(Ireland)...It took me twenty five years of travelling before I reached my neighbouring country of Ireland. That’s disgraceful. When I was young, it really was not a place anyone thought about going to; when I was older, I looked to mainland Europe; when I moved to the United States, South America beckoned.
Recently, however, the opportunity rose to get there. I drove across the River Foyle from Derry, after first seeing Bull Park, where pop-punk band The Undertones (www.theundertones.com) took the cover shot for their first album (the wall has been demolished, for health-and-safety reasons, so I was told—hardly punk) and entering County Donegal (Contae Dhún na nGall in Gaelic), which is technically part of Ulster, but obviously not part of Northern Ireland. Everything hereabouts is green, and it is not falling hook, line and sinker into a cliché to state that I saw at least 30 shades of that colour.
My first stop was a small castle that I saw standing proud in a field of golden corn. I aimed my car in its direction, but it still took a while to find. I did not turn into a farm, thinking this was not the way. When I returned, I left a polite note on my dashboard and set to walking around a field of wheat, over a stile, through some barbed wire, across another field and over a stone wall. I saw a man pushing a bicycle coming in my direction. He lived in Australia but was born just down the hill and remembered seeing Burt Castle (for this was it; see photograph above) every morning when he was a child. This was the first time that he had returned. 
The castle is ruined and consists of a single keep, not too large in size, the holes in one side making it look like a sad phantom. I walked inside. It is a 16th-century castle and overlooks Loch Swilley, which divides the promontory of Inishowen, which contains Malin Head, Ireland’s most northerly point, and the small promontory of Fanad, where I decided to head. The castle’s date is known, because a coin dating from 1547 was once found inside. It might have had a few skirmishes connected with it, and it has been a ruin since the mid-19th century.
One legend about it consists of a pregnant girl who was spurned by the father. Distraught, she walked to the loch, where a bevy of swans surrounded her. When they returned to the loch, she followed them and was drowned. In revenge, the girl’s father crept into the castle and killed the unborn baby’s father and threw him out of the window. On nights with a full moon, supposedly, swans gather on the stretch of the loch's shore closest to Burt Castle and create a curious and chilling cacophony.
Onto the peninsula of Fanad (I cannot remember why I decided to go there, as opposed to anywhere else), I stopped at the gorgeous village of Rathmullan (Ráth Maoláin), where are two or three pubs that look completely the part of the tourist’s image of an Irish bar. The Flight of the Earls was from here, in which Irish chieftains and noblemen fled Ireland for Spain, hoping that the Catholic kingdom could help evict the English. This was several years after the Spanish Armada was defeated, and also after the death of Elizabeth I, when King James I was on the throne, someone perhaps who was a little more sympathetic to the Irish cause. I was there almost exactly 400 years to the day on which the lords left.
In Rathmullen there is a wonderful, ruined Carmelite abbey from 1516 in the middle of which grew a thick carpet of orange lilies, and it was also here where Wolfe Tone, leader of the Republican Irishmen was captured. Quite some history! The coastal road is beautiful and leads to Ballymastocker Beach, recently voted the second-most beautiful beach in the world, so I was told by an Indian woman in Rathmullan. (First place went to Anse Victoria in the Seychelles, so second place is not too shabby.) The narrow road plunges down past purple heather to the beach, and a great panorama of the entire strand can be had by parking beside a cliff just before the road descends.
I drove back via Dargan Hill, Tamney and Rosnakill. Directly to the south of Burt Castle, I stopped by the famous Iron Age fort of Grianan of Aileach (Grianán Ailigh), which is impressive but not so much fun as Burt to scramble around. It is a ruin, but an exceptionally well-preserved one, which means you cannot get anywhere near it. Local mythology says that it was built by a powerful king called Daghda of Tuatha de Danaan, or People of the Goddess Duna.
The roads around it are very narrow and both so completely empty and seldom used that healthy crops of grass grow down their centres. Three young boys jumped out of a field and raced me a kilometre or so down to the main road, knowing that to pass them I would have to also squash them. I enjoyed the game. I headed to the small town of Raphoe, which can claim an even more ancient history, being named Ráth Bhoth by the Irish, which means “Fort of the Huts” and refers to the monastery which St. Columba supposedly founded in the sixth century. It also boasts that it can claim a “second most” award, that of the second-highest town in Ireland.
I had lunch on a patch of green in its centre called the Diamond, before getting directions to the stone circle of Beltany, which has 64 stones and a diameter of 44 metres. The stones surround a tumulus and supposedly were placed there to face the nearby hill of Tullyrap. I had to park my car at the end of a lane and walk along a narrow, treed path that after 400 metres suddenly gives a view of the complete site. It is a wonderful way in which to reach them and its only residents, a flock of 100 or so sheep.

(China)...China is a fun place to visit, but wow, is Beijing polluted. In the year before its biggest event in its history (well, except for maybe one or two previous events of Imperial magnificence), China should not start organising an Olympics event on Breathing. Those who can last a minute or more will receive a Gold Medal, or supplementary oxygen, whichever one they covet the most. That said, I have no doubt that the Olympics will pass flawlessly. The Chinese government will shoot a few thousand people, ban all cars, move the factories to the areas of non-Han Chinese and flap little red Mao books at the wind until all the soot disappears. As soon as the last event is over and the foreign TV companies have returned, then things will go back to being how they are. 
I did get some fresh air in the Gobi Desert, in and around the small city of Dunhuang, which is where the Silk Road split into two routes. It is a quiet place, well, at least for Chinese standards, although it did seem to have an inordinate number of taxi cabs for a city of 180,000 or so people that takes little more than 30 minutes to cross on foot. The taxis are all green, and they all idle by the road side, before getting bored, driving away somewhere and coming right back in the vain hope that a customer has appeared. No one has. That said, I saw many taxis charging across the Gobi Desert en route to one of the passes that mark the start of the two Silk Road paths, a roundtrip journey of between 140 and 200 miles, so perhaps fares earned in this manner are more than enough to keep away starvation.
The northern pass is called Yumen, the southern one, Yuanguan. Both are marked with Imperial Chinese forts of differing conditions of ruin, and they signified the empire’s westernmost limits. After them, all was potential danger. Today, at Yuanguan there are some ruined beacon towers and a rebuilt fort containing a museum; at Yumen, there is a small, ruined fort and some stretches of Hang Dynasty Great Wall, made from straw and mud, which predates the more famous stretches of Great Wall near Beijing by some 400 years.
The south road—for ancient travelers—was dangerous due to snowy peaks (there is less snow today) and bandits; the north road, because it travelled through the territory of the warlike Hun. One emperor decided he needed to make this route safer and negotiated pacts with what is now the Kyrgyz Republic and Uzbekistan. He sent an emissary who had little luck the first time around. On a second try, the Hun imprisoned him for 14 years. By the time he returned to the Imperial capital of Xi’an and reported what he had found out, 28 years had passed. His intelligence proved the turning point to eventual defeat of the Hun. In those days, people had more time. Well, definitely more time that the taxis do nowadays. 
