A journey through Wales is a walk through the landscape of my childhood imagination. It was like traveling through the fragments of dreams barely remembered, with a constant haze of deja vu hovering just over my shoulder. My friends and I were driving to the town of Hay-on-Wye, site of a famous literary festival and home to more used bookstores than any other place on the planet. Conversation...
Music is essential for any trip. It entrances us on long journeys by bus or rail, occupying the conscious mind and allowing insight to float up from the depths. You listen to those same songs over and over, and they soak up the landscape, the smells and the very feeling of the place. They colour the way you see it just like different shades of glass colour a sunny day. Here’s what’s on my travel...
Me and the puzzled travellers We searched the ground for wealth And scoured the dreaming valleys On days where shadows melt Digging for the blue and the green Constant in opal or ultramarine If you could only find yourself that way… Steve Kilbey, The Church It’s a lovely fall day on the Bosphorus. Sunny with a scattering of cloud, and the water heaving with steady chop. Asia’s over there...
Colin was mesmerized by the steady geometry of the rocks backed by grassy coastal cliffs which looked as though the land had been bitten off and then softly eroded. But for me the Causeway was just a strange pile of stones on an inhospitable day. I couldn’t buy into its myth. I only sensed something when I picked my way out to where the slippery stones were surrounded on three sides by the sea...
Liechtenstein is a strange place. It’s a monarchy ruled by a prince in the middle of Europe, landlocked in the Alps between Switzerland and Austria. At 62 square miles it’s the 6th smallest country in the world, but has the world’s second highest GDP per person thanks to it’s status as a tax haven. It’s the sort of anomaly on a map that people pop into for an hour, just to say they’ve been there...
One night in Noumea, the capital of the French South Pacific territory of New Caledonia, I wandered into a kava bar. It was a difficult place to find. I had a rough idea of it’s location on a map, but darkness sinks as thick as lies in the South Seas night. There weren’t any streetlights and I didn’t know the name of the road. I circled the area half a dozen times, the headlights of my car...
I landed one day late in December 2010 to explore the French overseas dependency of New Caledonia. It’s the third largest island in the South Pacific, after Papua New Guinea and New Zealand. Its coasts are fringed with barrier reefs, romantic lagoons, and more lost beaches than you’d care to count. In the interior of Grand Terre — the main island — rugged mountains climb to mist-fringed...
As I wrote in the prior blog, I still don’t know how I found the “guesthouse” where we spent that first night in Rangoon. At first it seemed like a great value. But in the end we got more than we bargained for… It was a small place owned by Indian traders, on the second floor of a decrepit colonial building lost down a forgettable side street. We had to trudge up a dark...
Of all the places I traveled in Southeast Asia, I liked Burma the best. It was by far the most traditional country in the region. It was free of Thailand’s 7-11’s, paved roads and fast food. Free of Vietnam’s scams. And it lacked that uncomfortable undercurrent of violence and broken psyches that seemed to blight Cambodia. Burmese people were quiet and kind. Old men in the...
I read a fascinating book last week called Pan American Clippers: The Golden Age of Flying Boats by James Trautman. It’s about a forgotten age of air travel, when men were men, adventure was waiting around every corner, and the world was a much larger place. It was the decade before World War 2, the early days of aviation. Air travel was still a luxury within reach of a select few. Crowds...
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