“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 […]
Quirky places make interesting destinations. The homogenization of the world can make for dispiriting travel. One destination starts to look exactly like another, and global brands, identical shops, and “authentic pedestrian zones” litter the world’s branded destinations. However, there are still plenty of places where you can escape this monotony, and the island of Cyprus […]
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 […]
Jeddah is a most curious city. With about 5 million inhabitants it is Saudi Arabia’s second city, and a major seaport. It is the gateway to the holy city of Mecca, and a thriving economic hub. It has a different feeling to the other Saudi cities that I visited, and perhaps its motto “Jeddah is […]