I visited a less famous stretch of the Great Wall, near to Beijing. I do not remember why I chose to go to the Huanghua area. Maybe it was because few other tourists do. The Chinese go there at weekends to enjoy boat trips on the lake. The reason Westerners do not go, I soon found out, was that it was impossible to access the wall there. You can see it, you just can’t get on it. I walked around the lake for two miles, past the small boat dock and watched large grasshoppers with pink legs flit around. The narrow path leads to The Chestnut Farm of Ming Dynasty. The fact that there was one, and I could visit it, and probably most other people do not know of its existence pleased me tremendously and almost made up for the fact that I could not stand on the wall. Almost.
On the walk back I spotted a steep slope through the chestnut trees and decided to scale it. No one was around, and perhaps the signs in Chinese did say “no admittance,” but I certainly could not read them. The hillside was very steep, but I scrambled up by holding rocks and roots, and 10 minutes later I was standing in a Great Wall defensive tower, with the sun behind me, and a lengthy stretch of Great Wall in perfect view on the other side of the lake. The tower itself was a clutter of bricks inside but intact out. A perfect 20 minutes, and no one saw me slide swiftly down through the chestnuts. Back in the Gobi Desert, I did see that it possesses colour, and even the flat, stony sections have magic to them. Two small villages manage to irrigate themselves—although as I drove through the desert, it did miraculously starts raining, albeit lightly—and produce red and green grapes, some of which is used for wine, but most of it for raisins.
The Muslims in Dunhuang prepare delicious kebabs over open grills, consisting of five pieces of lamb, two grilled grapes and a piece of fat, all rubbed in spices, most notably chili. I could have eaten them all night, especially at 1 yuan (14 cents) each.
The sand dunes at Dunhuang are magnificent, and nearly every one of them can be climbed. The entry price is steep, certainly for current Chinese standards, at 180 yuan (approximately $25), and then extra are camel and motorbike rides up the dunes and toboggan rides down. From the top of the dunes can be seen Moon Crescent Lake and a pagoda. An attempt was made to explain to me why this lake does not silt up, but I did not understand it. The only nationalities in attendance here were Japanese, Chinese (who are travelling for the first time in numbers in their own country) and the French. 
The former two groups constantly take photos of one another, flashing the V for Victory sign, while the latter holler and whoop as they run or slide down the hills. The Japanese come to this region to see the phenomenal caves at Mogao, which contain the largest indoor Buddha in the world, rising 108 feet. A second rises 92. Another cave contains a reclining Buddha, and every one of the 735 caves (about 10 can be viewed by visitors, who are not allowed to bring their cameras) has stunning art, painted under the light of oil lamps over the course of 1,000 years.
At the dunes, only the Westerners do not like to wear the bright orange plastic shoe protectors that keep the sand out of footwear. Long lines of visitors wearing these day-glo things slowly trudge up dune sides. My sand was later that day dumped out of my shoes onto a Beijing patch of grass, beside a statue of a Ping Pong bat and ball unceremoniously wedged under a flyover, unless, that is, the statue was already there before the road. 
Near to the Ming Tombs I had lunch at Friendship Store #2. A blank-staring waitress and a generally able translator were hounding to death a pair of Americans when I arrived. They were being offered dishes comprised of only one word. “You will have beef?” “And beans?” The American woman was not thrilled at the idea of “beans,” so said the only word she believed would make all the Chinese go away—“Beef.” And then she nodded. The Chinese rallied. “No beans? You not have beans?” More blank looks. “How big is the beef?” the American asked. Approximations are made. Five minutes later, both beef and beans come out. This, I expected.
Earlier, the first dish to come my way was watermelon, a food I cannot stand. (I hate the stuff. I had a bad one when I was 10 or so and now cannot even stand the smell. It must be the cheapest fruit, too, as always when you get a fruit bowl, melon forms the greatest part, much to my continued disgust.) I declined politely, only to be met with stares, confusion and panic. I saw my waitress several times in the next 30 minutes holding my plate of watermelon, far away to my sides, and on the first opportunity, she surreptitiously placed it on an extreme corner of my table during the only time my attention was focused on looking for something in my backpack. The next day I was outside the Lu Jin restaurant, famous for its Peking duck and catering to a long line of foreigners (reservations are needed; I did not have one and was told I had an hour to eat up and get out.).
An old man was playing music on an instrument he had taken out of a wooden case. It appeared to be a cross between an accordion and a zither. He laughed between each song. A very young girl—probably his granddaughter—accompanied him by terrorising a barely born, white kitten. She chopped it on its head with the side of a flattened hand; she stuck it down a hole in a grinding stone; she tried to stuff it down a smaller hole in the same stone; she made it cling to her t-shirt, from which it duly fell and landed in the middle of the road—all of which are very busy in Beijing, even the less busy ones—and picked it up by any of its extremities that happened to be closest. I honestly thought the cat would not live, and perhaps it no longer is alive. Probably the pollution got it.

(Puerto Rico)…I started to wait for a bus from San Juan International Airport, but very soon realised that the Puerto Rican bus service was far from up to scratch. Get a taxi. Flying in from St. John’s in Antigua & Barbuda, I saw the old section of San Juan from high above and grew excited just looking at it. I was dropped off just off Avenida Muñoz Rivera, at the Plaza Colon, a neat, small square of cafés and shoe shiners. I like colonial places, the bright colours of its tidy houses, its small restaurants and cafés where it feels as though patrons come to the same establishment every day and tall linden trees. Walking north towards the Caribbean Sea, I discovered my first section of the city’s famous defensive walls. This was the Fuente San Cristobal.
Puerto Rico’s symbol, seen everywhere, is a turret poking out over the edge of the bluff and with a small window, and the first one I saw was here. It was very hot. Juan Ponce de León, who had traveled with Christopher Columbus in 1493, originally set up a settlement a couple of miles from the present site of San Juan. It was called Caparra. He did not live long enough to see the start of the fortification of San Juan, which started in earnest in the mid-16th century. Its most celebrated defence was that of repelling Sir Francis Drake of England. The principal defensive fort, called La Fortaleza, later on became the home of the Spanish province’s governor. I had the addresses of a few cafés and bars that looked interesting, but all had been closed down. Perhaps they were not tacky enough.
