Several young women bashfully ask for a photograph and my friend is ever-obliging, aqua imp eyes flickering. It’s our first time in the city and we’re savouring it. Bands of young men don’t request a picture they just fire their flash in our direction.

Hazy late afternoon air is drowning in the smell of industry and docks and food and…something. We walk on. My friend’s celebrity ebbs; we talk about long-distance love. Jazz resounds in basement bars and I suspect businesses are born and broken in rooftop restaurants.

Beyond The Bund, where the roofs of the Old Town curl upwards to ward off evil spirits, old men dream in tea houses. Black cables cut the air between buildings in urban alleys. They carry electricity and linen; whites somehow impervious to stain.

Shanghai presses itself urgently — and deeply — into our senses. Neon flares across the cityscape after the briefest twilight but part of me ignores it, preferring to imagine the place steaming and hedonistic and underbellied in the 1920s.

It’s now been a long time since I walked by the Yangtze. But Shanghai still burns in my brain. I walked those streets when everything felt amplified. Life was raw and huge and I devoured it. There’s a strong sense of ‘true self’ tied into my recollection of that city too and it anchors me when I feel I could go AWOL from my own life.

I was reminded of all this when a friend told me recently she liked the ‘second chance’ of Chinese New Year. If 2012 hasn’t begun as you hoped, why not start again on January 23? Where do you want to be (physically or metaphorically) this lunisolar year? Join me in making your Year of the Dragon burn.

Playing in Istanbul's Sultanhamet © Sara Moss

Welcome to another year.
Play, create, explore, learn, reflect.

Camel sculpture at Deira Creek, Dubai © Sara Moss

In the husk of a day – a melting twilight – I twist on my sun lounge by the open-air pool to catch a noise far behind me. Dubai steams. Migrant workers still toil by Deira Creek. Neon shop signs burn their hues into the evening palette of light. The hypodermic Burj Kahlifa – the world’s tallest building – pushes toward invisible stars.

As I think I am accustomed to the pervasive smell of diesel, fragments of the noise filter, again, through the traffic hubbub below. The call to prayer is faint and fractured. Expecting it does not prepare me for the intensity of  feeling it elicits: a brief intoxication as I contort on the sun lounge and cock my head to catch each sound wave.

Twilight on Deira Creek, Dubai © Sara Moss

The call curls into my head and lodges in my chest. It feels ancient. It makes me want to listen. In its wake is a longing of some sort. Art, architecture, ruins and wrecks have never made me feel so…connected to place. Have these tangible facets of culture failed to resonate as strongly because we are hardwired to respond to sound/music in different ways?

My swoon is decidedly not about religion. Somehow, for a few moments, the entreaty to pray envelopes my sense of what it is to be human. Our frailties, dreams and deaths are common but disparate. Our past roots and future anxieties can fray our present. But on the evening air is a reminder of now: Come. Be still for a while.

Clearly not the Tube, Auckland, New Zealand © Sara Moss

“Mind the gap.”

Screeches and grumbles of London Underground trains still track through my memory. There’s a pitch change at deceleration and again at departure. Tunnel-bound vapours sting nostrils. A platform arcs to infinity at midnight and feels like a thimble in the rush.

The Tube hauls more than 1 billion people annually across a 402 km network, straddling subterranean and elevated London. It’s a feat of logistics and there’s energy in that bustle. Like electrified tracks, my anticipation crackles in a foreign city.

Such momentum lasts until summer on the Tube presents Petri-dish armpits arresting the will to live. Winter feigns respite, providing warm pockets underground — then the lifts break. It’s initially novel to squirrel below street level via stairs. However, there’s no eagerness in my ascent by foot.

London is a behemoth, cloaking countless opportunities for a traveller to be wrested from the familiar. Riding the Underground is a sociological instructor in nuance. It’s also a short course in keeping alive to all travel slops on your shoes, sticks up your nose and shoves in your face.

The busiest Underground station is Waterloo: nearly 50 000 people enter during the three-hour morning peak. It’s easy to be swept into the morass. Though I’m now resident half a world away, it’s hard to remember not knowing what that felt like.

I’m writing this as I prepare to be swept into the life of cities which have carved histories and projected futures far removed from those of London: Dubai and Istanbul. A tremor of anticipation flicks across my stomach and I’m ready for the too-huge world.

