Our Team

Editor

With family scattered all over the place, travelling is in my blood. I grew up in Bordeaux, then southeast France, and when I wasn’t visiting cousins in Germany or on bridesmaid duty at an aunt’s wedding in Florida, most of my childhood weekends were spent at my grandparents’, in a tiny village in one of my favourite places: Provence.

In my quest for adventure, I’ve since watched the sun rise over two oceans after trekking up a volcano in Panama, thrown myself off a mountain on a zip wire at 120kph in Italy, and travelled the length of Cuba by car, horse and train, aboard the famously slow ‘Tren Frances’.

When I'm not planning my next trip, I love eating my way around London, listening to Cuban music or watching a film with a nice glass of red. A Bordeaux, naturally.

Deputy Editor

We all remember our first trip abroad, don’t we? For me it was a caravan holiday in Wales. It rained. There was lots of mud. Okay, so I wasn’t what you’d call a trailblazing toddler, but in the years since, I have been making up for it.

I delivered Zimmer frames to fund a trip around Europe, worked as a construction lackey to get me to Australia. In a bid to finance other trips I toyed with escorting, considering selling bodily fluids. Mercifully, travel journalism saved me from such ignominy and I have been lucky enough to report from every continent bar Antarctica.

I fear flying, so I go overland where possible. You see more that way. My crowning glory was a rail trip from London to Xi’an, where I watched the gradual change in people and landscapes from the comfort of my carriage. When I’m not on the road or living vicariously through our contributors, I pass the time with music, books and Scotch.

Commissioning Editor

Taken out of school at 14 to learn on the road, my travel life never came pre-packaged with pillow mints and poolside Prosecco. But who needs those when you’re hitching trips in fishing boats to Colombian beaches or getting caught up in the colours of India’s Holi Festival? Granted, I probably wouldn’t have had to inject myself with the rabies jab in Siem Reap, but I would have never got to meet that foam-mouthed flea bag in the first place.

Seven years as a writer have taken me from the snowy slopes of Austria, for ski lessons with Chase & Status, to the dust of Dubai for De La Soul, while my self-funded sojourns have led me down the Devil’s Throat, through the rainforests of Borneo and to a guilt-ridden, ringside roast at a Rockhampton rodeo.

Away from adventure, I’m more crosswords and coffee, with Curtis Mayfield through the speakers and the football on the TV.

Commissioning Editor

The quintessential Generation Y backpacker, my travel experience started in a first-year university dorm room with a battered copy of Alex Garland’s The Beach. By the time the final page was turned, the flights to Bangkok were booked. After three weeks of wandering from Chiang Mai to Trang, I returned home, exhilarated but a little underwhelmed. I had the bug.

Since then, I’ve been fortunate enough to visit a wide variety of destinations, from Vietnam, Malaysia and India, to memorable rendezvous with the European cities of Bruges and the ‘moveable feast’ that is old Paris.

My favourite travel experiences are widely varied, from driving mopeds up mountains in northern Thailand, to watching storms roll in over the Perhentian Islands in Malaysia, to spending an afternoon relaxing with a fire crew in Penang who had an unsettlingly large collection of venomous snakes. Outside of travel, I enjoy rugby, gnocchi and Nintendo video games I should have grown out of 10 years ago.