Tag Archives: travel

Georgia Bound

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In the Orlando Greyhound Terminal all is hustle and bustle: a short young woman of astonishing pinkness is trying to coax a can of Coke from a huge vending machine: a small child is glued to her side literally riding on the roll of flesh that encircles her midriff. Seated across from us are three men who could step in as extras for a remake of ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ without a wardrobe change or recourse to a makeup artist. A man in baggy tracksuit pants shuffles from the ‘restroom’ clutching his groin: he needs to as if he releases the material the pants will fall to the ground, they barely cover his backside as it is. In the land where the car is king taking a bus might seem like a poor decision. Perhaps: perhaps not. Continue reading →

A Chance in a Million

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It stretched away on all sides: a shiny black crust many metres thick that snaked and cracked across the face of the earth like some revolting sore. It radiated the sun’s heat with ferocious efficiency and one felt totally basted in warm air, like a piece of meat in a convector oven. I felt my core temperature peaking as sweat ran from each and every pore, eyes stinging from the salty rivulets and the diamond-bright sunlight overhead that this cursed rock seemed to reflect upwards thwarting my wide-brimmed hat. It was hellish in its assault on the human frame, hellish in aspect and hellish in its total abnegation of life. Or so it seemed. Continue reading →

Welcome to a New World

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The passenger compartment in the boat, although open to the elements at the rear, was stiflingly hot and airless. We were all arranged along either side on padded benches with the hard upright walls as support and a pile of luggage on the floor in between. The roar from the three Mercury 200 outboard engines was horrendous and together they raised an impressive ‘rooster tail’ of wake almost as high as the boat itself. The only saving grace on this infernal journey was that the sea was smooth apart from a very long-interval swell which came at us exactly side on and thus did not cause any stomach unsettling motion. Continue reading →

The Judas Goat

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I’ve never really liked goats. Something about their smell, the dead eyes and annoying bleat. So growing up on a smallholding in Cornwall in the 1980s with a handful of the creatures was something of a trial: my mother named one Mischief – not without good reason. It seemed that no matter how hard you hammered the spike to tether them into the ground they would find a way to escape. And then they would head towards the garden, greenhouse or vegetable plot and begin to feed. However, unlike other animals that might eat a few plants and then proceed to curl up and siesta the goat will stroll around picking the growing tips of as many choice plants as it can find and ringing as many newly planted trees and shrubs. It is this almost hellish characteristic that I most disliked and which has led to them being nick-named ‘The Desert Makers’. My favourite saying in reference to goats as a species was ‘the best kind of goat is a curried one’. Continue reading →

Street Life

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I stepped out onto the balcony just in time to witness a stream of urine spurting down into the street from the balcony opposite. The small boy giggled with delight, his naked brown bottom-half shining in the early morning sun while his father sat behind him smiling at the scene with no word of reproach. The man was dressed in flamboyant red boxing shorts but his physique was not that of a fighter, or if it had been then those days were long past and the shorts were an old memento. Their little balcony was cluttered with plants, chairs and washing: a tiny piece of al fresco space cantilevered out above near traffic-less streets in a part of the city without plazas or green space. Continue reading →

Dreaming of Bacon

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Those of you who know me well will gasp at the next piece of information. Until yesterday midday I had not eaten for 65-hours! A personal record indeed but one which gave me absolutely no pleasure in achieving. For the first time in nearly a year I was laid low by a stomach infection which came at me unbidden and sweeping low under the radar did its work and laid me out flat for two days straight (which might also be another record). Wow, down like a nine-pin. Continue reading →

Grist to the Mill

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Must post, must post, must post! It seems like a long time since the publish button was tapped, and indeed it is, over 3-weeks. Why this has happened is the reason behind this post’s opening lines. There is a a need to break silence and get something, anything out there (although not just any old thing will do as it does need to have some sort of binding theme to it). Continue reading →

Of Ants And Men

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The ants had been right: shortly after nightfall the heavens opened and the rain drummed down on the tin roof making conversation difficult. Later it softened considerably and was more like rain falling on canvas, a comforting lullaby. Continue reading →

From Babble to Babel

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If there is one thing destined to make a man feel totally hamstrung, inadequate and foolish it is not being able to express himself clearly. Nowhere is this exposed more vividly than when trying to communicate in a foreign language where one is often reduced to a frightful child-like level of sentence construction. Continue reading →

A Good Place to Read

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Browsing the English titles on the bookshelf I pulled out a tattered copy of Hemingway’s ‘Green Hills of Africa’. Resting the book on the shelf I opened it near the beginning and was greeted with the sight of a small brown scorpion advancing up the margin near the spine. Continue reading →