Lost in the maze of old Marrakesh The souk was an overpowering lungful of two-stroke motorcycle exhaust, human sweat, sizzling food, and the pungency of a tannery that seemed to soak into my clothes and permeate my skin as I navigated passageways clogged with bicycles, donkey carts and tightly-wrapped humans who strode with determination rather than shuffled along. For the newly initiated...
Steve Kilbey We’re rounding out the year with a conversation that’s different from everything else you’ve heard on Personal Landscapes. Until now, I’ve spoken with or about writers of travel literature. But this time, I’m talking to a songwriter. It’s also an excursion into one of my own personal landscapes. Getting some backstage writing advice (Buffalo, 2009) Steve Kilbey is the singer...
Gordon Peake [Photo by Steve Morris] Gordon Peake’s first book — Beloved Land — was a memoir of life in Timor-Leste, one of the world’s newest and least visited nations. He followed it up with another ‘residency’ book, this time on Bougainville, an island off the coast of Papua New Guinea that hopes to become an independent country. Unsung Land, Aspiring Nation will be published in early...
Did you miss my live stream conversation with writer Lawrence Millman on Tuesday? I heard there was some sort of election in the US. Surely you weren’t watching that instead?! Don’t you want to know what drink pairs best with bird droppings…? Aren’t you curious about how he scared away a mother grizzly and her cubs by flashing his genitals at them…? Do you really mean to tell me you don’t want to...
I went back to Canada for a couple weeks in October to visit friends and family. This journey required six flights — three in each direction — every one of which was delayed. I traveled on three airlines: Lufthansa, Air Canada and SwissAir. All failed in multiple ways despite charging me far more money and delivering far less than in the past, with the exception of physical discomfort which...
Edith Durham, Albania’s ‘mountain queen’ When I hiked through the Accursed Mountains in Kosovo, Montenegro and Albania last June, I met older Albanians who still referred to Edith Durham as their “mountain queen” for her staunch advocacy of Albanian independence and her love of its people. I’d stumbled across a copy of her 1909 book High Albania while preparing for my trip, and...
Bayonne, where tall half-timbered buildings reflect their greens and reds in the Nive I spent my last Basque days in Bayonne, where tall half-timbered buildings reflect their greens and reds in the Nive and Adour rivers. The riverside has a Middle Ages feel about it. It’s easy to imagine those same narrow buildings gazing down at the water traffic that made the city such an important commercial...
Inspecting bikinis on the Grande Plage Biarritz was once synonymous with glamour. Not just your run-of-the-mill glamour, either, but royal glamour. It started in 1855, when Napoleon III’s wife Eugenie built a palace on the beach. Empress Eugenie was born in the Spanish city of Granada, and her husband wanted her to have a home close to the border of her old country so she wouldn’t...
French Basque country Two sun soaked days of freedom on the Côte d’Argent, and then we shifted our base to the riverside town of Bayonne for a taste of French Basque country. It began with a drive through the foothills of the Pyrenees, where small villages locked architecture into a cultural time capsule and grew the staple foods of French Basque cuisine. Espelette shutters painted pepper red...
Surf’s up on the Silver Coast Winding mountain roads overburdened with speed cameras and toll booths led us over the edge of the Pyrenees and into France, where we’d take a brief detour from Basque country to swim on sparsely populated beaches up the coast. The geography flattened into an unremitting expanse of pine forests sheltered by massive sand dunes, and beyond them, beaches that...
Author of Vagabond Dreams: Road Wisdom from Central America. Host of Personal Landscapes podcast. Editor-at-Large (Europe) for Canada's Outpost magazine. Writer at The Shift. Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.