Category: Travels for Fun
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THE STOPPING PLACE
Kuala Besut and Pulau Perhentian – February 1978 I lay on the floor of Jaafar’s house with a map of Malaysia spread out in front of me, and let my eye wander north. Jaafar took in travellers at his home, half a kilometre back in the jungle behind the fishing village of Beserah – no electricity, no plumbing, a big room and a row of mattresses – and the days there had a way of dissolving into nothing much at all. That was the point of the place. But a map…
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THREE EMPIRES, ONE AFTERNOON
Malacca, Malaysia – 17 February 1978 Malacca felt like a different country. Kuala Lumpur was concrete and traffic and the muezzin’s call; Malacca was crumbling laterite and Dutch gravestones going soft in the rain. I found St Paul’s first – walls without a roof, the sea showing clean through empty window frames where glass had never been replaced. Inside, Dutch tombstones lay flat against the walls, their lettering worn but legible if you crouched close: Dutch names, Dutch dates, a life and a death recorded three centuries before mine in a…
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THE YEAR OF THE HORSE
Kuantan and Beserah – 3–8 February 1978 The yellow book did it. Tony Wheeler’s South-East Asia on a Shoestring – the traveller’s bible, already dog-eared and coming apart at the spine – beckoned me to the east coast, away from the ordered calm of the Universiti of Malaya campus in Kuala Lumpur and toward what I was convinced was the real Malaysia. Ten days of Chinese New Year holiday stretched ahead of me. It was the Year of the Earth Horse; the New Year fell on the seventh of February. I…
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TARZAN NEVER MADE IT TO THIS JUNGLE. BUT I DID.
My earliest perception of a jungle came from the old Tarzan movies – Johnny Weissmuller re-runs, then all the other bare-chested muscular guys who followed on the big screen and television. I gathered that jungles were full of swinging vines, chimps and elephants. I didn’t know at the time that those “jungles” were mostly Hollywood sets. So I found myself in genuinely unfamiliar territory when I explored my first real jungle – a tropical rainforest in Malaysia in 1978. The real jungle looked a whole lot more chaotic than the ones…
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THE SAFARI LESS TAKEN
My neighbour from Aleppo, Syria and mate for 35 years, Scott Christiansen, and I were in Tanzania last month for a consultancy. It was a Sunday, and we had Bambara groundnut and sweetpotato leaves growing out of our ears. So we decided to get out of Dodge. When in Tanzania the thing to do is to go on a safari. But the Swahili word ‘safari’ simply means going on a journey. Scott and I decided to take a safari in Tanzania … but just not the type you’re thinking of. I’m…
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KARIJINI
If you’re a redophile then I’ve got just the place for you. Head to the Pilbara region of in the north central part of Western Australia. Iron ore country. The landscape glows with deep reds and earthy ochres. Iron deposits layered over 2.5 billion years. The red ancient banded iron formations are among the oldest rocks on Earth. The red of the Pilbara isn’t just pretty to look at. It’s pretty to cash in at the bank. The Pilbara is a global powerhouse in iron ore production. Pilbara mines export nearly…
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MURDER IN FJÄLLBACKA
I love a good murder mystery and am always on the lookout for new authors. So when my Norwegian friend, Inger, told me about a series of crime novels based near her Swedish holiday home, I was keen to read on. For a couple of years, I immersed myself in the Swedish coastal town of Fjällbacka as I read a series of Camilla Läckberg novels. I think I read nine books about the husband-and-wife duo of writer Erica Falck and police detective Patrik Hedström as they solved crimes in their little…
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CAN THO
I arrived in Can Tho, Vietnam’s gateway city to the Mekong Delta, after an all-night flight and a three-hour drive from Ho Chi Minh City. I was too tired to set out and explore the city … and it quickly became too hot and humid. So I did the lazy photographer method and just set the camera on time lapse on my hotel room’s balcony while I took a snooze. There was a fair bit of activity on the Hau River, which is a distributary of the Mekong and passes through…
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A SUNDAY STROLL IN HARARE
Jet lag got the best of me so instead of sleeping in on my first day in Zimbabwe, I woke up at dawn. It looked like a beautiful spring day in Harare so I put on my walking shoes to explore. There’s always one destination I aim for when I arrive to a new place: the botanic garden. Google Maps said it was a 30-minute walk from my hotel so despite the advice from the hotel reception who said you can’t walk there, I set out regardless. Google Maps was right.…
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