Pier 39, SF Kites San Francisco, USA © Sara Moss

Flooding Brisbane, 13 January 2011, Australia © Sara Moss

Hammered firmly into manicured lawn, the for sale sign reads “Millionaire’s Row at an Affordable Price”. Only metres away a crow swoops to haul a complete rat carcass from the ground into the branches of a flowering tree. Deftly, the crow then pauses with its bounty on the rusting roof of a Queenslander before continuing towards the Brisbane river.

I’m walking through the waterfront suburbs to ease my restlessness; it’s not working. Today the river is a broad slick of grey-brown, unreflective under a sky which has begun to smudge with cloud. The water is visible here thanks to an undeveloped corner block and the gradient of the bank. A new, angular development squats waterfront below eye line from the street.

Slightly more than seven months earlier I stood in the same place to watch the river in flood, sweeping mercilessly and debris-ridden towards Moreton Bay. Most of Queensland was drowning. Recollection of the January floods piques my tension.

Stilling myself at a closer vantage point, the former wool stores on the opposite bank catch my eye. Their red brick endures and the solidly-framed windows would once have reflected the bustle of dock life. Heady trading days. Now, a barge, kayak and ferry appear on the water, keeping their own rhythm. Quiet. I need to move again.

The light turns oddly apricot-coloured; the sun becomes a disc behind what is surely a brewing storm. I don’t stray too far from the river but turn my gaze to the surrounding conglomerate architecture.

Starkly contemporary dwellings abut shabby, new, and exquisitely-renovated Queenslanders. There’s a smattering of houses more inclined to European climates and the occasional, untouched 1950s timber house on an obscenely large block makes me think grandma and/or grandpa is still holding on. But my agitation is unabated. It’s a nameless internal jangling as I walk.

I flick to 1999, when I arrived in Brisbane. Echoes of afternoon walks I took then surface: meandering through streets in a city where I knew no one, looking for some sort of connection to place. Wondering what sort of life I would make in new geography. Voluminous greenery, sweet air, summer storms and fine winter days marked out my first two years. I found new friends. Then other horizons whispered their sweet nothings.

As the sky begins to break and the first raindrops crack onto dead leaves resting on roadside clover, I turn home. No solace to be had by the river today. I climb the hill of my street, that bit higher into crackling air, as the thunder begins in earnest.

"Marilyn Monroe" on Hollywood Blvd, USA © Sara Moss

In some cities the little black car and the diminutive black dress are made for each other. Los Angeles is one such place. I’ve no clout with couture but enjoyed my ride from LAX to Hollywood; no traffic snarl and the motor hummed as my friend and I compressed the past five years into sound bites. The colours and chameleon form of the city had settled under an afternoon heat haze. I had no immunity against the impending siesta.

Upon waking in my friend’s apartment, the California dreaming began in earnest. She had a lot to show me.

Hollywood Boulevard was awash with early evening light and all the hustle of the tourist trade. A look-alike with crazy hair and Kiss make-up had removed his prosthetic tongue and was sucking on a cigar instead. He was slouched in a chair outside the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf café. Freddy Krueger leaned against a wall looking bored near Madame Tussaud’s, taking a break from making young children cry at the flash of his plastic claws. Stars flecked the pavement, not the sky: this was red carpet territory.

An upper level of the Hollywood and Highland Center showed hazy downtown skyscrapers; growing luminosity of the El Capitan Theater sign across the street; the beggar on the corner who must have wondered how he had nowhere to go in the place to be.

The attractive man behind the counter at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf café proved to have a sense of humour but no ear for accents.
“Are you Scottish?”
“Australian,” I replied with a smile.
“I’m American, so I can’t tell!” he joked, “But thank you for the Mad Max movies and thank you for Heath Ledger — the best Joker ever.”

The brevity of my stay preserved the novelty of wandering the streets of a working movie town. I harboured a secret glee spotting street signs prompting associations with musicals and trashy television I watched as a teenager. Perhaps I’m easily pleased but turning a street corner to find pedestrian access blocked due to a film shoot in progress, never failed to delight. Serendipity can be an interesting guide but there’s a sure-fire way to get close to the action.

