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On To Saigon Or Whatever It’s Called
Day 35 of this trip and we cop out for the first time. Up until tonight it’s been local food all the way….Indian, Nepalese and Vietnamese dishes, local specialities, street food, even a frog on a stick for God’s sake. But Can Tho is different: the restaurants aren’t quite as inviting, the atmosphere is less accessible, and the street food we’ve tried is unpopular with locals and close to inedible. So we cop out and find an “ordinary” restaurant, The Lighthouse, which, perish the thought, does steaks and stuff. For the first time since we entered the country, we eat some non-Vietnamese food: Michaela’s is a French dish, mine Belgian.…
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Empty Roads, Desert Rain & Mirages: Matmata-Douz-Tozeur
It’s fair to say that the journey from Matmata to Douz isn’t the most challenging foreign drive we’ve ever undertaken, with long stretches of empty road cutting a perfect straight line through the desert. In terms of civilisation, there is nothing: a good hour of roadway passing not a single building, let alone anything as grand as a village. In fact the greatest – maybe the only – challenge is the patches where the sand has covered the road, the tarmac has all but disappeared and the grip of our tyres is about as good as a stiletto on a polished floor. At last we reach signs of life as…
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Photographic Memories #5
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 #5: Mother Russia What makes this photograph special to us is how it captures the very essence of the way we had pictured Russia probably since childhood: a frozen river, austere architecture, smoke billowing into the morning air from the tall chimneys of factory buildings, it is the Russia of our mind’s eye. This was sunrise in St Petersburg, captured as we made our way…
