Sightseeing through the Historic Heart of the Cape Peninsula October 15, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Africa, Beach Resorts, Cape Town, Rail Pass, Restaurant, South Africa, Tour, Travel Clinic, Trip , 2commentsThe Cape Peninsula has a rich history. Here is a short drive that allows time to savour it. Our route leads through avenues of ancient oaks, past vineyards nearly three centuries old, to several places that share a peaceful, old-world charm — from the cool of Groot Constantia’s cellars to the romance of small fishing boats in Hout Bay Harbour.
The low bridge of land between Table Mountain and Lion’s Head is known as Kloof Nek. Drive to here from the city centre by driving along Adderley Street towards the mountain, turning right at the end of Adderley Street into Wale Street, then taking the 6th left turn, into Buitengracht, which becomes Kloof Nek Road. (more…)
Touring Paradise, St George’s Street — ‘memory mile’ of a Naval Town part 2 October 15, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Map, Museum, Rail Pass, Sightseeing, South Africa, Tickets, Tour, Trails, Travel Clinic, Trip , 2commentsFrom Jubilee Square to ‘Black Town‘ Jubilee Square, on the left, commemorates King George V’s Silver Jubilee in 1935. By coincidence, the drinking fountain in the square commemorates an earlier jubilee — that of Queen Victoria in 1897. It was moved here recently from its original position near The Residency. A statue of Able Seaman Just Nuisance was unveiled nearby in 1985. (more…)
Disappeared Inca Empire Supremacy CUZCO part 1 September 19, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Cars, Chile, Cuzco, Destination, Flight Schedule, Sunblock, The Nile, Travel Clinic, Travellers Cheque , 2commentsMore than merely the capital of the Inca empire, the very name ‘Cuzco‘ in Quechua, the language of the Incas and still spoken today, means navel. It was the navel of the Inca world, the omphalos of their empire which at its height stretched over 2,000 miles (3,200km) from Chile in the south to Colombia in the north. It was both an administrative centre and holy city, and is said to have been conceived in the shape of a puma, with its head at Sacsahuaman, the great fortress of cyclopean stonework on the northern edge of modern Cuzco. (more…)
How safe is Air Flight Journey? Commercial Airplane Accidents and Safety September 13, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Air Tickets, Airlines, Flight Schedule, Round The World, Tickets, Travel Clinic, Travel Gear, USA , 3commentsThe most dangerous part of flying is the journey from your home to the Airport and back!
Commercial aeroplane accidents are rare events. Even so, a jetliner crash is major news all round the world, often renewing the question: how safe is it to fly? The information in this article was provided by courtesy of Boeing Aircraft Company. It attempts to answer some common questions about commercial aviation and describes the effort being made to make jet travel even safer than it already is. (more…)
Backpacking in Mani continue… August 30, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Accommodation, Europe, Greece, Rail Pass, Sightseeing, Tickets, Tour, Trip, Vaccinations , 3commentsAnother memorable walk was the nine kilometres from Yerolimena to Vitheia. This is the deep Mani, almost as far south as one can go on mainland Greece. The road passes through a landscape dotted with crumbling towers, those ‘brooding castellations’ which are the most striking feature of the region. It was from their gaunt tower houses that the feuding Maniot families of the eighteenth century bombarded each other with musket, cannon and rock, while a cowed population of serfs crept from their semi-troglodyte hovels between the fusillades. (more…)
Backpacking in Mani August 30, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Greece, Hotels, Tickets, Tour, Vaccinations , 3commentsFive hundred drachmas for the room: the matter was soon settled. Just over £3 for a generous bed, a vine-clad balcony with a splash of bougainvillea, two lemon trees in the garden below, and a view over olives to the sea — not a bad deal. Then the old lady took me firmly by the arm and led me into the bathroom. She pointed to a large hole in the ceiling. The sight of it seemed to provoke in her a torrent of recrimination. She spoke fast, too fast for my rudimentary Greek. What was she trying to convey? ‘You can’t get a plumber these days, not for love nor money. “You simply can’t trust the workmen any more, can you?’ Together we contemplated a knotted cord dangling from the black hole. Ipárhi Fero zestó?’ I persisted tiresomely, ‘Is the water hot?”Zestó, zestó,’ she echoed shrilly, irritated by a fatuous question, and launched into another dramatic monologue with a wealth of expressive gestures. Then suddenly she was gone, leaving me to ponder along the unpredictable and intractable nature of language as a medium of communication. (more…)
