Kate Hennessy : Freelance Writer

First published in the Sydney Morning Herald (Traveller weekend section), here, May 2012

This is not how I imagined my Namib Desert tour would begin. Myself, three Germans and an English couple are held captive in our guide’s Land Rover as he flips through a booklet of disturbing aerial photographs of the yellow sand dunes we’re here to see.

The car is stationary, poised to cross the Swakopmund River. It’s not clear when the tour will resume, at least in a locomotive sense. It appears first we must learn some facts about the vast ocean of sand before us that in December 2010 became part of the largest national park in Africa and the eight-largest protected area in the world: The Namib Skeleton Coast National Park.

Yellow Dunes. Translucent palmato gecko. Image: Kate Hennessy

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Kate Hennessy dons her blacks and joins 20,000 Goths in Germany at the world’s most un-colourful festival.

(See photo gallery here)

He stalks by the tram stop in head-to-toe black PVC, thighs squeaking like rodents. Sunlight glints from studs around his neck long enough to skewer a steak and his face scowls out from behind a fragile scaffolding of chains and piercings. Yes, I think. We’ve arrived.

Each year in May or June, the German city of Leipzig hosts the biggest Gothic and dark culture event in the world – the four-day Wave-Gotik-Treffen (WGT). More than 20,000 of the Gothic diaspora heed the call to come and swamp Leipzig in black.

Photo: Kate Hennessy. Leipzig Opera House for Diamanda Galas. Outfit care of the amazing Imaginarium Apparel: http://www.theimaginariumapparel.com/

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Most tourists who visit Peru’s Sacred Valley will whip around its famed capital, Cusco, then beeline it for iconic Incan ruin, Machu Picchu. Both are wondrous sights and tourists looking for photographs and souvenirs will return home satisfied. But for seekers rather than sightseers, the Sacred Valley also offers ayahuasca: a potent, hallucinogenic, shamanic healing medicine.

My experience begins a month before Peru while visiting a friend in California. At a dinner party I mention I’m interested in shamanic healing. A guest says he’s just returned from an ayahuasca retreat in Iquitos in Peru’s Amazon jungle. Humid and buggy, Iquitos is the centre of Peru’s ‘psychedelic tourism’ boom but he warns me Iquitos is intense for first-timers.

“Go to the Sacred Valley. It’s gentler there.”

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Words by Kate Hennessy/Images by James Brunker

[See PDF for published version with James' wonderful photographs. Mine below are just snapshots.]

We’ve radically changed travel plans to come to the Virgen de la Candelaria festival in Puno, Peru, but on arrival I’m felled by altitude sickness. Puno doesn’t look or feel very high but at 3,830 metres above sea level it’s higher than both La Paz, Bolivia (at 3,640 metres) and Machu Picchu (2,430 metres).

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You might be lucky enough to have felt it yourself. A connection with a place that’s both instant and profound. Maybe it’s the light, the culture, or the architecture. Whatever it is, you fit. For fashion designer Frances Carrington, this place was Dehli when she arrived in 1995. Denied her dream to do aid work in Africa, Frances was assigned a place by Australian Volunteers Abroad in India instead.

“I’d visited a friend in South Africa and I really wanted to return to work somewhere in Africa, anywhere! Arriving in Dehli was a real shock. The pollution was extreme and there were so many people. I didn’t know how to respond to the beggars, especially children or mothers with babies. I was wondering what I’d done, signing up to stay here for two years.”

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