Dianne Sharma-Winter writes: I came across this term Conscious Travel on the internet the other day as I was fishing in the great sea of communication that flows across continents and consciousness. With the corporate office where I came to share my talents with a company who promotes themselves as one which offers cultural insights as it’s unique selling point in the background, I skim read the blog and wondered at the vagaries of life.
My recent experience of this kind of Five Star “Stick Your Telescopic Lens in the Face of a Villager”, who has been paid to entertain you with the charming aspect of their desperately simple lifestyles” approach to tourism was perhaps the best example of Unconscious Tourism, a kind of tourism that smacked of voyeurism is something that I despise. Read more
Dianne Sharma-Winter reflects on a NZ icon. Before gourmet food stores, restaurants and magazines (and we have some great ones), there was the honesty box by the side of the road – and its still there! Read more
Dianne Sharma-Winter writes about her stay in Broome, Western Australia
I haven’t really had much of an exploration of town and around Broome since I arrived here. I have seen the iconic sunsets and the camel trains along Cable Beach, I have witnessed the high speed jaw snapping tail whipping woman eating crocodiles from a safe distance and generally pondered the seemingly infinity of red earth space between here and anywhere else.
Last year in India, I met a woman who worked and lived and loved the Kimberleys. “Broome is my shopping town,” she said when I remarked that a family member had moved there. “It’s only three hundred kilometers down the road.”
Only. Three hundred kilometers of red earth with nothing in between here and there. No petrol stops, no chai stalls, no clusters of villages. Just that wide brown land, an artists palette of gorgeous blues and reds and pink and orange with the odd kangaroo leaping across the road.
I have to admit that it unsettles me. That kind of land could just swallow you up! Read more
Dianne Sharma-Winter writes:
One of the many names for the river Ganga (or Ganges) translates to “Roaming around delighting in Apple Tree Island”
Anyone who has plotted the course of this river knows that this is exactly what the Ganga likes to do. Her riverbanks have changed many miles over the course of time and then there is the monsoon where she breaks her banks exuberantly.
Slow travel is a bit like that. I have had the luck to roam around delighting in India like a river, slow and languid at times and rushing with purpose and intent at others. Read more
