I emailed her and to my surprise and delight, she emailed me straight back. After a decidedly sunny exchange, Ayun revealed that she has just published the Zinester’s Guide to NYC so I thought I would ask her to share her many secrets with us. Read on for an insider’s guide to NYC …

1. Please tell us your favourite NYC places to do the following…

A) get a coffee: The Buon Italia grocery in Chelsea Market – it has little table overlooking the olive oil where you can sit and sip.

B) go for a walk: The side streets of the East Village with a lap or two in Tompkins Square … preferably at dusk during the holiday season.

C) get drunk with your friends: The drinking’s been scaled way back, my friend, but Otto’s Shrunken Head on 14th St, and Decibel Sake Bar on East 9th remain forever dear to me.

D) take your kids to play: Empire Park between the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridge … though these days my kids prefer to play by going to a comic book store. I was just playing in Jim Hanley’s Comic Universe across from the Empire State Building today …

E) buy crack (that’s a joke): Duly noted. Now if you’d said sell crack …

2. How did the new book come about? Joe Biel of Microcosm Publishing called with an offer I couldn’t refuse – someone with better financial sense would’ve refused it in a second, but assignment-wise, it’s a dream come true. I’ve always loved yanking visitors from the beaten tourist paths of NYC.

3. How long did it take to write? Nearly two years. My first order of business was to rustle up some fellow zine publishers and get them to contribute some of their favorite haunts, and then get them to revise what they’d written and flesh their listings out a bit more. That first go round yielded a lot of bare bones observations on the order of ‘Pakistan Tea House is yummy’. My own listings took a surprisingly long time to write – as you may have guessed from reading No Touch Monkey! (That’s Sarong in my Backpack for all of you in Australia and the UK), I have a tendency to rattle on forever. It was hard distilling my favorite things about a location or an event to just a few sentences. Then there was the infernal looking up of addresses, phone numbers and nearest subway stops, and figuring out how to categorise everything – grunt work I presumably wouldn’t have had to sully my soft authorial hands with, had I been working with a bigger publisher. The creative control working with an outfit like Microcosm can’t be beat, however. Everything was very collaborative and personal in the best way.

4. In Sarong in my Backpack, you had some pretty wild times on a teeny tiny budget. Do you have any tricks for surviving on the cheap? Eat in street stalls and the type of restaurants that could be mistaken for street stalls should the walls fall down. Try to time your visit for the months when that locale’s weather will likely be at its most pleasant, so you’ll be inclined to stroll and make al fresco meals of stuff culled from the local markets. That’s also the best time to partake of free outdoor events. Remember that your best souvenir will be any journal you keep, preferably illustrated and peppered with addresses of those you meet on the road.

5. Which countries are the best budget countries? I wouldn’t presume to dictate – it’s a matter of taste, and there are still a tonne for me to discover. I will say that traveling in India offers such a wide variety of experiences that visiting it can feel like visiting dozens of countries, all of them manageable on a tight budget. You certainly won’t be the first Western backpacker to visit, but particularly if you are travelling alone, there will be times when you will be glad not to have to reinvent the wheel – the infrastructure is there in terms of places to stay, transportation, cheap eats…

6. And the worst? Quite possibly the United States, though surely it’s gotten better with the advent of Chinatown buses. They started as a way for Chinese restaurant workers to travel between New York City and Boston for a pittance. The rest of the populace caught on and now they run everywhere. But as far as traveling internally, a large portion of this country remains car-centric to such a degree that you will have trouble getting anywhere without one. I’d suggest making lemonade from those lemons by going on a cross-country bike trip, hitting small towns that don’t get a lot of tourists – I think you’ll find yourself receiving a warm welcome from the locals. It will be good for them to meet you too. Australians are great travellers. Americans, less so. I think it’d be a better world if every American had to visit at least one foreign country before they’re allowed to turn 19. And not as a soldier, thank you very much.

7. What is the strangest thing you have ever done to make money when you’re overseas? I got some garden variety coloured chalk and used it to make drawings on the sidewalk, expecting people would toss down coins. Hey, it worked for Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins. Meanwhile, there was some art student laying down a picture perfect replica of some Old Master a few paces further on…

8. Where will your next trip be to? I’m hoping a newspaper or magazine will pay to send me to my hometown, Indianapolis, Indiana, to cover the opening of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library. And lately, the movies of Fatih Akin have given me a major hankering to visit Istanbul … which is funny, because they’re mostly set in Hamburg.

9. Do you have a wish list of places you would like to visit? If so, where? Always. Mexico City. Oaxaca. Guatemala. Morocco. Ghana. New Orleans. London, now that one of my very dearest friends is living there.

