1,000 nautical miles on an authentic wooden pinisi ship… read my recaps from the journey along the eastern coast of Indonesia’s Sulawesi south to Flores in my Sulawesi cruise review, Ombak Putih ship review and an informational How to Choose Your Indonesia Cruise blog post.
I attended PURE Life Experiences in Marrakesh for AdventureSmith this past September, representing our company as a buyer at trade show for the high-end experiential travel industry. While the trip was mostly work filled, I had a little time for exploring in the Atlas Mountains with my cousin (who lives in Casablanca) and for roaming in Marrakesh’s Medina and the gorgeous Jardin Majorelle.
Along with meeting with AdventureSmith’s current partner operators, I was tasked with scoping out new small ships and luxury lodges to bring to our clients & met a fun range of folks—my show besties being from Sheldon Chalet and FeelViana Hotel. PURE was also an opportunity to learn from great minds, like Andy Lark of Group Lark who spoke about “cracking the code on experience.”
This past weekend I was a guest camp counselor at Camp BC, a grown-ups-only camp experience at Basecamp Tahoe City, teaching a group about travel writing and journaling—with a focus on how to document a trip while you’re on one.
Our small group met while a light snow dusted the ground outside, chatting about tricks of the trade writing for all platforms, from magazines and books to blogs and Instagram. I live-reported the event on AdventureSmith’s Instagram account. A few highlights:
I flew to Antarctica this past December. Hard to believe, hard to explain, but I tried my best on AdventureSmith’s blog. Read my review of my air cruise: Expert Review: Antarctic Express Fly the Drake.
Some of my good friends recently got married in Baja and post-wedding spontaneously hopped a ride north from Pescadero with another friend. I love the impulsiveness of these adventurers, so I took a portrait I drew of them from the beach volleyball court and Photoshopped it on some of their road-trip photos. These are the results:
I recently traveled to Peru for a work trip with AdventureSmith Explorations and only had time for two small sketches. For photos from the journey, view my Instagram feeds: the personal/llama-filled @lis_k and the professional @adventure_smith, which features a fuller look at my wanderings in the Lares and Salkantay regions, Sacred Valley, Cusco and Machu Picchu. Huayna Picchu is sketched above while I waited in line for the gates to open; below is a view of Humantay Glacier, an acclimatization hike I took on the Salkantay trek. My full expert review is also now published on this trip – read my trip report.
Here’s another look at some of the sketches in my journal from traveling in New Zealand. (view my Australia sketches here)
Franz Josef Glacier: I drew this on the hike out, sitting on a rock, looking back at the glacier. It was a very peaceful moment for me, and super satisfying to be traveling alone, able to hike as fast as I wanted, and stop for as long as I wanted to sketch in the sun.
French Ridge Hut: drew this at twilight sitting outside on the kea perch between the outhouse and the hut. Colored it inside as it got too cold! We were looking at the map in the hut’s kitchen as I colored and at first thought a bit of Mount Avalanche was East Peak. The hut sits at 4,856 feet above sea level, which was an all-fours advanced tramp up 3,508 feet of elevation in just 4.5 miles from the Aspiring Hut in the Matukituki Valley floor, just outside of Wanaka near Rob Roy Glacier. This is one of the most rugged and magical places I’ve ever been.
Gebbies Valley: I drew this sitting in the front paddock of the farm I WWOOFed at on the Banks Peninsula just outside of Christchurch. I don’t love how the recently sown paddock came out; kinda wish I’d left the field white. In person, it was super cool looking with lines of new green sprouts. But this sketch does give a good sense of the happiness and home this land meant to me.
A peek at a few pages from my journal from Australia. I got really into sketching locations during my travels. I used a blank-paged Moleskine notebook, whatever pen I had on me, and my MINISTAFF colored pencil set—I highly recommend this for travel art!
I’m back in New Zealand after 10 days touring the southeast of Australia with a friend from the Bay Area, and WOW. What an adventure! We arrived in Melbourne and set off west right away in a camper van rental on the Great Ocean Road. We then retraced our steps and headed back along the coast east and then north up to Sydney. Here’s a peek at some of the highlights by region:
GREAT OCEAN ROAD: From Melbourne, we drove this coastal route as far west as the famed Twelve Apostles limestone stacks, then turned around and did the route again with different stops. I loved the shrubby, cliffy coastline around Torquay, Jan Juc and Bells Beach and watching surfers there; seeing koalas in the wild in the eucalyptus trees around the Kennett River Holiday Park; meeting a cute little girl who showed us how to pick up the birds at Kennett River (I think they were green rosella parrots); spotting our first kangaroos and wallabies on the dirt road behind Kennett River; and walking the beachfront by the Twelve Apostles towering in the surf just feet in front of us. This stretch of road also gave me my first real taste of driving Bela the van’s manual transmission. I’d only ever driven a few manual cars on very short distances before, and doing so here—and on the opposite side of the road—was a challenge but one I’m so happy to have conquered!