Tacky, though, is the Calle de la Fortaleza. I preferred the streets both up and across that are to the north, towards and left of the San Felipe del Morro fort. Well worth doing is the walk along the base of the wall, starting at the San Juan Gate, but note that if you walk to the right and all the way along to the end, towards El Morro, then there is no access back into town but only back from the same gate. Continue past the gate, that is, if you would be going left if coming out of town, and walk along this shorter stretch. A cool, attractive garden with a café is to your left, with sculpture and parrots. One spot I liked was the Museo Felisa Rincón de Gautier, in the last home of the city’s first woman mayor, or alcaldesa, a very colourful woman also known as Doña Fela and who in her advanced years took to wearing huge glasses and elaborate hair-dos. She was mayor between 1946 and 1968, a huge length of time for a politician by my reckoning, and died in 1994, aged 97.
The museum has numerous photographs of forgotten friends and politicians. In fact, the entire museum has an atmosphere of having passed its usefulness, which made it feel even more necessary to visit and dawdle in. I was the only one there, apart from three museum staffers. Perhaps there really was only one, the other two being friends of hers. It is at the junction of Caleta de San Juan, a treed street that drops down in large steps and is bordered by colourful, high houses, and Calle Clara Lair. (Problematic to me was my attempting to take photographs, an impossible task, of all the places where I saw seven or eight or so juxtaposed houses all in different bright colours—lemon yellow, Fanta orange, pastel blue, lime green, etc.) This definitely is a museum for Puerto Ricans, who still hold her in great esteem.
I often do not bother with the world’s great museums, preferring to see modern life on the street. In this, I am certainly not alone. My excuse is that I have little interest seeing dead people’s furniture. It does not even have a Web site, which further endeared it to me. Over the side of the northern walls, which in places is said to be 20 feet in width, is poorer housing. I did not walk down to it, which was possible, thinking that the residents probably would not appreciate me gawking at the colour that often is present in poverty, or as the Sex Pistols once hollered, “A cheap holiday in someone else’s misery,” always one of my favourite song lines.
That said, such scruples did not stop me visiting the favela slum of Rocinha in Río de Janeiro, Brazil, the name of which, by the way, means “little ranch” in Portuguese. Also to the north side of town is a parade of sculptures of heads, which caught my attention, next to a house’s forecourt of luxuriant foliage and squawking parrots, all things that are suitably Caribbean and add to the general enjoyment. Along these lines is the Butterfly People (www.butterflypeople.com) gallery at 257 Calle de la Cruz, where pinned butterflies are displayed for sale in small to gigantic picture frames. Signs deter photographs. The art is no doubt beautiful, the butterflies appearing to fly even after death. Other signs say that the butterflies are bred in the tropics especially for the gallery, rather than being plucked from some sylvan glade in Costa Rica. Prices are not cheap.

(Maryland, USA)....I have always intended to visit Smith Island in Maryland since I read William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways, a wonderful travel narrative in which the author—recently jobless, recently divorced—decides to travel 13,000 miles around the United States driving only along back roads. I remember chapters on Nameless, Tenn., and Greenwich, N.J., but the one that registered most strongly with me was when he visited the town of Ewell on Smith Island. That a populated island was not accessible by bridge but so close (270 miles) to New York City fascinated me. Perhaps it was even more remote then, than it would be today, but I would go.
The small ferry to the island leaves from the mainland Maryland town of Crisfield, whose new, ugly, waterside, grey-sided condominiums have gone some way, if not all the way, to destroying the place. One gem there is Gordon’s, a tatty but atmospheric diner in which sat a host of characters who were just about to go crabbing, or have retired from doing so but cannot quite let go. The motto outside says: We Cater to Watermen. I did not get to Ewell (I saw it) but instead to Tylerton. 
Smith Island is a collection of islands, and of the three villages there, Tylerton is separated from Ewell and smaller Rhodes Point, which can be walked between. Tylerton is small and very quiet. Most men were out in boats, and the women were washing, stripping and packing crab or preparing meals. One famous culinary item here is Layer cake, which comprises eight, ten or twelve layers of sponge separated by one less number of slices of chocolate frosting. It is a rite of passage for girls here to prepare one of these delicious treats. I also headed to the crab shanty of Bill Clayton (see photograph), where he showed me how soft-shell crabs are continuously monitored as they lose and regain and lose their shells. Oystering has suffered greatly as of late.
Later, I met the celebrated writer Tom Horton, who lives in Tylerton, and he told me that currently the Chesapeake Bay holds only two percent of the bay’s historic high number of oyster. Such a statistic does not allow for oysters to be a business, something that the nonprofit Chesapeake Bay Foundation (www.cbf.org) is trying to reverse through education. I visited its buildings in Tylerton and on Port Isabel Island, the latter having the meanest greenflies in the area. With a group of five others from L.L. Bean’s Outdoor Discovery unit, I kayaked from Tylerton, past Rhodes Point and around to a sandy island called Hog’s Neck. The scenery was idyllic: marshy land (like where I grew up in Kent, England), still waters, thick, green grasses and—a new phenomenon here—ranks and ranks of Brown pelicans.
The main day of kayaking for us was the traversing of the bay between Smith Island and Tangier Island, Va. Some of Smith Island is also in Virginia, and were we regaled with tales of disputes between Smith and Tangier islanders and Maryland and Virginian politics. It often turned murderous, with boats turning their lights off and poaching oysters in off-limits spots, or not playing fair by dragging large rakes behind them, rather than small ones. Watermen have been killed in these skirmishes, one tale told to us involving a notorious oystermen in the 1970s who was shot dead by the coast guards in front of sunbathers. Tangier Island, approximately 12 miles to the south, is a smaller island but is more populated and seems more affluent. It has only the one town, Tangier, and on my Saturday night, I watched in fascination as the same golf carts (the main form of transportation on both islands) trundled around and around the large circuit around town. There were the young couple—he with reflective sunglasses and an iPod, she with a very bored expression, until the fourth time around, when he had obviously decided to share the music—the young, orange-T-shirt-wearing, overweight man who looked damnably morose and the elderly man who smiled continuously as he whisked his girlfriend (?) around.
The crab cakes on both islands are the stuff of legend. The church has a sign outside commemorating the encampment of British troops on the island in 1812 and their subsequent defeat in the waters near Baltimore and Annapolis. There is a lot of English heritage hereabouts, reflected most obviously in the surnames. On Smith Island, there were and remain Bradshaws, Harrisons, Smiths, Thomases and Lairds, while on Tangier Island there are Crocketts, Pruitts and Shores. Their accent and dialect also is deemed to be akin to Elizabethan speech.
Between the two islands is a long spit of broken islands, some with names, some without. It is possible and great fun to walk at low tide between little patches of sand kicking through the water. I found an abandoned duck decoy placed on a patch of seaweed to resemble a nest, a fat, stranded jellyfish and all manner of birds, including a Clapper rail and several Black skimmers, which trail their lower beaks along the water’s surface skimming up food.
