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Vietnam, Vidi, Vici: From Ha Noi to the Hai Van Pass
Often, they carried each other, the wounded or weak. They carried infections. They carried chess sets, basketballs, Vietnamese-English dictionaries, insignia of rank, Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts….. They carried diseases, among them malaria and dysentery……… By daylight they took sniper fire, at night they were mortared, but it was not battle, it was just the endless march, village to village, without purpose, nothing won or lost.“ – Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried ‘The Things They Carried’ is one of the pre-eminent books about the Vietnam War. It is haunting and visceral in equal measure while affording the reader as comprehensive an understanding of war as can be gleaned from print.…
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Machu Pizza – Why is good local food so hard to find?
A ‘Curate’s Egg’ is one of the more bizarre idioms of the English language. Meant to describe something which has both good and bad qualities, it has its roots in a now defunct 19th Century British satirical magazine, although the phrase itself has shown remarkable staying power. It now crops up quite widely and I would submit that the tourism industry is one of the most rampant Curate’s Eggs that modern society affords us. Often bringing vast wealth to the area in question, tourism assuredly comes at a cost and even if loss of identity or authenticity are less easily assigned a price tag they are no less discernible. Economists…
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Berlin: Please Mention The War
“Yeah, Paris is nice, but I can bring you around the corner and show you where Hitler blew his brains out. You can’t say that standing outside the Louvre”. It was hard to argue with our sprightly tour guide, even if I was in a particularly argumentative mood. Standing outside the Brandenburg Gate on a brisk January morning I was freezing and numb to the wonders around me. That would soon change. The ensuing week would imbue me with a fascination for history, a reverence for Berliners (and a disaffection with EDM) which has sustained to this day. Perhaps no city on earth has facilitated as much horror as Berlin…
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Rio de Janeiro to New Delhi: Poverty and Pride of Slum Life
If sitting on the Copacabana, sipping beer and gazing across the idyllic Rio coastline is not heaven on earth, then it is astonishingly close. The weather is invariably stunning, the water glistening and all watched over by Christ the Redeemer himself. I can’t claim to be a beach lover, but nowhere has been closer to converting me than the Copacabana. However, this is all a matter of perspective. Because my Brahma wasn’t served from an Irish Bar wedged into the sand in the middle of the beach. It was brought to me by the array of people that trudge up and down the beach, a case of beer on their…
