(Belize/Honduras)…Flying is not becoming easier, and on every flight I hear at least once a neighbor complaining how long the flight is. Not every passenger chooses to fly, I know, but I suspect the majority do, and I got to wondering if flights are only as long as the passenger’s desire to get to wherever the flight is heading to.
The experience of flying could be better, but it can always be worse, and I always pinch my leg to remind myself how lucky we are to live in accessible, transportation-minded America, in which New Yorkers enjoy even more flexibility, including three cruise ports. Many of those people I see when I travel do not have such advantages. This is not me being patronizing. It simply is true.
Recently, I came across another example of this good fortune, having reached two towns of the same name and linked by history. In the south of Belize, in Toledo District, close to the border with Guatemala, is a small town called Punta Gorda. That’s Spanish for Fat Point. Flying there—actually, puddle-jumping through this country the size of New Jersey from Belize City to Dangriga to Placencia to Punta Gorda—on a small, low-flying plane, I saw a stately Belizean procession of meandering rivers, thick jungles and thin, sand-colored roads, but nothing that looked like a point, fat or otherwise. There is no reason it has its name, except if you consider where its people came from. Its people are the Garinagu, more commonly known as the Garifuna.
They originally hail from the Caribbean islands, or was it Venezuela and Guyana? No one remembers for sure. The British treated them terribly and threw them out of what is now the island-nation of St. Vincent & the Grenadines. They landed, destitute but still not enslaved, on the Honduran island of Roatán, where they established a small town called Punta Gorda, from where the Belizean town got its name.
Some stayed. Others moved along the coast to Nicaragua, Guatemala and Belize, which is its largest population. The second largest is in Los Angeles. Passing a large clock tower painted with national symbols, the bus driver in Punta Gorda, Belize, popped in a CD of the Garinagu music of Andy Palacio. Its infectious beats swayed like wind-caressed palm trees. Palacio died young, in 2007, and is considered a national treasure. “There’s another Punta Gorda in Honduras,” I was told. I knew that. I had been there, and now I had been to both, but I kept silent. It seemed from what I heard that for many Garinagu going to Roatán was a dream, a pilgrimage of return. I felt slightly self-conscious that I traveled to both Fat Points, especially as it was my British ancestors who kicked them out of their 18th-century home.
Additionally, I saw that it is far, far easier and quicker—but not as much fun—to fly from Belize City to Houston and then back south to Roatán than it is to ferry across from Punta Gorda, Belize, to either the Guatemalan or Honduran coasts and then continue by road to La Ceiba, which sits more or less opposite Honduras’ Islas de la Bahia, one of which is Roatán.
In La Ceiba, travelers must make a choice of catching a second ferry or taking a flight. Thus, most Belizean Punta Gordans have never been to their Honduran parent. The Belizean ferry does not run every day, and even if you sail to Honduras, you still have to pass through Guatemalan waters and customs, adding to the logistical nightmare. In Honduras’ Punta Gorda I stumbled, quite by chance, on the 211th anniversary celebrations of the Garinagu’s arrival on Roatán. Even on this small island, getting to Punta Gorda takes some effort. The island has a scrunched-up spine along which travels its one two-way road, but the hassle was worth it. The party oozed exuberance. There was music, food, dancing and colorful dress.
The town stretches along a dusty main street, a white-sand beach, lines of power cables and palm trees and the blue Caribbean Sea. Its wooden buildings are as bright as the costumes worn on this special day and in memory of distant origins—oranges, blues, yellows; West African designs, conical caps and vibrant bandanas. In hindsight it was also memorable for its guest of honor, who landed a short way down the beach, stepped out of a helicopter and sauntered down, to where we all sat eating seafood stew, wearing a large white Stetson hat and shaking hands. Soldiers twitched to attention, but the mood remained happy.
It was Manuel Zelaya Rosales, the former president of Honduras, who at press time still remains in the Brazilian embassy in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa after his much-chronicled political troubles, coup d’état, exile to Nicaragua and clandestine return. He was supposed to have come with Nicaragua’s president Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista, but did not due to a Honduran-Nicaraguan dispute concerning maritime borders that rears its ugly head every few years. Maybe Ortega wanted to visit beautiful Roatán, but politics stopped him. Many of Belize’s Punta Gorda citizens are halted by expense and difficulty. There is little that should stop us.

(Israel)…One first impression of the Old City of Jerusalem is that it is a warren, a place of hidden spaces and forgotten lineages. I snooped beneath arches half my height to find courtyards, some showing the green, red and white of Palestine, others showing the blue and white of Israel or Greece; a large white cross against a red background showed the centuries-old home of the Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem, a Christian military order who safeguarded pilgrim routes and pilgrims and cared for the sick among them, who later in its history was also known as the Order of the Knights of Rhodes and the Sovereign and Military Order of the Knights of Malta.
I saw a Greek Orthodox priest scurry across David Street, known to Arabs as Suq el Bazar, and disappear, aptly, along Greek Orthodox Patriarchate Road. I followed and saw a noisy group of Palestinian schoolchildren bearing bright pink backpacks on their way to school. Two nuns in white robes with blue trim, members of Mother Theresa’s Missionaries of Charity, disappeared under a dark arch past shuttered stores selling junk, souvenirs, maps and religious paraphernalia. Some shopkeepers were taking a broom to the Roman flagstones outside these stores. I came across a street called Ethiopian Monastery Street and another named after St. Francis, his Franciscan monks also present here.
