My Favourite Holiday: Chloe Matharu
Scottish-Indian singer, songwriter and harpist Chloe Matharu looks back at a globetrotting adventure on the high seas
An early life decision I made was to find work that paid me to travel, so holidays for me are mostly spent at home, galloping the length of a Hebridean beach on my Irish ex-racehorse, camping on the machair or watching the night sky from the back of my croft. But one voyage I vividly remember was my first trip as a newly qualified third mate. I was to join the bridge team onboard a passenger ship in Fremantle in Western Australia, navigating around the Pacific.
Some highlights for me were whale watching in Alaska against a backdrop of glaciers; witnessing electrical storms off the coast of Beijing; diving for black pearls in Bora Bora; experiencing Japanese onsen; snorkelling on the tropical island of Lifou, where the air is as full of bright butterflies as the sea is full of coloured fish; and watching volcanoes glow in the dark in Papua New Guinea. Something I’m really enjoying as a musician is finding ways to revisit places I travelled as a seafarer and getting longer than a day to explore them, so I’m looking forward to my sixth tour of Australia this December with a stop in Asia en route.
Chloe Matharu plays The Wee Red Bar, Edinburgh, Tuesday 6 October; The Lodge Arts Collective, Lockerbie, Friday 9 October; picture: IRH Photography.
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