The Secret Map
Travel Essays by Simon Slater
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“The first I heard of the beach was in Bangkok, on the Ko Sanh Road.”― Alex Garland, The Beach ”What’s your passion?” an inquisitive new roommate asked as I was rummaging through the jumbled mess of my backpack. It was January 2015, and we’d both recently arrived at beach guesthouse ‘Done Right’, on the outskirts of Cambodian…
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After over a decade of Buena Vista Social Club catapulting me into their fiery, sensual and rum-soaked world from the CD age through to Spotify, the opportunity arose to finally visit the promised land. The album, as much a classic as Cuba’s vintage cars, had been both the initial seed and continued influence for me…
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A stream of motorbikes broke free of the constraints of the road and spilled onto the pavement en masse. The red light seemed to have opened a new flow of traffic as opposed to a cessation of movement. I asked my taxi driver what was happening. He shrugged, “It’s just Monday morning.” That was Ho…
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The following images come from a trip to Korea from my current home of Japan. It represents a nostalgic retread to a familiar city, my previous home – Seoul. I met the young ladies who comprise the heart of the collection at a tourist site and asked if they’d like to walk a path less…
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I met Jewel, a spirited American from the state of Missouri, upon arrival at a cigar plantation in rural Vinales, a Cuban national park two hours from Havana. Although coming to Cuba with solo travel intentions, we gravitated towards a shared sense of humour and easy-going nature. We took horse rides, storm-soaked journeys on piece-of-shit…
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One good reason to travel far and wide is to distance yourself from whatever routine or culture you’ve alligned to and experience life anew. A trip to Cuba will undoubtedly provide this. During a stay in the instantly charming town of Trinidad – a crumbling, kaleidoscopic old-world town straight out of a Western (cowboys and…
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I met Saki and Aki, two students from Japan’s Kyoto University, a few days into a two-week trip to Cuba. We were buying ice-cold coconuts to sip in Old Havana during the midday Carribean scorch of late August and after a brief exchange, decided we’d spend the day together. Akiko’s heritage is half German, and…
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Toward the end of what seemed like a six-month winter here in the UK came to a close, my friend Oli floated the idea of a weekend to Venice, Italy. Before you could say “ciao bella” we’d booked a brief but much-needed respite from the winter blues. The goal was simple: to wander around Venice and…
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On a recent trip to the Big Smoke to see an old flame, I took my camera and stayed a few days. Using the sleepy, leafy, and extremely posh area of Kensington as a launchpad to wander about central London, the excursion culminated alongside the red carpet of the UK premiere of ‘Three Billboards outside…
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I met Lononder Teni Backare, aka Teni the Abstract, in Seoul, South Korea, where we both earned our bread and visa status as English teachers. We’d connected through social media and met up in the grungy yet rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood of Hongdae. Her passion outside of the classroom was spending her weekends on the streets of Daegu, documenting…
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When my Italian friend Debora returned to Bristol for a few days, she suggested a day trip to a historic pier on the outskirts of Bristol. I didn’t need much convincing to escape the construction drills and sirens of the city centre but was pleasantly surprised how close an oceanic escape was – just a mere…
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Welcome to the Jurassic Coast of Dorset, England.
The Secret Map 