Tuesday 22 October 2019

Travel Writer of the Year - again!

For the past three days I've been jumping up and down inside like Olive in Little Miss Sunshine, because on Saturday night I won the Australian Society of Travel Writers' most prestigious award: Travel Writer of the Year.

Aloft in Turkey - instead
 of attending awards night 
It's a big honour and feels so good to be recognised by my peers. Freelance travel writing can be a lonely art sometimes - most of the time we travel solo and there's all that solitary writing time - but moments like this remind me that I'm part of a wonderful community of writers and travel media people which has been my surrogate family for more than 20 years.

The awards are open only to members of the ASTW, i.e. only to professional travel writers, so there's some stiff competition. The other two finalists for this award were actually two of my friends; one of them, Catherine Marshall, won the award last year AND the year before.

I've won this award four times before myself, but the last time was in 2013 so I was pleasantly surprised just to be a finalist this year. I certainly didn't expect to win. I still can't really believe it.

It's judged on a portfolio of each writer's three best published stories for the year, so I thought I'd share the links to mine here, all published in Traveller, in The Sydney Morning Herald:

Tamang kids, Nepal
High hopes in the Himalayas: my Nepal cover story about a new 15-day trek run by Intrepid Travel to help people in the Langtang Valley recover from the devastating 2015 earthquakes.

The call of the high: an essay about why we climb mountains, seek out rooftop bars and choose window seats when we travel.

Kyushu's sacred mountain hike: a story about a 10-day walk I did late last year on the remote Kunisaki Peninsula in Kyushu with Walk Japan.

As fate - and an assignment from Traveller - would have it, I was in Turkey until yesterday and couldn't attend the ASTW awards night in Cairns last weekend. So the ASTW Committee asked me to send my acceptance speech by video. Here's the result (I'm better in print!), shot in a little antique shop and cafe in Istanbul where I'd stopped for a tiny cup of Turkish coffee:


Big thanks again to the ASTW and the judges and award sponsor Visit USA, and to everyone who sent lovely messages via Facebook, which made my brief layover in Singapore's Changi airport the best ever. And now that I'm home I can jump up and down on the outside too.

Wednesday 9 October 2019

Tiny house review: Unyoked's Micah "hideout"

Tiny houses are the future. There, I said it. And not just for living in. Ever since tiny houses started colonising travel a few years ago, tiny low-impact weekenders have been sprouting up everywhere - and by "everywhere" I mean places so off-grid all your phone is good for is as a paperweight while trying to read a book outdoors.

Bed by Unyoked (and pic)
This post is about one of the "tiny house stay" pioneers - Micah, by Unyoked - and it's the final episode in my Goldilocks series reviewing four "tiny house stays" I experienced earlier this year.

(If you missed the others, they were: Edmond, just south of Sydney, Tallarook Tiny Home on the NSW south coast and Fred's Tiny House in Castlemaine, Victoria. And for more on the whole "tiny house stay" thing, see my tiny house travel story in Traveller.)

Unyoked origins
Tiny house stays officially arrived in Australia when twin brothers Cam and Chris Grant quit their corporate jobs in Sydney and set up Unyoked in 2016.

Cam & Chris in Unyoked country
Inspired by the sense of freedom and adventure they felt as kids when camping and hiking, they built the first architect-designed tiny houses for rent and put them on privately owned wilderness blocks a couple of hours from Sydney and Melbourne. But these weren't just escape hatches from modern life.

"It's not just about renting tiny houses," says Cam. "We want people, through our experience, to realise that sitting at a desk for eight to 10 hours a day, answering emails in bed and feeling guilty for taking that one trip at the end of the year isn't the way we have to live.

"I think collectively we're starting to realise that and more and more of us are looking to get back to simpler times, to reconnect with nature and get off-grid once in a while."

Country Victoria roads...
Meet Micah
Just getting to Micah, one of Unyoked's six tiny houses, felt like a small adventure, despite it being only an hour from Melbourne. Mr No Impact Girl and I drove along dirt roads under Simpsons-blue skies dotted with fluffy clouds, through five farm gates, past sheep and windmills.

Parking inside the last gate, we loaded our bags and an esky into a little black wagon, and trundled down the hill to where Micah sat - in a paddock ringed by gnarled old eucalypts beside the bone-dry Campaspe River. A few lonesome crows provided the outback soundtrack.

There she is! (Because like ships,
tinys are always girls)
One of the best things about the Unyoked experience is that there's no one to meet you when you arrive.

You probably won't see another human being during your stay, in fact (except the one you brought with you) or anything man-made.

