Category: Travels for Fun
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BRAULIO CARRILLO
Recollections from travels in Costa Rica – 1981-1986 Just north of San José, looms Braulio Carrillo National Park, a rugged park of almost 500 square kilometres. Braulio has an elevation variation of almost 3000 metres so you’ve got seven life zones from cloud forest to lowland tropical forest. Yet despite its proximity to San José most of the park was rarely visited in the 1980s simply because it was impenetrable. A highway completed in the late 1980s changed that and now Braulio is probably the most visited park, although most people…
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SANTA ROSA
After viewing the photos I’ve presented so far you might start to visualise Costa Rica as lush and verdant with raging rivers running through every valley. While that’s certainly the case in the Talamanca mountain range, if you travel less than 300 kilometres as the crow flies to the country’s northwest, to Santa Rosa, Costa Rica’s first national park, you’ll feel more like you’re travelling in the savannahs of Africa. Costa Rica has a ridiculous amount of life zone diversity for such a small country and this – together with its…
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AL FURAT
The mighty Euphrates River – better known as Al Furat to the locals – starts as a trickle in the highlands of eastern Turkey and flows for 700 kilometres through northeastern Syria before joining the Tigris River in southern Iraq. The basins of both rivers form the cradle of civilisation – Mesopotamia. The banks of the Euphrates are rich in archaeological sites – but you’d probably need a mask and snorkel to see them as they have been inundated by the rising waters caused by dams. The Roman fortress of Halabiye…
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ALEPPO’S COPPER SOUK
You will hear Aleppo’s copper souk long before you arrive. BANG BANG BANG PING PING PING BANG BANG BANG. On a narrow street in Aleppo’s old quarters, copper craftsmen in the Souq Khan al-Nahhaseen congregate as they have for hundreds of years and pound out copper products. It is a drab and filthy area where dust, ash and grit hang in the air and after visiting it you will certainly feel the need to shower. But like all of Aleppo’s old quarters if you look beyond the dirt you will find a…
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THE BRIDGE OVER THE AFRIN
About 70 kilometres northwest of Aleppo, and just a stone’s throw from the Turkish border, a Roman bridge crosses the Afrin River. I came across it one day while a mate and I were trying to find the Greek – and later Roman – city of Cyrrhus. We came to the bridge and stopped the car and said ‘Whoa – can we drive over that?’ It looked solid enough and sure enough it was. In fact for nearly 2000 years it had stood up to continued traffic. I liked to imagine…
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BATU FERRINGHI 35 YEARS LATER
In 1978, I was a scrawny 19-year-old teenager with a huge lust for adventure. I wanted to experience something exotic so I enrolled for a semester at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur. On the weekends I would leave campus and explore parts of Malaysia. I used my thumb to hitch rides and slept wherever I could set up my tent. I immersed myself in the Malay culture and loved every minute of it. On one trip to Malaysia’s east coast I wandered into a village and was introduced to…
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A PAIR OF DAYS IN PARIS
DAY 31 – Paris We can’t have a Facebook travel journal and not have the cliche picture of us at the Eiffel Tower. So here is our contribution. The weather forecast called for rain during the entire time of our stay but we woke up on Friday to find a bit of blue sky so we dashed out of our hotel and walked 3 minutes (yes, we’re that close) to the Tower. I got to the second platform and that was as far as I could go. I am terrified of…
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SOUND OF MUSIC IN SALZBURG
We came to Salzburg with our friend, Inge, so we could run through the mountains surrounding the city and sing out ‘the hills are alive…’ But the weather didn’t permit such activities. But we found the next best thing. There was an exhibition on the Von Trapp family at a Salzburg museum which allowed us to simulate Julie Andrew singing her love of the Alps. The museum had some displays on ‘The Myth of Sound of Music’. Hollywood used some creative license in the movie but the most interesting was that…
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AN OVERNIGHT IN HELSINKI
Noon in Helsinki. The sun hardly makes an appearance at 60 degrees North and barely gets much above the horizon. As we’re right near the winter solstice we only got about six hours of light, but it was hardly light as it was overcast and dark and dreary all day. A lot of ties to Russia in Helsinki. Here’s a statue of the Russian Emperor Alexander II right on the Senate Plaza in front of the White Lutheran Church. The Helsinki Lutheran Cathedral is a central landmark of the city. It…
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