A Traveller’s Eye, A Thinker’s Heart
I like to tell stories. I like to take photos.
And I like to share them. Enjoy.
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ALONE IN HOTEL QUARANTINE
As Padma, Joseph and I hit the tarmac at the Perth International Airport on Tuesday night we knew our real adventure was only about to begin. The dreaded forced hotel quarantine awaited us. We had read online of so many experiences of Aussies in quarantine; so many folks just couldn’t cope with being locked up…
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ALL BY OURSELVES.
I finally got that long-awaited gin and tonic. Or rather three gin and tonics. The Qatar Airways flight attendant keep bringing them to me. Maybe he sensed the cloud of stress above me, the mild stench of anxiety surrounding me or the furrows of worry on my face. With each G&T all of those emotions…
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A WANDER IN THE MOSELLE
In 14 days from now Padma, Joseph and I are hoping to be sipping some gin and tonics on our flight home to Perth. We’re still not confident we’ll be on that flight, but to date we haven’t been bumped again. Australian politicians are proving to be inept at doing anything to get home 30,000+…
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THE CASTLE AT JUNCTION 36
Castello di Mesocco Padma and I were heading north on the A13, minding our own business and in no particular hurry to get anywhere. It was one of those unreliable Alpine mornings — the cloud that had filled the valley overnight was lifting off the forest in slow white ropes, thinning as it climbed, so…
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ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER VALLEY
Ticino is a canton of valleys. They come down out of the Lepontine Alps towards Lake Maggiore like the fingers of a spread hand – Bavona, Maggia, Verzasca, Leventina – each one within an hour of the next, and each one, somehow, its own small country. The day before, our friend Hans had driven us…
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THE SHUTTERED TERRE
The shutters were closed. Not broken, not hanging off their hinges, not weathered to bare grey — closed, and lately painted, and latched from the inside by somebody who had gone away and meant to come back. Padma, Hans and I walked through three villages in one long cloudy day and I do not think…
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TWO STONES FROM ONE VALLEY
Padma and I have seen a lot of churches in Europe. Spectacular, yes – vaulted, gilded, hushed – but after a while they blur into one another. So when our Swiss host Hans suggested we visit a church, this one up a side valley in Ticino, we didn’t exactly leap for the car keys. Then…
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THE VALLEY BEFORE THE DROP
There’s a particular kind of friend who, when you turn up in his country, doesn’t ask what you’d like to see. He has already decided. I have known Hans Striker since 1981, when I met him on a train in Mexico. He was a medical student then, working his way through an extended holiday of…
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ON THE TRAIL OF MARTIN LUTHER
Padma and I look at a different kind of map these days when planning our travel destinations. Instead of maps with tourist attractions we look at the map showing the incidence of COVID. And after studying the map we could tell that the former East German states of Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt had very low rates…
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