Cinque Terre

A cool evening with the breeze wandering through Biassa, sitting in a little local place eating thin thin pizza with just tomato, mozarella, basil and a beer. Hair still wet from swimming in the sea, sand between my toes. Looking out and down to the harbour. Walking home past a church and some Italians tending their gardens, windows open, the smell of vines in the air.

Sunday Morning

Vanilla soothing black tea; Silver stars in a whiskey sample bottle

Heat

Me at Saadien Tombs, Marrakesh, photo by Lauchlin

Marrakesh, height of summer.

You are surrounded by crisp dry heat just like when you've done your washing and hung it out on a particularly sunny summer's day. You bring the washing in and it's superdry all crispy in your arms. Heat-soaked all the way through.

Your clothes, before you put them on in the morning, they feel like that. Hot already, right to the core.

Clothes and walls and rooftops and roads. Wind.

All of it is hot.

Five Minutes, Friday

Near Flinders St, Melbourne

Midnight. I was standing, waiting for the tram. It was drizzling lightly, falling in whorls, in flakes like snow. Thinking about beer, tiny shoes, conversations with new people whose names are already blurring. About how strange it is that, with some friends, time stretches so almost-three-years feels like not-that-long-at-all.

Spain

I'm taking a break from writing endless job applications to daydream, as usual, about being somewhere else, somewhere with windy coastline and amazing old palaces.

This is what I remember: long dry dusty roads, strangely lush olive groves, wind farms looking small and then looming huge from below. Weird signs on the roadside from a long ago iconic ad campaign.


The road near Cartejima

Rounding a corner to see a white-washed, tiny village hugging the hillside with barely room for cars. Ducking my head to fit through a doorway squashed by several hundred years. Eating cherries marinated in some kind of spirit, five would tip you into silliness.


Cartejima


Window at the Alhambra

Dusty hot hot day at the Alhambra, walking slow, looking and looking at tiles and carvings and patterns on patterns.

I put a slideshow here if you want to swoop through Spain for a bit - the photos are in chronological order so it's a bit like a little tour.

Sunday

I took the slow tram to st kilda
had a chai latte with josie & dooley
can't stop loving the height and incredible blueness of this sky.

Crossing

I'm curled up in an "ocean-view recliner" with a yellow blanket snuggled over my jeans, reading Burning Chrome. Half-listening to the man wheezing as he crosses the room to sit near me. "I suppose you'll never get old," he says, when he catches his breath. He smiles when I tell him "Probably." Tells me he's 84. I'm watching the night get deeper, feeling the thump of distance as the sea disappears beneath us. Wondering if my generation will be able to choose to live forever.

Addicted to New

On the one hand it's hard, all this beginning again. Making another home. Building a reputation within my chosen career again. I'm back in Australia, house hunting and job hunting and wearing my only two pairs of trousers because it's cold and everything else is still in shipping. I wouldn't have to wear the same jumper all the time if I had settled down somewhere, if everything in my life was in its place and just how I like it.


The street we stayed in, Bodrum, Turkey

On the other hand, all this change, it's great. It feels like I'm still travelling - not looking at things with bored eyes but with the eyes of a foreigner. Noticing Art Deco details on buildings, amazing graffiti, a stylish Melbournian wearing a waist-tied camel coat with elbow-length sleeves over a grey stripey top.


Tower of a mosque, Bodrum, Turkey

I think I might finally understand why people can become travellers permanently. Maybe it's about feeling constantly inspired. Addicted to newness.


Tiles from Topkapi Palace, Istanbul, Turkey