A Visit to Dominica September 1, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Caribbean, Hotels, Rail Pass, Restaurant, Sightseeing, Tickets, Tour, Trails, Trip , 3commentsA strange thing happened this year. A man I’d met only twice, a bit of a loner, invited me to go with him to the West Indies. I fancied him so I said yes.
I knew of Dominica only as the birthplace of Jean Rhys, a writer I deeply admire. Now when I read about the island I discovered that it is volcanic and mountainous and is the last refuge of the Carib Indians, the descendants of proud cannibals who starved to death rather than accept the fate of slavery. It is one of the wilder places on earth and contains rainforest, and boa constrictors. (more…)
The Drums of Nefta August 31, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Africa, France, Hotels, Rail Pass, Tour, Trails, Trip , 6commentsIt is late evening and Marianne, Walter and I have just finished a large couscous washed down by several bottles of heady local wine. My companions start talking in Arabic again and I have the depressing sense of being a hick tourist fallen among real travellers. Wine- numbed and bloated, I lapse into silent recapitulation of what has brought us here.
I met Marianne on Jerba, an island claiming mythic status as the place where the Sirens held Ulysses. I too was becalmed, though the Sirens were inaudible. I would take bus trips from the island to towns in southern Tunisia but they never lasted longer than a day. Their chaos and squalor did not compare well with the pristine beauty of Jerba and, as a lone male out of season, I was prey to a horde of street hustlers. On Jerba I had made it clear that I was not in the market for anything and they left me alone. (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…)
Gypsy Serenade August 26, 2008
Posted by dodo in : England, Germany, Hotels, Restaurant , 3commentsBy the time the train arrived in Madrid the Arabs had stolen my coat. I had not been long in the restaurant car: ten minutes, the length of a cognac. I was coming south from England; they were returning home from a factory in Germany.
On the way to the hotel I stopped the taxi to have a drink in a bar. Outside it was winter and raining. He was standing inside, an old brown overcoat and a white shirt buttoned without a tie, around forty. One of his sons was dancing in worn-out boots, the other singing for him, to the clapping of hands without a guitar. They looked about ten, with long hair, both so brown and handsome I could have hugged them; (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…)
Greece Delphi: the Sacred Centre, the Navel of the World continue… August 8, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Accommodation, Airlines, Cars, Europe, France, Hotels, Motel, Museum, Rail Pass, Tickets, Trails, Travelling Bag, USA , 3commentsThe village of Kastri was built over the site of the sanctuary and this proved a problem in the nineteenth century when archaeologists wanted to examine the famous oracle site. International rivalry developed over the excavation rights. France won, but at the expense of rehousing all the villagers of Kastri at another site, New Kastri (now the modern Delphi), just over 1/2 mile (1km) to the west. French archaeological investigation has gone on to a greater or lesser degree ever since. (more…)
Boating in Eire Dolmens and Blarney, feeling of plunging Water, eXhilaration Adventure July 25, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Aquarium, Art Gallery, Coliseum, Dolphinarium, Hotels, Motel, Museum, Oceanarium, Planetarium, Restaurant , 3commentsIt was a bright, clear spring morning when the boat docked in Rosslare and I disembarked in Eire.
Finding the roads almost traffic free, I decided to push on as quickly as possible towards the harsh and romantic west coast.
I was making good time when my eye was caught by a small, wooden sign, on which was written, “Harristown Dolmen“. I pulled up opposite, wound down the window and stared. At this point I might as well confess to being what is called in the trade a “megalithomaniac”. Any stone, no matter how small, if it has the tag “megalithic”, then I’m hooked. (more…)
Aboard the Trans—Siberian Express July 25, 2008
Posted by dodo in : China, Embassy, England, Moscow, Rail Pass, Restaurant, Russia, Sightseeing, Tickets, Tour, Trails, Travelling Bag, Trip , 3commentsShe started sobbing three hours before the border. The conductress tried to console her with a glass of sweet, strong tea but without much success. She remained in the long druggeted corridor, a crumpled figure in a pink dressing gown watching the forests spinning madly by. The tankard holding the glass depicted a Slavic swordsman defending a child and she held it tight as a keepsake.
It certainly was a crying matter. The birch forests of Siberia, so upright, so elegant in autumn, had been broken by this winter campaign. Brought into perfect arcs by wind and snow, the younger birches littered the track-side like ribs and tusks while the old and brittle, unable to bow before the onslaught, rose into the air like splintered spines. (more…)
River Journey up the Zaire July 23, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Accommodation, Aquarium, Art Gallery, Canada, Coliseum, Dolphinarium, Hotels, Motel, Museum, Oceanarium, Planetarium, Restaurant, Trip , 4comments“Into the eighth day and I really feel I’ve had enough. I’d like to be transported to a bathroom in the Ritz and then to a dry Martini in the bar.”
