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What Are You Managua bout it? Nicaragua, Covid 19 and a Government in Denial
A trip through Central America. A year abroad and hopefully a dream realised. The opportunity to learn Spanish, soak in the Latin culture and trace the footsteps trod by the Incas and Aztecs hundreds of years before us. Until the whole world came to a standstill that is. Well, all but Nicaragua. It was March 10th and we were in El Tunco, a cosy surfers village in El Salvador, when the rumours began. The President was intent on closing their borders. And we were on the wrong side. Covid 19 had arrived. The vagaries of quarantine and social distancing were by now normalised in Europe and Asia but only recently had…
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Sad Siro – The 9 Worst Sporting Events I’ve Ever Attended
The future ain’t what it used to be Yogi Berra As Coronavirus marauds the globe, it has become widely accepted that attending sporting events will be among the last things to return to ‘normal’. This is tremendously disappointing for many of us, but we will at least be spared from the depression and boredom that attending sporting events often brings. Below are 9 times they did so for me. 9. Panathinaikos 2 – 0 Larissa – Superleague Greece Leoforos Alexandras Stadium, Athens – 30th April 2017 The creaking home ground of Panathinaikos FC threatens to crumble at any second and is nestled in the north east of the Greek capital.…
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2020 is our Chance to Travel Local
Perhaps it’s Ryanair’s fault. The infamous Irish airline frequently serves as a lightning rod for opprobrium but that’s only because we in Europe have such a fetish for filling their flights. They carried 146 million passengers in 2019 and 2020 was due to be even more of a budget-break bonanza. Ryanair has changed how we holiday in Europe but 2020 will be the year we dispense with the notion that travel must be international for it to be worthwhile. Recent decades have seen Irish people swap Bantry and Bundoran for Bucharest and Bratislava as our horizons relentlessly expand, our tastes grow more cosmopolitan and we demand to travel further, faster…
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Sarajevo: A Tragic History Artfully Told – But Bring a Packed Lunch
In his book ‘Shadowplay’, Tim Marshall recounts meeting a Serb for dinner in the midst of the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1995. Having listened to the Serb denounce NATO’s bombing campaign of Belgrade, Marshall retorted that Bosnians had endured more in a weekend of the Siege of Sarajevo than Serbs in Belgrade had gone through in two months. Marshall is quick to acknowledge that he was hardly complying with his title of ‘Diplomatic Correspondent’ but that’s not to say that he was wrong. Sarajevo is a remarkable city. Its people are warm, its vistas stunning and the city’s streets hosted some of the 20th century’s most consequential events. Archduke Franz…
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India – Incredible and Intoxicating: A Week in The Golden Triangle
I don’t know if the phrase Stockholm Syndrome carries any weight in India but it describes my relationship with the country succinctly and accurately. It’s a part of the world that introduces you to norms entirely warped from an occidental orientation (such as the curious cruelty of the caste system) and surreptitiously swipes closely held luxuries upon entry, personal space being the most glaring example. And I can’t wait to go back. Not even the English language escapes distortion although there is precious little of it around. ‘Road’ no longer refers to lane adorned tarmac used by relatively homogeneous motor vehicles. Instead a ‘road’ is a disheveled morass of fumes, both…
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Vietnam, Vidi, Vici: From Hoi An to Ho Chi Minh City
In Norse mythology, Balder was the God of Light and Purity. He was said to be so beautiful that light shone from his body and flowers bowed before him as he walked past. I don’t know who his modern day equivalent is, but as I marched out of the tailor in Hoi An in my custom made suit, I was willing to bet that it was me. My last piece on Vietnam ended in Hoi An, a pleasant canal-riven town. It offers markets and ornate bridges but most importantly, it offers tailors. Custom suits, typically the preserve of Louis Copeland and his cabal, are a volume business here and you’re in…
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Poland at Christmas: A White Warsaw with a Red History
Arriving in Warsaw was to have my emotions assaulted unlike any other part of my week in Poland. No longer was the skyline the preserve of the rustic and endearing buildings of yesteryear. Rather, as I peered outside from the train station, towering skyscrapers crooned over the skyline like cranes above a construction site, dominating all around them. I was in a very different place, perhaps even a different century. Even in this company, The Palace of Culture and Science stands out, known colloquially as ‘Stalin’s Penis’. Soaring into the sky at 237 metres it was constructed in 1955 and remains the tallest building in Poland. Its construction was ordered…
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Poland at Christmas: Walking in a Wroclaw Wonderland
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India and its Idiosyncrasies: Namaste to the Newbie
There is broad consensus that the dramatic increase in food allergies in Western society is partly due to the ultra sanitized world we have created for ourselves. Mr. Muscle and his army of military grade detergents have inadvertently blunted our immune systems to the point that they can’t defend us from ostensibly benign microbes later in life. Not so in India. Sanitation and serviceable sewage systems have unfortunately been deemed surplus to requirements in this sprawling sub-continent and in a country where children are more familiar with Dengue Fever than Dettol, peanut allergies are unlikely to make an impression. It’s a very serious cloud complete with an imperceptibly small silver…
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Morocco: Care for the Desert Menu?
Morocco is one of the most chaotic countries that I’ve been to, and so it’s a touch ironic that its colonial past was indirectly determined by that uber-organised bastion of central Europe, Germany. As a recently re-unified German Empire gradually advanced its military capabilities at the dawn of the 20th Century, Anglo – French hegemony became increasingly insecure. In an effort to strengthen their relationship in the face of the Germanic Sword of Damocles, Britain and France embarked upon the ‘Entente Cordiale’ in 1904. This manifest itself as a series of political agreements to foster a ‘warm understanding’ between both nations. One of these agreements was the British allowing the French…
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Poland at Christmas: Walking in a Wroclaw Wonderland
Timothy Snyder’s ‘Bloodlands’ details the barbaric brutality imposed on Eastern Europe from the Second World War through to the end of the Cold War in 1989. Encompassing the entirely avoidable and heart-achingly tragic famine in the Ukraine and the nadir of Western Civilisation that was the Holocaust, it is a painful but necessary read for anyone intent on travelling between the Baltics and the Balkans. Poland is afforded more attention than anywhere else and having read it one would be forgiven for assuming it to be a country shrouded in its history’s shadow for eternity. Mercifully, this is not the case. My sojourn through Poland would last a week and…