The sun was still not up in the sky. I stumbled left and right and suddenly came across one of the most famous streets in the world, the Street of Sorrows, or the Via Dolorosa, where Jesus Christ was judged, bore his cross, fell down three times, died and was buried. Religious or not, this amount of history is difficult to imagine. The 14 stations of the cross (some say that the 15th is when Jesus rose again over the Mount of Olives) are marked along this road, and all day, and especially in the evening when trying to get from A to B is slow going, religious groups reverently trace his last steps. I saw religious groups of Koreans in bright baseball caps, Greek and Armenian Orthodox in sober clothing and Congolese in printed cotton suits dyed yellow, green and red. Some pilgrims carried wooden crosses, and at every station prayers, hymns and sermons were said.
Walking the length of Habad Street and then zigzagging along Bet El and Hayei Olam I came across the Western Wall, the holiest site of Judaism. Small pieces of paper were stuck into the wall, and the devout rocked gently against it. Behind the wall is the one of the holiest Muslim sites, the al-Aqsa Mosque, on the grounds of the Dome of the Rock and the Temple Mount, where Solomon built the first Jewish temple. That area is off-bounds to all but Muslims.
The machinations of all this history I found impossible to grasp, so I just reveled in the majesty of it all. Disputes also occur at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which contains the last five Stations of the Cross. It is tucked down St. Helena Street, which looks as though it stops at a dead end, only to turn left and then right. A second arch leads to the Arab souk, or suq, the market. Muslims act as doorkeepers here, for the arguments between Armenian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, Syrian (aka Syriac) Orthodox (a tiny population), Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria, Ethiopian Orthodox and other Christian interests run so deep that much-needed repairs cannot be started and occasionally fights break out over which order should care for which step or roof top.
For me, the most fascinating walk, no more than 100 yards, starts in the small square in front of the main entrance of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. In the right-hand corner is a small heavy-stone doorway that leads to the first of two dark Ethiopian Orthodox chapels. Monks sit silently in dank corners, the thin passage leading up steps before turning left into the second chapel. Walking around this takes you to another small set of steps that lead out to a roof with a dome, which is the roof of another part of the overall church below. Across this roof is the entrance to the Coptic Church. Ethiopian priests do not cross a magical line somewhere on this roof, as neither do the Coptics. Just along from here I visited a school with children learning Arabic and reading the Koran, and above them on a balcony I saw an orthodox Jewish reading the Torah.
Back in the church I discovered the burned chapel of the Syrian Orthodox and the first of a series of small caves that are said to go for some distance beneath the city and where Joseph of Arimathea is supposedly buried. Jesus’s tomb is here, too. Writers are supposed to withstand the desire to use adjectives, and I will definitely do so here. Okay, just one—everything here is incredible. Just get here early when the crowds are small or nonexistent.
Two spots to enjoy views of the city are the Austrian Hospice and the Church of the Maronite Patriarch Exarchate. In the 18th century, all the world’s superpowers scrambled to buy property in Jerusalem, and the Austrian Hospice is one piece of evidence of that. It contains guest rooms, as does the Maronite church, and I cannot think of anywhere better to stay to feel just an infinitesimally small bit of what has happened and is happening.
Arrive at the Austrian Hospice 15 minutes before dusk, order a double espresso and walk up to the roof. Gaze across the city, at the roof of the Dome of the Rock sparkling golden, at the inhabitants bustling along streets and at the green edging coming to life on the minarets just before the taped muezzins announce the call to prayer for Muslims. For five minutes the sounds from a dozen or so minarets echoes across the air and thousands of years of history—and conflict—peal away to one single moment.

(Svalbard)…In August, I strolled up, after taking my shoes off, to the bar of the Mellageret and ordered a drink, and thus doing so, I claimed a Travel Superlative, that of having a beer in the world’s most northerly pub. I’d also done this in the world’s most northerly settlement, Ny-Ålesund in the Norwegian Arctic island of Svalbard. Generally, everything here, is the “Most Northerly this” or “Most Northerly that.”
The accolades start as you land at Longyearbyen Airport, the world’s most northerly scheduled-flight airport at 78° 14’ 50’N (from now on, W’sMN will stand in for this superlative). The records continue as you enter Longyearbyen—named after an American miner, John Munroe Longyear, from Lansing, Mich.—which is the W’sMN settlement with more than 1,000 residents. Longyearbyen, approximately 800 miles north of the Arctic Circle and 600 miles south of the North Pole, is light for every minute of the summer, which is the time to come.
Spend a couple of days here and then embark on one of the adventure cruises that go northwards in search of whales, seals, glaciers, misty fjords and, most stunning of all, Polar bears. I saw five, all fat, lazy and contented, lying on ice packs high above an easy meal of a dead Fin whale. The name that I knew the region by when I was young, Spitsbergen, is in fact one part of the island group of Svalbard. The W’sMN spot I have now been to is 80° 00’ 3’N, a little atoll (and, yes, you can have atolls in cold places, as well as in warm) called Moffen Island.
Anchored 1,000 feet from the shore (being a wildlife refuge, this is a legal requirement). I gazed at the walruses wobbling down the stony beach towards the sea, which on the day I was there registered 2°C. If you want to be an official Svalbard Polar Bear, and have a certificate to prove it, you need to go swimming in this water, which I did for exactly five strokes. The water on your skin resembles a thousand knife pricks.
