Category: Travels for Fun
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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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TRAVELS WITH JOHN
Facebook today has reacquainted me with a long lost friend and travelling companion. In 1978, I stumbled into a losmen (guestroom) on Samosir Island in northern Sumatra. I saw this seasoned traveller there – a skinny, long haired bearded man wearing Coke bottle bottom glasses and eating porridge and bananas. John Ducedre was a Canadian and we hit it off perfectly and explored the island together. Eight months later, John showed up at my house in northern Wisconsin driving a beat up van and offered me a ride to Banff. I…
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THANKS FOR THE RIDE
I was going through some old stuff and found my old hitchhiking card, designed and printed by my brother-in-law Duane Miller, which brought back a rush of memories of simpler, safer and more carefree days. I started hitchhiking in 1976 to get home from college and in the late ’70s used my thumb to get everywhere. I saw myself as the Jack Kerouac of the ’70s, travelling the country, meeting folks, experiencing their lives and writing about it. I crossed America several times, hitched south to New Orleans and the southern…
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A LAST BREATH AT THE PLAZA DE TOROS
In November 1994, Padma and I followed my photographer mate, Victor Englebert, through the gates of Cali’s main bullring, the Plaza de Toros de Cañaveralejo. The concrete terraces were already filling, families and old men in hats leaning forward over the red timber barrier. Brass music drifted in the heat. Dust hung in the air. The spectacle began with ceremony. A woman rode a compact, muscular horse around the ring, reins loose, posture upright. The crowd applauded her precision. Then the matador entered in a gold-embroidered traje de luces, pink stockings…
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LAS LAJAS
Santuario de Nuestra Senora de Las Lajas is located seven kilometres from Ipiales in southwest Colombia. Built between 1916 and 1948 in a valley on the Guaitara River, it attracts pilgrims from all over Colombia and abroad – one of most visited religious sanctuaries in the Americas. One shrine is to an Amerindian named “Maria Mueces” and her deaf-mute daughter “Rosa”. Rosa saw the Virgin Mary in a cave here in 1754 and suddenly spoke a few words.
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MARKET DAY IN SILVIA
On a Tuesday morning in July 1994, my photographer mate Victor Englebert and I drove up into the hills of Cauca to the town of Silvia. Every Tuesday the Misak people – also known as the Guambiano – descend from the surrounding páramo and villages to trade, catch up and, just as importantly, be seen. By mid-morning the plaza was a wash of deep indigo and cobalt. The Misak favour blue: blue woollen ponchos edged in pink, blue skirts falling to sturdy boots, blue shawls pinned against the chill. And everywhere,…
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