Anna Hart is a travel columnist, author and speaker specialising in experiential and positive-impact travel. She’s the slow travel columnist for The Daily Telegraph, adventure columnist for Suitcase magazine, and travel columnist at Gourmet Traveller Australia. She is currently working on a follow-up to her bestselling travel memoir, DEPARTURES, published in 2018.
What does a journey mean to you?
A journey is anything that transforms me. Hopefully for the better, but who knows?
Which country or location most inspires you?
It’s my job to travel to new places and seek out what is uplifting and inspiring, and which stories need to be told. I’ve never met a destination I didn’t find inspiring, and if I did, I obviously didn’t try hard enough. That said, I visited Mexico for the first time last month and now have a hunger to explore every corner of this incredible country, starting with Oaxaca.
Where would you go back to and why?
After years of failing to understand why anyone would return to the same place twice when there’s so much more of the world to explore, I’ve recently woken up to the pleasure of revisiting places I’m semi-familiar with. Currently I’m planning a trip to Poland (where I spent a year teaching English when I was 18) which is one of the most underrated European destinations, and a country that could use some support via tourism, given their unwavering generosity towards Ukrainian refugees.
Top insider tip for Los Angeles?
To enjoy LA, pretend you live there. Stay in a relatively walkable neighbourhood like Santa Monica, Venice Beach or Echo Park, go to yoga classes or join beach runs, queue up for the local cult bakery, perhaps venturing to one museum. The tourist thing doesn’t work in Los Angeles, it’s not Rome.