Not so many groups have kayaked this route, which is mostly too shallow for the boats inspecting their crabbing pots, so I felt somewhat adventurous. Tangier Island’s litter bins are all shaped like lighthouses, which I thought a nice touch. Crosses and religious paraphernalia are dotted around. I wonder how long these islands can survive? The young look bored, and the supply of seafood, especially oysters, needs to be restocked. I hope it does remain alive, as its people have an obvious love for their respective islands.

(Greenland)...This place is massive. Greenland measures 2,166,086 square kilometres, of which 755,637 square kilometres forms its massive ice sheet, the middle of the world’s largest island. Its coastline also is staggering, being some 39,330 kilometres in length, which is roughly the size of the Earth's circumference at the equator. On this huge piece of land live approximately 60,000 people.
That is one person for every 36 square kilometres of land. Of course, the people—Inuit; outsiders are known as qanuallit—can live only on a much smaller piece of land, along the coasts. Ilulissat was the farthest I was north, at 69°10'N/49°45'W, some 350 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle. It is a pretty place, but no doubt harsh at many times of the year. The sound I will remember is of the 8,000 dogs here, howling away as I went for a walk at 5 in the morning, unable to sleep because of the perpetual light.
Every one of them was chained by a five-foot length of chain, which meant that they had a circular span of 10 feet, which is good to know, for they certainly are not pets. They are related to husky dogs and are not allowed south of the Arctic Circle (other breeds, in turn, are not allowed north) in order to keep the breed strong and pure and ready as working dogs. Also given the Danish name of grønlandshund, the dogs work hard, but during the summer they just sit around, not being fed too much in order to keep them fit. I walked around Ilulissat many times, between the rows of brightly coloured wooden houses. All the wood needs to be imported from Canada or Denmark, Greenland’s mother country. When the road runs out, a small trail winds along the coast, passes several fishing boats and ends at the beginning of the great glacier here. A hill here is where in olden times the elderly, no longer wishing to be a burden on their families, would throw themselves off to their deaths. Only those who contributed could live, was the unwritten rule, seemingly.
The glacier, called Sermeq Kujalleq, is the most active in the northern hemisphere, each day discharging into the icy sea more fresh water than New York City consumes in a year. It is spectacular, and the temperatures dropped noticeably when one is close to an iceberg, which here are immense. Think very large, and then think again. The scenery constantly changes, due to the migrations of this ice. One morning I awoke (I hardly got to sleep, really), and two Minke whales slowly passed by my window amid a few icebergs and a few more patches of floating, condensed snow. Two days later, and the whole bay—which stretches to Disko Island—was cluttered with ice. It was as though some giant had moved the hotel overnight. Equally of interest to me were the huge expanses of tundra. One could either jump from grassy tussock to grassy tussock or huge stone slab to huge stone slab. Rivers occasionally meandered from one small pond or lake to another but mostly quickly disappeared into the damp sod. Ravens jumped around. I walked for quite some time and found myself at the cemetery, which views icebergs from a distance. Who knows how many here died as a result of the elements?
A Greenlandic saying goes, If you do not fear the sea, you will not last one year in Greenland, and even in July, the water was frigid. One local told me that the only way to survive a soaking is by not panicking and being young to begin with. He told me of three young men who somehow let their boat drift away as they were out hunting. One of the men jumped in to retrieve it, but the current moved the boat faster than he could move towards it. His friends ran to get help. An hour later, the man was plucked out of the water, having survived by grabbing hold of a small lump of ice. The air ambulance was called, but apparently after being cared for on the boat, he promptly walked straight past the ambulance crew and was seen later that evening down the pub having a beer.
The town—it has 4,800 people and is Greenland’s third-largest settlement—is known also for being the home of Greenland’s greatest explorer, Knud Rasmussen (as I write another Rasmussen is currently leading the Tour de France cycle race, although as I revise this, he has now been thrown off for irregularities concerning drug tests), and by his childhood home, now a museum, was going on a kayaking competition, in which competitors manouevered around a set course (small Inuit boys guided them by waving red flags) before lifting their long, heavy kayaks on their heads and shoulders and running approximately a kilometre before doing it all again and again and again.
I had no idea how many laps constituted the race; one competitor was Spanish. I know this because I replied to him in his language after hearing him swear at dropping his kayak upside down in the water. He was not about to put his hand in the water to re-right it, not without at least a pint of Spanish jerez inside him. His name was Xavier, and being the only qanuallit competitor had become quite a celebrity. He had been given an Inuit name, for the locals could not pronounce his Spanish one.

(Antigua & Barbuda)...Recently, I went to the Caribbean for the first time. Considering how fortunate I have been to get to go travelling quite often, this is either very strange or a fault on my part. I have always been engrossed by Latin America, both Central America and South America, so my time, money and enthusiasm have gone in those directions, rather than to the Latin islands of the Caribbean or anywhere else there. I have been to Caribbean coasts of Panama, Costa Rica and Mexico, but never to one of the island-nations that sweep around in that broad, attractive archipelago. My first chance was to the small islands of Antigua and Barbuda, which together constitute the nation—independent from the United Kingdom since 1981—of the same name. Its most famous son, seen in posters everywhere and in the name of its brand new stadium, built to host games for the 2007 Cricket World Cup, is Sir Vivian Richards, who I remember playing cricket in England in the 1970s and 80s. They refer to him as a living legend, a label that is ridiculous, but there can be no mistaking—and neither should there be—the importance to this small country of 70,000 people of having someone of his world stature representing them.
The day before I got here I was listening to him bemoaning on the radio the shocking state of West Indies cricket, from England, where his team was being soundly thrashed by the old colonialists. I stayed near a small village called Bolans, which seemed typical of all the places I saw there. Few seem well off, but poverty was not present.
My map suggested it was possible to walk from Hermitage Bay (home to a new, very expensive hotel of the same name) to Mosquito Bay on which was my hotel, but the Jolly Beach Harbour Resort has muscled its way, together with a wide entrance for yachts, in across what was once able to be walked upon.
So, I walked back past one of the island’s many abandoned sugar mills, across a small lagoon (water is rarely evident anywhere here) and through this straggly village of small houses, tethered horses and free-roaming pigs.
On the other side of the island is Nelson’s Dockyard, which always was called English Harbour until the name of Horatio Nelson became more marketable. He detested the place on his one brief visit as a junior officer, and his words cannot be disputed by the marketers as it was the only statement he made about the place.
Today, it is pleasant, so much so that guitarist Eric Clapton has a house nearby that blends into the reddish rock and is stared at for ten minutes by every tour group to the island. The capital St. Johns has a little to recommend it, but the tiny village of Seaton’s, on the other side of the island, has more, especially an old man called Louie who I started chatting to as he was chopping the tops off coconuts. He gave me one.
