Tales of magical travel experiences from the finalists in our competition to win a $10,000 trip for four to any Silk Air destination within Asia
Click here to read the winning entry
Spanish family
A glorious day in the summer of '69 and I am hitching a ride in the south of Spain. A family in an old black car stop to pick me up and, from their disapproving looks and bird-like cries, I gather they are horrified that I am out on the
road on my own. These lovely people take me home, insisting that I stay the night, so that they can put me on the train the next morning.
They cook me a beautiful meal and want to know all about New Zealand. My Spanish is very basic and they have no English at all so our conversation is interspersed with much laughter and waving of hands, but their generosity is real and heartfelt. Next morning they insist on buying me a ticket to my next destination, Marbella, and their goodbyes are as if to a new-found daughter.
Penelope Gardiner
Cold water
While travelling around Burkina Faso, we borrowed an old motorbike for an afternoon's ride around the outskirts of a dusty village. We had been lucky enough to buy a bottle of cold water straight from a working fridge (so often they are just for looks with no power supply) and we stopped on the side of the bumpy, dirt road for a drink as the sun went down in a beautiful copper blaze.
A little girl came walking past, somewhat startled at the sight of two white people sitting on an upturned log. She was carrying a bottle with just a splash of dirty, brown water so we offered her some of ours.
After taking a mouthful, her eyes virtually popped out of her head and she spat the water out in shock. She was both horrified and in fits of giggles. She had never experienced cold water before.
Cindy Rimmington
European Christmas
Perhaps the most magical experience I have had travelling was a Christmas holiday period in Europe. During the crisp, mid-December winter nights in Koln, Germany, people are wrapped up warm in coats, scarves, hats and mittens wandering through the brightly lit stalls of handmade gifts at the Christmas markets.
Warming smells of mulled wine, roasted chestnuts and candy waft through the air. A quartet play Christmas carols on violins outside the gothic cathedral. People are chatting, laughing and singing; children are excited about the upcoming visit of Saint Nicholas.
Walking down the streets of London, snow begins to fall. Scurrying people slow their pace to enjoy the white flakes, striking up conversations and laughing with complete strangers. When enough snow has fallen, friendly snowball fights break out amongst the children. This is the Christmas every child sees on television and wishes to experience, even the adult-child within.
Siaan Mackie
Dusk on the Irrawaddy
The scene at dusk is a snapshot from any day in the past hundred years. Old ferries built along the sweeping, curved lines of colonial times float alongside assorted rusting boats.
Men and women are strung out along the slope, loading and unloading weighty baskets of goods balanced on their heads. Smoke from a fire drifts lazily through the air as passengers await a distant departure aboard one of the local ferries; cooking, sleeping, talking. Children run around energetically, flipping elastic somersaults in to the river with delight and women bathe modestly beneath their longyis. As the sun slides below the horizon, the sky fills with hues of pink, orange and blue.
Taking their cue from the encroaching darkness, the wings of the hundreds of fruit bats once again disturb the stillness, a streaming dark cloud of them flapping their way south down the course of the Irrawaddy.
Jake Morgan
Buddha's big toe
It's 1987. China is open for visitors but yet to commence its drive towards modernity. Backpacking through Sichuan we hear of Dafo, the Big Buddha carved into the cliff by the riverside town of Leshan. On a mild, spring morning we catch the boat across the swirling waters to pay our respects to this monument from the 7th century.
Enormous and impassive, the world's largest carved Buddha gazes across the waters towards Mt Emei Shan. His head is covered with over a thousand buns of curly hair, each one big enough to support a dining table. The viewfinder on my camera strains to capture the immensity of his presence, so I content myself with a snapshot sitting on the serene one's big toenail. Mute witness to countless dynasties and revolutions, the big guy is at peace, and so am I.
Philip Tetley-Jones
Journeys of Mau
On Satawal, a remote island at the cultural heart of Micronesia, locals live naked but for loin cloths and hand-carved outrigger canoes litter the white beach lapped by an azure ocean. Behind the beach rose a steeply thatched roof. Resting in the shade of the boathouse sat a dignified old man, his face weathered from a life on the water.
This was Mau, the last of the great navigators. He had kept alive the traditional methods of navigation used as the Pacific was explored for millennia. I sat and we talked of the journeys he had made, the places he had been, the people he had met. Then talk turned to the local brew. To not drink was bad luck. I brushed away the flies and gingerly sipped the rancid smelling, grey liquid - it was impolite not to finish.
Aaron Russ