Tag: Friends
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TWO DAYS IN MARGARET RIVER
Padma and I are hoping that many of our friends and family will visit us in our new home in Western Australia. We’re still discovering the State and trying to figure out where to take our guests. Our friend, Annie Tomalin, is helping us get some practice as tour guides. Annie and Padma were colleagues at the Colegio Colombo Britanico in Cali, Colombia a few decades ago … so we’ve also had a chance to catch up and reminisce about living in Colombia during a tumultuous era. Margaret River is a…
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THE LEGEND OF THE ULM SPARROW
My friend, Karl-Heinz Linke, has a reputation for exaggerating the truth when he tells stories. He’s the kind of guy who is always pulling your leg, so to speak. So, when he told Padma and me about the legend of the Ulm Sparrow, we assumed it was another one of his yarns. Karl-Heinz insisted it was true and to prove it he and his wife, Hiltrud, took us to Ulm to learn of the legend ourselves. We were told that 80% of the city had been destroyed during World War II,…
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A PEACOCK, A BRAMEL AND A WINDY RIDGE
For a number of years, Padma and I have been hearing about a home on a hill in County Cork of southwestern Ireland. Despite numerous invitations from its owners, our friends John Peacock and Paula Bramel, we could never make the trip. But now we finally got a chance to visit our friends and learn of their adopted homeland. Padma and I knew John when we were all living in Syria in the early 1990s. We met Paula when she and John travelled to Australia in 2013 and then in one…
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A CATALAN FRIENDSHIP
The Pyrenees, that long mountain range extending east to west and creating the border between France and Spain, have captivated me for years. As a university student I read Laurie Lee’s As I Walked Out One Summer Morning, which became one of my favourite travel books. At the end Lee secretly crosses the Pyrenees and enters Spain at the onset of the Spanish Civil War and I began to feel a calling to one day visit the region. It wasn’t so much the jagged, snow-capped peaks, shimmering lakes and raging rivers…
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THE LASHERMES OF VACQUIÈRES
The second principal destination of our Northern Hemisphere Friends and Family tour was Vacquières, a village of no more than 600 people just north of Montpelier, France. Two long-time residents are our friends from our Syrian Football Night Dinners, Philippe and Catherine Lashermes. Philippe and Catherine left Syria in 1992 and after a short stint in Cote d’Ivoire they bought an old farm home in a village and fixed it up and had three children along the way. Philippe commutes to work in Montpelier as an agricultural researcher by ebike. We…
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VALE MARIO
With great sadness I learned today of the passing of my friend, mentor, former boss and co-founder of the modern Costa Rican National Park Service. Mario Boza passed away yesterday at the age of 79. He had been suffering from mouth cancer since late April. His death comes as a shock as only a few weeks ago he wrote to me and suggested that he was on the path, albeit a very slow path, to recovery. Cancer rarely presents a straightforward path to recovery and in Mario’s case it took a…
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UNEMPLOYMENT AND THE LAST WINE WALK
A year ago today I became unemployed. It was a great day. A fantastic day, in fact. My dearest German friends, the Schnells and Linkes, drove many hours from Tauberbischofsheim and Illerbachen to help Padma and me mark the day … and for the more sombre task of helping us pack up our household for shipping to Australia. When our friends arrived at our home in Oberwinter they felt they made a wrong turn and ended up in Bavaria instead of Rheinland-Pfalz as I greeted them in my Oktoberfest garb, which…
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THE BAVONA VALLEY
Nothing beats having a local guide and during our visit to Ticino, Switzerland’s southern Italian-speaking canton, Padma and I were spoiled by having our friend, Hans, show us around. Hans took us up north from his home near Locarno to the Bavona Valley and brought us to the base of the 100-metre Foroglio Waterfall. Padma and I didn’t object when Hans asked if we wanted to hike to the top of the falls. After some sweat and toil we reached the top and followed the crystal-clear Calnegia River through rocky terrain.
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ON TOP OF THE (GERMAN) WORLD
Last Sunday was one of those frigid, yet super clear days that only seem to come around a few times each winter. We were showing Padma’s brother’s family around and were staying with our friends Karl-Heinz and Hiltrud Linke in their little village of Illerbachen. As the sun rose on a very frosty morning, Karl-Heinz pointed to Germany’s highest peak, Zugspitze, from his kitchen window. With visibility like that we just had to head for the summit. Upon arriving at the base of the mountain in Garmisch-Partenkirchen (the site of the…
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