Dust crusted summer absent of rain By the end of summer in an island without rain, the roads were crusted with a carapace of filth. Trees were burned brown. What grass there was had withered to straw. Only the prickly pear and olives retained a pale green. Old ladies polished their front doors at dawn with buckets and rags, to no avail. The island thirsted for cleansing rain, as...
Grand Harbour view from Valletta I didn’t suffer the entire time Tomoko was abroad because my old friend Zachary Peoples stopped by with his new wife on a round-the-world honeymoon. I’d met Zack at a border crossing in Central America in my late twenties. We traveled together for a while, and he became a main character in my book Vagabond Dreams. We’d last crossed paths in Tokyo a decade...
From the vegetable vendor around the corner My peaceful reading and writing routine was disrupted that autumn when my wife decided to take a trip home. “I’ll explain the shops to you,” she said before we left for the airport. “How hard can it be to buy food?” “You’d be surprised. So, there’s the food you buy from vendors, and the food you buy in shops…” I knew about the bread man. He...
Martha Gellhorn Martha Gellhorn wanted to be known as a novelist. Instead, she’s remembered as one of the 20th century’s greatest war correspondents. She wrote about what war does to ordinary people, and the despair of those who have lost everything. She covered the Spanish Civil War, and went ashore on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. But she also wrote about her travels in China, Africa...
Dervla Murphy (Photo from ) You may have already heard the sad news. But for those who haven’t… Dervla Murphy has died, aged 90. Her journey ended peacefully at home, with her daughter Rachel by her side. Old age was finally catching up to her. She continued to travel well into her 80s, but she wasn’t getting around very well in recent years. She never lost her curiosity, though, or her...
Along the Amber Route by C.J. Schüler Along the Amber Route traces C.J. Schüler’s journey down one of Europe’s great long distance trading routes. Like other ancient trade routes, this one had several branches running for some 2,500km from St. Petersburg on the edge of the Baltic Sea to the great trading city-state of Venice on the Adriatic. The existence of the Amber Route predates...
Palazzo oranges from the tree in our courtyard “The gardener will come at 8am to trim the fruit trees,” our landlord Marian said. “Please make sure you’re there to let him in.” As with most local tradesmen, he insisted on starting as early as possible, and so I set my alarm and struggled out of bed a few hours after I’d settled comfortably into it. Bougainvillea climb the stair to the tower...
Guy Kennaway (Photo by Vanessa Fristedt) Guy Kennaway’s Jamaica is “a little Eden made more interesting by the Fall”. His book One People is a comic novel, but Cousins Cove is a real village, and the stories he tells were gathered during his first ten years as an idle British expat. It’s a world populated by wannabe drug dealers, resourceful beach prostitutes and rental dreads who nurse warm...
The dining room in the palazzo We inherited a cleaning lady when we rented the palazzo, and she became our main contact with the village. Josephine’s Day was always a struggle because she preferred to arrive much earlier than we preferred to wake up. She was kind and reliable, but I never knew what to say to her, and so I barricaded myself in my study all morning and stayed there...
Not from that vicious old lady Insects could be defeated through the miracle of science and chemistry, in spite of their overwhelming numbers, but I never succeeded in my six year campaign to resist the rhythms of an island inhabited by larks. I was a night person trapped in a dawn person’s world. The mismatch became apparent very early in our stay. I experienced a sudden reunion with...