Otherwise, writer Freda Moon wrote some very kind words about Travelfish in the New York Times, and yes, even today, that makes my day.Īs a traveler and fact/story gatherer, what is your biggest challenge on the road? So I guess I’d say the “break” was seeing that as the way to do it. I’ve mostly written for Travelfish, as I found freelance too frustrating to rely on. What do you consider your first “break” as a writer? Then the currency crisis came along and I moved on to other typical work in Bangkok (a bit of travel freelance for local publications, teaching English, embassy work, and a long stint at a newspaper), and launched Travelfish with Samantha in 2004. Two years later, we published a guidebook to Thailand. (I’ve since learned plenty about guidebooks, and considering the difficulties the writers would have faced putting it together at the time, it was solid.) So a couple of friends and myself tried to do something better, and self-published a Vietnam guidebook in ’95. The Lonely Planet guidebook I was using, to my novice eyes back then, didn’t seem very good. The country had only really “reopened” to independent travel a couple of years earlier, so it was pretty rough and ready travel (i.e. The 1990s were a great time to travel in Southeast Asia. I’ve been here ever since, living in Thailand, Cambodia and Indonesia. It was love at first sight, and I’ve been in the region on and off since, returning for six months every year since ’94 and moving to Southeast Asia in ’97.

In late ’93 I arrived late at night at Don Muang airport on a flight from Kathmandu, and I walked out of the terminal, smelt the air and it seemed everyone had a motorbike.

At the time I knew nothing of the region, India had been my focus, and I picked Bangkok for no reason other than I knew where it was. Later, in 1992, I purchased a RTW ticket ex-Sydney, and as a part of that I had to pick a port in Southeast Asia as a part of the ticket. I think that period is what planted the travel seed in me. I started traveling early, off the back of my father’s work, living in Japan, South Korea and Italy in the late 70s and early 80s. He currently lives in Bali with his partner Samantha, their two kids, and their dog Skye Govinda. He cofounded Travelfish in 2004, and has been writing about the region since 1997. Send your piece Click here for more information.Stuart McDonald is an Australian travel writer based in Indonesia.

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Recently, she has underwent a solo travel challenge in China with both adventures and misadventures – she accidentally took the wrong train for a ride of 10 long hours. Now, Kadek has more than 56,000 followers on Instagram and 500,000 page views of her blog. Ever since she came across a suspicious stranger who educated her about where and what to do in Hong Kong, a passion to travel ignited within her. Kadek Arini started off as naive, clueless 18-year-old who went abroad for the first time with a friend to Hong Kong without an itinerary all that she knew was that there was a Disneyland there. A photo posted by Kadek Arini Gayatri on at 5:44am PST

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