How can you be bored with Morocco? I hear you say. It’s got ancient medinas pulsing with a myriad of sights, sounds and smells; mountain peaks and precipitous canyons; sweeping desert dunes and sun drenched surf; ancient history and modern nightlife; you can even get a beer if you really want one. Many people would quite justifiably demand far less of an ideal holiday destination, but I am not really an ideal holiday destination kind of guy, as regular readers…
A positive new year message In these times of grim uncertainty, facing permatanned presidential lunacy on one side and black flagged killers on the other, amongst all the other gloom ridden headlines, we could do with something positive to start the new year off. I may be able to do little to help us fend off the perils of the turbulent year ahead of us but my travels in recent years have at least given me one source of hope…
Another taste of slum life in Burkina Faso It’s all very well luxuriating in 5 star hotels but you aint gonna learn much about a country or its people sipping fine wines and chomping on Lobster flown in from some distant sea. Sometimes you’ve just got to get down and dirty. So, I was only too happy to go back to the muddy shacks of Jongo, on the outskirts of Ouagadougou, the shabby capital of Burkina Faso, to see my…
A bit of everyday life in the suburbs of Abidjan, Ivory Coast There’s a wonderful lack of urgency on the sandy streets of Gonzague, this ramshackle development stretched out along the pedestrian unfriendly, coastal route to Grand Bassam. Why hurry anywhere, when you can dawdle in the sun and sea breeze, chat to neighbours or a shopkeeper, making a trip to the shop last twice as long as any westerner would? A goodbye to a parting guest might become a…
Dear Ethiopia Actually, why am I starting with the word dear, when what I really want to say is, “fuck you”! It’s difficult to hold anything dear about a place that has institutionalised the ripping off of visitors and does so with a level of contempt that may well be unique. If it was just me that had similar thoughts, I’d keep my whining to myself and any other embittered travellers for when we’d had a few too many beers,…
You won’t get very far on a street in Sudan before you run into a sittet shai, a tea lady providing essential hot refreshments to passersby: tea, sometimes laced with cinnamon or mint; coffee, with flavours like ginger, cloves or cardamom; karkadeyh – hibiscus tea. Whatever the choice it will come totally saturated with sugar. Crouched on little chairs behind their paraphernalia and a charcoal burner with a steaming kettle, these ladies are an essential part of everyday life. Over…
A Catholic wedding in Sudan Dear God I had expected to be writing to you with your Allah hat on, seeing that Sudan is a Muslim country, but as luck would have it I got invited to a Catholic wedding so thought I had better have a few words with you about it. Whatever religious hat you had on when you created the people of Sudan you must have been in a good mood, as they are a likeable lot…
Who’s going to put Egypt back together again? “What do you think of President Sisi”, asked one of the charming young ladies who had been helping me buy a train ticket. “Well, er um”, I waffled, trying not to commit myself too much in one direction. We were, after all, standing by a group of people queueing for tickets and the wrong opinion, too firmly expressed has caused some to disappear without trace during his excellency’s reign. “I hate him”, she…
It took me two weeks to work out what was wrong with Kiev and that’s because, on the surface of it, there’s nothing particularly wrong with it at all. Eventually I came to realise that all was not as it should be. Strolling its boulevards and broad streets, the European will feel at home amongst the grand 19th century architecture, after all this was an era when Tsarist Russia was so enamoured by life to their west that French was…
The village of Charenghi Pathar has nothing to appeal to the average tourist. So effective was this deterrent that I turned out to be the first one they had ever seen there. Although its lack of appeal was motivation enough for me to want to see it, the same could be said of many places, so it was no random event that brought me there. It was the birth place of my dear friend J who had his first opportunity…
