(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.

(Italy)…News comes in of Venice, which in the week beginning Nov. 30 is suffering from its worst flooding in 22 years. The height of the water in some places has reached 1.56 metres above its normal level. I was in Venice last month, and on two days when the moon was at its fullest, the streets were covered with a foot of water. It is quite entertaining to the tourist, but to the residents and the city itself, such continual attacks are a threat to this beautiful city, which was settled, it is thought, by refugees fleeing from the Germanic horde. I was staying at the home of good friends, Francesco and Ivana, the former a Sardinian, the latter an Italian of Slovenian descent. Much walking is required of this place in order to have at least some of it remain with you when you leave. There are some major thoroughfares (narrow ones) that visitors troop along to get to the Piazza San Marco and the Rialto Bridge, and if you want to avoid these, then a detailed map is needed, along with the idea that you will walk and walk and not get very far. Often a street will look like a dead end, only for the smallest of arches to appear that leads to a small bridge and…etc, etc.
I loved everywhere here, but one special, beautiful spot is the Ponte Chiodo on the Fondamenta di San Felice, in Cannaregio district. It is one of only two bridges in all of Venice, including its lagoon isles, that does not have side railings. It leads only to a door of a private house, the Palazzo Chiodo (whose residents no doubt were teetotallers, or walked very carefully).
The other example is the Ponte del Diavolo, on the island of Torcello, which has two attractions: a Cipriani restaurant and the Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta, in which are the relics of Croatian Saint Heliodorus and a very faded, hard-to-decipher plaque dating from 639 that is the earliest mention of Venice. The walk back to our friends’ home from the Ponte Chiodo would take us past the imposing church of the Fondamenta Madonna Dell’Orto, near to where are four statues of moors, one of which over the long passage of time has had his nose rubbed down to a grey shine. Not surprisingly, this is called the Campo dei Mori, and the artist Tintoretto lived here. Indeed, he is buried in the Madonna Dell’Orto. One excellent bar in the area is Al Timon, on the Fondamenta degli Ormesini, which serves excellent tapas, known here as cicchetti. 
Another hot spot for these is the Do Mori, on the Calle dei do Mori, which is not near Campo dei Mori but next to the wonderful Rialto Market, which sells fruit, vegetables and fish. Francesco has been going to the same fishmonger here for years and calls him “maestro,” which is a touch I like, for the man surely picks out scallops and cod like Giuseppe Verdi picked out notes to suit the seasons. Do Mori purports to be the oldest bar in Venice, and its patrons come in for two or three cicchetti and a glass of house white before tackling the crowds again. And there are crowds: 60,000 residents and some 25 to 30,000,000 tourists per year. Back at Al Timon, the walk home would be then across a small bridge with a guard turret, which was closed at night to keep the Jews inside their ghetto (spelt gheto in the Venetian dialect, in which John is spelt Zwane, the slangy derivation possible here if you say Giovanni very fast without too much care to pronounce each syllable).
The ghetto—founded in 1516, the Jews were not subject to the curfew only after Napoleon invaded La Serenissima in 1797—has five synagogues, some of which it is difficult to spot. On one corner is an office run by the Jewish Chabad Lubavitchers community who are the latest arrivals and perhaps its most vocal one, in which every time I passed I saw a video playing of its dear Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who I remember seeing once in Brooklyn in 1993 driven in a limousine. I was also in Venice, apart from sightseeing, to run the 23rd Venice Marathon. Jokes abound of how it is possible to run 42.2 kilometres in a city that ostensibly has no streets.