For a quick route from Hollywood to Universal Studios the subway is recommended. The Metro Red Line will take you to Universal City station in less than 10 minutes for under $2. We went to a taping of The Tonight Show but I didn’t know a human greenhouse awaited us at the studio lot. I assume the hundreds queuing for hours get a bit testy in warm weather unless they are sprayed intermittently with water vapour in a shade clothed waiting area.

While pleasantly damp I was bemused by the security screening — that would put several airports to shame — required before finally entering the studio. However, once inside we revelled in the hideousness of the comedian who was our entertainment entrée. The host was more palatable but The Tonight Show Band comprised consummate musicians who inadvertently put some of the guests to shame. This concurrently revealed the marketing power of Disney.

Far removed from Disney-style fame is LA’s Page Museum and La Brea Tar Pits. On a portion of land south-west of Hollywood asphalt naturally bubbles to the surface and has trapped animals, including sabre-toothed cats, wolves and mammoths, during the past four Ice Ages. Archaeological digs since 1906 have revealed more than one million bones preserved in the pits between 10,000 and 40,000 years ago.

The Page Museum is home to the famous ‘fishbowl’ laboratory where visitors can watch scientists and volunteers clean and catalogue recent archaeological finds. It gave me a whole new appreciation of these onerous tasks and the work behind the specimens already on display. But I didn’t expect to cry. This unanticipated outburst was prompted by suppressed laughter. A young boy’s enthusiastic attempt to get a closer look at a huge jaw bone was thwarted by an apparently-too-transparent display case. It’s okay — we all recovered reasonably quickly.

Emerging red-eyed and blinking into the sunshine we drove through the surrounding affluent neighbourhood of Hancock Park. It had instant appeal with its manicured lawns, mature trees and variegated architecture. Celebrities no doubt numbered among the homeowners in that little idyll but after heading to the hills to learn about real stars at the Griffith Observatory, a new plan was hatched. Road trip.

It wasn’t quite the extended California cruising we’d daydreamed about, however, at the crack of mid-morning the next day we set out along Freeway 101 North to Santa Barbara. The two-hour drive afforded views of a side of the Pacific Ocean I was unaccustomed to. There were also ragged ribbon-developments of malls, unremarkable housing and agricultural pockets backed by the stark relief of dusty looking mountains which didn’t so much as kiss the sky, but make a gesture towards it.

Santa Barbara Mission, USA © Sara Moss

Upon arrival we were lured to beachside market stalls and embarked on a post-lunch mission to the local Mission, founded by Franciscan monks in 1786. It proved to be a photographer’s delight. We made our way through the extensive complex with our cameras fixed to eye and heads swimming with light, line, colour and creation. A priest gave mass in the old church onsite.

Our return journey ran late into the afternoon and afterwards I couldn’t quite settle at my hotel. I sat briefly in my room on Sunset Boulevard but it was my last evening in town and I had to walk. I didn’t yet know these days had been precursors to the next part of my life. That would begin after the café.

Hollywood Boulevard was awash with early evening light and all the hustle of the tourist trade. Break-dancing street performers were encircled by a clapping crowd when, much to the delight of all, firemen in a passing truck also began clapping and made brief bursts of the siren in time with the performers’ music. Wet, half-expectant children wanted another turn to run screaming through the Hollywood and Highland Center fountain jets which now lay dormant.

In search of a warm drink, I stopped where the Gene Simmons look-alike had sat at with his cigar. I bantered briefly and bizarrely with the server about green tea, ‘jasmine dragons’, dinosaurs and mythology. With tea purchased and the need to wander unabated, I was soon at the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and North La Brea Avenue. The sun hadn’t completely disappeared — light was just holding on as I rounded the corner onto North La Brea.

Two men in their mid-twenties speaking an Eastern European-sounding language walked in front of me. One was strikingly good-looking and the other was exceedingly plain. I could hear someone washing up through the open window of an apartment; someone else within the same building yelled a couple of words I didn’t make out.

I stepped into a narrow band of sunlight that squeezed itself between buildings and saw two cyclists riding along a tree-lined street to my left. They had the easy manner of friends who were comfortable in their surroundings, chatting as they rode. The street was so quiet by comparison to the boulevard just two blocks away.

