Tag Archives: landscape The desert is a magically beautiful place. It is also unforgiving. You have to be tough to forge a life in these hostile, barren expanses where almost no precipitation falls. Bedouin or “desert people” – from the Arabic badawī – have made the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East their home for thousands of years. Even […]  “The desert never leaves you.” My driver, who had declared his love of the desert as we were driving into it, said this with awe in his voice. I agree with him. I too, love the desert: there is something mystical about the way seas of sand drape and fold into the distance. The shimmering […]  ‘Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.’ This sense of dislocation – in a positive way – often arises when travelling off the beaten track. In Southern Ethiopia, I was so far off the popular routes that most of the ‘highways’ I was on weren’t paved! Around the city of Arba Minch – […]  Riding the rails is my favourite way to travel. Being able to move around at will, or nestle in a seat or a berth, while watching the world chug past the windows, is just magic to me. It was summer – many years ago now – and we had several weeks in which to explore […]  Peace. Is there such a thing? At the moment – at least in my corner of the world – there is an absence of war. Given the current political climates internationally, this absence of war does not feel like “peace”. It feels like a precarious balance of competing tensions: a temporary truce, while one holds […] |
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