About the Great Wide Open Blog
We are Andrew and Margaret, and for a large part of our lives we have been travelling — seriously, often for months at a stretch, and a great deal of it by bicycle. Great Wide Open is where we put that experience to use: practical guides to the places we know, and honest accounts of what it actually felt like to be there.
We are Andrew and Margaret, and for a large part of our lives we have been travelling — seriously, often for months at a stretch, and a great deal of it by bicycle. Great Wide Open is where we put that experience to use: practical guides to the places we know, and honest accounts of what it actually felt like to be there.
The name is a nod to Tom Petty — Into the Great Wide Open. It catches the thing that keeps us going back: that moment when you step into the unfamiliar and feel just how large the world is. A viewpoint you almost skipped. A city you'd never heard of until you cycled into it. A place you thought you knew, showing you something new. We've had a lot of those moments, and we're always after more.
Who we are
Between us we've travelled at length through [Australasia, Hong Kong, Spain, and the wider reaches of Europe, the USA and Canada] — usually for weeks or months rather than a quick fly-in, fly-out. A good part of it has been by bike: thousands of kilometres under our own steam, through cities, countryside and plenty of places well off the tourist circuit. Going slowly gives you a different relationship with a place — more accidental encounters, more time to notice things, a far better sense of how it actually works.
We've done the organised tour and the famous sights. We've also spent long evenings lost in the wrong neighbourhood, found that the guidebook's top pick closed two years ago, and learned which advice to trust and which to ignore. At some point you stop looking at places and start feeling your way into them — travelling slower, noticing more. That's the whole idea here, and it's why the site's promise is a simple one: travel further, notice more.
What you'll find here
The site is organised the way the menu is: three main sections, each doing a different job, plus a running blog.
Destinations are the places themselves — country hubs, city guides and the individual sights worth your time. Practical and researched, written the way we wish travel guides were: useful, specific, and without the filler. Start here when you're deciding where to go.
Guides are the planning layer, grouped by the questions you actually ask: how long to give it, when to go, where to stay, how to get around, what it costs, where to eat, whether you can walk or cycle it, and what's worth a day trip. Start here once you know where, and want to turn it into a trip.
Journeys are the trips themselves — a rail journey, a long cycle ride, a ferry crossing, a road trip, a cultural encounter — told first-hand, with enough practical detail for you to decide whether to do the same.
And the blog — our travel stories, news and insights — is the unfiltered record: posts written on the road as things happened, day by day. Not tidy retrospectives; the real thing, including the bits that didn't go to plan.
Put simply: Destinations and Guides tell you what to expect. Journeys tell you what we made of it. The blog tells you what it was actually like on a wet Tuesday.
A note on trust
Right now the site goes deepest on East Asia and Australasia. Some of that we know first-hand [— Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand —] and return to; some of it, [Japan and South Korea in particular], is drawn from close research and reliable sources rather than years on the ground. Where that's the case, we say so on the page. We think that's simply the honest thing to do — and it's the difference between a well-founded guide and a confident guess.
Travel changes quickly, too. Prices shift, businesses close, and the brilliant restaurant someone swears by will occasionally turn out to be a car park. We work hard to keep things current, but treat what you read here as a well-informed starting point rather than the last word — and tell us when we've fallen behind.
Get in touch
The comments under each page are always open — if something here prompts a question, or reminds you of somewhere you've been, that's the place to leave it. For anything more direct — a correction, a suggestion, a question you'd rather not ask in public — the contact page is the place to go. We read everything, and reply when we can.