One Brit crazier than me, Lewis Gordon Pugh, recently swam for two-thirds of a mile in water like this, ice bobbing close by, but he is trained and has a unique way of raising his core body temperature. His swim took him just a shade under 19 minutes, when any time more than one minute in water that cold can have irreversible effects. Three seconds was plenty for me, but that dot of water by an old burial site called Gravesnet is now the W’sMN spot in which I’ve gone swimming, smashing my previous record of the public swimming baths in Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, at a measly 64° 11’ 27’N.
Anyway, let’s get back to Ny-Ålesund. It is predominantly a research station, but it is permanent, with 150 inhabitants during the summer, 30 during the winter. It has a store, a post office, an abandoned steam train ideal for photographs and the W’sMN Arctic marine laboratory. It is not a temporary community, and it is not formed of heated tents, which other upstart claimants claim makes them the W’sMN settlement.
Do not believe them. And what makes Ny-Ålesund the winner is that it acts like a town, with residents chatting on street corners, shoppers sharing jokes with the clerk in the store and friends sharing a pint—well, at least they can the two summer evenings a week (one in winter) the pub is open. Life can be felt here. Stories are told. One I heard at the pub was when I started chatting with Mehmet, a Turk from Istanbul. He told me a great tale about Ny-Ålesund. The famous Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, the first man to reach the South Pole, left from here in a zeppelin (you can see the tower from which this craft was tethered) to be the first man to reach the North Pole. This was in May 1926. Earlier that year an American, Richard Evelyn Byrd, claimed he had reached the pole, but his data was confused and his achievement doubted. Amundsen went with an American explorer called Lincoln Ellsworth and an Italian pilot called Umberto Nobile, who brought along a crew. Nobile told Amundsen and Ellsworth not to wear furs because of their weight and to bring small Norwegian and American flags, which they intended to leave at the pole, for the same reason. When Nobile arrived, he and his crew were decked out in heavy furs, which infuriated Amundsen, but not as much as he became when he realized that the heavy crate he believed was full of technical equipment actually contained a massive Italian flag that fluttered down to cover the pole for, seemingly, acres: The W’sMN con trick.
No con trick from me. While Amundsen et al only floated over the North Pole, rather than landing there or taking sleds and dogs, I actually walked all the way on foot to the pub. A little to the south is another town, Barentsburg, which is on the same fjord, Isfjord, as Longyearbyen, which, incidentally, is the home of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a climate-controlled underground warehouse that is off limits to most and in which have been deposited seeds of every plant known to science. Its building was completed last year. Barentsburg, a Russian-Ukrainian mining community that is fascinating to wander in but very rough around the edges to look at, does not provide such an easy life, so it seemed to me.
I would not be surprised if it was abandoned in the next decade, a decision that would probably have more to do with the commodity markets, rather than the desire of people to live there. A statue of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin stands in the central square beneath a stylized mural of three strong women workers and a sign on the hillside that in Russian says “Peace to the World,” the—you guessed it—W’sMN mountainside message. But the Lenin statue here will have to make do with second place, for there also is a statue of him in the now-abandoned town of Pyramiden, 50 miles to the north. Hardly anyone goes there now.
Cruise ships do stop in Barentsburg, though, and it is worth seeing. Some of the prettier buildings are deemed unsafe following a 2008 earthquake, and the wooden walkways that crisscross the town are not for the unsure of foot, but there exists here a definite atmosphere of adventure and “otherness.”
A bar—inside a hotel that surely has seen better days—is compelling in a let’s-go-back-in-time manner and offers a curiously inscrutable menu that includes “soup noodles ‘Rolton’ in assortment” for 20 Norwegian kronor (NK), “cappuccino ‘MacCoffee’ in assortment, 12.5 grams” for 15NK, “dry rings of calamaries (sic), 18 grams” for 8NK and “bus trip: port—birch grove—port” for 50NK that I did make serious enquiries about but was told I’d already missed that day’s exciting itinerary. Shame, that, as it might just have been the World’s Most Northerly Birch Grove Adventure, and who would not want to pay the equivalent of $7 to see the World’s Smallest Tree, all of them no more than two inches in height.

(England)…When we saw the danger warnings and little red shields peppered across the shooting range of Shorne Marshes, my friend Alex Carlisle and I, and sometimes Paul Obey and Clive Gilby, would know it was time to gather our belongings and get ready to disembark. Emerging from a tunnel, the train swept along the Thames & Medway Canal, which came right up to the train track’s side, and we stepped out at the tiny Kent station of Higham, which was not in Higham at all, rather in Lower Higham, a hamlet in that it did not possess a church. The station was an Edwardian, one-story building that dragged along the platform, with a ticket office that was never open and no railways employer that I ever saw.
I felt some connection with the railways, albeit a very tenuous one. I have had three grandfathers, and of the two that I met, one worked for the railways all his working life. My mother would tell me of how he worked half a day on Christmas Day, every year. Throughout my life there have never been trains on Christmas Day, though I rather feel that I would have loved to have taken one and wander around Higham on any December twenty-fifth, especially to the end of Church Street, where there was a church, all on its own, a mile from Lower Higham. The frost would have been crisp on the stalks of grass, and there would have been few other people around. Perhaps a woman wearing a headscarf would poke a head over a hedge, or a man would be seen tapping a walking stick against a low wall and walking a dog. Even watching an idling car, it exhaust-pipe fumes crystallising in the air, would take on a quiet beauty and otherworldly fascination.
