Category Life stories
Abdullah’s miracle
8 October 2019, Dahab, South Sinai, Egypt. I was meandering my way down a dusty, nameless Dahab street on a sunny desert day, on my way to visit a toothless, old Bedouin lady. She speaks to me in an old dialect through her scarf and I barely understand a word, but I am intrigued by […]
Why we need to be kept in the dark…
Last week I learned why we really shouldn’t be afraid of the dark…and why we need to be kept in the dark… During my long years as an outdoor guide, I spent many a night gazing at the beautiful starry nights with my international clients, quite in awe, and wondering all those things that you […]
When I was a travelling unicorn in Africa in the 80s
My most favorite decade of travel was the 80s – ahhh the good old days. No internet, no plastic problems, no over-tourism, no mobile phones, no selfie sticks, no extinction problems and best of all, nobody knew where you were. We just drifted around, using the trusted travelers grapevine as our Stone Age Tripadvisor, only […]
A long visit to Limboland
Limboland. It’s not a place I have spent much time in before. Who would have thought, that whilst on a 4 week holiday in my country of birth, New Zealand, visiting friends and family, that I would have gotten stranded here in Limboland, with my life as I knew it turned upside down? Mid March […]
Bedouin women making history
Um Yasser, a middle-aged Bedouin woman of the Hamada tribe in South Sinai, was born in a rock house, but spent much of her childhood living in a cave dwelling in the desert, where she and her mother tended their herd of goats. The Bedouins are an old, conservative ethnic group, with laws that govern […]
Valuable lessons about giving charity
Recently I posted a picture on Facebook of an old Egyptian man sitting in his chair on a chilly winters day outside a pharmacy in the little Red Sea town of Dahab. Spread in front of him was a blanket, where he was trying to sell odd things – shoes, some clothes – to eke […]
Hiking 200km through the desert: the Sinai Trail – part 1 – Anticipation
You know that feeling of needing a soul-stirring adventure? A little challenge to get your pulse up and give you that “alive feeling” again? That was me, stuck in my office a few months back. Bored and flicking through Facebook I found something that rang my bell: the opportunity to hike 200km through the Sinai […]
It’s Christmas: still no room at the inn
It’s quite hard, I find, to enjoy a cup of tea at someone’s house when you can hear gunshots being fired outside. It was late in the afternoon, and I was at Hashem el-Azzeh’s house in Hebron, Palestine. My friend, Sophie, and I had just spent an interesting and moving day walking around the settler-occupied neighbourhood […]
My top 10 fiction and non-fiction books to read on Vietnam
A list of interesting, insightful and above all true-life or true-to-life books on Vietnam. If you are going to Vietnam, these books will make your journey more meaningful. If you haven’t been yet, or don’t even plan to go, they will still enrich your knowledge about a beautiful part of the world with tragic recent history.
My top 10 most insightful books to read on Cambodia
Recommended Reading: Cambodia Cambodia has to be one of the most moving places I have ever been to. Their tragic recent past still haunts the population today in the form of landmine victims, psychological trauma, lost family members and mistrust. However they struggle on with life – because after all, it could not be worse […]
Adventures of Venus 