Category Archives: Travel
The Velvet Queen
A tip for walkers
Here’s your New Year’s present
Feast your eyes on Windjana Gorge in the Kimberley, West Australia Continue reading Here’s your New Year’s present
The Greenhouse: Audur Ava Olafsdottir
-You won’t get far on dreams, Lobbi, Dad would say. Continue reading The Greenhouse: Audur Ava Olafsdottir
‘An Exact Observer of all things in Earth, Sea and Air’
He wrote the first bestselling travel books which inspired Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels, and gave us many new words from barbeque, chopsticks, cashew and avocado to sub-species. He has more than 1,000 words in the OED. He circumnavigated the world three times and visited all 5 continents. He visited the Galapagos 150 years before Darwin and Australia 80 years before Cook. He described plants and animals never seen by a European. Nelson’s sailors studied his Discourse of Winds, Tides and Currents. He was quoted by Darwin, Nelson, Humboldt and Cook. He documented the effects of marijuana, described how soy sauce was made and drank the Spanish version of a cappuccino. He rescued Alexander Selkirk.
His burial site is unknown and he is largely forgotten. Continue reading ‘An Exact Observer of all things in Earth, Sea and Air’
Daniel Mendelsohn: An Odyssey
Gert in Kerala
Kerala State in Southern India is known as God’s Own Country. It has all the delightful features of other parts of India; temples, music, colour, great food, agreeable and helpful people, luxuriant vegetation, wonderful flowers… I could go on, but the thing it does have, unlike many other parts of India, is a sufficiency of Toilets. You may wish to call them bathrooms, lavatories, washrooms, but they all amount to the same thing. It has an adequate supply of reasonably clean sanitation. Kerala’s toilet coverage is almost universal – 97 percent. This is to my mind a key indicator of the way people are respected there.
Continue reading Gert in Kerala
Chicken Lady goes to Nar Nar Goon
Saga Land The island of stories at the edge of the world. Richard Fidler and Kari Gislason
I’ve begun studying Icelandic, and I believe that the literature produced during the Middle Ages in that remote island close to the Arctic Circle is one of the most important in the world.
Jose Luis Borges