I went to China and Hong Kong to film a documentary. I finished a master's thesis and graduated from journalism school. I spent five months in Sierra Leone, West Africa.

I got a job in Ottawa, and drove across 75% of Canada in five days. My grandmother died from pancreatic cancer. In between these big events, there was time with family and friends.

I've started to notice, with great alarm, how fast time seems to go now that I'm an adult. I don't like it. I don't like it one bit. I love taking photos, so this is just a small sampling of what I took over the year, and some photos by friends and family.

Musical credit is Sweet Disposition by The Temper Trap.

Happy New Year, everyone! Best wishes for 2010.

A Year in Review from Allison Cross on Vimeo.

I arrived back in Canada and was very much soothed by the predictability of my surroundings. Food was fresh and plentiful. Clean water came from the tap. My bed wasn't full of bugs. Cheap, new clothes were available everywhere and cars had seat belts. I relished the decadence of hot showers and mild weather. I poured over the thousands of photos I took, trying hard to remember the feeling of lying on a deserted beach. I was happy to see friends and family, and grateful they'd put up with my frantic emails and phone calls while I was away.

I relaxed after being on edge for months. Life at home was very peaceful. In Freetown, hailing a taxi and getting to work in torrential rains was a major accomplishment. Grocery shopping and trips to the bank were time consuming and frustrating, but always exciting. The constant attention from men was annoying and sometimes frightening. 

Life at home is peaceful — but also predictable. As time has gone on, I've missed that excitement more and more, particularly when there are few people who can relate to my experience.

I often tell people about what it was like in Sierra Leone: devastating poverty, petty crime, unemployment, malaria, no indoor plumbing, insects, corrupt police and government, and rain — so much rain. But I didn't expect to feel insulted when people asked, with genuine concern, why I would ever want to go to a place like that. I had to force myself to remember what I'd thought of Africa before I went there, and remind myself how foreign and foreboding it seemed at the time.

But I still come up with the same answer to that question: I go to new places to see what the world is like beyond what I see every day. It's uncomfortable and sometimes scary, but I think that's the point.

The farther I go out into the world, the smaller I feel. My personal problems and annoyances feel insignificant. My understanding of religion, society and culture seems insufficient. My capacity to affect change feels inadequate. But anyone who ventures to new places can at least begin to acknowledge how different we all are — something I am still trying to wrap my head around.

I'm working in journalism now and given the state of the economy, and the journalism industry, I'm grateful. But I get antsy for that kind of excitement from time to time. I'm hoping I can eventually combine my love of travel and journalism into a (financially-viable) career.

By Allison Cross
Canwest News Service

Full story, go here.

A security crackdown on airline travel to the United States is a superficial fix to grave problems with Canada's airport-safety system, says an expert who contends this country remains vulnerable to aviation terrorism.

"It's cosmetic," Peter St. John told Canwest News Service on Saturday.

"'Reaction security' is not good security. 'Pre-emptive security' is what you need. You need to be anticipating who's going to be doing what. That's what good intelligence is about."

Transport Canada, along with governments around the world, on Saturday implemented temporary security measures for flights to the U.S., including bag and body searches at gates, after a Nigerian man tried unsuccessfully to detonate an explosive device on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit.

"It should be a wake-up call," St. John said of what officials in the U.S. are calling a botched Christmas Day terror attack.

St. John, a retired university professor who has written extensively on airport security, aviation hijacking and international terrorism, said Canada's airport-security system is porous and vulnerable to terrorism.

Transport Canada should focus on hiring highly trained security professionals in airports instead of more expensive technology, St. John said.

"We've flirted with the idea of machines that can spot everything ... but we've never developed proper human security," he said. "In all intelligence matters ... and counter-security ... it's always the personnel that find the problems -- good, well-trained personnel who know what they're doing and know what they're looking for. If you're not prepared to pay for these people and not prepared to put proper security in place, bombs are going to be let off."