When Granddad Barton died, his wife, my Nan Barton, took us on summer holidays on the train with heavily discounted tickets that came through my granddad’s working associations and her continued membership of the Old Southeronians of the British Transport Pensioners’ Federation. My uncle Mike Polglaze, the husband of my Dad’s eldest sister, ran for a while the Bluebell Railway steam train that went from Sheffield Park to Kingscote via Horsted Keynes along the Kent-East Sussex border. My father grew up in Sussex, while the rest of my family are from Kent, true Kentishmen and women, born to the west of the River Medway that divides our county and us from the Men of Kent born to its east. Polglaze is a Cornish name, but then Uncle Mike married into our family. In his attic, he had a scaled model train, with steam trains, tunnels, lakes, switches, stations, hillocks, deer, passengers, station employees and short-trousered schoolchildren holding little notebooks to record train numbers.
The River Medway flows into and out of the Weir Wood Reservoir, one of its earliest tributaries touching Kingscote station, before taking on steam and flowing all the way to the beginnings of the English Channel along the Thames Estuary just beyond the bishopric of Rochester. The Medway’s flow is responsible for the flooding and drying of the Isle of Grain, also known as the Hoo Peninsula, on which at its beginnings lie Higham and the neighbouring village of Cliffe. On the same parcel of land is Allhallows-on-Sea, where my Aunt Glad and Uncle Frank lived after moving from Northwest London; during World War II they operated a bacon-and-eggs café in Harrow and were blown across the road by a German bomb. The family legend states that Aunt Glad was still holding the frying pan when she recovered her senses on the other side of the road.
Residents nickname this Thamesside spot Allhallows-on-Mud, for that is what one generally sees. It’s also the inspiration for the name of this blog. Opposite Higham Station was a thin, disused quarry. Trees had secured footholds on its far side, and these were the haunts of Little owls, which would pop up out of holes at twilight before flying no more than ten yards to a viewing perch. If any of us had some money, we would stop off at a corner shop where we had to shout in order for the owner to appear.
A little more than twenty-five miles from the centre of London, Higham was a hamlet of ghosts. Church Road was the long lane that led from station to church and the start of Higham Marshes. Half way down was an apple orchard, the fruit of which often spilt into the road and our haversacks. Once we climbed in, only to run when we heard the farmer’s yell, something I thought only happened in old films. Turtle doves cooed from electricity wires as we scarpered to the end of the road, where St. Mary’s Church appeared at the bottom of a very slight slope. A Kentish flint wall surrounded it. It was never open, and a little later it was announced abandoned. Just before the church, the road forked in two, with both branches quickly ending. The fork to the right led to a footpath that skirted the ruins of a Benedictine priory founded in 1148. Its first prioress was Mary, daughter of King Stephen, the grandson of William the Conqueror. Stephen is buried just down the road in Faversham. Also down the road and much, much closer is a small settlement called Lillechurch that was the priory’s first site. Parts of it are said to remain in the walls of houses there.
We were all inwardly pleased to learn of the scandal that befell Higham Priory. In the early 16th century, when it was dissolved, it was found that two of its nuns had had children with the hamlet’s vicar, Bardefelde. Income came in from various sources including an annual three-day fayre, the permission for which came from Henry III, but at its end, financial irregularities were seen to have been commonplace. To appease the locals, alms of twelve pence a year were given over to the poor of Higham, while the other remaining funds seemed to have been invested into priories in Cambridge and Dartford, where I was born. That John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester and the man responsible for the dissolvement of Higham Priory, had a sister who was a nun in Dartford might neither be here nor there. Later, Henry VIII executed Fisher, who refused to acknowledge the king as the head of the new English church.
On the other side of Higham is Gad’s Hill Place, the home Charles Dickens bought when fame came his way, a place mentioned by Shakespeare in Henry IV. Taking the left fork, we would cross a branch of the rail line that took us to Higham, walk beneath two lines of pylons and emerge out on the marshes. The landscape is so flat that the large Thames tankers, coming down from the nearby jetties of Tilbury and West Thurrock on the other side of the river in Essex, passing in sight of the memorial to the Powhatan Indian princess Pocahontas, who died in and is supposedly buried in Gravesend, the name given to the place where at last ran out the bodies, dead from the great bubonic plagues of the medieval era, in need of burial space.
After passing by the rookeries that made the trees appear pockmarked and dying, the flat grasses would begin of Lapwing and Common curlew nests. Thin dykes spliced the land at right angles, and Barrow Hill, rising to a mighty five feet above sea level, stood to the right, rutted by sheep that during our years there one year were no longer there.Puncturing our slow walk to the levees on the Thames were Whimbrel, Grey heron, Stonechat and Winchat. On the other side, only a few feet of rounded stones dividing the walkway on top of the levee from the river, at least at high tide, were Purple sandpiper, Ringed plover, Redshank and Greenshank, as well as, on the other side of the river, Coalhouse Fort, built in 1874 to protect the estuary from French invasion. Farther on, we used to search for fossils in the chalk around the Martello tower of Cliffe Fort, one of many rectangular structures built in the century earlier to guard as against other Europeans, this time the Dutch, who were more successful in terrorising the riverside inhabitants.
Alex would always find the best fossils. Martello towers were named after the Corsican village of Mortella (somehow the vowels got twisted) on San Fiorenzo Bay, whose towers, originally constructed by the Genoese, so impressed the British besiegers, who in 1794 with two warships of the latest design fought long and hard to subdue a spot guarded by only 33 men. When it was taken, a study was made of this new defence and orders followed by Acts of Parliament soon materialised. Today, San Fiorenzo goes by the name of Saint-Florent, almost directly due south of Genoa and on the other side of the Cap Corse peninsula from Bastia, the second town of Corsica.