The course starts outside of the city (a-ha!) at the 18th-century Villa Pisani, which through a gap in the wall I could espy its maze, whose labyrinth of hedges lead to a small tower wrapped by a circular staircase and on top of which is a statue. The race runs along the Brenta Canal, through some quaint towns and the not-so-quaint Maghera and Mestre industrial areas, in which some of the largest boats and cruise ships are made, and out into the Parque San Giovanni. By this time, runners are tired, but soon coming into view is the skyline of Venice. The last five kilometres are in Venice itself, and over the top of 14 bridges are placed ramps so that steps are not required to step up. There’s even a special pontoon bridge to get competitors over the Grand Canal, and this can only be run—actually, by this stage of the event, walked—by official marathoners, which is a delicious sense of entitlement if you’re a traveller. It was the day after that I visited Torcello and the other Venetian islands, letting the vaporetto water taxi do the work, not my hamstrings.
Murano is famous for its glass, which on the rare occasion can be seen in its manufacture, the blowers preferring the cool that comes in through open doors to the gawks and stares that also enter. Of the sellers of these expensive creations, Venini is the most expensive and has a beautiful shop right where the vaporetto stop is. Wandering far away from what is certainly a touristy spot, we found the sterling Ai Bisatei osteria, on Campo San Bernardo, where we ate a local, hard-to-find specialty, spleen seasoned in lemon and pepper.
Burano is famous not for glass, but for lace, as well as for its colourful houses. A local told us that this is a relatively new concept and that the bright colours actually harm the brick buildings, which would originally be whitewashed only. The penultimate island—before Torcello itself—was Mazzorbo, which is the quietest by far and is connected to Burano by one bridge. Right on the far corner is the 8th-century Chiesa di Santa Caterina, which has the most wonderful worn marble floor. Within a roadside shrine, on the way to the church I saw the small painting of Christ that is the subject of the photo above.

(Portugal)…I decided to get off the main E-4 motorway in northern Portugal at the town of Mirandela. There was no rhyme or reason for this, just that I had become bored, even though as far as motorways go, Portugal has to have some of the world’s emptiest. I was heading into the lonely region of Tras-os-Montes, all those esses pronounced with drawn-out esh sounds. I took a lonely road, and then I took a lonelier one and found myself in a space of a short time in two villages not even on my map. The first was named Soeima, the second Gebelim. There is little information to be found on them, other than the first has a population of 180, the second, 259, and that the name of Gebelim derives from an Arab word jabalain, which means “between two mountains.” The village’s crest was wonderful, two intercutting mountains and a black boar beneath two olive sprigs. A Roman bridge is in the area, and its church is dedicated to St. Martin.
It did feel that this region hugging the inside of the Spanish border was twice removed. Firstly, it is in Portugal, not Spain; secondly, it is difficult to get to if you do decided to make it to Portugal, as inevitably one first goes to either Porto or Lisbon. This is a realm where bear and wolves still exist and the locals play a form of bagpipe, together with their cousins in the Spanish province of Galicia to the north, called a gaita, played by a bagpiper called a gateiro and made from the wood of fruit trees: apple, cherry and olives.
The mountains I was passing through had the name of the Serra de Bornes, which added to the sense of the imposing country I was in. I strolled around both Soeima (the subject of the photograph above) and Gebelim. This is the land that tourists want to see—stubble-chinned ancients trying to pull stubborn mules off hay carts parked beside stuttering fountains and widows dressed in black shawls and headscarves tapping across cobblestone lanes with canes. 
A considerably larger town was Mogadouro, which has both a castle and a church and a name suggesting I was nearing the area’s famous wine-producing valley. When Mogadouro first got its start, the Douro River was a narrow river with occasional rapids. Today, it has changed dramatically, with heavily terraced vineyards and a series of dams that flooded the valley and allow pleasure craft on wine-tasting adventures access all the way into Spain and its Duero River (same river, different spelling). After a very comfortable night at the new Aquapura Douro Valley hotel (www.aquapurahotels.com/douro), I went back to my idea of remoteness and visited two monasteries a little farther west, in the villages of São João do Tarouca and Salzedas.
