Ireland, Ireland together standing tall, Shoulder to shoulder, We’ll answer Ireland’s call. Those stirring words from Ireland’s Call, as belted out by Irish rugby players and fans before matches, played on a loop in my head as I approached the misty shores of the Emerald Isle. My stomach still churned from the choppy ferry crossing, […]
That morning I awoke with severe backache, as if my lumbar discs had slipped into the gap between the front seats of my friend’s Fiat Uno, joining fag ends and bottle tops on that rancid carpet. I blinked as the sun’s first rays reflected off the snowy peaks opposite our parking spot, perched on the […]
Nowadays, it’s harder than ever to separate the USA from its politics, with blanket coverage of the torpedoes being launched from the Oval Office against the established global order. However, for the seventeen-year-old me, the run up to our holiday was more about the allure of American popular culture – having grown up on a […]
Yes, I finally made it!! For my regular readers, Cape Verde may seem a surprising choice for this milestone, famed as it is for its beaches rather than for historical sites. In fact, Cape Verde is as rich in history as it is in natural beauty. In 1461 it became the first Portuguese, and indeed […]
Almaty is one of the greenest cities I’ve seen, and I mean green in the old-fashioned not the eco-friendly sense. The architecture is more functional than aesthetically pleasing: modernist Soviet structures with all the finesse of giant concrete Lego blocks host public and residential life while glass towers built on petrodollars house capitalist enterprises that […]
Once Europe’s longest pedestrianized street, Nicosia’s Ladras Street has been transformed by the so-called Green Line that divides the city. The street’s traditional Cypriot life has been replaced by typical European retail chains, yet the requirement to show a passport to proceed hints at a deeper division. Despite attempts to bridge the cultural and religious divide, political tensions remain high; the city still bears the physical and emotional scars of the Turkish invasion of 1974, with no realistic end in sight.
Fresh from a mid-summer glacier ski on the Jungfrau mountain, the fifteen-year-old me surveys the world… glimpsing a future packed with travel and adventure…
A slither of land wedged between the tourist magnets that are France, Germany and Belgium, Luxembourg is often overlooked on European tours, but the annals of history show…
The last time I was in Skopje, I had come to persuade the Macedonian interior minister to sign up to a trans-Balkan action plan for tackling organised crime to be launched at a ministerial conference in London. This time, many years on, the only crimes in evidence were a most curious and incongruous collection of […]
I cannot claim it to be universal law, but I often find the friendliness and hospitality of a country’s inhabitants to be inversely proportionate to their recent troubles. So it was when I snuck behind Burma’s iron curtain in 2005 where, despite (or because of) the brutal military rule, the locals were overjoyed to see […]
Nomad Scribe 