Louise Southerden is an award-winning travel writer with a passion for natural places, low-impact travel and sustainable living. She has travelled the globe as a professional writer for more than 20 years and won numerous awards, including the Australian Society of Travel Writers’ prestigious Travel Writer of the Year award – four times, most recently in 2013. Louise is a regular contributor to Fairfax Traveller in The Sydney Morning Herald and the author of Surf's Up: The Girl's Guide to Surfing (2008, also available as an ebook) and Japan: A Working Holiday Guide (2001). Her most recent book is Adventures on Earth (2015), an interactive ebook of her best-ever adventure travel stories and images, available on iTunes. Originally from Sydney, Louise now lives in northern NSW, Australia, in between travels. Find out more at No Impact Girl, including Louise's ode to travel: Dear world, I miss you: 13 things I love about travelling.
Tuvalu makes it easy for you in terms of deciding how long to stay. Seeing Tuvalu in 5 days works with the flight schedule and gives you time to explore Funafuti, Tuvalu’s main atoll, beyond its main island, Fongafale. And because there’s not a lot to see and do, you’ll have a chance to relax into Pacific Island time too....
Spend a few days on Lord Howe Island and you’ll start to feel as if all’s right with the world. The air is clean, the weather is perfect, you’re immersed in natural beauty every day, the people are friendly and, perhaps best of all, without digital distractions there’s plenty of time to, say, gaze at the sea, take a hike,...
If you love being in the sea, you’ll love Lord Howe. Not only is this World Heritage-listed island surrounded by the warm, clear waters of Lord Howe Island Marine Park, home to the world’s most southerly coral reef and an abundance of marine life, it’s an adventure playground for ocean-lovers. You’ll need a week to make the most of the aquatic offerings for...
Welcome to Byron (no one calls it “Byron Bay”, it’s an Aussie thing) in NSW. And chances are you will feel welcome as soon as you get here. It’s that kind of place. It’s a good idea to stay right in town, so you can walk or ride a bike everywhere you need to go. There are accommodation options to...
To say Tuvalu is off the beaten tourist track is an understatement. Your friends will probably have to Google “Tuvalu travel” when you tell them you’re going. If they (or you) have heard of it at all, it’s probably because its main claim to fame is that, like other low-lying island nations (come on down, Kiribati and the Maldives), it’s...
Lord Howe is the kind of place that makes you believe in love at first sight. Flying in over the blue Pacific from Sydney or Brisbane (flight time: about two hours), there it suddenly is, in all its natural glory. The twin peaks of Mt Lidgbird and Mt Gower, real mountains that dominate the island’s southern skyline. Isolated northern beaches...
Unearthed by surfers as a holiday destination in the 1960s, Byron Bay has always marched to the beat of its own drum. The epicentre of the Northern Rivers region in northern NSW, 800km north of Sydney and 200km south of Brisbane, it’s sunshine and dolphins, beaches and bare feet, hippies in campervans and buskers on Jonson Street. Byron Bay beaches,...
I’ve spent so much time travelling solo over the years that I now love the freedom of it, and feel at home wandering alone, dining alone, making friends in new places. I also love being able to dissolve into a destination, cast off from my own cultural background and forget where I come from and what I think (as much as possible). I want to be surprised, off balance, out of my element – that to me is the joy of travel.
If I could swim everywhere, I would. Sea kayaking is the next best thing; if I can’t be “in” water, I love to be “on” it. I’ve also got a soft spot for walking, because it slows life down, letting you experience more of the place you’re in and, like other forms of low-impact travel, simplifies your daily existence when you’re on the road. No passports or train tickets, just boots and a backpack, and all the time in the world.
The short answer: no. In more words: I’ve been on trips where I’ve thought, “What ON EARTH am I going to write about this?” but surprisingly few in my 20+ years as a professional travel writer, and even in those cases, I always found something interesting to write about. Besides, what is “bad” to me, might be someone else’s “good”. And whether I like a place or not is almost irrelevant. My job is to take readers there in a way that shows who might love it, while always telling it like it is.
This is a tough one. So many trips, so many life lessons… The most important? Perhaps that life is short, like a trip you don’t want to end. In this way, travel wakes us up to the world, how incredible it is, and reminds us not to take any of it for granted.