Eighth day, Zaire River. We often lost each other on the seven barges being pushed a thousand miles up the Zaire River, once Conrad’s Congo.
I found my son Joseph, aged seven, in one of the five bars with Sammy, a young soldier. to-dot puzzle. Sammy was concentrating on Joseph’s dot-to-dot puzzle.
“He’s very good at them,” said Joseph. “He never misses a dot.” “Where’s Daddy?”
“Gone for a pee at the back.”
It was all right for men, they could go over the side. Women had to cope with the dark, smelly “cabinets” and first invite the rats to leave through the crumbling rusty holes. These were the boats left at the Belgian Congo’s independence. (more…)
In Pursuit of the American Dream July 18, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Motel, Museum, Paris, Tour, USA , 5comments“Kis mah grits,” said the waitress, conversing with a regular customer as she served me up a 99-cent breakfast in the diner at Orlando Airport.
I was frequently to hear Americans exhorted to kiss each other’s fried porridge, in a parody that seems to be the last legacy of the Southerner who occupied the White House in the dark days before Ronald Reagan. Kissing grits has supplanted the fashion for kissing ass, which is surprising in an upwardly mobile society.
An hour later I was drinking (what else?) Florida orange-juice beside a motel swimming pool while the early-morning sun gently warmed away jet-lag. The lady on a nearby lounger ordered the waiter to put a slug in her juice. (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…)
Excited Spanish Travel, Rail Pass Matanza July 10, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Air Tickets, Andorra, Europe, Rail Pass, Sightseeing, Tickets, Tour, Trails, Trip , 4commentsSix-thirty am. I’m already dressed and out of the couchette as the train slows to a halt in the darkness. Outside, nothing but gravel and a road on one side: on the other, the small halt with its sign L’Hospitalet and the bus waiting to bear us on the long winding climb, leaving behind an ever-lengthening panorama pierced with points of light. The snow stands in cliffs on the uphill side of the road, cut by snowploughs only hours before.
In Old Andorra, Peter is waiting with his Santana Land-Rover, and greets me heartily. Has there been a matanza yet? I ask. “There was one at Margarita’s on Monday. I think there’s another tomorrow at Mestre’s,” he answers.
Our goal is fourteen dizzying kilometres up into the Spanish Pyrenees. A community still living in an almost cashless economy, to a pattern already set in the fourteenth century. One of the last outposts of a peasant culture which is rapidly passing from the world, governed entirely by the seasons and depending little on manufactured inputs. (more…)
A Fair Show, happy Travelers Diaries July 6, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Accommodation, Aquarium, Cars, Cash, China, Destination, Dolphinarium, Ireland, Library, Museum, Restaurant, Round The World, Tour , 3commentsThrough Leinster and Munster, along Connaught lanes and highways there’s a movement. Brazenly on verges, tucked behind hedges, parked in laybys there are caravans. Not tourists but the homes of the Irish Travellers, the Tinkers. Herds of their horses hold up the traffic. Greys, chestnuts, roans, bays and the especial pride, the batty mares: great coloured, patched horses, piebald and skewbald, hooves swathed in shaggy hair. They’re all heading along roads which lead to the nub, the October fair, Ballinasloe. A convergence for horses and horsemanship, dealing and drinking, exchanging news and the “crack”. “You’ll never see as many horses together as you will at Ballinasloe. Once Seamus McGinty rode down the high street at the head of sixty, his sons as outriders flanking their wealth.” (more…)
Traveling alone, Rail Journey triple alliance part 2 June 29, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Cuzco, Germany, Hotels, VISA , 4commentsThe train pulled its way up onto the altiplano with its stunning emptiness and its snow-capped mountains beyond. Whatever pleasure one has in the newness of it all, the harshness soon becomes apparent. For the spectator the coruscating sodium light and the pounding of one’s temples from the 15,000-foot altitude are not conducive to appreciation. For the Indian there is a bleakness that their bright clothing cannot efface — dun-coloured landscapes, an absence of trees and shrubs, and a piercing wind setting up miniature whirlwinds which bob across the tableau. Three or four adobe houses cluster near the railway, where a dog may raise himself to give sporting chase to the train. In fixing such a picture in time, one had mood in plenty but no focal point — no dominant feature that would lead the eyes into the rest of the scene. Puno, a frontier town in both senses, on the shores of Lake Titicaca had both mood and focal point. (more…)
Traveling alone, Rail Journey triple alliance part 1 June 29, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Air Tickets, Flight Schedule, Hostels, Hotels, Motel, Pacific, Peru , 4commentsI do not recall how much my memories of that night-time journey were the creation of fitful dreams or the stuff of actuality. The blackness of the night and my own fears were real enough as the lights of the bus probed the landscape, revealing steep escarpments and the outlines of vertical cliffs. Sometimes, peering over the side of the bus, I caught sight of the ghostly white caps of Pacific rollers coming to spit their fury at a continent. The bus swept down the hills and then ground its way up another hilltop through a succession of sandy switchbacks. I kept thinking of the drunken Cary Grant in North by Northwest, as he strove to bring his car under control. Was our driver chewing coca leaves, as so many long distance drivers did in Peru, to ease the burdens of an eight-hour journey? I looked around the bus at the crumpled figures managing some sleep. Two rows in front of me a Japanese man slumped against a girl with a shock of auburn curls. A strange couple, I thought. (more…)