To reach the first I went through another little village called Mondim, where nearly every house is undergoing renovation. This is because the wife of the most successful Portuguese banker is from there, and together they practically brought the village. São João lacks the money but is blessed in other ways. Its cathedral with ruined Cistercian monastery (although some priests do live adjacent) dating to 1113 boasts a nationally famous painting of St. Peter by Gaspar Vaz, a student of Grão Vasco, also known as Vasco Fernandes. A very similar painting hangs in a museum in nearby Viseu. It is noteworthy for its depiction of Portugal’s then king dressed in pontifical purple, his face made to resemble a peasant, with rough features and a bold statement that where the regal power lays so does the religious.
I almost tripped over the tomb of Pedro Afonso, who as well as being the Count of Barcelos (where the country’s famous painted roosters are carved in tribute to the legend of an accused murderer being spared at the eleventh hour) was also the illegitimate son of the country’s King Dinis and the author of a work on the old enemy Spain entitled Crónica Geral de Espanha de 1344. I like the idea of history books dedicated to just one year and written by someone not from the country chronicled. I think this should be encouraged. Have the history of, say, Canada chronicled by someone from Swaziland or Papua New Guinea, who may or may not have been there. Portugal’s noble laureate in literature, José Saramago, came here and wrote in his travel book on the country, “In spite of which, the traveler knows he has never been here before, knows he has never visited São João de Tarouca, has never crossed this tiny bridge, never seen these hollowed-out grassy riverbanks or the ruined building in front of him, or the arches of the aqueduct (and now, as he writes, he is not sure he has seen them this time either), this short incline leading firstly up to the church door, then down again to the town.” On the way to the second monastery, I stopped in Ucanha, which has a relatively steeply arched bridge dating to the 12th century that crosses the River Barosa.
Part of the bridge has a stone roof under which is a long line of stone seating where monks from the monastery in Salzedas used to sit and collect tolls from travellers. In the church in Salzedas the wooden pews where the priests lined up also had seating, ingenious wooden protuberances that would allow the priests to spread out their cassocks over so it still appeared as though they stood throughout the long masses. The monastery at Salzedas is more fascinating and crumbling than the one in São João and like so many times experienced by Saramago, I, too, had to search for the villager who had the responsibility of holding the key.
When he arrived, it solved one of my long-standing questions as I have travelled around Iberia—where do all the old men who stand around outside cafés and churches comes from? Well, here was living proof that there is a steady stream of up-and-comers biding their time to take the place of the nonagenarians. He was pleasant, and as the heavy wooden door creaked open, we stepped into a musty quadrant of chipped stone, invading plants and broken paving slabs. It dates to 1168. Supposedly, there is a renovation project under way, has been since 10 years ago, it’s just that no one has got around to doing anything yet. An English couple owned one room off the quadrant, I was told. There was nothing special about the room, any more so than the calm, decayed wonder of all of it, so I asked why they—anyone—would want to own this particular spot. The guide had no answers, and then it turned out that the owners’ family came to Portugal in 1752.
It is true that many of the grand port- and wine-producing families of the area (if the room is owned by one of these) originated in England, and the Netherlands, and tend to marry to members of other vintners, but it seemed odd yet magnificent that they would be described as English when there would be in most probability little difference between them and anyone else in the area. Salzedas also has a crumbling Jewish quarter. It is small, three or four minuscule alleys and a heap of rooms piled on top of one another. The sewage system smelt as it would have done—or worse—than when the monastery was built. Only one small flat looked as if though it had had some attention. When you stepped out of the quarter back into the square in front of the church, the light was blinding.

(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.

(Denmark)…I was in Denmark recently and made a beeline to the coastal town of Dragør. It was the second time I was there, both times on the number 30 bus, which leaves Copenhagen, crosses to the city island of Christianshavn and then travels to the suburb of Amager and onto the island of the same name. The scenery soon turns into countryside, and the houses become more spread out. Close to here is the country’s international airport, which can be walked to from Dragør but does not fill it with noise, perhaps because of wind patterns.