And I especially liked Deadwood Bay, which is in the village of Crab Hill. There I found a deserted beach with warm, turquoise water and a perfect view of Montserrat, with one side of it still destroyed by the July 1995 eruption of its Soufriére Hills volcano. From my idyllic spot, I could see yellow-white slopes to one side of the island, darker colours (vegetation?) to the other. Boats do go out there for a price, but the currents discourage kayakers. I took a small place to the neighbouring island of Barbuda, which is coral and flat.
On a clear day, the Barbudans can see Antigua, but Antiguans can never see Barbuda. I had a wonderful day here, visiting a colony of Magnificent frigatebirds that is accessible only by boat; exploring some caves that were the homes of the island’s original Arawak people and that now house small crabs that inhabit shells that look like broken rocks (I crawled through a small gap to see a garden of cacti, only to be told that recently a woman in a wheelchair made the same short (but not for her) journey; to the Beach House where I was dive-bombed by Roseate terns defending their nests and ate spiny lobster together with a glass of Glenmorangie single-malt whisky; searched for and found a rare, endemic Barbuda warbler; saw the remnants of the K Club resort where Princess Diana used to hide away, and saw island capital Codrington, which houses most of the island’s 1,800 people.
Passengers sit under a tree at the airport until they hear the one afternoon plane (of two the whole day) coming to land. Calvin, my guide, told me that if you were born on the island, or were resident for sufficient years, you could build a house wherever you liked and then claim ownership of that particular parcel of land. Back in 1981, some of the people on the island were not so excited at the prospect of being united in a new nation with Antigua, but economically they had no choice. It seems that the union did neither island any harm. People on both were invariably pleasant.

(Panama)...The Naso indians, a few of which live in Costa Rica, but the majority in Panama wedged against the Costarricense border, inhabit 11 small villages along the Río Teribe, a swift-moving river. It took 90 minutes to reach the first village, Wekso, going upstream, but approximately 20 going down. (One must be in a different area of Latin America for Ws and Ks to be predominate in nouns.)
To reach the area I took a small plane from Panama City’s second airport, Albrook, to Bocas del Toro (a pretty cool set of African-Caribbean islands off the Panama mainland that already is fairly full of Europeans and Americans), before staying on the same plane back to the mainland town of Changuinola. This basically is a banana plantation. The plane was so small that there was no—I was told when I, the only tourist, got off the plane in Changuinola—room for any luggage. I did have a backpack with me, so could cope.
One needs very little if the truth be known. When I did get my stuff back, in Bocas del Toro, several things were missing. My Spanish is so-so but good enough to be understood, but that did not help, and such is travel. From Changuinola I jumped on a small bus that went 10 kilometres to a small hamlet on the Río Teribe called El Silencio. It contains a convenience shack, two dogs and a sharp slope leading to the river. This is where the Naso picked me up in a wooden dugout canoe. Soon the boat journeys between steep wooded slopes and over shallow, rocky sandbars. Green Amazon kingfishers darted from sentry branches. Wekso is fascinating.
The Naso (www.odesen.org/ingles/weckso.html) now use it for the occasional tourist. It comprises four accommodations blocks, and also has a rudimentary shower, an open deck and a kitchen. Its former use was as a paramilitary training camp set up by former Panamanian dictator and CIA agent Manuel Noriega, who now is rotting in a Miami jail. From the river, one can hardly see the entrance to the place, it consisting of a thin rocky strand leading to steps cut in the hill side. Camouflage-coloured paint adorns a wall, on which is written some bad poetry extolling the attributes of the Motherland. Snakes, sharp daggers and rifles also have been drawn. Wekso stands on the top of a bluff. To the far side of its small area is a very steep path that leads to former training area. I found some military ordnance and also saw an animal called a grisón. It is uncommon to see, being secretive, and the Naso were very excited that I saw one. One afternoon we continued up river to visit Sieyik, which is the capital of the Naso territory, which still does not have official designation as an autonomous governing area, status enjoyed by all other tribes in Panama. The Naso is the only people in the entire Americas, from the top of Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, with a recognised king.
His emblem, a crown below an arch of 11 stars (one for each village) is badly painted on the badly constructed town hall. An open area of grass is in the middle of numerous shacks and rutted pathways. The main item of attire here is the Wellington boot. The village, also on a bluff, was dry when I was there. Lunch, including a whole pod of guava, was eaten at one of these shacks, after which I walked down hill for a dancing display by the villagers.
One young boy was wearing an ocelot skin. I bought some Naso arrows in a quiver, which I have, and I like, but which two minutes after my purchase I wondered how I was to get it back to the States. Back at Wekso I watched a woman wade across the river along a route known to all the villagers. At one spot, it came up to her chest. She cooked me chicken, and I chatted to one of the Naso. His story was fascinating. His father escaped the drug wars and repercussions of Colombia, skipping from town to town, island to island, to the San Blas Islands off of Panama.
These are run by the Kuna indians in a totally autonomous manner, and I have been there for the most gorgeous islands and scuba diving of my life. This he had felt was too close to Colombia, so he skipped again and ended up in Changuinola. Then he somehow made his way up the Río Teribe to the Naso, where he married and settled. My friend was the result. He matter of factly told me of how he had been disturbed by a panther and managed to kill it (the alternative truly had been to be killed).
We sat late into the night, which was totally still. In the morning I watched some Golden-hooded tanagers and a magnificent Long-tailed tyrant and sat by the river waving at the passengers of the river taxis. This was one time I felt the world’s only tourist, and I like to fool myself into thinking that once in a while. A small water taxi takes people from a small river north of Changuinola across the Bahía de Almirante to Bocas del Toro. It is a wonderful way to reach the islands, and I saw the small island (I first saw it two years before) that is the only breeding site of the Red-billed tropicbird in the distance.

(England)...I have always wanted to visit Lindisfarne, also known as Holy Island, in Northumberland (the modern-day name of ancient Northumbria), and last month I got that wish. I was armed with a volume of the Venerable Bede's The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which in my copy also contained The Lives of St. Cuthbert and the Abbots of Jarrow and Wearmouth, both books having been written in the 8th Century and remaining in print. Bede, who mainly was based in Jarrow, no doubt came to Lindisfarne on numerous occasions, as it is not so far—even all the way back then—to travel to.
The earliest saints who came to set up a religious community in Lindisfarne came from the Scottish island of Iona, which also was called Hii, or so I learnt from the Bede's writings. That all said, Northumberland still feels somewhat distant and detached from the rest of England. It is not Scotland, certainly (although they do pay the bagpipes there, albeit instruments with no mouthpieces, as are seen north of the border), but also it does not necessarily feel English.
Maybe it is the beginning, or end, of the Viking realm, and certainly the monks and abbots of Bede's time knew all about the dangers of the men whose name translates into "those who wait in the bay," or in Scandinavian languages, the vik, as in, for example Reykjavik. Lindisfarne is not always an island, the ebbing tide revealing a causeway that until it was tarmacked not so many years ago must have been treacherous and muddy. Posters abound in the island's one village warning hapless visitors of the dangers of trying to beat the tide, which sweeps in fast.
