“As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.” - Herman Melville, ‘Moby Dick’
I am a geographer and I love to travel to experience new places, new cultures, new ideas, new environments and new foods. I really enjoy understanding our world more deeply through first-hand experiences. On this page, I have recorded a few of my travel diaries to share with you.
In addition to several overseas field trips that I led for students to such diverse locations as Papua New Guinea, Burma, Cambodia, China and North Korea, I led five study tours for the Geographical Society of New South Wales between 1986 and 2015.
Between 1989 and 2019, I was a regular contributor to the travel and tourism lecture series presented by the Geographical Society of New South Wales, Australia.
I led five study tours for the Geographical Society of New South Wales as follows:
• 1986 - China (via Thailand, Burma and Hong Kong)
• 1989 - Papua New Guinea and Indonesia (Irian Jaya)
• 1991 - USSR (Russia, Estonia and Uzbekistan)
• 1996 - Myanmar (Burma)
• 2015 - North Korea and China
My travel and tourism lectures for the Geographical Society looked at Eastern Europe in 1989, Irian Jaya in 1990, the former Soviet Union in 1992, Bolivia in 1994, Burma in 1996, Mali in 2005, North Korea in 2006, Iceland in 2007, China’s Ancient Tea Horse Route in 2008, Ethiopia in 2009, The Guardians of the Red Sea (Yemen, Eritrea and Djibouti) in 2010, Middle East Hotspots (Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria) in 2011, the Last Threads of the Iron Curtain (Transnistria and both sides of North Korea’s border regions) in 2012, Iran in 2013, Beyond Siberia (Russia’s Wild Far East) in 2014, Tunisia and Algeria (Springs of the Arab Spring) in 2015, the African Sahel (Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso) in 2016, Three Pacific Micronations (Kiribati, Nauru and Palau) in 2017, Turkmenistan (also in 2017), Coastal West Africa (Gambia, Liberia, Ghana, Togo and Benin) in 2018, and Tajikistan in 2019. Lectures were also planned in 2020 and beyond, but these lapsed because of the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