(California, United States of American)—Apart from a brief incursion to Emerald Bay on the north side of Lake Tahoe, it has been a while since I visited California. In regard to scenery, it is a truly impressive and diverse state.
The Santa Barbara County Superior Court on Anacapa St. is a marvellous building, its architecture evoking Andalucia, its staircases spiralling and its staterooms, especially the Mural Room, a riot of art and colour. It must be truly depressing to spend your last days of freedom in such a beautiful setting. A mirador gives great views, and the city’s pier—amazingly not tacky in the least—Stearn’s Wharf is the perfect place for seafood. Try the Santa Barbara Shellfish Company (www.sbfishhouse.com), which was only slightly spoiled by a drunk Mancunian at the next table commenting on how everything was bigger here than back home. Santa Barbara also has a gorgeous mission on its highest hill, and we saw several other missions during our travels. My favourite was the one near Jolon, up and off the Coastal Highway. The road to it, Nacimiento-Ferguson Rd., can be missed very easily, as the Pacific Ocean scenery the entire way from Los Angeles, but especially after San Luis Obispo, is one long photography-moment.
That road is a joy to drive, with little traffic and thick forest. It even went through a minute band of Redwood, but a little later, one needs to stop to present your documents to a policeman at the edge of Hunter Liggett army base. Army bases are undisturbed places for nature, but it is surreal to see Western bluebirds and Western meadowlarks flitting around tanks placed in serene (mostly!) meadows used occasionally for bombing practice. Finally, soldiers and barracks came into view, for it is on this camp where exists the Mission San Antonio de Padua (www.missiontour.org/sanantonio/index.htm; see photo above), founded in 1771. There were no fees, no pamphlets, no tourism concession and no other visitors. The inner courtyard has the ramshackle unkemptness that I love in such places. I walked the last 400 metres to it, which was highly enjoyable. Oddly, there are several ship masts on display, brought by captains in the hope that their seafaring lives would be easy ones, but it certainly could not have been easy to get the things here in the wildness of 18th-century California. This all was owned by William Randolph Hearst at one time, as did all the land between here and the coast, a small kingdom.
What we first thought was the mission turned out to be his attractive summer cottage. We managed to catch two farmers’-market days, the first in tidy, enjoyable San Luis Obispo, which also coincided with a monthly mass cycle, hundreds upon hundreds of cyclists, some dressed up, who chatted, laughed and seemingly had a lovely time. This was not the Critical Mass political protests of some cities; there were even free bicycle storage areas with security. The other market was in the town of Sonoma, where the popcorn tent went up in flames. Big Sur is as beautiful as we heard it was going to be, and the waterfall that spills onto the beach (at least it did in June) metres from the ocean at Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park (www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=578) should not be missed.
After enjoying San Francisco for three days, we headed through the John Muir Redwoods and the Sonoma and Napa wine valleys, stopping off at the Hess (www.hesscollection.com) for a tasting and a gander at the art collection upstairs that contains a Francis Bacon painting, Man Talking, which probably is worth more than any amount of wine produced here. Priceless is Yosemite National Park. Jaws hitting floors is an apt reaction to what is seen here. On the way we stopped off at Chinese Camp, which is in the middle of the wide agricultural belt that divides California. It’s largely deserted now, but once it was home to 5,000 Chinese gold and rail workers, including 400 or so who apparently fled here from parts of Mexico controlled by Sancho Panza.
Back in Yosemite, every next waterfall brought larger gasps, as did such rock faces as El Capitan and Half Dome and the Mariposa Grove of gigantic Sequoia trees. The latter’s pride and joy is the truly immense Grizzly Giant Sequoia, where we sat in disbelief as one fat idiot tried but failed to prise off some bark while all the time pitifully trying to justify something by repeating aloud the word “amazing.” Finding an empty spot beside the Yosemite Creek while looking at the stunning scenery and a White-headed woodpecker was a happy memory. Driving out of the park along the Tioga Pass saw some snow on the ground and very chilly temperatures, and feeling the warmth of the rising sun on the pristine Tuolumne Meadows should not be missed, as should not the Tioga Pass Resort (www.tiogapassresort.com/summerdining.shtml), which has the nicest breakfast bar I can remember. At 2,939 metres above sea level, this is the perfect place of pancakes on a cold morning.
An hour later and we were baking, as should be the case in June, in the Sierra Nevada ghost town of Bodie, where Mountain bluebirds flitted around. Bodie (www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=509) is the world’s largest ghost town, once home to 10,000 people. Run by the National Park Service, it is kept in a state of “arrested decay,” so were told. The ranger also told us that there are a few remains of a Chinese camp here, on the other side of the hill we could see, and there were several gunfights between the whites. Banks, stores, schools and cars all sit as they have done for 100 years in the scrubby desert. The town is north of Mono Lake, which features tall carbonate formations called tufas. Our last major stop, after stocking up on jerky at Mahogany Smoked Meat (www.smokedmeats.com) in Bishop, was Death Valley, where we arrived just at sunset to enjoy the moon emerge over Stovepipe Wells’ sand dunes. Another beautiful spot was Salt Creek, but we were there at the wrong time of year to see its endemic Pupfish.