Big Safari Game in the Okavango Swamp, Kalahari Desert Travel August 30, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Africa, Botswana, Cape Town, Europe, Rail Pass, Sightseeing, South Africa, Tanzania, Tickets, Tour, Trails, Travel Clinic, Travelling Bag, Trip, Vaccinations , 5commentsWe slid through the swamps while animals criss-crossed our path before and aft; kudu, zebra, buffalo, impala, and a herd of fifteen giraffe, splashing through the water with feet big as plates. Matata poled gracefully; he could have been punting down the Cam as his pole pushed blue and white water lilies aside. His ears were sharp as a jackal’s and he could spot the tracks of a hippo from an extraordinary distance. The lilypad sized footprints, at least one foot across, sank deep into the mud — heavy, purposeful tracks. (more…)
Big Safari Game in the Okavango Swamp, Kalahari Desert Travel August 30, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Africa, Botswana, Travel Clinic, Travelling Bag , 6commentsStranded in the Kalahari desert we had no water and half a packet of Marie biscuits. The bus from Francistown had broken down again and the passengers disembarked, squatting in the cumbersome shade of a baobab tree. They, like us, were shifty-eyed; there had been no rain in Botswana for four years and the lions of the Kalahari were getting hungry. In Gaborone, a week before, we had watched the mauled body of a German girl carried into the hospital. Her death reminded us of the dangers of complacency in Africa. In the shadow of the bus, a vulture wheeling overhead, I kept my eyes fixed on the bush behind us. (more…)
Not on the Itinerary continue… August 8, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Brazil, England, France, Hotels, Round The World, Tour, Travel Clinic , 3commentsNow I felt well under par. Lying on the bed, which was very old- fashioned but deliciously comfortable, I thought of my home, my Queen and my country. The time was now about nine-thirty, and I must have looked ghastly, for a young nurse who popped in with a set of pyjamas sized up the situation in a second and popped out again, running down the corridor calling for help. (more…)
Not on the Itinerary August 8, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Accommodation, Air Tickets, Cars, Destination, Hotels, Moscow, New York, Round The World, Russia, Sightseeing, Tickets, Tour, Travel Clinic , 5commentsAlthough my churchgoing is confined usually to weddings and funerals, there are times when I am certain that one guardian angel at least has been detailed to watch over my welfare.
Such an occasion occurred halfway through my holiday in Russia. I had taken a package tour to Moscow and Leningrad primarily for the White Nights Festival of the Arts in June — an annual event of Soviet cultural life when the sun hardly sets for a fortnight and old men sit in the public gardens for half the night playing speed-chess. (more…)
A Slice of Big Apple August 2, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Accommodation, Cars, Destination, Hotels, Italy, Motel, New York, Restaurant, Travel Clinic, Travelling Bag , 6commentsSix gritty months of fumbling with biros and over-read text books in a level tedium were wiped out. Wiped out by a five-hour flight to a city where riding the subway is an act of hedonism, and where the pollution on the streets works on the brain like speed, driving people scrambling to the summits of New York City’s towers of granite and power. (more…)
Springtime for Czechoslovakia July 14, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Czech Republic, Europe, Hotels, Insurance, Moscow, Museum, Prague, Sightseeing, Tickets, Tour, Trails, Travel Clinic, Trip, Vietnam , 5commentsIrena lived in a late-Seventies block of flats on the edge of town, half a mile from the Russian barracks, part of an ugly outer-urban sprawl. After buying me lunch in a new concrete hotel called, romantically, The Interflora, she drove me back at high Skoda speed through the centre of town — choke full out, engine howling in second gear as we skidded across wet cobblestones, clipping kerbs and narrowly avoiding the numerous potholes and dug-up sections where slow attempts were being made to repair the water mains, shattered by the minus-twenty-five February temperatures. The only vehicles Irena took any notice of were the thin double trams, locked inscrutably into their own system, clanging their way up and down the narrow streets making unmistakable tram noises. Saturday afternoon shoppers shared the pavements with soldiers in iron-grey overcoats wandering about in twos and threes.
“You can tell the difference by their boots,” Irena told me before I’d had a chance to ask the question. Some of the Russian soldiers (pull-on boots, no laces) looked Mongolian and very young. (more…)
My Thailand Travel Diary part 1 June 12, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Bangkok, Hotels, London, Thailand, Tokyo, Travel Clinic, USA, Vietnam , add a commentTokyo, the Okura Hotel. Girls in kimonos and obis stand by the elevators on each floor to greet arriving and departing guests, with a great deal of bowing. After unpacking soiled clothes, I anxiously fill out a list stamped with the warning: “Garments badly worn out will be returned unlaundered.” Ergo, my frayed shirts and frazzled underwear will probably be rejected. The room-maids trot, rather than walk, and they bow low both before and after turning down the bed.
