Tag Archives: people

Barcelona is unique. The second largest city in Spain, Barcelona is touted as one of the world’s leading tourist, economic, trade fair, and cultural centres. It is the capital of the semi-autonomous community of Catalonia, a wealthy area of 7.5 million people with its own language and culture and distinct history. As the regional capitol, […]

View full post »

Papua New Guinea is a veritable pastiche of colours and customs, jungle noises and music, tribal warfare and elaborately costumed dance. Creation myths abound, wending their way through oral history and everyday life, so that ancient legends are transformed into marketing strategies, and no one can be sure any longer which is which. That is […]

View full post »

‘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 – […]

View full post »

The earthquake in Nepal in April 2015 killed more than 8,800 people in that country, injured nearly three times that many, and left nearly 3.5 million homeless. As a further blow to the national psyche, numerous precious historical religious buildings were damaged or destroyed. Many of these were contributors to the 1979 UNESCO World-Heritage listing […]

View full post »

I love Bluesfest! Byron Bay Bluesfest, the annual five-day Easter long-weekend festival of blues and roots music from around the world, always includes a line-up of interesting international visitors. Some are big names that take me back to my youth (see, for example: Bring on the Big Names; The Soundtrack of my Youth Musical Name-Dropping; […]

View full post »