Considering the aridness, there is life here, including amazingly fast Black-tailed jackrabbits and pale-pink Say’s phoebes. I am not sure what it was, though, that had my eyes streaming through my stay there. It is a glorious place to come, although any tourists—ourselves included—do tend to follow exact itineraries, perhaps not such a bad idea in such a hostile environment. We did have to tell off two obnoxious tourists for repeatedly talking loudly at the Devil’s Golf Course, an area of absolute silence and nothingness. They gave us a look but did shut up.

(Finland)—Slightly jetlagged, in that nice manner of letting everything sweep over you and offering very little in a struggle against it, I was sitting on a lawn at a manor house called Haikko (www.haikko.fi), some 40 kilometres outside of Helsinki. It dates back to 1362, when it was home to Dominican priests who were part of the Russian monastery of Vyborg, but equally interesting was that the home’s latest renovation was funded by a lottery win, even though the latest owners would never be classed amongst the poor. Just down the road is the country’s second-oldest town, Porvoo, whose Finnish name comes from the local phonetic attempt to say its Swedish name of Borjå. Most of the Finnish places I visited have populations of Swedish speakers. Finnish, itself, is a far more difficult language to learn.
Porvoo has a wonderful district of cobbled lanes and red, wooden houses that today receives growing numbers of visitors but a part of which, up the hill, in the 1960s and 70s was often referred to as the “Shanghai of the Nordic Countries,” for its inherent dangers to life and limb from its inhabitants, apparently. It is noted for its snail restaurants. Timbaali (www.timbaali.com) even has a rout of snails crossing its awning.
Helsinki must be notable in that it is the only place I can ever remember going to in which I wanted to go shopping. I detest shopping, but in the village of Fiskars, famous for its orange-handled scissors, I visited its design museum and saw several shirts made by equally well-known Finnish company, Marimekko (www.marimekko.fi). In case anyone thinks I am softening, going to visit the shop was a last-minute decision I took after realizing I had 20 minutes following a visit to the Suomenlinna island-fortress (www.suomenlinna.fi) and not a stop I had to make before discovering that island’s hummocks, beaches, ponds, battlements and, even, a beached submarine. This UNESCO World Heritage site (no, not Marimekko) has, I was surprised to learn, a resident population of almost 900, as made evident by the existence of a supermarket just before the local ferry pier. Also, somewhere else on the island and not seen by my curious eyes is a työsiirtola, an open prison for very low-risk prisoners.
The most-visited spot, but also the area where you can most easily escape all other people, the fortifications of the King’s Gate, reveals an inscription that reads “Eftervärld, stå här på egen botn och lita icke på främmande hjälp,” which is Swedish, not Finnish, and means “Progeny, stand here on your own foundation and do not rely on foreign help.”
This was a quote from Count Augustin Ehrensvärd, who was commissioned to build the fort when Finland was part of Sweden. The city of Turku, the oldest settlement in Finland, also unveiled some interesting history. This small city will share the honours with Tallinn, Estonia, of being one of the two Cultural Capitals of Europe in 2011, and while it is pleasant, I think it will find it hard to compete against the medieval atmosphere of the Estonian capital, but let’s hope they work together.
One of my favourite Turku finds was a bust of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. It was tucked away beside a red-brick building and was not on any official tourism pamphlet that I read, but it turns out that he stayed in a house here (of which it is now outside of) when in 1907 he fled Russia. In those years, Finland was part of Russia. He must have been grateful, as one of the first acts he administered when the Soviet Union was formed in 1917 was to give Finland full independence. On the other side of the equation, I took a boat from Turku to the island of Ruissalo, which yearly hosts the Ruisrock rock festival (www.ruisrock.fi). It’s been a while since I had been to one (Reading in the early 1990s, Glastonbury a little before that).
The Sunday line-up of bands was notable for being the last show by local heroes, The Crash (www.thecrash.com), whose songs are catchy but a little poppy for my tastes. They did a version of The Smiths’ There is a Light that Never Goes Out, which was excellent. I also managed to see The Gaslight Anthem (www.gaslightanthem.com), who hail from New Brunswick, N.J., which is the main campus of Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey (www.rutgers.edu), where I studied for my Master’s degree, and the Soul Captain Band, Finland’s most famous, and probably only, reggae band.
Also in Turku was a musical tree, an oak to which was tied a dozen mobile phones. A list of birds and their relevant mobile-phone numbers were listed below, and if you call one, you hear the sound the bird makes trill through the air. I rather liked it, the idea that using your personal phone can lead to a moment not of noise and meaningless chatter but one of quiet and contemplation.
Back in Helsinki I pottered around various neighborhoods, promontories and islands. One spit of land, Katajanokka Skatudden, very close to the central harbour (see photo above), I liked tremendously, and the next time I go, I will have to visit and eat at a restaurant tucked at the base of a circular building away from the stares of tourists. It was called Welloma (www.wellamo.fi), and if you climb up the steps beside it and then turn on the streets above it, you can get an excellent view of the Russian Orthodox Church of Uspenski.

(Cayman Islands)—Scuba, scuba, scuba. This is the main reason to come to Grand Cayman, an island that initially struck me as rather soulless. The small capital of this small island, which remains one of the United Kingdom’s few remaining colonial outposts, George Town, has little to recommend it, apart from some interesting statues and tasteful wall murals in a central square. Mostly it contains luxury shops selling to the cruise-ship passengers that stay here from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. on any given day.
