“The Silk Road” is an evocative notion, and redolent with imagery. It is, in fact, not a single passage from Europe to China, but a vast network of roads and tracks, cities and waypoints that lubricated the east-west trade of the first 15 centuries of the last millennium. Of the nearly 6,500 kilometres of identified […]
It wasn’t so much being kicked in the back that bothered me. It was Air Canada’s extreme corporate reaction to smother the event and make me feel like an idiot. And to tell the truth, I wasn’t kicked in the back—not directly, anyway. I had had spinal surgery on May 1, and left for a […]
I lie awake at night from time to time, conjuring up new journeys and reliving past travels. Cities explored, countries discovered, time zones conquered, and often a list of destinations to be re-examined jostle through my mind as I try to fall asleep. Of all the places I have visited, only a relative few stick […]
The curious thing about curious places is that curiosity is relative. It is extraordinary how normal places feel when one is standing in the centre, yet how unusual they seemed only hours before when considering them as a point on a map, as a figment of some cartographer’s imagination. Tbilisi, the capital of the Caucasian […]
Ireland is the sort of country that could follow you into a revolving door and come out first. It is an enigma; it is a little bit magical; it is possibly the most beguiling country that one can ever visit. Except Dublin, of course, which has, in the manner of European capitals, erased all character […]
Idleness and curiosity make dangerous bedfellows. So it was, a few years back, that I finally decided to visit French Guyana, a curious semi-country on the northeast coast of South America. As a boy, I was completely fascinated by the book Papillon. It is the tale of a convicted murderer from Paris, sent to the […]