Travelling on your doorstep

I love travelling. Who doesn’t, right? The thrill of the exotic, making new friends in different places, learning another way of understanding day to day life. Other languages and cultures and ways of being.

I’ve been addicted since even before I hucked my first backpack onto my over-excited 21 year old shoulders. Since then, I’ve done my fair share of galivanting around the globe, and while I’m nowhere near done with exploring the world, right now I’m in the process of putting down some roots. Maybe shallow roots, granted, but even shallow roots need time to take hold. And so there are no big adventures on my immediate horizon.

Of the places I have been so far, one of my favourite is definitely South East Asia. Laos and Cambodia have a particularly special place in my heart. My favourite vicarious past-time is to greedily consume the images of photographers who live there, or at least get to shoot there on a regular basis.

But guess what Sydney has to offer? An overlooked, quiet suburb out in the west called Bonnyrigg. On face value Bonnyrigg is just another mish-mash of identikit houses and wide, empty streets with a sleepy and quiet feel. But Bonnyrigg is home to a little gem of a secret. There are Buddhist temples – Chinese, Cambodian, Laos – tucked away down in the side streets. Apart from the Chinese one – which is huge – they are sprinkled around the suburb, just begging to be tracked down with the help of the street directory.

They were mostly closed on the day I visited, and so I was only able to lurk around the outside, but the thrill of seeing Asian architecture nestled amongst Sydney homes and gardens was a lovely thrill all of its own.