The advice is, get out when the coast guard says, or if not, stay the night. (Even the official website, www.lindisfarne.org.uk, posts a warning.) There are two main tourist sites here, the castle at one end of the island, and the priory, a 20-minute walk to the other side. The castle sits on a rocky bluff, an imposing edifice, but even though it looks like a medieval or Dark Ages monument, it dates only to the 16th Century, probably no more than a feudal house, even if it still might have had one eye on the Scots, who often attacked, but no more than the English attacked them.
The English and Scots also used to raid their own people's livestock. Tales abound here of the Border Reivers, animal rustlers, who felt no concern at murder. One rumour has it that the men of this region on waking would first check their necks to see that they had not been slit in the night. The castle was gussied up by famed architect Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens in the early years of the 20th Century, his companion Gertrude Jekyll being responsible for the walled garden 300 metres across the sheep-cropped grass, which was designed so that it could best be admired from the battlements. (There is a very attractive web site on her and the garden at  www.compulink.co.uk/~museumgh/jekyll.htm.)
 Inside is a rabbit-warren's array of rooms. I walked out to the end of the island, along the coast path and back to the village along an internal road lined with sheep. At no point did I get a better view of the castle than is possible from the track that is the shortest distance betwixt castle and priory and skirts the sea. In the village there are some quaint shops, a weather vane inside someone's window (that's a first for me) and a small, inviting public house called the Crown & Anchor, where I drank a pint. The priory obviously is the oldest building here, and wonderful views of the castle can be enjoyed, looking out over a small bay and the edge of the North Sea. The hulls of old boats had been in several places turned over and converted into sheds for fishing equipment.
To the left are the Farne Islands, small, inhospitable lumps of rock, a home only to thousands of sea birds and, at one time, St. Cuthbert. (The Ecclesiastical History is a fantastic work, even though the saints and monks clearly had an obsession with the correct calculation of the date of Easter; quite likely the significance of this is lost on me; perhaps they feared wars could be started over this? Perhaps they were. A king of some people or other, who was called Penda, seems to have been a particular thorn to those desiring peace.) A statue of St. Cuthbert and another saint, St. Aidan, watch over the ruins of the priory today. Further down the coast, to the south, is the different but equally impressive castle of Bamburgh. Like all Norman castles, it is a bold statement firmly announcing that the people thereabouts were defeated.
Right on the North Sea coast, the castle is memorable seen from the water's edge, its turrets reflecting in the wet sands from over the top of ranks of sand dunes. The castle guide was eccentric and explained at long length a painting that depicted the Grand Old Duke of York, even though my fellow visitors were all American and had never heard of the popular English nursery rhyme of "when he was up, he was up, and when he was down, he was down, and when he was only half way up, he was neither up nor down," etc., etc.
The castle enjoys the fame of being the first castle in the United Kingdom (well, any of the countries that later on would constitute the United Kingdom) to succumb to gun fire, rather than catapults, ladders, burning tar, etc. I walked around its edges, espying birds I had not seen for a while, such as Wheatear, Redwing and Reed bunting, and watched a game of football that was taking place in the fortress's colossal shadow, one mini-"war" amid the ghosts of several real ones.

(Mississippi, USA)...I went for a week-long drive in Mississippi, sticking to the back roads and seeing what I could uncover. It was similar, although much shorter, to William Least Heat Moon's wonderful travel journal Blue Highways: a Journey into America, which was written in 1982, 25 years ago. I did not discover a Nameless, Tennessee, as Least Heat Moon did, but the open road of the United States always leads to wonderfully eccentric or eccentric and wonderful finds. I started in New Orleans and headed across the Pontchartrain River and up along the Pearl River past Hickory and Bogalusa, before entering the Magnolia State. I took Route 35, which pretty much heads due north, but took a diversion when I saw a sign reading Hot Coffee, five miles.
Who could resist visiting a village of that name, although all that is there is a general store that at least has marketing savvy enough to always have java on the boil. Actor and sometimes nude centrefold Stella Stevens (née Estelle Caro Eggleston) supposedly was born there, but this was a line fed to her by her publicity agent, something along the lines of "I come from Hot Coffee, but I was the drop that spilled over the cup."
It is near the larger town of Taylorsville. I headed northeast along the beautiful Natchez Trace Parkway (no billboard advertisement permitted) to Tupelo, to see the re-creation of Elvis Presley's boyhood home, where the women at the ticket desk grew quite angry when I asked about Elvis' father's time in jail for forgery (supposedly, he and some friends changed the 3 of a $3 cheque to an 8). Sometime after he was released, the house Elvis was born in was physically put onto the back of a lorry and moved to their new home―Elvis' home from thereon―in Memphis, Tennessee.
Driving across the state I visited the home of another Mississippi icon, William Faulkner, in Oxford. Rowan Oak, his home's name, is two or three miles south of the town and near the wonderful hamlet of Taylor. But perhaps the most memorable episode of this wonderful drive was heading south from Clarksdale all the way down the Mississippi Delta to the small hamlet of Pond, via larger spots such as Vicksburg and Natchez. 
At Clarksdale it is possible to have breakfast at the crossroads where Blues legend Robert Johnson was said to have sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his guitar skills, although the choices are severely limited, from a Popeye's Chicken restaurant to a doughnut shop with no seating. But this was sufficient to have me decide to follow Johnson's trail. Drive south to Itta Bena, just west of Greenwood, and take Route 7 south. Johnson is the only person I know who has at least two graves (some say he has three). The first, if heading in the same direction I did, is at Quito, a place so small it usually does not end up on state maps.
The road is narrow, the village poor and dusty. Next to a small bridge is―or was, as I think they have shamefully since knocked it down―the Three Forks General Store, where Johnson was poisoned by a husband jealous of his wife's dalliance with the Blues man. The store had, I was told, been moved three miles away from an even more obscure spot. When I was there, it was frequented, seemingly, by a gaggle of small boys all running around half-naked. A small plaque marks where Johnson was buried (perhaps?). It is behind a small church that in turn stands behind a disused factory and next to a small park of caravans.
Another five miles down the road is Morgan City, where Grave No. 2 stands, marked by a more expensive memorial paid for by contributions from fans and erected some 50 years or so after his murder. The area is very atmospheric: flat fields, long lines of poplar trees gently blowing in the faint breeze, a heat haze and burning tarmacadam. It is not hard to imagine lines of stopping cotton-pickers.
I had lunch in Belzoni, so-called Catfish Capital of the World, in a small, dark spot called Little Wimps Bar-B-Q House, where a toothless old woman continually smiled at me while watching a soap opera. I did drive on maybe two miles of Interstate but took the first available exit.