The first time I read of this attractive town was in a short piece of writing by Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano in his book El Libro de los Abrazos (“The Book of Hugs”)—“Durante más de un mes, la abuela vomitó desde la cama un incesante chorro de insultos y blasfemias de los bajos fondos. Hasta la voz le había cambiado. Ella, que nunca había fumado ni bebido nada que no fuera agua o leche, puteaba con voz ronquita. Y así, puteando, murío: y hubo un alivio general en la familia y en el vecindario. Murío donde había nacido, en el pueblo de Dragør, frente al mar, en Dinamarca. Se llamaba Inge. Tenía una linda cara de gitana. Le gustaba vestir de rojo y navegar el sol” (“For more than a month, the grandmother spewed from her bed an incessant stream of insults and blasphemies of the coarsest language. Even her voice had changed. She, who had never smoked or drunk anything stronger than water and milk, was playacting with a raucous little voice. And as she was playacting, she died; much to the general relief of the family and neighbourhood. She died where she had been born, in the town of Dragør, facing the sea, in Denmark. She was called Inge. She had the beautiful face of a gypsy. She liked to dress up in red and sail around the sun.”)—my apologies for any mistakes in translation.
The first time I visited was in an early December, and it was chilly. I found warmth and coffee in the Dragør Bistro, on the corner of Kongevejen and E.C. Hammersvei, which inside has three rows of sketches of local characters, presumably its customers. I walked around the pretty village, which has small, well-kept houses, narrow lanes and cobbled squares, and I said one day I’d come back when I had more time. That time was last month. The weather was perfect as I walked across its marsh, the Øresund bridge in the distance which, and only since recently, is the only road link between Denmark and Sweden. This marsh is where I first saw a Dragør goose.
The town boasts thousands of them, but the living ones have been “exiled” to an area known as the Goose Republic betwixt marsh and fort, honking away in a large, free area of chicken-wire fence and wooden barricades and scuttling after one another in long lines. They are mainly an off-white; in the old part of the town, geese can be seen in wooden carvings, as weather vanes, on an old packet of local salt I saw in its small museum (which has a twisted roof that in its guise as a former town hall was supposed to stop snoopers from sitting on the roof and listening in on secret conversations), on shop signs and in garden ornaments. They far outnumber the humans. The low fort is by the beach, and a line of humble yachts border a breakwater that ostensibly moats the battlements.
It was built during World War I together with four other fortresses, which I will list just because I like their names—Flakfortet, Kongelundsfortet, Mosede and Taarbæk—and has a restaurant inside it; when I was there, a company called Humanic (www.humanic.dk (only in Danish)) was putting on what looked like a Crazy Olympics. Helmeted contestants—and all were men—threw themselves along a greased runway as human bowling balls to knock down skittles; other were tied into a human-size Fussball game, and others dressed in padded costumes that made them look like human hamburger rolls negotiated an obstacle course.
The old part of the town consists of a fishing port (almost all activity ceased now) and the aforementioned narrow lanes and cobbled squares. There is an interesting history. It first came to importance in the 14th century when the Hanseatic League of tradesmen gave it certain business rights in regards to salting fish (the salt came from Lübeck, Germany), which it was a little easier to catch from here than elsewhere in the region, the fisherfolk occupying the place between August and October.
Boxes of herring were marked with one, two or three rings, depending on their quality. In the 16th century, the Swedish King Christian II—known also to a few as By the grace of God, King of Denmark, Sweden and Norway, the Wends and the Goths, Duke of Schleswig, Holstein, Stormarn and Dithmarschen, Count of Oldenburg and Delmenhorst, but only to a few, invited the Dutch, who were at the time far better farmers than the Danes, to settle there, and 25 families took him up on the offer. Traces of them still remain, even though when Christian II died in 1523, that was it for the 126-year-long Kalmar republic, which brought together—never easily—Denmark, Norway and Sweden. He might have been beneficent to the Dutch farmer, but he also was known as The Tyrant. He took over Sweden following the notorious Bloodbath of Stockholm in which scores of people—mainly those supporting the Swedish Sture political party, who favoured the peasantry at the expense of the nobility and clergy (a belief never likely to succeed in medieval Europe)—were executed.
