Everyone knows the real international language is love. So it’s hardly surprising that so many of us are willing to relocate to far-flung places in the name of romance. I did it once. It ended in tears after two years, and actually messed me up good and proper, but I wouldn’t swap my experience for anything.
Moving to the other side of the planet where you don’t know a soul except your beloved puts you in a scary position. Your support circle is gone. You’re dependent on your partner for your social life, emotional succour, everything.
It’s a start from scratch.
But my experience is mild! At least I could speak the language and got a job relatively quickly - and it still took me about a year to feel settled. It must be a whole lot more daunting when you don’t speak the language and you’re not legally allowed to work, or where there’s a significant culture-shock factor. Imagine what it must have been like for disco dolly Jemima Goldsmith when she married Imran Khan and moved to Pakistan!
To cut a long story short, my relationship eventually imploded and I returned to Australia. But I don’t regret those two years in Manchester one bit. I made some amazing friends, saw a lot of England, got my first publishing job - and did a lot of character-building.
Have you ever relocated for love? Did it last, or did you live to regret it? Any advice for globetrotting romantics?

-Susi Watusi

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Who could have said in say, August, that we’d be leaning against a bar discussing Iceland? (Of course, you may well have been - given its white-nights party scene, its noble literary history and its endearing penchant for believing in elves, not to mention the genius of Sigur Ros and Mum.) The global financial sky-fall has brought the little island to a sad state of affairs, and on a recent night a friend told me that she’d like to head over there with a case or two of rollmops and some hard currency and spread some cheer.

The joke got me thinking. After the bombings in Bali, many travellers on the hunt for a tropical paradise chose to go there as a way of helping to rebuild its devastated tourist industry. In the wake of the tsunami, various destinations were visited not only by relief workers, but (as they recovered) by sympathetic tourists looking to put their dollar where it would help the most.

Pity travel. Is it a patronising, Lady Bountiful, pampered-first-worlders’ indulgence, or genuinely compassionate?

Cherry Washington

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On my first backpacking trip through Europe at the age of 20, I met a girl in Ios who travelled with a bright purple carry-along suitcase. She looked ridiculous, but I was secretly envious of the ease with which she travelled. Ever since I’ve wondered, is backpacking an activity that actually requires a backpack?

Of course, if you’re trekking to Everest Base Camp, it’s an essential item. But for an island-hopping holiday through the Cyclades or a journey from one urban environment to another? It could be more trouble than it’s worth. (If you think you’ve experienced Parisian wrath, try squeezing into a heaving metro carriage with a pack strapped to your back.)

Despite these musings, I still dutifully pull out my backpack every time I travel. Why? I’m not quite sure. It’s almost automatic: I’m going backpacking, I’ll take my backpack. Next time though, I might take a moment to think about where I’m going and how much actual on-the-road travelling I’ll be doing before I start packing. If I do, I might find the convenience of a suitcase on wheels wins out.

What about you?

- Gab Nancarrow

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Returning recently from a jaunt in Europe I was faced with a 12-hour stopover in Bangkok. Yes, it sounds like crap, and it was.

Hopping off the KLM tumbrel cart I had been strapped to for 13 hours, I slid through customs like a ghost - my head felt like someone had lined it with newspaper and replaced my brain with a ferret.

I had grand plans of hanging out at the airport. I figured that Suvarnabhumi in all its shiny newness must have something to entertain a weary wanderer for half a day. How wrong I was. My dreams of showers and cinemas, libraries and lounges were as false as the eyelashes of the local kathoey. My mother lives in rural New South Wales and Moruya airport has more to offer than Bangkok’s; at least you can feed the bloody kookaburra. There was nothing to do but drag my feet around, politely declining offers of luxury cabs. The place was a boring temple to international dullness.

My aimlessness soon turned to the feverish rage of the overtired; the clock seemed frozen, the Bangkok Post was devoid of the usual lurid Thai crime stories, and the security guards were getting irritating. Broken, I realised that my only hope was to get the hell away. First I wolfed down a bowl of spicy soup and a fresh coconut, which improved my outlook no end, then I headed to the taxis.