St. John has also long advocated for stricter security measures such as an outright ban on carry-on baggage, as well as a policy that prohibits passengers' luggage from being on a flight if the owner isn't -- for any reason.

"I don't understand why a country like Canada that's so good militarily and has got so many techniques it has developed in war and conflict, cannot develop a proper security system," he said. "It's just simply a question of (terrorists) trying, before one of these things really works because of the poor defences. It was poor defences and bad airport security that led to 9/11."

Canada's aviation security system lags far behind many other developed nations, St. John said.

St. John said the Air India tragedy in 1985, when a flight en route to Bombay from Montreal blew up mid-air and killed 329 people, also should have served as a wake-up call to Canadians. He said it didn't.

The Roadtrip: From Penticton to Ottawa from Allison Cross on Vimeo.

1. Taxi from house to water taxi terminal: 5 minutes
2. Wait at water taxi terminal because the boat is late: 1 hour, 15 minutes
3. Water taxi ride across Sierra Leone river to Lungi, where the airport is located: 20 minutes
4. Van ride to airport: 5 minutes
5. Wait in line to check in, have bags (barely) searched: 2 hours
6. Snack at airport: 30 minutes
7. BMI flight from Freetown to London: 7.5 hours
8. Layover in London-Heathrow airport, where I revel in high-speed internet and fresh bagels: 5 hours
9. British Airways flight from London to Toronto: 6 hours
10. Wait at customs in Toronto: 20 minutes
11. Airport shuttle to downtown Toronto: 30 minutes
12. Subway ride to friend's house: 10 minutes

It's a good thing I didn't fly all the way to Vancouver, my final destination. It may have killed me.

- Dental floss
- Chickens (sometimes alive, sometimes not)
- Coat hangers
- Car steering wheels
- Car steering wheel cover
- A jar of mayonnaise (most likely past its expiration date)
- Cell phone credits
- A carburator
- Pig feet
- Lingerie
- Cookies and crackers
- An umbrella
- Diapers
- A Manchester United poster
- Hot chili peppers
- Laundry detergent
- A passport photo (to be taken as I sat in the car in traffic)
- Counterfeit DVDs

Why leave the car to shop at all?

Sierra Leoneans love it when you praise their food. Their staple dish is cassava leaf cooked with palm oil, which is served on a generous portion of rice. Sometimes it’s cooked with goat meat or fish. I’ve met many people who eat this same dish three times a day. But I can’t get used to this dish, which gives off a very pungent odour and looks, as Chris so thoughtfully said once, “like baby crap.”


After three or four bites, I usually can’t stomach any more of it. As I told the police officer, I’ve developed a liking for groundnut soup, a curry-style dish cooked with peanuts and palm oil, and I’m sure many other ingredients I’ve never been able to identify. But I sometimes have difficulty getting this dish down too, given the propensity of women here to lace their groundnut soup with a generous handful of hot peppers.

Eating in Sierra Leone is certainly a challenge. Lots of Freetown restaurants serve Western, Lebanese and Indian food but it’s expensive and I’m getting very tired of eating out. I’m not much of a cook, and given the fact that we don’t have steady power at home, my meals generally consist of noodles, soup, sandwiches and pasta. Buying milk, meat or yogurt means you have to eat it within a few hours because it very quickly goes bad in the heat. Mangoes and bananas are available for fairly cheap, as are apples, although you have to pay a bit more for those. The milk is sold sealed and unrefrigerated and if it remains so, is good for about a year. But it tastes like preservatives.

The best meals I’ve had so far have been at the beach. Freshly caught and cooked swordfish is served with a generous helping of rice. The worst dish I’ve ever had is something we’ve affectionately started calling pig slop. Served on the street in a bowl, it contains: attieke (a rice-like substance made from cassava), spaghetti noodles, a hard-boiled egg, raw onion, raw cucumber, a dollop of mayonnaise, a squirt of ketchup and topped off with a small, whole fish. Like the cassava leaf, I was fine until about four bites in when I got a good look at what I was eating.