The defeated party’s leader, Sten Sture the Younger, was injured in the mêlée and died on the icy wastes of Sweden’s Lake Mälaren as he was being taken back to Stockholm. His widow, Kristina Nilsdotter of Tullgarn, still considered a hero to the Swedes, took over the defense of her country but was herself finally defeated north of the Swedish capital at the Battle of Uppsala. Did this all come about because of herring? Perhaps.
The inner section of the town is a joy to walk around, and hollyhocks of every colour grow literally everywhere, as numerous as are the geese. The houses have steep, thatched roofs and often an ochre or dark blue colour, while dotted around are old advertising, water pumps and ironwork. It exudes the calm of a warm September weekday afternoon.
I then walked, first passing a tumulus covered in large rune-like boulders, to the neighbouring village of Støre Magelby, which I was told was where the Dutch set up its community. There were no Dutch names in the church’s cemetery, which I reached after walking along a main road but then ducking down some narrow, grassy lanes bordered with neat bungalows. Støre Magelby has a small duck pond, a few thatched cottages and—best of all—a rusting card with a round, rusting sign that said Dragør Sportfiskerforening, which I think means Dragør Sports-fishing Association.

(Netherlands)…Realising the road had run out and that I had no choice but to put my car on a ferry filled me with more joy that it should have done. I could see that I had just missed it as well, but the river was not so wide, and it was due back in 15 minutes. When it returned, the captain threw down a small ramp, and after two cars drove off, three cars and two bikes got on. I sat on a balcony (no more than five steps leading to a thin walkway) and saw the hamlet of Kop van t’ Land get smaller behind me and the marsh of Die Biesbosch loom larger ahead, leaving the province of Zuid-Holland and arriving in Noord-Barbant. The river was the Nieuwe Merwede, and I was in the Netherlands. I had traveled to the Netherlands (to be precise, to Rotterdam) from Southampton, England, aboard the new MV Eurodam, the newest ship in the Holland America Line. This was my first real experience on a cruise liner, and it was an enjoyable one. Some people I spoke to on board where cruise ship-groupies, and I enjoyed their enthusiasm, although not fully sharing in it myself. My posts might suggest that I am someone who would not want to be restricted in a cabin. 
The Die Biesbosch marsh is a wonder, and immediately I was rewarded by seeing my first ever Common spoonbill (Platalea leucorodia), a bird that is not at all common in the United Kingdom. I spoke to one Dutch birder who told me that he had heard that morning a Golden oriole (Oriolus oriolus) and seen a White-spotted bluethroat (Luscinia svecica cyanecula). Intoxicating were the long, thin, straight Dutch roads through avenues of poplars and the subtle but invigorating rolling of the countryside that is broken once in a while by a windmill. I was reading Cees Nooteboom’s so-so novel In the Dutch Mountains, and the irony of that title (although I have not been to Maastricht in the Netherlands’ south, and they do say there are at least some hills there; plus the title of the novel was an invention for the English translation, for the original version goes by In Nederland) was apparent. 
I soon reached the town of ‘s-Hertogenbosch, which is famous for its small system of canals, neat houses and restaurants, impressive Sint-Janskathedraal (St. John’s) Cathedral and being the birthplace and workshop of that Medieval portrayer of the woes of Purgatory, Hieronymus Bosch, who in 1463 witnessed a devastating fire in Den Bosch (as it is known) that destroyed it and might have led to his choice of artistic subject matter. It is a pleasant place, and for lunch I ate the traditional raw herring, holding the salted fish by the tail and eating it from the head down with a spoonful of diced onion. My next stop was to the enclave of Baarle-Hertog. This is a piece of Belgium completely surrounded by the Netherlands.