This was fortunate, for it was where I met the most memorable person of the journey, the so-named Double Headed Reverend H.D. Dennis. He lives in a memorable building on Route 4. It stretches for about 100 metres and is painted in white, red and yellow. Biblical scripture is written on large boards and a tower at one end supposedly―the reverend was telling me all this in a raspy voice that I had to listen to very carefully in order to understand--was the Tower of Babel crowned by David's armoured hat. No a re-creation, mind you, but the real one. This he insisted upon.
Inside a very cramped, very colourful, working general store is the "actual" Ark of the Covenant, while inside it are the "actual" 10 commandments etched in English (perhaps surprisingly) on two slabs. He also has a story to tell about how God ordered him to build his shrine, and I decided very early on that I certainly was not going to be the one to dispute anything he had to tell me. He said he learnt carpentry while working with German prisoners of war, in Mississippi, during World War II. (Approximately 20,000 German and Italian prisoners of war lived in the state between 1943 and 1946.) His wife smiled and shrugged her shoulders a lot during my hour there. I was even escorted to a yellow school bus that he had wanted to fix up as a travelling church but which remained broken down. He waved to me as I disappeared. I remember him with fondness.

(Åland Islands, Finland)...One of the most curious, fascinating and wonderful places I have been to is the Åland Islands, off the coast of Sweden. It actually is a part of Finland, although the culture is Swedish. No doubt, the people there consider themselves apart from that country, too; it has the distinction of its autonomy being settled in June, 1921, by the ill-fated League of Nations, the forerunner of the United Nations.
The islands – and there are up to 400 of them, with perhaps even 6,000 more isolated rocks and islets jutting upwards, scattered over a land bridge extending across a parcel of water that effectively is the barrier between the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Bothnia – even publish their own postage stamps. I came here after running a marathon in Stockholm, and it is a fantastic place to recuperate. The ferry leaves the Swedish port of Grisslehamn en route to Eckerö on the Eckerö Linjen (www.eckerolinjen.fi) ferry line, on which people can witness the Swedish fascination with slot machines. At the time of my crossing, these machines were illegal in Sweden, and the ferry-crossers seemed more than willing to catch up with lost time.
The island of Eckerö (www.eckero.aland.fi) is the closest Åland Islands island to Sweden and also one of its largest. Immediately, all the cars embarked off the ferry and disappeared in the direction of the islands’ capital, Mariehamn, which is on neighbouring island, one that seems apparently nameless, although I did see the word Jomala written here and there. I walked. There was a small office that booked accommodation for travellers, then a narrow path that wound threw a wood and past a nature park that contained deer and ended up at a museum chronicling Åland life, hunting and fishing, in a tiny village called Vallberget. Minute cottages – stugas – dotted a park, and I stayed in one, right on a stretch of water at Käringsund. It was June, high summer, and things were idyllic. During the long, long evenings, as I walked along the traffic-less road to a dot of an isle called Främstö, I saw otters playing in the calm water and families singing songs accompanied by guitars.
Children seemingly are encouraged to stay up most of the night, perhaps making up for time that will be lost during the long, less-fulfilling winters. Just before dusk, a hare would appear at the edge of a field by my stuga, settle down for the night and remain there until the morning. There was a short walk back to the ferry terminal, then a lesser one to an old building that doubled as a museum and a post office, from where left the bus to Mariehamn. Approximately 30 kilometres away, it has a population of 25,000, and also some introduced peacocks on a small islet called Lilla Holmen. In its museum are displays pointing to its importance to the Vikings, and its status as a trading route can be seen in artifacts hailing from such Middle Eastern sites as Baghdad and Samarkand.
On the way home, I stopped off to see the church at Kyrkoby, which means Village of the Church in Swedish. It has a fine steeple, not particularly high, but wide and brown, and the lane beside it continues to end at a point that is nowhere in particular but none the less worthy for it—a lane; fields; hedges, and a small bay with one boat. The islands still enjoy a good degree of autonomy. No army bases are allowed on the island, and its parliament, the Lagting, elects two members to the Nordic Council and the European Union.
The walk back from the church was sunny, uneventful and perfect. The photograph above shows the top, spinning section of a maypole, with four sailing boats nodding towards the importance of the islands’ maritime history. Also extremely prevalent on the islands were 1950’s-era cars from the United States. I saw at least 10 classic automobiles. The ownership of these is very popular in Sweden, and it seems that to bring them to the Åland Islands is the quite the thing to do in the summer. I did not hear Rockabilly music, however. The politics of the island seem likewise placid, with a “revolutionary” mix of liberals, moderates, Social Democrats and independents, although what they feel they have to be independent of is beyond me.
Perhaps the moderates are not moderate enough? They all sit in an elected chamber called the Landskapsstyrelse, which like all Scandinavian words admirably dispenses with the need for apostrophes. One current law requires property owners to be citizens of the islands, not merely members of the European Union. From a shop selling only nautical tools and equipment I bought a high-quality Åland Islands flag, which has the classic Scandinavian design of a cross, with the vertical lines off center to the left. Whereas the Swedish flag is a yellow cross on a blue background, the Åland Islands’ flag has a red cross within a yellow cross on a background of the same colour. It hangs in my office.

(Macau)....Macau, or Macao, depending on your choice of spelling, is a curious place. I was traveling in China, in the small city of Zhaoqing in Guangdong province. I cannot speak any of the Chinese languages, so for most of the time I was ignorant of what I was seeing written around me. One thing I could make sense of, though, was the writing on a coach that every morning was parked beneath my hotel, as the name of the bus company was written in Portuguese. I knew that it could only be going to Macau, and it did, reaching this special administrative region (SAR) in about three hours, or the time it takes for two violent Hong Kong movies to air. Portuguese still is one of the official languages of Macau, but I did not hear anyone speaking it. 
There is some pride here of Portuguese involvement, dating as it does from 1553. Hong Kong also has much Portuguese history; the Brits only took over in the mid-19th century. Macau street addresses and tourist information is in Portuguese, so getting around is not a problem. It consists of three main islands. The first also is called Macau. It is the original settlement and is completely built over.
At its southern tip there are transportation hubs, hotels and restaurants and government offices; in the middle is the colonial area, including the famous façade of its ruined cathedral; while its north is more of a residential area, with a couple of quiet, off-the-beaten-path parks. It was in one of these during a rainstorm that I watched a game of mah-jong that I was none the wiser as how it was played when I left ninety minutes later. 
I also discovered an indoor ice rink and a former residence of Sun Yat Sen, the revolutionary Chinese leader who fled to Taiwan. The second island is Taipa, which is sinking beneath the weight of gaming. I took a bus through there on the way to the most southerly of the three islands, Coloane, and I could see huge fences wrapped around sites earmarked for casino development. Most of Taipa will be destroyed, it looks like; the other parts of this central island have been “reclaimed” from the sea. For example, the international airport here sits on what used to be water 20 years ago.
