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Brazil in Five Movements
FIRST LIGHT In the mountains and rainforests of Teresopolis. A shouldered pack, up the hill and the thrill when tarmac road finds wooded trail. The dappled canopy and the instant impact of becoming part of a kingdom of old things, life unseen and leaf litter. The polite, trilling birdsong. Nature unlimited. Huge trees, ferns, bromeliads →
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Baba: Video Night on the Ganges
Published by In the Know Traveler →
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Last hours in Istanbul
The first proper sunset in ninety days of snow and grey and now a city which looked always to its past flamed with the passion of the present. Colour flashed everywhere: the Bosporus a bottle-green, the sky streaked with crimson and the severe Byzantine battlements tinted a surreal orange by an onslaught of natural light →
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Morocco, in Brazil
Unzipping the tent flaps the dune appeared closer and taller than when seen in daylight, like something threatening using darkness as cover for stealth. There was the silhouette of a tree. A few stars. I was in Brazil, the trees dripping with the morning’s downpour. But the words “remote desert” in a news article had →
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Taranto: forgotten island
Published by Intrepid Times →
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Laurenzo
Laurenzo’s garden was a patch of Mediterranean perfection. The grape vines curled around the pillars, cats dozed on tables and in a wall a cross had been carved by a stonemason who pre-dated King Charles II. In this sun-dappled arcadia I was the only guest. The Albanian flag flapped on a growing breeze on the →
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Himalayan fury
Their laughter light and true in the still air, two teenage sweethearts perch on a dry stone wall by a locked and sun-dappled monastery. Shafts of light on far-off hills. Phewa lake in the valley below looks as small and inviting as an English mere in summer. Kites wheeling on thermals. An idle circling of →
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Midnight Express
Disembarking the wind-swept ferry at Canakkale in the Dardanelles Straits and the ghosts of history are everywhere you look. On the left a small museum plays a continuous big screen loop of mustachioed Ottoman soldiers marching off to war. A few metres away a field gun of World War One vintage hones in on the →
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My Catholic conversion(s)
Twice in recent years I have found myself making signs of devotion. The first was on a starless night by the ash-swept banks of the Ganges, where Hindu souls depart this world in a grand and eerie spectacle. The silent, unseen river was to my right, left the roaring furnaces, and centre-stage the tiny cloth-wrapped →
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As I walked out one morning
The conical hood of his djellaba is distinctive and makes him look important, like some medieval monk on a secretive errand. →
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Fez Diary: Part Two
Fez had the oddest, most eclectic drinking scene of any place I had visited. →
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Fez Diary: Part One
After a week of the school bathroom ordeal I decided to make a concerted effort to find a hammam. →
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Official Business
It was so much like a jail from the Wild West that it was difficult to believe it wasn’t a movie set. →
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The Brute and the Banshee
The two boxers – the brute and the banshee – screamed with spittle flying →
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Moroccan classroom nights
Never was a building so defiantly unaffected by the weather. →
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Metro woman
The Bangalore Metro, and a child’s face pressed against the window; as it should be, curious of everything. →
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Calcutta small talk
‘Are there laws in England that prohibit a student dating a teacher in your country?’ →
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Nightcycling
Infinite heaps of trash – the burial mounds of the 21st century, and the overpowering smell of unwanted things. →
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