This is the southern end of the Pan American Highway, which goes all the way from Tierra del Fuego to Alaska … sort of. I say “sort of” because, for instance, there’s no bridge across the Magellan Strait, though my bus got across fine on a ferry. There’s a gap of about 100 kilometres in…
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Aug
Have you visited a country if you’ve been in transit at one of its airports? If so, this trip in 2008 was my sixth time in New Zealand. If not, it was my first. By this stage, I’d taken to kissing the ground of new lands with tongue, such as Antarctica earlier in the year.
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Jul
I bought two of these coffee mugs at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. After pouring in boiling water, the black rectangles went away to reveal pictures of gay celebrities such as Oscar Wilde. Not the best in dishwashers …
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Jul
Later this week, I’m visiting Far North Queensland for the tenth time. On my previous nine trips, I went to the Great Barrier Reef … never. Should I take the plunge this time? I don’t think so. It’ll always be there (well, maybe), and I just want to get some sun and work on my…
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Jul
When I was in my first year of high school, Hey! Hey! It’s Saturday used to play the video clips of the latest hits. I was upset that a weird, classical sounding song had knocked ‘Mickey’ off the number one position. The song was ‘I’ve Never Been to Me’, 12 years before it opened the…
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Jul
I’ve written in some exotic places – like Antarctica! The ship that took me there was named after Lyubov Orlova. There was a photo of her in the bar, with a brief explanation that she was a popular Russian actress. Her IMDb biography, combined with a knowledge of history, is more illuminating. Born in 1902, her…
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Jul
When I visited New York City in 2007, I didn’t see the stage musical version of Xanadu, but I caught it five years later when the students at WAAPA (the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts) put it on. Xanadu is an example of the public getting it right … repeatedly. The original movie did not do…
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Jun
On my first trip to Argentina, before Skype, before international roaming (or at least before it was affordable), before prepaid calling cards, before you could phone on Messenger, before WhatsApp … if I wanted to call home, I went to one of these: In a pokey booth like this … … a meter would clock…
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Jun
