A few months ago, I finally returned to Budapest, eight years after my first visit. Budapest very quickly became one of my favourite cities in Europe, and I was curious to see how I would find it a second time around, and whether the magic would capture me just as instantaneously as it did the …
I have to admit, I had no idea what I was signing up for when I decided to volunteer in a hostel on the Algarve on Portugal’s south coast. Anyone who knows me won’t be surprised that I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to work in a hostel called Le Penguin, but on further research, …
Hawaii is world-renowned for being a luxury holiday destination – when I told friends I was going, I had more comments on how jealous they were than I had for any other destination I’d been to. When people asked my mum where I was on my journey, they turned green when she told them I …
We went to Hawaii because it was cheap. This is a sentence that I never thought I’d say, and it made no sense at all to me when I realised it. Nevertheless, it was true. The plan was to fly to Vancouver; having realised we weren’t going to be able to afford our planned American/Canadian …
After months of travelling around hostels and changing beds every few days, we were looking forward to settling down in Brisbane and getting our own apartment. We spent five weeks (four weeks too many) living in a central hostel with a party atmosphere before moving to a laid-back “sharehouse”-type hostel closer to my work. Cut …
