Fields & Stations, Issue 7

We publish passion pieces by great travel writers.

We love travel writing and we love travel, and we try hard never to forget that these are two different things.

We’re interested in the farthest-flung bits on the map as well as the everyday backyards that suffer from inadequate championing. We are travel nerds who have felt the irresistible lure of a package holiday. We crave the obscure, the profane, the refined, and the common.

We like road trips and code-switching, supermarkets and diglossia, slow trains and amusement parks, route maps and dusty museums, puddle jumpers and mass tourism sites, tasting menus and street food. We love the substance of travel and its details, the opportunities provided by travel to lance the cultural and political divides that threaten the world.

We believe that real and meaningful experiences are not rooted in authenticity. Cultures are constantly changing; a fixation on authenticity locks cultures in a box.

We also believe that there is an internal logic to travel writing, that it is a craft with its own conventions and characteristics, and that even a great writer might be a poor travel writer.

Our contributors make their homes on five continents.

In this issue:

Road trips captivate travel imaginations like nothing else. The open road, the freedom, the risks, the challenging logistics, the reality that things might go disastrously wrong – or delightfully right.

The seventh issue of Fields & Stations is the road trip issue: six narratives of road trips, from epic to weekend escape.

Cecilia Martens contributes a how-to guide to travelling Africa overland. This is a comprehensive and wonderfully useful piece of writing, a rare service article in the pages of F&S.

Kanika Gupta writes about her journey from Delhi to Kabul, a formidable logistical challenge for an Indian passport holder and an altogether amazing story, replete with unwelcome intelligence officials and rich hospitality in the form of eight-course meals.

Caroline Eden captures the magic of a short road trip from Yerevan to Lake Sevan during a stifling Armenian summer. Eden closes her article by describing a delicious cool breeze and you can feel it. An escape hatch from urban heat is no small thing.

In her notes toward a travel memoir, Sheila Ngoc Pham writes about an interstate Australian journey of deep familial significance, which she retraces with her young children during Covid. Hers is a latticework reconsideration of a family story coterminous with reconfigurations of Australian cultural history.

Mimi Aborowa’s suggestive narrrative of a journey from Lagos to Accra is a thrilling journey. Between petrol shortages, corrupt immigration officials, and linguistic complexities, Aborowa advocates for improved transit links, easier border crossings, and stronger cross-cultural ties across West Africa.

Federica Bruniera closes out the issue with her mammoth road trip from Canada’s Yukon to Argentina’s Ushuaia, a journey so vast we asked her to divide it into three bite-sized pieces: the far north, the far south, and her war stories from all points in between.