A smiling man from Issan was my saviour, and some 45 minutes later I was loafing about the marble floors of the MBK, one of the world’s greatest small-business hives. Like a happy drone, I wandered about for hours, while around me the shopkeepers slurped soup. When the ferret in my head started to squeak I knew it was time to head back to the airport and check-in. Early.

‘12-hour stopover’ joins ‘we need to run more tests’ and ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ as a phrase I never want to hear again.

- Larry O’Leary

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When you’re wedged in economy and the person in front of you has jacked their seat back so far you can smell their shampoo, all you can think is ‘let me get reborn as a millionaire with a private jet and get me the hell outta here’. Those luxury-scented daydreams might not be as out of reach as you think - thanks to Geneva-based LunaJets. Many swanky private jets are stone-cold empty on the return leg after depositing their cashed-up clients at their chosen point. LunaJets works with private jet operators throughout Europe, the Middle East, Russia and the USA to maintain a database of flights that you can get on for a fraction of the real cost. You can book a single seat or you can book a whole cabin - now there’s travel worth frocking up for.

Dee Dee Luxe

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My number one piece of advice to any traveller relates not to what they should take on a trip, but to what they should leave at home - basically as much as possible.

It’s a hard one to get your head around, though. Your backpack is open on your bed the night before you embark, your possessions gathered around you. This is your stuff. You’ll want to have it while you’re away. You need it, right?

Carrying your gear around from one place to another is perhaps the best way to realise how annoying stuff can be. It weighs you down, and lets face it, those 90L backpacks you see abusing the spines of travellers and knocking into locals give us all a bad name.

Aside from the freedom of movement you’ll gain by shedding the weight of your belongings, you may find a different kind of freedom. A freedom from stuff, and a realisation that two T-shirts and pair of jeans can easily be the sum total of a traveller’s entire wardrobe.

- Jenni Kauppi

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They’re everywhere - in books and magazines, on postcards and tea towels, coffee mugs, fridge magnets and t-shirts - artistic masterpieces so familiar and endlessly reproduced they could be wallpaper for our collective consciousness. Warhol’s soup cans, Monet’s waterlilies, Van Gogh’s swirling skies, Munch’s The Scream, Picasso’s Weeping Woman… our world would look a whole lot different without them.

But nothing can compare to seeing these artworks in the flesh, exhibited in the great galleries of the world. To be taken by surprise by a painting’s presence - overwhelmed by its power - can be an emotional experience that’s hard to put into words.

On a recent visit to Spain, I had the opportunity to see Picasso’s masterpiece Guernica in its current (contested) home, the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid. Wandering this stunning gallery, I wondered what it’d be like to see this painting I’d studied and read so much about over the years… I should’ve known.

I’m always amazed when I see Picasso’s paintings in the flesh – the energy and life force they emit is intense. Guernica, painted as a protest against the Franco-sanctioned bombing of the Basque town Gernika by Hitler’s troops in 1937, is no exception. This huge canvas explodes with the artist’s fury; the effect on the viewer is devastating. Its black-and-white colour scheme is grimly powerful, and its myriad details – so much starker when hanging on a wall in front of you – are chilling. Seeing Guernica up so close in all its enormity is like being punched in the face.

Not far away, at the Museo del Prado, it was Velázquez’s luminous, painstaking portraits of 17th-century Spanish aristocracy and their servants that blew me away. There was something unexpectedly poignant about all these posturing royals, long gone and forgotten; while the artist’s empathy for the clowns, freaks and lackeys common to the Spanish courts of the day could not be missed. Las Meninas brought tears to my eyes.

Yet reproduced on the printed page, Velázquez’s paintings are more striking for their historic interest and fine composition than for their overwhelming emotional impact.

What work of art has most affected you on your travels? Where did you see it?

- Suzy Watusi

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What’s the age limit for travelling with your parents? I’d say there isn’t one. I’ve been travelling with mine for 26 years. We’ve visited more than 100 places in 24 countries and our experiences have been wide ranging: we’ve shopped in Paris, road tripped through 15 states of the USA and volunteered for one month at a primary school in Cusco with Peru’s Challenge - collectively our most incredible travelling experience. Next of the list: Hong Kong, quickly followed by Brazil.

These trips have firmly planted the travel bug in us all, and my brother, two sisters and I travel as much independently as we do all together. But it’s the family trips I like best.

- Gab Nancarrow

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