I adore visiting these geographical oddities. It is small, but two or three bars with outdoor seating border a busy junction, and it is enjoyable to sit there. Much is made of the strange nature of this place, and a broken line goes right through the middle of one restaurant, so that it is possible to have your coffee in the Netherlands and your croissants in Belgium (or would that be better, gastronomically, the other way around?). Actually, to say that this Belgian village is completely surrounded is not true. Within the main section of this Belgian enclave are six pieces of the Netherlands, while its other main chunk has one Dutch piece in it; then again, there are 14 minute pieces of Belgium also dotted amid the Dutch soil, which collectively is called Baarle-Nassau. Residents pay taxes dependent on where their front door is, so the position of doors constantly is changing from town to town without actually changing house.
This all came about following years of regional warfare and the 1843 Treaty of Maastricht, which attempted to resolve all that and that secured the boundaries of the Netherlands and Belgium following Belgian independence from its neighbour in 1831. That obviously did not work absolutely everywhere. A further attempt was made in 1875 to settle the issue of this fractional enclave, but the governments of the two countries refused to recognise any findings; in 1996, one more attempt was made, but by then everyone realised that it was better to let the tourists revel in the historical oddity. One more wonderful find—back in the Netherlands, but very close to Belgium—I made was the small town of Wouw, which I stopped at solely because I like the look of its name on a road sign. I am so glad I did. It has a neat central, grassy square with a white restaurant at one end and a huge church that appears much larger if viewed from a cobbled entry lane of trees.
A local spoke to me—he said they got few visitors—of the German bombing it received at the end of World War II. “That building went, as did that one, and that one over there. Also that one, too,” he said, as though everyone in town knew of every atrocity dumped on it. In turn, I told him of how my infant mother went for a walk with her parents and sisters in the early 1940s in southeast England, only to hear the sirens warning of German attack and hide in a bomb shelter. When they returned, their house in Barnehurst had been destroyed, resulting in them moving to the house in Crayford that I knew when I was born and which my grandmother lived in the rest of her life.
I particularly liked a frieze of Noah’s Arc atop one house. One building in Wouw rebuilt since those dark days used to be a brewery, and today a sculpture of a swan holding in its beak a gold star (the former brewery’s symbol) graced the roof and a line of old bottles found on site had been plastered into a wall.

(Peru)…It’s been 10 years since I visited Peru. Will I ever get back, is the question? Perhaps this is one of the conundrums of a traveller. Do you consistently tick off new, exciting destinations, or return to a favourite spot to relive its magic? And this is a notable question, since I meet many people who go to the same place every year without fail. I have never understood the appeal of a timeshare, notwithstanding the nightmare of being offered free golfing weekends as you spend too many hours with a teenage salesperson desperate to remain in Torremolinos, rather than Tottenham or Tranmere. Or do a little of both. I was glad I went to Peru and its most-famous attraction, Machu Picchu, in the late ‘90s, as nowadays it seems increasingly difficult to reach. I reached it by train from Cusco, after first travelling on a longer stretch of rail from Puno, near Lake Titicaca.
The train to Machu Picchu leaves the Estación San Pedro (as opposed to the Puno train, which comes into the Estación Wanchac), which we reached after walking down the wonderfully named Street of the Deserted People, known hereabouts as Calle Desamparados. For the first 60 minutes of the four-hour journey, the train gets no farther than a mile from Cusco. This is because, due to the steepness of the hills around this beautiful city (it’s higher in altitude than is Machu Picchu, which surprises many people), the train has to perform a complicated pattern of switchbacks, puffing so far up the slope, only to then slide back down for a few minutes before building up another head of steam and moving a little distance higher than it did when it came to its first halt. Finally, the train moved forwards and in no other direction, chugging past mile after mile of trackside slums. 
