Kailash Calling
First published in the Sun-Herald
It was early April when I took a jeep north from Kathmandu across the Friendship Bridge and into the kingdom of Tibet, still deep in the grip of winter.
Omkareshwar
First published in The Sun-Herald, 2005
On the run from the glamour and excess of Goa, I arrive in the holy town of Omkareshwar at the heart of India, the ferocious heat of the plains like a wild dog at my back.
Goa
First published in The Sun-Herald, 2005
It has been six years since I washed the last of the Indian dust from my skin but when I step out of the Mumbai airport into that press of bodies, that laden air, it rises up in me from the vaults of memory. Ah, yes. This place.
Colombia – In Search of Lost Time
First published in the Sun-Herald, 2005
Relatives pleaded and wept. Well-travelled friends exchanged significant looks. Even the travel agent raised an eyebrow. I blamed my teenage obsession with 80s action flick Romancing the Stone (“She’s a girl from the big city. He’s a reckless soldier of fortune. For a fabulous treasure, they share an adventure no one could imagine… or survive”) and boarded a plane to Bogota, my own reckless soldier of fortune in tow.
Buenos Aires
First published in Black & White, 2005
We cross the Rio de la Plata in the blackness that comes before dawn, on a slow boat from the old Uruguayan smugglers port of Colonia del Sacramento. Before us, a pale stain lights the horizon: not the rising sun but the insomniac glow of the city.
Circling the Mountain
Kate Hamilton was awarded an Australia Council Emerging Writers grant in 2005 to work on a non-fiction book about her pilgrimage to Mt Kailash in the far west of Tibet.…
Brighton Rock
First published in Black & White, 2004
It’s a Saturday night in Brighton’s West Street and the beast is waking. Shrieks of rifle-toting Essex girls in fluffy combat bikinis rent the air – brides-to-be strung with L-plates and jaunty veils as they totter on kitten heels to the next round of vodka jellies, trailing shiny balloons in the shape of cocktails and penises.
El Oriente
First published in Black & White, 2004
In search of adventure, we take a bus from Ecuador’s capital Quito and head east into the Amazon Basin. The road climbs to the highland paramo, wreathed in cloud, then drops through rainforest in every shade of green – trees bearded with silver lichens and vermillion bromeliads, spliced with cascading falls and below, the roar of white water.