Countries
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Charleston: Charm and Cheer with a Challenging History
“In Xanadau did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea.” Kubla Khan – Samuel Taylor Coleridge I don’t know where Xanadau is, but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that it is nestled somewhere along the harbour of South Carolina’s magnificent Charleston. It is almost suspicious how gorgeous Charleston is. Each wood paneled home is pristine, the public buildings magnificent, domineering and reminiscent of Santorini at sunset. It is as if even the sun itself has been painted in the sky, so perfectly do its rays cascade down the cobblestoned street which in turn…
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Athens – Mythology, Democracy – and Souvlaki
According to Greek Mythology, Athena was the goddess of skill and the arts (among other things) and was worshipped for her cunning, creativity and craft. However, this reverence was not universal. Arachne, a maid from northern Greece, was a weaver of prodigious precision and her ability was matched only by her conceit and hubris. She quickly amassed an army of acolytes convinced that her abilities represented the apogee of human endeavour but such acclaim was not enough for Arachne. Awash with arrogance, she ultimately challenged Athena herself to a weaving competition. Athena readily accepted and both set about weaving the most stunning work they could. While Athena wove a picture…
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Rome: Meditations from the Eternal City
Reading ‘Meditations’ by Marcus Aurelius is deceptively time consuming. Accounting for all of its nuts and bolts my copy amounts to a slender 256 pages – detailing a year of Harry Potter’s adolescent antics routinely fells more than double the amount of trees. However, so laden are each of its credos, so drenched are its assertions with moral implications that range from the subtle to the seismic that my reading of it became something of an ordeal. Aurelius himself won wars in less time than it took me to actually finish it, but I recommend doing so sincerely and unreservedly. He remains among the world’s most influential philosophers and one…
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Wallabies, Waterfalls and the Uffizi of Ubirr: Kakadu National Park
“There is no fundamental difference between man and animals in their ability to feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery.” Charles Darwin Darwin, perched on the north coast of Australia’s Northern Territory, is perhaps the perfect city to be named after the British naturalist. With Litchfield National park to its south west, it is just a short hop to a wild menagerie of kangaroos, possums and even flying foxes to say nothing of the gamut of exotic birds that call Litchfield home. However, it is the roaming expanses to its south east that garner more interest. Kakadu National Park. It is a remarkable place. Expanses extend beyond every horizon, incredible…
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Anatomy of an Aussie Road Trip
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Anatomy of an Aussie Road Trip
I love inter-railing. Waking up in one city, with its history, cuisine and traditions and retiring in another complete with contrasting cultures and conventions is invigorating. Indeed, its sufficiently rousing to dispel the fatigue fostered by the sparse sleeping hours such a holiday affords. The maelstrom of currencies, customs officers and cantankerous train station clerks is both wearying but oddly ingratiating. Prime among the appeal is variety. Beginning your week sipping an espresso in Milan only to end it eating Goulash by the Danube or savouring Cevapi at Lake Bled has an appeal so enticing it borders on mesmeric. So what to make of an Aussie Road trip? Could moving…
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Wallabies, Waterfalls and the Uffizi of Ubirr: Kakadu National Park
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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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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…