This is why Unyoked calls its tiny houses "cabins" or "hideouts". As Cam Grant explains: "What we're trying to do is emulate the experience of hiking through a forest and finding your own cabin in the woods."

Micah's minimialist facade
Bed + moon
First impressions: Micah is the epitome of simple, basically an off-grid wooden box, on wheels cleverly concealed by stacked campfire-wood. It also has a flat roof instead of the storybook gable roof seen on most tiny houses.

Most different of all, there's no loft bed. Instead the queen bed is at waist-height, a signature Unyoked feature. Much as I love the cubbyhouse feeling of climbing a ladder to bed, I also loved this bed-couch-daybed. Plus it was flanked by two enormous picture windows that brought the outdoors in.

Happiness is a sunny bed
So you can curl up with a cup of tea or your favourite person, or both, and watch the wind dancing in the trees, the sheep grazing, those crows flying by.

In other words, you can be inside and still keep abreast of what's going on in the real world, i.e. outside.

Even after dark. That night, after an early dinner, we lounged in bed and watched the best show in town: the full moon rising from behind the nearest hill. The next morning we saw the sequel, also from bed: a spectacular sunrise.

(Since our stay, Unyoked has made their beds even more comfy with mattresses by Koala, which donates part of its profits to koala conservation, and In Bed natural bed linen.)

A cabin of wood + light
A Scandi-Japanese cabin
Beyond the bed, Micah's plywood interior gives it a cosy, cabin-y feeling, a nod to Unyoked's Scandi-Japan design ethos. There's plenty of natural light - from the sliding door, those two picture windows and another window over the sink.

I loved the minimalist kitchen with its camping-esque gas cooktop and white enamel plates, bowls and cups.

Wine supplied (for a price)
Micah had possibly the best reading matter of all the tinys I stayed in: a stack of Penguin paperbacks including Call of the Wild and Picnic at Hanging Rock (because Hanging Rock is just down the road), two cabin-themed photo books and a "Field Guide" full of need-to-know guest info.

Other thoughtful touches included: hot water bottles for cold nights, a couple of yoga mats, loose leaf tea and coffee beans - plus a grinder, a plunger and an aeropress coffee maker. And there were "provisions" (with price tags) such as wine and pancake kits.

The only bit I wasn't crazy about was Micah's bathroom. Everything necessary was there - composting toilet, hot shower, handbasin. It just looked like an afterthought, a sort of in-house outhouse.

Barefoot on prickly grass
The verdict
Micah's location and non-loft bed are its winning features and I love that Cam and Chris are thinking outside the hotel room box, curating experiences with a sense of fun and creativity.

Most importantly, they really deliver on the "unyoked" promise: helping you step away from the striving-working-busy vehicle and surrender to a slower way of being in the world, if only for a night or two.

*

Micah's sunset view
How to do it: Unyoked's six tiny houses - three near Sydney and three near Melbourne - are about to get 15 new siblings. Within the next 12 months there'll be three more each outside Sydney and Melbourne, the rest near Brisbane and Canberra, in northern NSW and in Tasmania. See unyoked.co

While you're there: Kyneton is cute as a button that's fallen off your favourite shirt. Only an hour's drive northwest of Melbourne, and situated in the beautiful Macedon Ranges, it's country and creative in equal measure. Loved The Town Roaster, a retro-style cafe with crazy-good coffee and sugar-free treats and The Hamster, for vegetarian fare. At Mineral Springs Park you can fill your bottles with mineral water, for free. Hanging Rock (of Peter Weir's "Picnic at" fame) is 10 minutes away. And on hot summer days you can cool off with a swim at two nearby waterfalls: Trentham and Turpin's.

Gratitude: Thanks to Unyoked for hosting us for a night at Micah. I can recommend their free weekly "Dispatches" too, creative emails bearing tiny-related news items like "why silence is good for your brain".

Tuesday 1 October 2019

2040: The most inspiring book you will read this year (or ever)

This time last week, before the delegates at the UN Climate Action Summit in New York sat down to talk about solutions to the climate crisis, before they even heard Greta Thunberg's powerful "How dare you" speech, they watched a few clips from an Australian movie.

Seen the doco?
Now read the book
2040, a documentary released earlier this year and directed by Australian filmmaker Damon Gameau, was projected onto the walls of the stately UN General Assembly Hall and introduced by lead Paris Agreement negotiator Christiana Figueres. (It was screened in full at the UN Youth Climate Summit later in the week.)

If you haven't seen it, this eco-doco is a fascinating fast-forward glimpse at a best-case-scenario future Earth.

