(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.

(Maine, New York, etc)…I recently took two trips north of New York City, so as to see parts of my “backyard” I’d never seen before. It has always fascinated me that Americans at the drop of a hat can decide to move from Los Angeles to new York City, or vice-versa, while in England—at least when I was a kid—eyebrows were raised if you decided to move from South London to North. “You’re moving where…? Well, good luck, it was nice having know you.” It was considered far less odd if you moved from Bexleyheath to the United States, than if you moved from Bexleyheath to Belsize Park, which my friends Shaun and Scott did.
It is President Dwight Eisenhower who Americans have to thank for their healthier attitude, as it was he who signed the Interstate Bill that upgraded and built the country’s web of fast roads. England, meanwhile, has a few major motorways that support thousands of kilometres of Roman lane. One of my recent trips was to Lake Placid in the Adirondack Mountains of New York State, a state that measures 141,299 square kilometres, as opposed to England’s 130,423—which might explain why New Yorkers and all Americans need to drive farther and cannot be constrained by internal notions of what is and is not “home.”
The Adirondacks is the last true wilderness in the Northeast and in effect stretches all the way from the northeast of Pennsylvania, along the Appalachian Trail, across New York (where its bulk lies), across the Green and White mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire, respectively, and out into the deep woods and endless lakes of Maine. Lake Placid itself is famous for hosting several Winter Olympics, the last being in 1980. It is wonderful to see how small and unimposing its Olympics facilities are in this age of hype, explosions, floating architecture and corps of 1,000 drummers. The town—one street really—is trendy in an escape-from-New-York-City way, while the lake surprisingly is off the beaten path. A smaller lake, Mirror, in the town often is mistaken for Placid, and vacationers paddle around it with smiles on their faces, maybe ignorant of the mistake.
We took a kayak and paddled around Placid, watching the Great Northern divers (known here as Common loons) surface, beads of water dripping off their striped necks. There are three islands in the lake, two large ones—Buck and Moose—and one small one—Hawk. We tied up at a tip of Moose and swam in the cool water. One female Mallard took a liking to us and followed our kayaks.
 Next to where we stayed was a Howard Johnson hotel, which maintains one of the very few HoJo restaurants still in existence. The ski jump is formidable, and why anyone would want to go down one is beyond me. Being English, I have embarrassed and fond memories of our own ski-jumping star, Eddie “The Eagle” Edwards, who angered and delighted spectators with his antics at the Calgary Olympics, at which one Italian commentator termed him not a ski-jumper but a “ski-dropper.” But the fact is he could go down the ski jump, where I certainly could not. I believe a film on his life is coming out next year, starring Steve Coogan. The thing that impressed me about the ski jump is the very small space that exists as you get off the steps and onto the launching pad.
We took a beautiful hike along Indian Pass from the original Adirondacks hiking base, the Adirondack Loj, the last word spelt not as “lodge” but in a phonetic manner pleasing to its creator, Melvil Dewey, one of the original wilderness supporters and the inventor of the Dewey Decimal Library Classification System. (Was his name spelt Melvil, rather than Melville, because of his parents’ shared belief that trickled down to the son?) It is by Heart Lake, which also is cold and has more than a hint of vegetal matter when its bed is stepped on.
My second trip was to visit as many of the Shaker communities of the Northeast United States as I could—this was in a week of $4.50-per-gallon gasoline prices. I have always been interested in the Shakers (full name: The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing) since reading an article on them in the September 1989 issue of National Geographic. Our first stop was Sabbathday Lake in Maine, which is the only remaining community. The only male Shaker left—there are five left today, although there are strong hopes of one more joining up soon—is Brother Arnold, and when we arrived, he was sweeping leaves in preparation for the upcoming tourism season, which runs there from May to October (www.shaker.lib.me.us). He chatted with us. A team of volunteers helps them maintain some 730 hectares.
This is a small amount compared to the Shakers’ heyday, in which there were more than 30 communities in more than 15 states, including a short-lived, all-black community. Sabbathday Lake has a calm that I will not even try to describe here. It is a place to sit and think and feel. Farther down the road is Alfred, Maine (www.ficbrothers.org), which until 1931 was a Shaker community but is today owned by the Canadian-based Brothers of Christian Instruction. We were accompanied by one of the brothers as we walked to the small Shaker graveyard there, and he asked if we wanted to hear him sing the Shaker hymn Simple Gifts, which was written there. It was a touching and beautiful moment and again screamed out simplicity.
From there, we headed to Canterbury, New Hampshire (www.shakers.org), and luckily we approached it along New Road from the east, which gives a wonderful view of this large community—the last one to give up operating—from the bottom of a hill. It, too, is a joy to walk around, but a nearby motorbike-scrambling course with accompanying engine sound rather destroyed the ambiance. More peaceful and far less known were the former Shaker communities of New Lebanon in New York and the nearby Inn at the Shaker Mill Farm (www.shakermillfarminn.com), which was a Shaker mill and now is an inn (that should be obvious from its name, no?) and sits by an idyllic waterfall. We stayed in a B&B, Hitchcock House (www.hitchcockhousebb.com) that was built by the Shakers as a private home. It was very pleasant (minus the statue of the comic Bald eagle in the front yard), and one of the owners, Ted Delano, told us that he remembered the Shakers when he was a very young lad.
Our last stop was in Hancock, just across the border in Massachusetts, which is a tourist attraction but adequately shows the live of the Shakers and explains how they cared for their every need, a concept that the director said amazed certain elements of today’s youth.
Two hikes lead from this living museum, one to the top of a hill called Mount Sinai, where the Shakers went during a brief stint when it was their fashion to receive visions, the other to a wood where they collected wood for their famous boxes and furniture. As we walked along this second path, a bear was spotted. When I finally saw it, I was convinced in my urban manner that it was a statue placed there to inform other urbanites what the country looked like. When it growled, we realised that it was indeed a Black bear and made a hasty retreat, ignoring most of the rules that are supposed to be adhered to when a bear is seen.