Every morning, I would sit on my balcony at the Sunset House Hotel (www.sunsethouse.com) and have a coffee, and I found I could set my watch for when the cruise ships (Carnival and Royal Caribbean) came in; and there were more than usual, a result of ships at that time not visiting Mexico and its H1N1 swine flu. Farther up the coast, Seven Mile Beach indeed has a strand to be proud of, but its hotels and strip mall-style shops, lining up against the road, left me cold. Far to the east of the island (a 30-minute drive) there was the gorgeous Queen Elizabeth II Botanical Garden (www.botanic-park.ky), which has several well-kept but wonderfully ragged gardens, a lagoon, rare Blue iguanas and the Cayman Islands only fully endemic bird species, the Vitelline warbler, which I saw very soon upon arrival.
But it is for scuba-diving that most people come to these islands, and it was also the reason I came. I had done my Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI; www.padi.com/scuba) course of online study, and on my first morning on this warm island was ready to become certified. This was a two-day operation, which initially included having to swim 700 feet and to tread water for 10 minutes. My instructor, Mike Sutton-Brown, originally an inhabitant of Blackpool (www.visitblackpool.com) in Lancashire, England, was a member of Sunset Divers (www.sunsethouse.com/staff.php) and an able teacher. All the skills I needed, and which seemed obtuse when read about on line, became simple and relevant when we practiced them in the pool and improved them in the Caribbean Sea, which laps up to the rocky front (that means there’s a reef right there waiting for you) of the resort.
On my second day of training, I started to see members of PADI arrive from their headquarters in Rancho Santa Margarita, Calif., there to prepare for a week of diving collectively known as Total Submersion 2009, or Total Sub for short. To be certified, divers need to complete four dives of deeper than 20 feet and for more than 20 minutes. My second dive of the day was the only one that I chose to abort, one of my ears refusing to equalise the increasing pressure that comes with depth. Thankfully, the next day, I did three dives with no problems, and after that, during Total Sub, I did another 12. Mike showed me how to do each skill, and then he would sign that I should repeat it. If I did it correctly, then there was shake of hands to show that I had passed.
Some of the trickier manoeuvres included taking your tank and buoyancy-control jacket on and off under water and getting rid of the water that you allowed to completely fill your mask (your eyes are smarting), but I was aware all the time that I was breathing—thank you very much—so I did not feel nervous. And then after one last certification dive, I was a fully-fledged Open-water Certified diver, and that felt good. On the next morning and for another three mornings, I and 15 other divers—together we were Team White and we ruled the seas in the post-dive water fights against the other four teams—went out to various sites chosen by our crew leader, Trevor, to experience the wonders of the deep. I have been to 58 countries and love travelling, but it occurred to me as I emerged following my first dive that three-quarters of the world was previously off limits to me.
The sea, I instantly decided, is a wonderful place. I saw Hawksbill turtles and glided after them; spotted a huge Green moray eel with its tail stuck through one hole and its head through another; smiled at large Hogfish swimming in pairs and as curious of you as you are of them; recognised diamond-shaped Southern stingrays accompanied by Blue tang fish that were preening them; inspected amazingly shaped coral and sponges; saw an octopus’ sucker-laced leg emerging from a crevice; marvelled at juvenile Spotted drums, a black-and-white fish that has a gorgeous tail and dorsal fin that can only be told apart because of their position in relation to its head (adults lack the fin), and generally had a fantastic time enjoying a huge host of other fish, only a few I was able to name following a careful analysis of a field guide. We swam above reefs, along passages, over sandy flats and close to wrecks. On the seabed we saw Garden eels rapidly popping back into the sand, Peacock flounders disappearing into the floor and lthe large forearms of conch encased in beautiful pink shells. The smile on my face when I emerged, following the standard three-minute safety stop at 15 feet below sea level, I could feel from ear to ear. I love this world.
Then, we would take the necessary surface-interval rest, before going in again, but at a lower depth, which is one of the golden rules of safe, no-decompression diving. Back at the bar at Sunset House we compared adventures, and everyone—and there was an incredible array of people, of different ages, sizes and athletic abilities—was excited that there was a new diver in their midst. At one dive site, and there are more than 70 within a short boat ride of Sunset House, called Oro Verde, we were told the amusing, although also tragic, story of how it got its name.
The Oro Verde is a sunken wreck and very much the stuff of local legend. Apparently, its captain wanted to retire, and he thought retirement might be made easier if he conducted some illegal activity just before giving up work. A certain white powder was secretly stored on board, but very soon the crew discovered the contraband and approached the captain to ask for a share of the proceeds. The captain refused, so the crew “dispatched” him. It was then that things went very wrong for them. They wanted to put the boat somewhere safe to dwell on their next move, but they lacked the captain’s knowledge of the local reefs. The boat grounded, and the panicked crew all drowned. Rumors start to spread on the island that there was an interesting cargo still aboard, and all boats turned towards the Oro Verde. Fortunately, the police reached the site first and confiscated the drugs. This is when the police made its big mistake of the whole error-prone tale. They took the cargo to the more desolate East End of Grand Cayman, wanting to get rid of the drugs before the weekend started. So they burned them, but just as they began to do this, the wind changed direction. Locals joke that still to this day, residents of George Town and Seven Mile Beach, to the west, stand outside their houses and shops every Friday night and wistfully stare eastwards with their nostrils dilated.

