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A beer and a cheese sandwich. That’s the amount of a foreign language you need to get by. You’ll never go thirsty or starve, although you might spend your days in the gutter and your nights hallucinating. Having worked as … Continue reading
Category Archives: Travel writing
You might be familiar with C.S.Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles; you might indeed be sufficiently conversant with them to know the plot of the final book, The Last Battle. While I don’t find myself sympathising with its teleological* narrative, it is nonetheless … Continue reading
Turkish football has a certain reputation amongst English football fans. If your team is fortunate enough to be playing in European football, there’s always a certain frisson when you hear that your team has been drawn against the three legendary … Continue reading
Calm… calm… Naked man. Soaking man. Dog bowl. Peştemal. Ortan. I think that probably brings you up to date with parts one and two. Any questions? Ortan stirred me from my dog-bowl supported meditation. As discreet as a Turkish Jeeves, … Continue reading
(For obvious reasons, all photos in this blog are taken from the internet; I didn’t take my camera in with me…) You left me, dear reader, clad in a peştemal and trying to suck my stomach in whilst essaying a … Continue reading
Every middle aged man is required to be self-confident, bullish and able to deal with a variety of situations in a phlegmatic and self-assured manner. Few circumstances are permitted to penetrate that veneer of worldly wisdom and boundless self-assurance. With … Continue reading
‘Can I see your identity card?’ It’s not really the sentence you want to hear from a security guard, particularly when the only available answer is ‘no’. My first evening in Hong Kong, and I was surfing on a wave … Continue reading
First stop – we had to see ‘the volcano’. Little was I to know that two weeks later, volcanoes would become a very big thing in Indonesia. At this time it was just something to see. We drove for 1½ … Continue reading
What was Bali like? Hard to tell. It was something of a staging post between two airport visits, in many ways. Having spent weeks in the grimness of Stalag Karawaci, anywhere would have been a breath of fresh air, so … Continue reading
Sometimes it’s the smallest things that give you perspective. A friend and myself were in Taman Mini Indonesia Indah (a sort of theme park but stranger than that – more details in a later blog) and it was raining. We … Continue reading