A morning ritual

Travel Writer: Jackie Goodall observes a swimmer in Tel Aviv

Berlin with a twist

Travel Writer: Aisling Bonner on late-night street games

A taxi ride to prison

Travel Writer: Ellie Brennan encounters the inmates of a Ghanaian prison

Running with the big beasts

Travel Writer: Emma Keogh ran in Kruger National Park and lived to tell the tale

A realisation in Auschwitz

Travel Writer: in the shade of an oak, Shane Kenneally understood what no guide could tell him

In China, they can’t stop taking pictures of me

Travel Writer: Laura Doyle feels she is being treated like a celebrity

Travelling the world, one murder-mystery at a time

Travel Writer: John Poole finds that detective novels are the perfect travel guides

Between the desert and the deep blue sea

Travel Writer: Lisa Mullee takes a journey at breakneck speed across La Guajira Peninsual in Colombia

La Paz: the home of magical realism

Travel Writer: A tour around the infamous San Pedro prison gave Conall Scollard a surreal view of the Bolivian city

Tehran: a city of arrested development

Travel Writer: Rachael Kealy found the Iranian capital to be a contrast between the cold regime and the warm locals

The warmth of shared loneliness

Travel Writer: Fearghal O’Nuallain makes an unlikely friendship in the Romanian countryside

Prague: A menopausal break

Travel Writer: Bernie Kirwan loses herself in the magical wonder of the Czech city

Truckin’ for Jesus, to Texas and beyond

Travel Writer: vast highways, signs for Jesus, fast food – Kate Duignan’s American road trip

Fear on the banks of the Bosphorus

Travel Writer: Aoife Kavanagh shadowed the Orient Express, from Paris to Istanbul

Tibet on a bicycle

Travel Writer: The easiest way to get into Tibet? Michael Cusack has plenty of insider tips

Drinking radioactive poison at the Chernobyl hotel

Travel Writer: Nicky Larkin’s vodka-filled night in Chernobyl left a dilemma: die of thirst or die of radiation...

Catching cold while ice-fishing in Mongolia

Travel Writer: A question to the 4x4 driver led Lorcain Cameron on speeding dash across the ice to investigate

The healing power of island life on Inis Oírr

Travel Writer: Louise Nealon has special memories of the Aran Islands

The Tikal and the Mayan refuse to give up their mysterious secrets

Travel Writer: Brendan Butler tries to uncover what happened to a people and a civilisation

A slow train through ‘sacred land’ with a mysterious stranger

Travel Writer: Shannon Kelly’s journey to Cluj in Romania in the company of a bushy-bearded wise man

The Northern Lights: all I could think of was the ‘mild, green Fairy Liquid’ ad jingle

Travel Writer: Margaret Salley on trip to Iceland that ended on the precipice of a glacier

Beaver Island: a journey into the strange unknown

Travel Writer: for Annie Lowney, the Lake Michigan island promised idyllic Americana; the reality was more David Lynch’s ‘Twin Peaks’

On the trail of F Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway

Travel Writer: Ciara O’Callaghan traces the steps of two great writers, from Paris to Cuba, to Barcelona and Alabama

The Trip – my falls in foreign lands

Travel Writer: Aileen Broderick on a chance encounter with a tattooed lady that inspired the title of travel book

Travel Writer: the Shortlist

With nearly 600 entries and a longlist of 45, our shortlist of the ten best travel writer competition entries is here

Did you make the Amateur Travel Writer longlist?

It’s taken us a month to get through all your submissions but after some great reading we’ve come up with a longlist of 45 articles

How to be a travel writer - top tips from Irish Times writers

The Irish Times Amateur Travel Writing competition is in full swing. For inspiration, we asked some of our writers to give their tips on how to write great travel stories

Travel writer, Japan: ‘The town of Unzen sits in a bowl of steaming, gurgling volcanic hills’

A trip to Unzen in Nagasaki Prefecture reveals rich mix of culture and religion among the volcanic baths

Travel writer, East Africa: ‘The people were kind, humble, proud’

Tim Hurley travelled to Ethiopia and Kenya with Irish education charity Camara

Travel writer, Butte, Montana: A mining city home to thousands of Irish immigrants

Irish men and women arrived in the late 19th century seeking their fortune beneath the Montana plains

Travel writer, London: The penny jar was raided for a trip to Hogwarts

Karen Kelly Maguire and her daughter found their own magic on the Warner Bros Harry Potter Tour

Travel writer, Italy: ‘We found a warm welcome in religious houses all the way to Rome’

In the height of summer Tamsin Treverton Jones takes a 500km walk down the Via Francigena pilgrim path

Travel writer, Syria: ‘Most of this is a war zone now, the medieval souk gutted by fire’

My Syrian visa was the jewel of my passport and I couldn’t drop the country from my itinerary, despite the danger

Travel writer, Graceland: ‘Surrounded by singing Hawaiian dolls, I fell in love with Elvis’

On a family trip to the US, Caitlin Nunn was more interested in the food than Elvis history, until an unexpected giftshop encounter

Travel writer, Iran: “Their mischaracterisation as bloodthirsty fundamentalists hurts them deeply”

In a series of reader submissions to the Irish Times Amateur Travel Writer competition, we meet Neil Barret as he navigates the sometimes contradictory landscape of Iran

Travel Writer, Peru: "There were times when we wondered what we had gotten ourselves into"

Naoise Waldron on exploring Latin America with just her husband and a tent

Travel Writer, Wicklow: “I told myself I was prepared to face my fear of being completely alone.”

Sabhdh Quinn dreams of venturing around the world alone, starting the process with a solo trek on the Wicklow Way

Travel Writer, Morocco: “Not only was my destination unusual, but so would be my mode of transportation”

Glen Vince defies doubts on his voyage from Europe to Africa

Travel Writer, India: ‘One day you could be attacked by a monkey and another day driven in a taxi to the middle of nowhere’

Anna Przybylo travels across India and discovers a variety of life lived quite differently to the West

Travel Writer, Auschwitz: “I remained ashamedly stoic, wondering 'why did we come here?'”

Kelly Konya visits the most prominent site in the history of the Holocaust

Travel writer, Trans-Mongolia Railway: “I've never felt so distant from the demands of daily life.”

Mark Buckley on realizing that the journey is truly more important than the destination

Travel writer, India: ‘Kolkata reeks of poverty, but it also reeks of character’

Ethel Crowley navigates beauty and hardship on the streets of Kolkata (formally Calcutta) for our Amateur Travel Writer competition

Travel Writer, Oregon: “The steers are lively, and make the young cowboys earn their rodeo stars”

Denise O’Meara discovers a remote section of the United States during her work as a nature conservationist

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