10. Any plans to visit Australia soon? I’d love to – I’m either going to have to win a free trip or stand beneath the tree that dumps buckets of money on people’s heads to make it happen, though. My old friend David Kodeski has wonderful things to say about a performance festival in Perth – they keep flying him out and treating him like a king. Perhaps they need a queen?

11. Any tips for aspiring writers out there? How did you become such a media starlet and get published, especially when you talk about things like farts and vaginas? Media Starlet!? Where!? The best advice I can give is to cite something the late monologuist Spalding Gray told Tricycle Magazine, that he started performing the autobiographical monologues that garnered him a lot of recognition because he ‘got sick of waiting for the big infernal machine to make up its mind’ about him. I’ve never had much of a gift for going after success in a traditional, mainstream way. Starting my zine, The East Village Inky, is what led to my first book contract.

Forty-five issues in, it still sustains me creatively during periods when everything else feels like it’s beyond my reach and/or control. Writing is only part of being a writer. You’ve also got to get it out there, particularly if no one else seems interested in doing it for you. Dare to be Heinie! www.ayunhalliday.com

Aussies, get your copy of The Zinester’s Guide to NYC here

That’s why I love short stories; so much plot line satisfaction jammed into one book. My awesome friend Shaunie T gave me an anthology of The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2010 to read while I was in Thailand and Vietnam and wow, wow, wow… now I am a little starstruck. And intimidated. And inspired.

These true stories are funny, elegantly written and quirky. The first page takes you 16,000 feet up the side of a mountain in Ecuador. I have never been there and, based on this story, I sure as hell don’t want to go but I am glad that Mary Caperton Morton did.

These women have healed sick dogs in Rajastan, moved to rural Ethiopia, were followed by government spooks in Burma, fell in lust in the Wadi Rumi Desert in Jordan and had a plaster cast made of her vagina in Brighton. Hell, I want to invite these girls over for a drink!

What struck me beyond the blatant courage and literary agility of these writers is the difference in emotion. These stories are written with a palpable tenderness; a willingness to be vulnerable, flippant and romantic. Male travel writers don’t seem to admit to their fears, follies and sorrows as much as women do. It’s not a bad thing – it’s just a different thing – but the lack of bravado is definitely the main reason I loved this book so much.

Tell me, Glorious Travel Nerds, do you think that male and female travellers tell stories in different ways? If so, how?

Love and Other U-Turns author Louisa Deasey gives us a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the road trip that inspired her brand new book about a ‘city girl, an unruly comedian, a love story and an amazing adventure’.

1. What is your favourite place in Australia and why?

Anywhere you can leave your door open at night and just hear the breeze in the wind and the stray howl of a dog, trees shivering and air that echoes the space … waking to nothing but sky and warmth. Possibly Kalgoorlie in September, Denmark WA in February, or anywhere in Far North NSW or Qld in July…Oh or Broome in June.  I just love Australia…

2. Is there anywhere you wouldn’t go back to? Why?

I loved everywhere we went, and I found something to appreciate and learn about it all. Mainly it was all an echo of aspects of myself.

The only place that truly shocked me, because the clichés were true, was Hall’s Creek, in WA. It was riddled with child pregnancy, welfare problems, addictions, screaming, and, to be a bit ‘out there’, just an awful, slightly evil vibe. When we left, I felt like we’d been let out of jail, even though the sky was big and the roads didn’t stop us … but not far further, things were better. A bit like life!

3. What were the best things about being on the road?

Every day is different. Every day you’re free. Every day you’re slightly frightened and that’s a good thing. Every day you’re learning new things about yourself, about the world around you, about the way you react to people and places, about your beautiful country and your cultural inheritance, and other people’s cultural inheritance. Every day your values are stripped back to the fundamentals: physical needs, relationships, inspiration. After being stimulated on that level it’s really hard to go back to monotony!

4. What were the hardest things about being on the road?

OK, first up, the obvious: Lack of cooking facilities, and lack of good coffee! Since when does steaming some milk and adding International Roast constitute a latté? To get cooking facilities, you need to stay in a youth hostel, yet the irony is, you mainly meet backpackers from overseas. So we stayed with other Aussies which was an adventure in itself.

Also, I didn’t realise how masculine the Australian outback was until I went there myself. And I thought it wasn’t fair!

5. And travelling with your partner for so long? Good, bad, ugly?

Jim was a wonderful travelling companion. He loved driving, he was so low maintenance he slept in the seat of the car, he ate tuna cans day after day and practised jokes on me – what else coud you ask for? But yeah, you just learn everything in fast-forward when you’re spending 24/7 with someone in the front of a car! You become one and the same – at one point we only had one set of car keys, so if we lost each other, it would be a matter of just ‘sensing’ where the other one was … it was pretty intense!