Inspired by the birth of his daughter Velvet, Damon (best known for That Sugar Film) spent three years visiting 14 countries and interviewing hundreds of scientists and other experts about innovative ideas and technologies that currently exist (no pie-in-sky stuff allowed) to present an intelligent guess about how life on Earth could be 20 years from now.

Damon and Intrepid marketing
guru Gillian Monaghan
He offset all his travel emissions, by the way, with carbon credits and by planting a small forest in northern NSW near where he lives with Velvet and his partner Zoe. And because one of 2040's partners was Intrepid Travel, a carbon-neutral BCorp I often work with, I was invited to help plant some of those trees - which will hopefully sequester 90 tonnes of CO2 by 2040.

Here's something Damon said that chilly winter's morning when we were all taking a break, which neatly sums up the film's ethos:

Velvet, Zoe + Damon
"If you go beyond that dominant discourse in the media, there's hope everywhere. It's everywhere. The spotlight is on this tiny little part of the stage, but if you look in the shadows and the wings, there's magic happening. So we need to get that spotlight THERE and get people to be inspired by what is actually going on."

Now 2040 is a book too, a beautiful 300-page "Handbook for the Regeneration" and it's hands-down one of the most inspiring reads I've had in a long time.

I borrowed it from my local library and was so tempted to dog-ear pages and write in the margins and underline poignant quotes and interesting stats and handy tips that I'm thinking of buying a copy to keep and keep referring back to.

What to eat for soil health
The book opens with a tear-out (I resisted the temptation) Household Checklist, 13 simple things we can all do to reduce our impact right now, such as: grow your own food (growing a kilo of veggies sequesters 2kg of emissions) and change your search engine to Ecosia (done! Ecosia uses ad revenue to plant trees for online searches).

After a foreword by Paul Hawken, founder of Project Drawdown2040 is divided into sections about Energy, Transport, Drawdown & (carbon) Sequestration and Consumption.

Each section ends with "More reasons for hope" about sustainable things happening all over the world, and suggested things we can do now to help in our homes, offices and communities.

There's info on carbon-sequestering foods, environmentally friendly fabrics (hemp and linen are top of the clothes heap), "environmental dashboards" being installed in communities to give live feedback on energy consumption, and how to envision the Earth as a doughnut (to understand how climate solutions benefit everybody).

Some of the best quotes come from Paul Hawken, particularly in relation to Project Drawdown, which has been developing a map of the top 100 solutions to reverse global warming - such as empowering girls and women, reforestation, reducing food waste, regenerative agriculture, solar farms and plant-rich diets.

A page of youthful wisdom
It's all so easy to read and gorgeously put together with plenty of colour images and illustrations and quotes from some of the 80 children Damon interviewed in various cities around the world, all aged between six and 11.

There are interesting stories about everything from the origins of Monopoly to Earth Overshoot Day in various countries (Australia uses its share of the world's resources by March 31 every year, apparently), as well as insights into how things went awry in the first place.

My favourite bits were about the rise of regenerative agriculture (eight of the top 20 solutions to the reverse global warming are food-related, apparently) and the "seaweed solution" - which Damon calls "the simplest, cleanest, least political and most inspiring" he'd seen on his whole 2040 journey.

Here's his educated rave about it:

"Seaqueen" is the future
"If I told you that this one solution could potentially draw down staggering amounts of carbon, restore marine ecosystems, provide enough seafood (brimming with healthy omega-3 fatty acids) for 10 billion people... cool the waters over coral reefs to help prevent bleaching, plus provide a material to make plastics and clothing, feed cattle to dramatically reduce methane emissions and provide a biofuel for energy, you'd probably say, 'This sounds like some Silicon Valley, Elon Musk-funded, Richard Branson award-winning miracle.'

"And I'd say: 'Nah, it's just seaweed.'" (Or "seaqueen" as he now refers to it.)

Lentil stew, mmm
The book ends with 50 delicious recipes, and cooking tips, based around ingredients that sequester carbon and replenish the soil - how many cookbooks do that?

Like I said, inspiring. 2040 is a book everyone should read, really. Pass it on. Tell your friends about it, buy a copy and share it around, ask your local library to order a few copies so more people can read it.

It's all about the collective consciousness: the more of us thinking this way, the sooner this Earthship of ours will set a new course for a brighter, healthier future for us all.

*

Big thanks to Intrepid Travel for the movie ticket for 2040; Intrepid also gave free tickets to school students all over Australia on 2040's opening weekend earlier this year. 2040 is now available for community and school screenings and the What's Your 2040? website has clips from the film as well as plenty of sustainable living tips.