Tongue Tied in England - Northumberland I
could have grown up with an accent needing subtitles. Had my family
not become ten-pound tourists in 1961, I might have preferred singin
hinnies to Anzac biscuits, gaan oot to de’en nowt, and being in fine
fettle to nursing the hangover one gets from too much Newcastle
(that’s“newcassel”) Brown Ale. A host of ancient Scandinavian and
Germanic words would have coloured my speech.
In Dracula's Shadow - Yorkshire, England “For
a moment or two I could see nothing, as the shadow of a cloud obscured
St. Mary’s Church and all around it. Then as the cloud passed... it seemed to me as
though something dark stood behind the seat where the white figure
shone, and bent over it. What it was, whether man or beast, I could
not tell.” Mina Murray’s Journal, 11 August.
It
was, of course, Dracula, bending over Lucy to drink her blood, a
haunting scene in a cliff-top graveyard revealed by moonlight. Bram
Stoker must have seen Whitby under a full moon, and perhaps even
wrapped in a North Yorkshire sea mist, for bathed in warm sunshine, the
historic coastal town looks too pretty to have inspired his
19th-century horror classic. ETHIOPIA
High Stepping in the Simien Mountains Deeply ingrained with dirt, the tiny hand inches forward, then jerks back, as the youngster steels himself to shake my paler but not much cleaner hand. He takes a steadying breath and reaches out again. Brushes my fingers with his. Smells my scent on his skin. A white woman. Perhaps the first he has seen in his short life... In St George's Footsteps - Lalibela Long before our guide identifies the holes in the wall as hoof prints, Lalibela has captured my imagination. For here, women grind grain with stones on stones while husbands and sons sell Pepsi and Kodak film to travellers come to see eleven rock-hewn churches... INDIA
In The Pink in Rajasthan Think pink if you will be in India for Holi, because of all the powders thrown and water splashed during this free-for-all festival of colour, red/pink is the longest lasting. Sacrifice some old clothes, or buy a white shirt and pants, and accept that you will sport punk-pink hair at any business meeting or social event scheduled within three weeks, for Holi is as fun as India gets and should not be missed... Himalayan High - Sikkim Twenty to five in the morning and my tent crackles with frost as I unzip. There to greet me is Orion, reclining on a mountain range painted black across a sky turning apricot and blue at its eastern extreme. Cold reaches in and grabs my fingers, which are ungloved so I can write. Breathing produces vapour clouds like cartoon speech bubbles. At least my legs are warm, protected by double long johns and sleeping bag. My top half, too, layered in a thermal top, shirt, two polofleece jumpers and the down jacket that World Expeditions provided for moments like these. Welcome to the north-east Indian state of Sikkim. IRELAND
Strange Company Indeed - Northern Ireland I’d been photographing him for half an hour when our gazes meet and my feet still. Sitting on a mossy stone, I studiy his elongated nose. His curled moustache. His pointed chin. And those eyes, all-seeing despite having watched centuries of Irish rain. Who carved this Janus (twin faced) figure? What offerings did people make - some still leave coins - before Christianity took firm hold? And how many folk since has the inscrutable idol so mesmerised they wake as if from a spell to find themselves in a damp graveyard beside a milking shed? Cow pats foul the lane to tiny Caldragh Graveyard, in County Fermanagh, but it’s worth getting muck on your shoes to see the figure which Nobel Laureate poet Seamus Heaney described as God-eyed and sex-mouthed... ITALY
In The Tuscan Chill - Tuscany Forget those stories about Tuscan sun. Stop picturing postcard-blue wash above rolling hills painted in greens and terra cotta. Tuscany snows on us, grey sky spitting icy flakes that redden our cheeks and make our noses run. And it’s early spring!
Yet there is hope this gloomy morning. For who could want more than a breakfast mug of thick hot chocolate in a café whose glass floor reveals an Etruscan pavement and medieval grain silo? Then our meeting with Michelangelo Marsili suggests the day is destined for a sunny end...
White Town Ramble - Andalucia Thyme perfumes the air as we climb, hints of peppermint and lemon spicing the mix as our boots crush wild herbs. A griffon vulture wheels overhead. Bells clink on grazing cows. In the shade of a tree we drink from a wine skin, learning to swallow while squirting the stream between almost closed teeth, or wear the water. Slightly damp, we continue along the track until it meets a mountain road.
