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Photographic Memories #12
As every traveller knows, when you look back through old travel photos, many of them trigger wonderful memories. With no current prospect of travel even domestically let alone worldwide, we will have no new adventures to blog, but we do have many such memories…. Photo #12: Stromboli A bit of poetic licence here as there’s 3 photos instead of the usual 1, but then it’s not often that you get the opportunity to climb a living volcano after dark and look down on the fiery inferno below. This was the Aeolian Islands, 2011. A boat trip from our host island of Lipari to the volcanic Stromboli included an afternoon stop…
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Photographic Memories #11
As every traveller knows, when you look back through old travel photos, many of them trigger wonderful memories. With no current prospect of travel even domestically let alone worldwide, we will have no new adventures to blog, but we do have many such memories…. Photo #11: A Sri Lankan Welcome This photograph recalls one of our most humbling experiences in all our days of travel so far. In August/September 2015 we travelled across Sri Lanka from west to east, making our way from Colombo to Trincomalee, via Kandy and Sigiriya. On our first day in Sigiriya we were introduced to Mangala, one of the few local tuk-tuk drivers able to…
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Cold Snap
Is it just me, or is anyone else irritated by the fact that, in the context of COVID, the world is referring freely to the “British variant” or even more geographically specific, the “Kent variant”, when ex President Trump was consistently vilified for referring to the pandemic as the “Chinese disease”? It’s called “COVID” because phrases like “Asian flu” and “Spanish flu” have been outlawed by the WHO as racially divisive, so how come the “British variant” is acceptable? Maybe it’s just me. Anyway, just as we sit here confined to quarters unable to travel, we get a little bit of the world – indeed a little bit of the…
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The Difference A Year Makes
It’s not always easy to stay positive and optimistic during this COVID lockdown, a mood not helped by an extremely dreary English winter as our weather does its absolute best to justify its bad reputation. Whilst some parts of the UK have witnessed significant snowfall, our South East corner has been deluged with what seems like incessant rain, borne out by this detail: January brought 151mm of rainfall when the historical average for that month is 50mm. Three times normal, and it feels like it, too. Many days have been simply too wet to take a walk, and the countryside is now so saturated that the fields and footpaths are…
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Dry January Just Gets Harder
It’s more difficult for me to do dry January than it is for most people. I should explain. You see, as a younger adult, I spent many years dealing with the emotional trauma of being an Olympic athlete trapped in a beer drinker’s body. I overcame that burden with a new year resolution somewhere around 2002 to never again visit a gym: a resolution that I am proud to have maintained ever since. It was my father who introduced me to beer when I was a teenager, in fact I celebrated my 18th birthday in our local pub, with Dad and other regulars, three years in a row in the…
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Photography Meets Art
Michaela’s mother, Norma, lives in the county of Suffolk, time honoured home to many of the great English painters. Norma is a highly talented artist in her own right, as you can see from this painting, one of a number she has created from our travel photographs. This particular one is probably my favourite photo of Michaela, taken in her natural habitat: a bar. On this occasion, a bar in Molfetta, Italy. To view more of Norma’s great work, you can visit… Photography by Michaela, www.normareadartist.com or Instagram@normareadartist
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Were We Safe? Take A Look…
Travel isn’t about staying in your comfort zone, sometimes you just have to seize the moment to embrace a new experience. It’s not always about safety belts, health and safety and life jackets. Here’s just a few of those occasions… We spent a whole day like this, sat on a blanket on a roof rack, clinging on to the struts for dear life as Khaled took us to various viewpoints in the desert. All the other similar rides were in the back of a pick up, but not Khaled, he just stuck us on his roof rack and sped across the sand, much to everyone’s amusement. If you’re out in…
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Photographic Memories #10
As every traveller knows, when you look back through old travel photos, many of them trigger wonderful memories. With no current prospect of travel even domestically let alone worldwide, we will have no new adventures to blog, but we do have many such memories….. Photo #10: Family History Like the poor soul remembered on this war grave, our surname is Sharman; this is the grave of my father’s cousin, Roland. The plaque is one of many hundreds of memorials in the war cemetery at Kanchanaburi in Thailand, built to commemorate those poor souls who perished during construction of the infamous Death Railway as they laboured as Prisoners Of War in…
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Photographic Memories #9
As every traveller knows, when you look back through old travel photos, many of them trigger wonderful memories. With no current prospect of travel even domestically let alone worldwide, we will have no new adventures to blog, but we do have many such memories….. Photo #9: The Lost Tomato Look closely at this photograph and you will spot that Michaela caught the precise moment that a tomato fell from its stacked trailer, and in the moment of the shot it is suspended in mid air just above the ground. Of course, you can’t capture shots like this intentionally, only by coincidence of timing. The original aim of the photo was…
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Photographic Memories #8
As every traveller knows, when you look back through old travel photos, many of them trigger wonderful memories. With no current prospect of travel even domestically let alone worldwide, we will have no new adventures to blog, but we do have many such memories….. Photo #8: Desert Life Desert life goes on with the Bedouin minding his camels in the midday sun, the battered truck displaying all the telltale signs of the demands of the unforgiving environment. Some perspective is given to this photograph by the pick up truck in the far distance, dwarfed by its surroundings yet still some way from the mountains beyond. Here, we are out in…
