Masai Warriors and Goosebump Trails
They say those who know do and those who don’t teach. But I can’t see why you can’t do both.
I love travelling, I love travel writing, I love journalism but I also love to teach. It’s fun to impart what little knowledge you might have come across to other people. And it’s even more fun to see what they come up with.
And with this in mind I have started teaching travel writing.
In the past few years, I’ve been to around 20 inte
rnational destinations and scores in Australia and New Zealand.. I’ve interviewed everybody from Masai warriors to Republican voters in the US to Irish genealogists to Albanian professors to Indonesian villagers. And I’ve written hundreds of travel stories.
But I didn’t start out as a travel writer. I did a pretty traditional journalism cadetship on a newspaper and worked in the Press Gallery in Canberra before heading to the Kimberley in Western Australia and then the Northern Territory to cover the burgeoning land rights movements there.
It wasn’t really until I worked in Central America in the mid 80s that I started writing travel stories. It was a way of getting stories published that you couldn’t get into the world news or features pages. One I remember was about the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua and what an evocative destination that was, even with a war going on there at the time.
We went over to cover the autonomy movement and elections. We sailed up the coast on a cargo ship and climbed into canoes which crashed over waves before landing on the beach. Everybody was green with seasickness but that didn't stop one girl carrying a birthday cake for her family the whole way. On the beach we were met by long-haired, wild-looking soldiers. I thought I’d arrived for the filming of Apocalypse Now.
The female Nicaraguan journalist and I slept head to toe in a mosquito-netted hammock, down with the soldiers. We thought we were safer there.
It seems strange now reading about Nicaragua as the newest tourist destination.
When I was there they used to blow up the ferry to Bluefields on the Atlantic Coast every second Friday.
Times change and so do politics and people. What was a war zone regularly becomes a tourist destination and vice versa.
That’s what makes it so fascinating to write about.
Come to one of my courses held in my Sydney home where you can also enjoy beautiful Balinese food cooked by my husband, Budi Arsana, and get some travel writing tips.
I also teach regional and family history writing. Nearly every story is enriched by historical background, I believe. And some of my favourites have been about tracing my family history in Scotland and Ireland, what’s known as the “goosebump trail”.
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for course dates, times and prices.