EAST LOTHIAN, SCOTLAND
I had a great aunt who lived in North Berwick and we'd stay with her when I was small. It was an incredibly grand, huge house on a golf course leading down to the beach. The beach was shielded by sand dunes and hid cowry shells and dead gannets, and the odd puffin. It was always freezing cold and I always insisted on getting into the water. I've been back a few times, and really it hasn't changed.
WESTERN AUSTRALIA
When I was 22 I drove with a girlfriend from Perth to Broome. The west coast is so different from the east coast, which I knew quite well. We stayed in caravan parks all the way up. We hit a kangaroo between Monkey Mia and Carnarvon, and watched it die in the field next to the road. In Port Hedland we stayed the night in a brothel, and then drove on to Broome in time for the staircase to the moon. Black cockatoos and sugar banana smoothies.
ISLE OF WIGHT
My family own a bit of woodland on the island. It's camping only, other than a lichen-covered little caravan filled with spiders. I stayed there with two dogs for a week in the summer several years ago. There's no electricity or running water and when it's dark, it's very dark. It being England and August, there were gales and torrential rain, and trees came down. The sheep from the next door field swarmed into the woods and got stuck in brambles, and drove the dogs crazy. It was a bit hairy.
THAILAND
I had a boyfriend who was living in Chiang Mai, Northern Thailand, studying the hill tribes, and I went to stay with him for three months in my early 20s. I remember eating at a place called "Chicken in front of the Brothel" which sold fried chicken or pork with amazingly hot chilli paste. You'd sit and eat, and watch the comings and goings at the brothel.
CHINA
I went to China right after I finished school. In Nanning in the south, I got so ill I lost about four days of memory. We met an Australian man in his 70s called Bruce who had left home in Adelaide when he was 19 and hadn't been home; had just travelled the world. I think about him a lot.
Evie Wylde's new book is Everything is Teeth, an acclaimed memoir about growing up in fear of sharks on the Australian coast. See www.penguin.com.au.