The drive to Kunitachi Hall, in Tsuyama, takes two and a half hours on streets even more clogged with Toyotas, Isuzus, Hondas than Manhattan’s. The average age of the players in the Kunitachi Orchestra is only twenty. But they are lightning learners, good-looking, well-dressed, polite, and harder-working than American and European orchestra musicians would be able even to imagine: we rehearse for four hours without intermission or break. (more…)
The Winter Palace: A masterpiece by Italian and French architects on Neva continue… May 4, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Accommodation, Bank Note, Beach Resorts, Credit Card, Flight Schedule, Library, Memorial, Moscow, Museum, Paris, Travel Clinic, Travellers Cheque , 3commentsWith Catherine the Great in power we find a new style creeping into the character of the buildings, classical tendencies from the West replacing Elisabeth’s Russian rococo style, the Palladian influence reaching as far as St Petersburg. The town gradually became, particularly in the reign of Alexander I, an ‘ Empire’ town; its classicist features were introduced first by Quarenghi and later maintained by Rossi. Rinaldi, the Italian architect, and the French Vallin de la Mothe, both employed by Catherine the Great, brought the Louis XVI style to St Petersburg, but on an overwhelming scale, inspired and required by the gigantic dimensions of the Neva. (more…)
The Amalienborg: A group of four lovely palaces around an octagonal piazza April 24, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Accommodation, Europe, Italy, Library, Memorial, Museum, Paris, Travel Clinic , add a commentThe Royal Residence in Copenhagen is generally known as Amalienborg. The castle is not one great palatial structure but consists of four palaces each standing alone round an octagonal courtyard. This is the Amalienborg Plads (` Place‘ or ‘ Square ‘), so called after the old castle Sofie Amalienborg, which was built in 1667 by King Frederik III’s queen Sofie Amalie, practically in the space occupied by the Amalienborg Plads. Sofie Amalienborg was burnt down as early as 1689. The great garden of the castle, however, did survive. At the back of the garden, and in line with it, was a military parade-ground which was rather larger than the garden. When the whole of this area was built over in the eighteenth century, in the centre of it a square was laid’ out which was given the name Amalienborg Plads. (more…)
Ceremonies in the House of God April 20, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Beach Resorts, Egypt, Travel Clinic, Travel Insurance, Travellers Cheque , add a commentThe concept of the temple as the “house of god” has been accepted, with the proviso that it should not be taken too literally. But in examining the relationship between the physical elements of the temples and the ceremonies that took place therein, the concept helps to illuminate Egyptian religious attitudes. Some such relationship is inherent in all religious structures, of course, even when the concepts and the temples differ greatly from those of the ancient Egyptians, as in Christianity. In the classical Greek temple, for example, the statue of the god was retained but the altar was situated in an area in front of the temple; the same happened with the ancient Roman temple. And in these two civilizations, not only did the most important moment of worship, the sacrifice, take place outside the temple, but it occurred on certain occasions only. (more…)
Later Additions to the Temple of Karnak April 19, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Africa, Air Tickets, Beach Resorts, China, Egypt, Library, Lodges, Malaysia, Museum, South Africa, Thailand, The Nile, Travel Clinic , add a commentThis is a singular monument, perhaps unique among all those preserved in Egypt. Its general orientation is not east-west like the Amon sanctuary, but north-south. It is in rectangular form, divided into two parts that go along the entire length of the structure. The western part includes a colonnaded room whose minor axis is aligned with the axis of the sanctuary of Amon ; north of this room there are three chapels. The eastern section is subdivided into three parts: the southern part includes a colonnaded room surrounded by smaller rooms; the central part consists basically of three rooms aligned on their axis but oriented east-west; finally, the northern part includes a series of rooms that culminated to the north in a solar sanctuary (the same kind as we have seen in Hatshepsut’s funerary temple at Deir el-Bahri). (more…)
The Roman Empire March 29, 2008
Posted by flyman in : Italy, Vaccinations , add a commentAfter the fall of Magna Graecia and the decline of the Etruscan civilization, the Roman Empire emerged as a great republic able to take advantage of two colonies in which scientific, artistic and philosophical scholarship was without match.
During the early years of the Republic, the Romans’ apathy to art and general conservatism makes it difficult to summarize their architectural achievements. After the fall of the Republic, however, the great generals, Sulla, Pompei and Julius Caesar, whose military victories provided a cause for monuments to be built in celebration, promulgated one of the great periods of Roman building. Caesar’s heir, Octavian, or Augustus as he was later known, boasted that he had found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble. In fact, the Roman development of the Etruscan arch into the vault and the ingenious invention of concrete as the principal load-bearing building material, would have Augustus’ own successor, Tiberius (AD14-37), find a city of marble and leave a city of concrete. (more…)