It depends what one is looking for in Macau as to what will be your favourite of the three islands (mine is Coloane). Macau, like most Chinese settlements, has a wealth of interesting alleys, markets, shrines, nooks and crannies to keep anyone interested for days; Taipa has a small colonial section ending at an old spa bordering a marsh (in danger of disappearing to construction crews) in which I saw herons and ibises, while Coloane is the closest to what one might imagine the entire peninsula to have, perhaps not too long ago, looked like. Coloane village was quiet, peaceful and relaxed. A small market did not create any of the noise usually associated with Chinese shopping; and it was in this village that I discovered the best coffee of that trip, at a bakery called Lord Stow’s (www.lordstow.com). 
It is on Rua da Tassara, and while there one must have several of its egg tarts, which are slightly burnt on their skin and absolutely delicious. Munching away, I watched three men build scaffolding using bamboo (this practice is used on two-storey houses as it is for 200-storey skyscrapers. No safety equipment is used, and death from falling is not unusual). I wandered around to the bottom tip of Coloane. Serenity quickly takes over. Little trails go through woods, and at the bottom is a now-seldom-visited spa and sports complex previously frequented by colonials. A plaque stating that this was the home of the Macao Swimming Association almost has faded away to nothing (see photo).
In an oceanfront bar were two men smoking cigarettes and speaking French. After dropping down past an understated Westin hotel and a small cemetery, woods begin again that soon rise very steeply on a trail of wooden steps to an electrical substation. The path falls away to the A-Ma Monastery, which is the largest and oldest in Macau. A large statue of A-Ma rising above the trees is to be seeked out if you lose direction. The monastery is impressive and colourful, and there I bought its sect’s flag, a triangular yellow affair with a pink border and red and pink stitching. On one side is a god being fanned by two priests; on the other, a dragon trying to paw a sun. There is a little silver bell at the top. The man who sold it to me took 15 minutes to package it for me, so as it stood no chance of getting damaged.

(Worldwide)...I have always enjoyed birdwatching – indeed, watching wildlife of any kind, but especially birdwatching. Call the hobby/obsession “birding,” if you will, the latest parlance. I started when I was 11 years of age going to the marshes of North Kent in England, around Higham and Cliffe, with my friends Paul Obey and Alex Carlisle, who remains my closest friend to today. I was never a very good birder. 
I am hopeless with identifying birds from their calls, not much better, I feel, even on identifying those I can see. That said, my nonbirder or slightly interested birder friends seem to be amazed by my identifications and the ability I have to spot birds, when all they can see is greenery and twigs. This is no real skill. If one does anything long enough, telltale signs emerge that allow correct identification and eyes are trained to see.
After a while, one gets used to seeing what perhaps is different, rather than seeing what can be classed as the “everyday.” Birding also is a great way of seeing the world, or at least adding another layer of interest to where one goes and what one sees. It allows one to walk slower through the environment and pause. I have never travelled anywhere specifically to bird watch, but I always take my binoculars. I also love mornings.
On a recent press trip to Cabo San Lucas in Mexico, I was fortunate enough to stay at a resort (I have written about the Bonita Pacífica Holistico Resort & Spa before) right at the edge of the development. Right behind the resort was a wide, occasionally smelly, area of desert, cactus and scrub, with a couple of small lakes and a track or two dividing it all up. One or two houses sat behind this land. It was beautiful and calming to get up at first light and walk around. That time of day also is the best time to view birds, which have first thing in the day energy, a need to eat and a desire to communicate. California gnatcatcher, Grey thrasher, Ladderback woodpecker, Gila woodpecker and Western scrub-jay were a few of the species I had never seen before.
I recently received an email from the public-relations company for the hotel, saying Great News…the resort’s upcoming golf course has received final permission. This, to me, is not good news, as I know where they are building the damned thing, right over that scrubland. I am sure to many this land looks abandoned or wasted.
As of today, I have seen about 900 species of birds, 325 or so in the United States, 220 or so in the United Kingdom and the rest scattered over the international destinations I have visited. Chances are I have seen more than 900, but I am positive that on many occasions I have not been able to name what I see, Naming things is no different than collecting things, a belief that often leaves me mulling. The main difference is that with birding, one is not filling one's apartment with items. The following is a list of nine of the rarer birds I have seen. Some are just rare, others are low in number due to a small geographical distribution, e.g. on islands.
My favourite I think is the Strange-tailed tyrant that I saw – actually, my girlfriend was the one who spotted it first…also, second and third – in northern Argentina. It is quite a spectacular bird, with the oddest tail feathers, hence its name. The bird in the photo is the not-rare Plush-crested jay, taken at Iguazú Falls in Argentina, close to the Brazilian border.

Black-and-white monjita (Xolmis dominicanus); family: Tyrannidae; 4,000-5,000, scattered, small populations in Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay; classed as Vulnerable Black-throated piping-guan (Pipile jacutinga); family: Cracidae; c. 5,000; very rare in jungles of extreme northeastern Argentina; São Paulo state and, maybe, one or two areas of Paraguay; classed as Endangered Flame robin (Petroica phoenicea); family: Petroicidae; c. 1 million but decreasing rapidly; Tasmania and Southeast Australia; classed as Near Threatened Hawaiian coot (Fulica alai); family: Rallidae; 2,000-4,000, small numbers due to small range; endemic to the Hawaiian island, with the exception of Lana’i; classed as Vulnerable Hawaiian goose (“Nene”) (Branta sandvicensis); family: Anatidae; 960-1,000, endangered due to small population; endemic to the Hawaiian islands of Hawaii, Kaua’i and Mau’i; classed as Vulnerable James’ flamingo (“Puna flamingo”) (Phoenicoparrus jamesi); family: Phoenicopteridae; c. 100,000; high altiplano areas of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and Peru; classed as Near Threatened Kittlitz’s murrelet (Brachyramphus brevirostris); family: Alcidae; 13,000-35,000, decreasing; Arctic waters along the north coast of Eastern Russia and in the Russian Chutkchi Sea, and in Alaska, southeast throughout the Aleutians and along the Pacific Coast southwards to the Queen Charlotte Islands in Canada; classed as Critically Endanagered Lessser rhea (Pterocnemia pennata); family: Rheidae; c. 5,000; scattered in flood plain areas around 1,500 metres above sea level of several South American countries, usually in separate subspecies, some of which are close to extinction; classed as Near Threatened Strange-tailed tyrant (Alectrurus risora); family: Tyrannidae; 10,000-19,999 remaining; northeast Argentina and southwest Paraguay; classed as Vulnerable