, some sailing and a bit of diving in some opulent tropical waters and a day in Port Moresby. I’m really looking forward to it all but I have to say that after nearly six weeks of constant travel and living out of a suitcase, I am also really looking forward to reaching home, doing some gardening, spending some unrushed time with the family and writing like a maniac to cover all the amazing experiences I’ve been having.

Hope to check-in again soon from Papua New Guinea.