WILSONS PROMONTORY: Southeast of Sydney, this amazing national park is the southernmost point of mainland Australia. Here we hiked Mount Oberon for stunning views of the coastline and dozens of islands; journeyed to watch the sunset on the rocks at Squeaky Beach; trail ran out to Tongue Point; and were awoken by wombats rocking our van as they scratched themselves on our mudflaps throughout the night. I loved their sneaky ways of pretending they were just eating grass when we’d open the door to catch them in the act.
EAST COAST: Up the east coast of Australia we popped into numerous beach towns and parks. Favorites on this stretch were hearing kookaburras laugh and seeing tons of washed up coral and sponges at our Cape Conran camp; relaxing on the colorful slickrock coast at the Pinnacles; seeing a joey in its mother’s pouch at our camp in Tathra; venturing out to eat lunch on the tiny and steep Burrewarra Point at Guerilla Bay; eating boxes upon boxes of McVities Digestives; and relaxing on the bright white-sand Murrays Beach in Booderee National Park and getting hassled by a resident blind wallaby there.
SYDNEY: We dropped off the Bela the van south of Sydney and trained over to Bondi Beach, where we were able to stay with a mutual friend with an AirBnB. I loved Bondi’s coastal track; seeing swimmers in the ocean-fed swimming pool at Icebreakers there; the ease of the city’s train system; ferrying into the city from Rose Bay so that our first glimpses of the city center were from the water; and catching up with a friend in Terrigal and relaxing/exploring the coastline up there—saw tons of windsurfers and kite surfers one windy day!
Bye for now Australia! Think I’ll definitely need to return to explore more…
On my third week, I set off on the more unknown part of my voyage, a big loop around New Zealand’s South Island. From here, I’m just planning as I go so it’s been fun to see where the journey takes me. I started off traveling with a new friend from Christchurch up to Nelson, where we stayed in a super nice hostel (Prince Albert) that gave us free bike and disc golf rentals. We rode over to Stoke and its famous McCashins Brewery and played the front nine of their local course. It was so nice to stretch the legs on a bike! Later that day we stocked up at the store and headed to Marahau, the trailhead town of the Abel Tasman track. I’ve been loving all the roadside produce boxes that people set up at the end of their driveways. We scored on some yummy Nashi pears in Motueka en route.
At Marahau, I continued pioneering New Zealand llama tourism by staying at Old McDonald’s Farm, which had a small her of about 10 llamas. The two males kept in a separate pen were not very happy about their quarantine as they could see the girls in the paddock west of them. It was kinda sad, kinda cute to hear their humming as they hugged the fence line just swooning over the girls. The farm also had some of the prettiest-coated cows I’ve ever seen. They were practically shining. Backpacker accommodation at Old McDonald’s is really great: small little 3-bed huts and outdoor kitchens scattered throughout different sections of the property. This place has a few years on it, but is super well maintained and tidy.
We hiked the Abel Tasman from Marahau to Totaranui over 3 days and 2 nights (staying at Anchorage and Awaroa huts). The huts were extremely nice (sleeping around 32 people in bunks), especially the newer Anchorage Hut, which had great tall bunks and a beautiful kitchen/gathering space with a heated wood stove and motion sensor lighting. The Abel Tasman trail is very graded and mellow, especially on the first day to Anchorage Hut, though there are definitely some steep sections later on.
Our first and last days were easy, logging just over 10 km (6+ miles) each day. Our middle day was the big push, at 20km (12.4 miles). We woke up early to take a low-tide shortcut across the sand or else it would have added another couple miles to the day. Just north of Anchorage Hut on the beach, just as the sun was rising, we scoped out a glowworm cave and it was so magical… they lit up the cave walls like little stars in the night sky.
The Abel Tasman is really a cool trail, and it was fun to plot out the journey as there is the tides to deal with and one mandatory low-tide crossing just past Awaroa Hut; miss it and you have to wait half a day.
It was also fun to meet other travelers here, many Kiwis and mostly Europeans. We met a great gal, Liz from Paris, at the Anchorage Hut and she continued with us for the rest of our tramp, so you’ll spot her in most my photos along with Philip who I traveled up with from Christchurch.
Philip and I left Liz at Totaranui, where she continued north and we took a water taxi back to Marahau. We saw some fur seals at the Tonga Island Marine Reserve, and a funny highlight was how they take the water taxi boats out of the water back at Marahau: they hitch it up to a tractor that then puffs out smoke as it tugs you out of the water and down the road.
From Marahau, I headed down the West Coast but I’ll save that update for week 4 when I catch up with writing.
_____smith 