I imagined other people a little way down the street, washing their clothes and waiting on the spin cycle at the laundrette opposite my hotel.

Miles from home, it felt so good to be out in the world, at dusk, in Hollywood, where everyone was playing out the grand stories of their lives — accretions of everyday things. I’d found the longest moment in the slipstream there on North La Brea, where life was effortless and glorious and pregnant with possibility. I’d finally felt everything was right, and life as I knew it was irrevocably changed.

Sailing the Dutch West Indies © Sara Moss

Warning: extended exposure to any of the websites listed here may result in unexpected travel.

If wanderlust is gnawing at you, here’s a site guaranteed to fascinate and inspire: Atlas Obscura — a compendium of this age’s wonders, curiosities and esoterica. Dawdling and daydreaming your way around the globe digitally is fun but creating the reality can take some cunning on a firm budget.  The well-travelled writers at Holiday Goddess balance panache with modest outlays of cash in their budget recommendations and if you’re really watching your money, Workaway links global hosts and volunteers willing to work in exchange for free food and lodging. Granted, Workaway is not for everyone but participation, language learning and local immersion are at the heart of the experience.

However, incorporating travel into your lifestyle rather than cramming it into tiny portions of leave may have more appeal. If you need tips on making the most of life outside a corporate cubicle, Aussie ex-pat Marianne Cantwell has some excellent advice at Free Range Humans. If you decide to throw it all in and long haul lures, Chris Guillebeau’s guest post on the Four Hour Workweek blog — How to Buy a Round-the-World Plane Ticket that Kicks Ass — is one to keep up your sleeve, particularly if you’re in the USA.

If you really do need to keep a lid on your wanderlust for now, you may find solace in an article by the School of Life’s Robert Rowland Smith about getting away without going anywhere.

View to right of Santa Barbara Mission, USA © Sara Moss

The vast swell of the Pacific Ocean lies between Queensland and California. An air trip between Brisbane and Los Angeles arcs over islands and shipwrecks and reefs. The ocean cleaves — in both senses of the word — two cultures which many would argue are increasingly similar. On a day where the sky over Brisbane has been the broadest, polished kind, I recall a similar expanse of Californian blue across the heavens. There’s openness to get lost in, the sense of the horizons being a trick of the eye, a road that just keeps going.

I took the photo to the left in Santa Barbara, California, next to the Mission first built by Franciscan monks in 1786. The road’s heading east, with a whole lot of country traced beneath its bitumen. Just as I depressed the shutter I wanted to walk that road. But there were other plans and booked tickets and finite resources. It was some time before the momentum urging me eastwards dissipated. I promised then I’d surrender next time. It is exquisite to just go.

Jeffrey St, Edinburgh, Scotland © Sara Moss

When I was home on holidays during university, my Dad took me to visit a man he knew who was a keen photographer. I’ve a memory of approaching a simple, post-war single-storey house in a small Australian town with eager anticipation.

I was nearing the end of a journalism degree and attempting to delay my entrance to the ‘real world’ by continuing to study; word on the street and in the tertiary halls was marrying writing and photography would be a good career move. But I knew nothing about photography.

Sunlight shone onto a deep brown linoleum floor as the photographer’s wife disappeared into the kitchen to make tea by a window framed with lace curtains. Several bookshelves lined the walls of the living room and the photographer was keen on show and tell.

His story had a familiar echo: his father had given him his first camera – a box brownie – and he’d delighted in it. The taking of the photograph was just the beginning though. Hand processing film and the excitement of the instant an image first ghosts onto photographic paper being rocked in a developing tray, enthralled him for years.

A volley of albums was delivered from bookcase to dining table and a whole black and white history was divulged. The photographer’s wife smilingly delivered our tea, careful to keep it from flipping pages, possibly bemused at her husband’s animation. She was a plain woman, softened and made a little plump by the years.

A favourite emerged from the moments of the photographer’s life: a portrait of a beautiful 16-year-old girl, with long hair and eyelashes to make any model proud, was looking off-camera and slightly downwards, smiling and backlit by sunlight. It was his wife. “I love photography because it is a time machine.” The couple’s smiles were knowing.

Our cups of tea were finished. I took up photography too.