Fields & Stations | Issue 7

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.