(Dominican Republic)...I was quite proud that I manage to travel completely around the southeast corner of the Dominican Republic under my own steam, or at least the steam of local, rickety gua-gua buses. I took 20 in total, and it was while taking them that I saw how wonderful Dominicans are. Gua-gua drivers flagged their peers down if they knew I needed a connection, or went out of their way to drop me off at the next bus stop I needed. Right from the pleasant, thatch-roofed Punta Cana International Airport, I took my first such bus. Just walk through the gauntlet of taxi drivers, skirt the car park, and you’ll see a bus stop to your right. I was a little anxious my journey started well, as it was edging towards darkness as I headed 40 kilometres over pleasant arable fields to the country’s religious centre, Higüey.
This ramshackle, dusty spot is best known for its Basilica de Nuestra Señora. Its blue trim, many faceted steeple and relative isolation keep it from being a concrete monstrosity. Inside is the 15th-century painting of the Virgen de la Altagracia, brought over from Spain by soldiers. I visited at 7 a.m. after an evening drinking beer and eating shrimps in a series of open-air restaurants where Higüeyanos come to dance. Surreal was watching a large-screen TV showing a baseball game from Venezuela. It was men versus women. The women wore shorts, the men trousers, and one of the men only had one arm. Excellent, I thought, a game for both sexes and incorporating disability, and then up to bat for the women’s team, dressed in a blue, yellow and red tracksuit and Adidas trainers, came Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, who, on the evidence I saw, was not born to the game.
I took buses—some crammed with 25 where 17 would have done nicely—to El Seibo, Hato Mayor and finally Sabana de la Mar, where I jumped on the first of my five motoconcho scooters for the eight-kilometre trip to the wonderful Paraíso Caño Hondo (www.paraisocanohondo.com) hotel on the edge of the Parque Nacional de los Haitises.
Perched in a dry subtropical forest, the hotel is the most pleasant lodging I found in that part of the Dominican Republic. I took a walk through the park to see birds, caves, huge spiders and petroglyphs carved by the country’s original inhabitants, the Taíno, including a Christian cross that must have been etched after the arrival of Christopher Columbus. Fat lot of good it did them. The park also is the only remaining site of the very endangered Ridgway’s hawk (www.wptc.org/wildlife/dominican.php). Perhaps 120 remain.
Early the next morning, I hiked through mud and rivers and saw one perched on a branch. As I looked down at my binocular-holding hands, I realised that mosquitoes are not in the same danger of extinction. I only caught one rubbish van, but that was between this hotel and my next stop at the fishing village of Miches, where a deaf-mute showed me the large fish he had caught that moment just off shore. At Playa Limón, which is the wildest, most pristine beach I came across, a young lad was trying to prop up his absolutely intoxicated grandfather back onto his donkey while himself trying to continue to push his scooter that still had its engine on.
From the road—every road in the DR is potholed to an almost Armageddon-like manner—I walked three kilometres down a gorgeous lane looking at Northern parulas and surrounded by 200 or 300 butterflies at a time. I was on the lookout for a lagoon, so I was most happy when I discovered first the Rancho La Cueva (www.rancholacueva.com) hotel. It was run by a jolly Austrian font of information called Walter. Apart from myself, staying there, were a Milwaukee couple and a mother and daughter from Utrecht. It made for very interesting company. Sitting at the edge of the nearby Río Cedro with the hotel’s dog at 7 the next morning was a joy.
Later, Walter dropped the Dutch and I at La Otra Banda, a community of dodgy-looking pieces of meat hanging off shop beams that was founded by Canary Islanders who the dictator Rafael Trujillo invited in the 1930s to whiten the Dominican popular in the hope that it would shore up his regime. Trujillo supposedly spent fortunes on powders and creams in order to blanch his own skin, much in the way that pop singer Michael Jackson is purported to. At the far south of this southeastern corner is the nation’s last remaining fishing village, Boca de Yuma, where the photo above was taken. It has a curious population of ex-pats from Trieste. The hotel I stayed in, La Vieja Pirata, had an owner from this far-flung Italian city, who smiled when I said I had been there three months before.
The weather was patchy, and I saw four rainbows in 24 hours. It is a short walk to the ranger station (no clothing allowance, quite obviously) of the Parque Nacional del Este. An endemic Hispaniolan lizard-cuckoo greeted me at the gate, and I saw a minute, brilliantly shiny, green Broad-billed tody inside. The forest here somehow roots itself into coral, which is hard on one’s boots. A fish lunch here can be expensive, perhaps the only thing to be so in the country. A fish is brought out, but the price is quoted by the pound. Just be careful, is my advice. Back on the north coast, I walked five kilometres from the main road to La Vacama Beach, only to be quoted a hefty price for a room at a hotel that featured an ostrich in a large cage. The price was tall, as I would have been the only person to stay there, so I decided to walk to the little village of La Vacama back at the main road (for what it was).
As I trudged back, a violent downpour ensued. I at first enjoyed the warm rain, but then my boots started swimming. I ran to a cow shed and tried to loosen a rubber handle off a gate. I abandoned that when I saw the reward of my effort would have been to stand in six feet of mud, so I made instead for an abandoned house. This time I did get the fence open, and it fell on the ground like a row of dominoes.
Diving out of the rain, I saw that the house was not abandoned. A little, wizened black Dominican was in one corner—all was bare concrete and live electrical wires—roasting a plantain over a small fire. I apologised, but he insisted on my continuing to shelter there and would not say no to my eating half of his lunch, despite it being small and there being no other food apparent. We chatted about the general lack of money and the crops he was growing in the shadow of the house, which was not his. When the rain stopped, we walked the 20 minutes to the village, where I bought him a beer and the other villages wondered who his new friend was.