The first main stop is the town of Ollytantambo, which is where travellers alight to either catch a bus to other towns between there and Machu Picchu, or to the Sacred Valley along the Urubamba River, which flows into Aguas Calientes, the small town at the foot of the famous monument. I will not deal too much with Machu Picchu, which is rightly written about in flowing purple prose, but concentrate instead on Aguas Calientes. This is a town that seemingly comes from a novel by Gabriel García Márquez, a ramshackle affair with no main street. Its principal thoroughfare really is the train line, which is paralleled by two raised walkways lined with equally ramshackle shops, although one of them did have Internet connection. (Those of you who shrug your shoulders at this revelation probably are under 25 and do not realise that in 1998 finding an Internet café in Peru was not so far removed from Francisco Pizarro believing he could find El Dorado in the same country in the 16th century.)
A walk along the rail (except for a couple of times a day, there is no danger, and the trains move so slowly in this, the last stop, anyway, that there really is no danger at any time) leads to a small square with a statue of the first ruler of the Kingdom of Cusco, one Manco Cápac (in Quechua, Manqo Qhapaq which means “splendid foundation”), who, among other achievements, is said to be the Incan ruler who abolished human sacrifice. The killjoy! Seemingly annoyed at this puritan act, no one bothered with him during the days I was there, the whole town being far more interested in that new god, the TV set, which was turned up loud enough so that the proprietor of the food shack across the square could hear it while in a back room amid noisy cooking apparatus. 
This town of approximately 3,000 people really does have an amazing setting, teetering on the edge of the swiftly moving Urubamba River and against the side of steep, verdant cliffs (see photo). It is up one of these cliffs that the Peruvian government keeps threatening to construct a funicular, which would disappoint both those of us who believe that travel should not be too easy all the time (yes, I know, Westerners like me have the luxury of requesting such ecologically sensitive things such as that) and the Hello Boys, Peruvian youngsters who run down the hillside in a direct line to continually intercept the tourist buses negotiating the 14 hairpin bends down from Machu Picchu, each time saying “hello” and hopefully collecting tips at the bottom of the descent. A paved street went up the other side of Aguas Calientes, essentially to give access to the rustic spa waters that give the place its name in Spanish, “warm waters.”
It was up this street, as I paused, that I saw the wonderful and motley parade seen in the corresponding photograph. Who is the man with the bandaged face? What could he be representing? So I asked. The reply was that the procession was to ward off earthquakes, which do happen here. In Cusco, there is every Easter a procession in honor of El Señor de los Temblores, The Lord of Earthquakes, which celebrates a painting from the 17th century that supposedly saved the city from disaster. Perhaps the wrapped man survived an earth tremor? But then again I was here in September? The spa itself is an outdoor affair and was struggling to come back to life following a recent landslide. I have heard that now, 10 years later, things are much better. Seven years ago another Incan ruin farther up the valley was discovered—Qoriwayrachina, which is Quechua for “where wind was used to refine gold,” while just two weeks ago, reports circulated that Machu Picchu was not in fact discovered in 1911 by Yale scientist Hiram Bingham but 40 years previously, by a German businessman (looter?) named Augusto Berns.
The argument goes that he did not boast about his claim, as he wanted the site of his ill-gotten treasure to remain a secret, while Bingham was under no such compulsion.
The same argument has been used before: The Basque fishermen wanted their secret of discovering rich cod fisheries off the coast of North America kept a secret, while Columbus couldn’t wait to announce his find, even though he was, if all truth be told, completely lost searching for Japan.
I was lucky enough to stay in a hotel that was then called the Machu Picchu Pueblo, which in my estimation was a wonder not too far below that of Machu Pichu itself. It had its own spur line, albeit 100 metres or less, into which pulled special tourist trains of well-off daytrippers.
Today the hotel is the Inkaterra Machu Picchu (www.inkaterra.com/en/machu-picchu), but I suspect it is none the worse for wear. Its beautiful rainforest grounds contain more than 375 species of orchid, a love of one of its earliest managers, and gorgeous places to dwell and watch local farmers and wildlife.