Antonio Galindo and his handsome mule Rojo are waiting around the first bend to escort us along an old tobacco-smuggling trail. They drop behind as we push through thigh-high shrubbery, but when we stop to admire snowdrift pueblos blancos (white towns) on the hills opposite, Rojo's bell sounds loud in Andalucia's midday silence... Sunday in Santiago - Galicia Imagine for a moment it is the Middle Ages. Europe is rattling with Knights Templar and crusaders’ swords. After Jerusalem and Rome, the third most holy city in Christendom is Santiago de Compostela, because here lies the shrine of St James the Apostle, first cousin of Jesus Christ. Faith in his miraculous power sets half a million pilgrims a year, and a few adventurers and followers of fashion, on El Camino de Santiago (the Way of St James), a network of “roads” through France to the northwest Spanish city.
Eight centuries later, good fortune (rather than planning) delivers me to the holy city on a Sunday... U.S.A.
Home of the grave I was too young to register John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, but I vividly recall the bloody newspaper photographs when his brother Robert was shot five years later. Both men - one arguably the most famous president of the United States, the other a candidate for that office - are buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C. Doing Time - San Francisco Three crime-free decades after doing time for armed robbery, Darwin E. Coon is back in prison - by choice. Fortnightly he follows in the footsteps of some notorious men to chat and sell his story about being prisoner #1422 in the world’s best known jail...
Size Does Matter - Yosemite NP, California You call that a rock?This is a rock!I can’t resist reworking Crocodile Dundee’s famous quote, for in front of me is no ordinary lump of stone. More than a kilometre tall, El Capitan is one of the world’s largest granite monoliths. Californian black oaks frame ant-sized climbers making slow progress up the face of this Yosemite National Park landmark... On the Anasazi Trail - New Mexico Thirty-something years ago, I played Cowboys and Indians with the boys from down the road, baying like a coyote as I fired imaginary bullets and arrows at each other. I grew up watching feathered men ride pinto ponies across television screens in pursuit of scalps and return, triumphant, to squaws in painted tepees. But centuries before the clashes that produced Hollywood's Wild West, native Americans were irrigating corn, beans and squash, and constructing monumental multistorey masonry buildings. They were the Anasaz, and they occupied what is now the Four Corners region, where New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado meet...
Shadow Boxing - Mesa Verde. Colorado Water and time have carved alcoves into the sandstone cliff opposite. Someone has then filled them with multistorey buildings fashioned from blocks of the same stone. The round towers and square rooms look so like miniatures in a shadow box, I expect a huge hand to reach over the mesa and rearrange the display. But giants did not build Mesa Verde's architectural wonders. The Anasazi (Navajo for "ancient ones") stood just over 1.5 metres tall... Silver City - Nevada Smoke drifts from the cigar between his teeth, mixing with the hat-brim shadow that darkens the eyes watching me with a lawman’s steely gaze. Then he grins, enjoying his acting role as U.S. marshal in a town where the most dangerous crime is jay walking.But life (and crime) in this historic mining town has not always been so relaxed. Back when the road into the Nevada Hills was dirt, when miners toiled by hand in hot, wet conditions 200m beneath below ground, and reporter Samuel Clemens first signed the pen name Mark Twain, Virginia City was a very different place...
Going Remote in Vietnam - North West Crickets anyone (behead, stuff with ground peanuts and fry)? Silk worms (plunge into water and stir fry with pomelo, a woody grapefruit)? With no need, yet, to supplement our survival rations with insects, we limit our purchase from the Black Thai women to a bag of innocuous looking pink water apples. Sign language and some basic translation by our guide completes the simple roadside transaction.
Two days into a 4WD journey through Vietnam’s mountainous northwest, our interest in the Hill Tribe people is equalled by theirs in us. And part way through a limited mobile wardrobe, I have attire to match theirs; my navy, red, yellow and green plaid shorts amuse everyone!
North-South Food Trail Backpackers who breakfast on banana pancakes from Bangkok to Bulawayo, and five-star tourists who start each day with an American buffet, deny themselves one of life’s great adventures. Tucking into foreign food can take courage, but there is no better way to get into a country’s soul than via its stomach. And that’s why my friend and I decide to eat our way through Vietnam, starting in the capital...