Malmaison: the Favourite country residence of Napoleon and Josephine continue… May 22, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Accommodation, Destination, England, France, Library, Museum, Paris, Turkey , add a commentIt soon became obvious that the château was too small. Percier and Fontaine added on two wings and pulled down the dividing walls in order to enlarge the drawing rooms. In doing so they practically caused the main structure to collapse and had to reinforce it with massive pilasters which still today look somewhat incongruous. The interior was decorated with care in the taste of the day. The walls were hung with both antique and modern pictures. Two red marble obelisks adorned one of the doorways; they came originally from the Château de Rueil, once the residence of Cardinal de Richelieu but now nonexistent. Berthault built follies in the shade of the trees; a Gothic aviary, a temple of love, sphinxes were dotted about the groves and the banks of the stream. (more…)
Malmaison: the Favourite country residence of Napoleon and Josephine May 22, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Accommodation, Air Tickets, Airlines, Destination, Egypt, Embassy, Flight Schedule, France, Hostels, London, USA , add a commentMalmaisonis not a palace. Yet Napoleon lived there during the dawn and the decline of his tumultuous career; Josephine loved it, improved it, and when destiny turned against her, retired there and finally died there. And so, by virtue of its owners, Malmaison deserves a place here.
It was a charming residence, built about 162o, just outside the village of Rueil, and it had been inhabited in turn by several families, the last of which was the Le Couteux de Moley. Abbe Delille described the stream which crossed the park in verse and regretted not having spoken more of this delightful spot in his poems on ‘Gardens’. Madame Vigee-Lebrun, who dined there in 1789 with Abbe Sieyès and several other enthusiasts of the Revolution, told how: ‘Mr de Moley inveighed against the nobles; everyone shouted, held forth . . . Abbe Sieyès said: In fact I believe we shall go too far.’ (more…)
Fontainebleau: A hunting lodge which saw four centuries of French history continue… May 21, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Museum, Sweden, USA , add a commentThe influence of Louis XV, like that of his predecessor, was detrimental. He demolished the Galerie d’Ulysse, decorated by Primaticcio, an action much regretted and criticised at the time, as well as the Pavillon des Poêles dating from Henri II, and he replaced this with the Gros Pavillon employing Mansart as architect. Louis XVI converted the rooms formed by the angle of the courtyard into enchanting petits appartements, and he also enlarged the Galerie Francois I.
In 1793 the sans-culottes behaved here with greater restraint than at Versailles. ‘The Revolution destroyed little’, remarked Charles Terrasse, ` (more…)
Tsarskeo Selo: The magnificent palace of the Empress Catherine the Great continue… May 7, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Accommodation, Air Tickets, England, Flight Schedule, Library, Memorial, Museum, Russia , add a commentThe staircases were decorated by murals — the work of Hubert Robert, the French painter of romantic landscapes with classical ruins. One of these murals represented the Gallery of the Louvre, lit from above, and another the imaginary ruins of the same gallery. The state apartments, which adjoin one another, overlook the main forecourt. First comes the famous Amber Room(iantarnaia komnata) with its walls completely panelled in amber, pale as honey. It had been made specially for the King of Prussia, Friederich Wilhelm I. Peter the Great saw it at Mon- bijou when he was in Berlin in 1717. The sergeant-king agreed to surrender it to him ‘ in exchange for eighty tall recruits’. (more…)
Tullgarn: A charming lakeside summer-palace of the Swedish monarchy continue… April 25, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Europe, Italy, Library , add a commentFirst, the building was altered in various ways: another storey was added to the wings, the roof was rebuilt and a new staircase was provided because the old ones allowed smells from the damp cellars to creep up into the house. But, for all this, the exterior of the house does not appear to have been changed in any very radical way. The interior, on the other hand, was completely redecorated in a light, unoppressive neo-classical style. This decoration, applied to the well-proportioned rooms of the old baroque mansion, has produced a very pleasant amalgam. It has recently been restored in an exceptionally sensitive manner and the effect is delightful.
Frederik Adolf had visited Italy, as all high-born young men of his day were expected to do, and had brought back with him more than a passing enthusiasm for classical art and decoration. On his tour, he also acquired a number of books on the classical antiquities (one of them was a present from the Pope), and these were in several instances a source of inspiration for the artists who executed the new decorations in his house. (more…)
