(Italy/Portugal)...I have never felt much moved to adopt religion, but I have always enjoyed visiting religious sites. Not churches, cathedrals, temples, etc. per se (in fact, I’ve become a little immune to such sights now, in the same way that I rarely want to visit large city museums) but more rather ruined monasteries and castles established by strange religious orders. Luckily, there are many of these, be they established by the Saracens, the Knights Templar, the Rosicrucians, the Jesuits, even the Christadelphians, a group that believes the literal word of the Bible.
There was a small church of theirs, nothing less than someone’s house, around the road from where I grew up in northwest Kent, and I always considered it slightly scary. This most probably was because it was not normal, in that it was not the “normal” church, not the “normal” thing people did and not the “normal “ thing people believed in or would talk about. Tomar is a large town on the banks of the small River Nabão in central Portugal. Here there is a large, impressive Knights Templar castle based on the Temple of the Dome of the Rock of Jerusalem. Perched high on the hill overlooking the whole plain, the castle was constructed in 1160 by Gualdim Pais, grand master of the Order of the Knights Templar.
When Philip the Fair of France sponsored a papal bull outlawing the Templars, many of the order hastily fled to the extremities of Europe, including the British Isles and Portugal. The Tomar castle served as one of their retreats, although this branch was dissolved seven years later following another bull from Pope Clement V. Then, as now, the real reason for such a move was money. In Portugal, the Ordo de Cristo replaced the order.
The Portuguese king Dom Dinis championed the new group, and Henry the Navigator was for some time the head of it. The sails of the Portuguese ships of discovery that reached India and the Far East displayed a red cross against a white background — the emblem of both the Knights Templar and, perhaps not coincidentally, the flag of England. The Ordo de Cristo declined in the 16th century and was abolished altogether in 1834.
It was a well-kept ruin when I visited and enjoyed its main cloister, which hosted the 1581 coronation of Philip II of Spain, who succeeded to the Portuguese throne following the death of the Portuguese king Sebastiano I. The walk that leads around the hill to the castle gives an impressive sense of the castle's isolation and power, its courtyard displaying pale raked sand, artistically arranged flowerbeds and wonderfully designed metal contraptions for tying horses to. Immediately inside the main door is a high 16-sided altar, where it was alleged the Templars celebrated mass on horseback. A short car journey from Tomar is the famous pilgrimage site of Fátima, where three children, Lucia dos Santos and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marco, saw an apparition of the Virgin Mary on May 13, 1917, whilst tending sheep. The area is actually named after a 12th-century Moorish princess and was sacred to the Islamic people who at one time inhabited this area. Now all the site is concrete and tacky souvenir stands.
Tomar and Fátima could not be any different if they tried. I also enjoyed Assisi in Italy. I had stayed in Perugia overnight and caught a very early train after walking downhill from Perugia’s centre to its lonely station. Assisi also has a station a long way from town. Famous for being the home of St. Francis, the town retains a feeling of tranquility, most visitors staying on the bottom level that leads to the cathedral rather than walking up its steep slopes.
My favourite religious site there — and it is merely a church, not ruined in any way — was the quiet church of San Stefano, a 13th century gem on a zigzag lane just off Via San Paolo. Apparently, when St. Francis died on October 3, 1226, its bells rang out despite the absence of bell-ringers. On any day one visits, the place will always nearly be empty of people. The old man in the photograph operated a very colourful street organ. People dropped pennies in a basket for him.

(Argentina)...“That’s unusual,” our Swiss host said, “usually, this is the last place in Argentina that people come to, not the first.” We were in the glorious wetlands of the Esteros de Iberá in the province of Corrientes. On studying guide books before I went, it was the one place that I knew I wanted to see, not just because of my interest in birdwatching, but perhaps because it was difficult to reach and seldom visited, although that is changing, with more and more people visiting with every year. We stayed at the wonderful Irupé Lodge in the village of Colonía Carlos Pellegrini (http://www.irupelodge.com.ar)
The bus dropped us off in the small town of Mercedes, 600 kilometres and 10 hours north of Buenos Aires. It was cold in early September, the country beginning to ready itself for the austral spring. A local called Sergio picked us up in his truck and began, after getting more hot water for his maté tea, the 114-kilometre drive to the lodge, nearly all of it a rough, stony surface, like the majority of roads we travelled on in this country. It still was cold when we reached the lodge, but it warmed up later that day and stayed warm.
The lodge’s burro gave us unwelcomed attention, until we learnt that the way to get rid of him was to slap the side of his face firmly. The rest of the animals in the vicinity were astounding, though, ranging in size from the Glittering-bellied emerald (Chlorostilbon aureoventrisa; a type of hummingbird) to the Carpincho (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris; also known as the Capybara), the largest rodent on earth, which I also saw in April in Gamboa, Panama, apparently the farthest spot north in which they dwell.
We went on several boat trips on the Laguna de Iberá, the biggest lake of this region that makes up approximately one-third of all the size of Corrientes province and is twice the size of the Everglades in Florida in the United States of America. Iberá means “shining water” in the Guarani language, which is spoken by the few in this area and nearly all in neighbouring Paraguay, where, with Spanish, it is the official language. And, indeed, the light does seem to sit on the water, rather than beam through it. This is a poor description, I know. Delicate reeds poke out of the water and add to the beauty. Most of the islands dotted here and there are floating, although any movement is impossible to see.
What one can see are the Yacaré (Caiman crocodilus yacare), a species of alligator, the occasional Marsh deer (Blastoceros dichotomus), which is getting rare, and many, many species of birds, among them Black-capped donacobius (Donacobius atricapillus), furtive among the reeds, Sooty tyrannulet (Sepophaga nagricans), Long-winged harrier (Circus buffoni), the magnificent Streamer-tailed tyrant (Gubernetes yetapa; see photograph above) and the noisy Southern screamer (Chauna torquata), which is of the size of a turkey, although not quite as fat, has a black neck band and sits sentry on the tops of palm trees.
In Spanish, these are called Chajá, and I just came across reference to it and its mournful cry (I imagine it was placed in the text as a metaphor for the soulless, anguished wanderings of the Argentina gaucho cowboy) in the epic Argentine poem El Gaucho Martín Fierro by José Hernández Pueyrredón (http://www.coopvgg.com.ar/selva/martinfierro/biografia.htm). On another day, we were driven approximately 40 kilometres to the home of some gauchos. The road went in the direction of Mercedes, and it is really the only road here; in the other direction it goes to near the small city of Posadas at the border of Corrientes and Misiones provinces. On the way we saw perhaps the best bird of our trip, the aptly named Strange-tailed tyrant (Alectrurus risora; http://www.oiseaux.net/photos/jean-michel.fenerole/moucherolle.a.queue.large.2.html).
Its odd tail has a small stretch of bare feather shaft and looks as though it once belonged to an eagle but has somehow been grafted onto a sparrow-sized backside. It somehow uses this tail, which lies flat and perpendicular to the body, to propel itself around, the whole endeavour having more in common with a butterfly than a bird. The red patch I saw under its throat only becomes red during the mating season, which I think must have begun for this bird days before we saw it. After all this excitement, we reached the gaucho settlement, which is poor.
The lodge owners wanted to involve them in its tourism efforts and at the same time provide them with some extra income and the traveller with a unique experience. They have succeeded, and no doubt I will later in this forum try to convey the glorious day we had there.