TripScape

I am Muslim, from Bangladesh, and the Vatican is not my faith’s holy site. That is the honest starting point for this guide. I had no particular religious connection to the place. I was visiting because it is one of the most significant sites on earth — because the art inside is among the greatest […]

Melbourne is one of the best cities in the world for food. That is not a controversial take – it is just what the city is. Forty-three countries later, I have eaten in a lot of places. Melbourne still surprised me. What makes it unusual is the range. In a single day you can have […]

I had four days in Melbourne. No rental car, no local knowledge, no group to share the planning with. Just a Myki card, a rough idea of what I wanted to see, and a city that turned out to be far more generous to the car-free visitor than most guides suggest. This is the 4 […]

The first decision most visitors get wrong about Melbourne is not what to do – it is where to sleep. Pick the wrong area and you spend your entire trip on trams trying to get somewhere. Pick the right one and the city opens up immediately – everything is walkable or a short ride away, […]

I had been looking at photographs of the Colosseum since I was a child. In school textbooks, on television, in the film Gladiator — that image of the great oval amphitheatre was so familiar it had almost become abstract. Just a symbol. A logo for Ancient Rome. Then I stood inside it. The goosebumps were […]

Everything has a limit. You can put a boundary around most things in life. But the beauty of Nepal’s remotest corners? That has no limit at all. I had been telling myself for years that I wasn’t ready. Not fit enough. Not brave enough. Not free enough. And then, one day, photos of the Annapurna […]

Most people picture Venice in summer. Sunshine on the Grand Canal. Gondolas packed three deep. Gelato in every other hand. I visited in the second week of November. The fog had settled over the lagoon the way it apparently does every year around that time — thick, low, and completely indifferent to any plans you […]

I had spent two days in Venice walking through fog, photographing Gothic palazzi emerging ghostlike from the mist, and getting genuinely lost in alleys that seemed to lead only to other alleys. Venice in November is extraordinary but it is also relentlessly grey. Then I took a 45-minute vaporetto ride northeast across the lagoon, and […]

Nobody told me to go to the State Library Victoria. It wasn’t in my original Melbourne plan. I walked past it on my way somewhere else, saw the chess set on the forecourt, went in to have a quick look, and stayed for two hours. That seems to be how most people discover it. You […]

I had three to four days in Melbourne, based in the CBD, and no rental car. That combination sends most travel guides into a mild panic – suddenly the Great Ocean Road “isn’t really possible”, Phillip Island is “best by car”, and you’re left staring at a list of laneway coffee shops wondering if that’s […]