I don’t want to give the book away but at a certain point I realised how we differed, and that affected how we could travel together…

6. Have you got any tips for the ladies on how to stay pretty under duress?

On the first road trip with Jim (and i write this in the book) I was all about trying to hide my ‘high maintenance-ness’ in the public toilets. Nuh. Uh. Guys just don’t ‘get’ that we need more than three minutes to get ready.

So, here are my weird ones:

Use any kind of oil or moisturiser to wash your face in the outback, if you have nothing but a public toilet block. Mix it with hand paper towels soaked in warm water and some moisturiser and voila, your face is clean and moisturised (hey, I was doing this under duress).

Always keep a few toothbrushes in the glovebox, handbag, everywhere …. you don’t even need toothpaste when you’re desperate.

At one point i had no idea where my hairbrush was and I needed to comb my hair, immediately. All we had were some clean plastic forks in the camping box. I used one of those.

Get your eyelashes tinted before you go! Wear sunscreen – buy the sticks (like from Clarins), they are really good and can hang around your neck if you’re jogging in super burning heat. Carry a cream foundation and  splash on in an emergency of red blotchiness. Use a lipstick as a blush on the apples of your cheeks if you have nothing else. And make the most of getting into a town which has some beauticians in it. They’ll become your closest friends  if you’ve just spent six weeks in the Goldfields. I’m not joking…

Buy a little perfume oil bottle from the Body Shop or Kleins perfumery or elsewhere. Use that instead of perfume, as it reacts better in the heat.

7. Best laundry tips? Did you come up with innovative ways to wash/dry laundry?

Sadly, no. I just didn’t take anything that needed ironing and no white clothes. Lots of reds and blacks.  Also be conscious that it’s about the experience, not about what happens to your clothes. Jim used to say he liked bumps on his car for that very reason. Only take things you don’t mind losing or ruining, that can pack up small, are comfortable and ‘you’. I still have one of the skirts I took with me from Kookai, it was made of nylon and squished up to about a square centimetre in my bag.

8. Did anything scary/dangerous happen? How did you escape/avoid it?

Oddly, only a couple of dodgy things happened in the course of one year, but my perception of scary had completely changed.  On the whole, in one year of car travelling I had about three dodgy experiences whereas in Melbourne I’d have scary/dangerous encounters on a daily basis. I was lucky, but I was careful too. At one point I went jogging and got approached by a guy in the outback, but that’s happened to me about 16 times in Melbourne at Princes Park. I just kept jogging, and pretended not to notice. Then got into the car, and scooted away.

9. If you had the chance to do it again, knowing what you now know, would you?

Yes. It was the best risk I’ve ever taken. I learnt so much about people, love, life …

I think life is about growth and learning, and the only way you can do this is to get out of your comfort zone.

10. Checklist for ultimate road trip happiness – what are the absolute must-haves for a life on the road?

All you need is an open, curious heart. If you have that, and are willing to go down the dark roads as well as the lush ones, you will have one grand adventure. And pack sunscreen and a sense of humour.

11. Any tips on how to get a decent night’s sleep without a bed?

Cotton wool in the ears, a beanie, socks, and if you can, someone you love to cuddle!

The good news for you, my pretties, is that there are five copies of Love and Other U-Turns up for grabs.

All you need to do to win your very own copy is to tell us 25 words or less about the best road trip you have ever been on.

Whether it’s a cautionary tale, a romantic comedy or a simple fact box, I crave other people’s stories, photos and itineraries.

And when people get sick of my incessant questions and avoid me in the street? I get my dirty mitts on a travel  story, the latest of which is the Best of Lonely Planet Travel Writing.

I love this book. My genius of a best friend bought it for me for Christmas and I have been doling out daily doses like a junkie at a methodone clinic (it’s the closest I am going to get to the real thing for a while).

I finished it this weekend meaning that this excellent book is now available for loan - hands up who wants it next?

Featuring essays by Lonely Planet co-founder Tony Wheeler alongside Simon Winchester, Tim Cahill and Jan Morris, just to name a few, these stories will take you to a Mayan village in Mexico, a perilous mountain pass in Afghanistan, Prague (several times actually), the outer provinces of China, a white beach in the Ascension Islands and everywhere in between.

Your travelling companions? Some of the sharpest observational writers I have ever had the pleasure of reading.

I was left with a feeling of total longing after reading some of these stories; flat-out pity after reading others. The main thing I felt? Escape … and isn’t that what travel is all about?

What is your favourite travel story, fictional of factual? Do tell …