Early afternoon , Bastille Day, 1989. I have been standing on the roundabout next to my house for nearly 3 hours. The moment I have been waiting for weeks is finally arriving. Le Tour de France, also known as La Grande Boucle, is passing my hometown, and on its way to Marseille, the finish of […]
Sifnos is the island next-door for me. Serifos is “my” island – I started going there a good 25 years ago, and from the moment I set foot on it, I knew I’d be back and start spending my summers there. I still do. It’s mountainous, wild and unpolished; beaches are virgin, and the occasional […]
Whenever I’m asked when the best time to go on safari is, my enthusiastic – if rather unhelpful – answer is “it’s always a good time to be on safari’. So, with a view to being slightly more helpful, I wanted to talk a little about Emerald Season. Conventional wisdom for years has been that […]
The clock strikes 9:15 AM in Rio de Janeiro. It’s April, and the heat is not excessive, so the weather allows for a lazy Saturday morning. Yet, there is an urge to explore the vibrant streets of the city and pay homage to the ever-present sun. I get up and take a quick shower, while […]
Uruguay is of wood and marble, of grain and sheen; where rural charm sits at the table next to aristocracy and both happily have sand between their toes or dirt under the nail from the outdoor explorations of the day. Olive orchards, hillside wineries, cattle ranches and small fishing boats all populate this tiny pear-shaped […]
The first stanza of Federico Garcia Lorca’s poem ‘Romance Sonámbulo‘ (‘Sleepwalking Romance’) translates: Green, how I want you green Green wind, green branches The boat out on the sea The horse on the mountain Written by the 20th century Spanish poet, the poem was arguably inspired by a European landscape and context, an azure Mediterranean sea and […]
Namibia delivers wide open spaces in a way that few other places on earth can. Dominated by a massive and ancient desert, the dominant image in people’s mind seems to be landscapes of unchanging and endless sand. While it’s true that there is a lot of sand (and I do mean a lot – I […]
Arabic is spoken by about half a billion people around the world and is the language of the Islamic religion – from Jakharta to Casablanca, the reading of the Qu’ran and prayers are in Arabic. Muslims revere the Qu’ran as the literal word of God as recited to the Prophet Muhammad, so the written book […]
Olive oil, wine, and cork. Lots of cork. I know of few places whose story can be so thoroughly woven together by and distilled down to such spare components. Portugal’s Alentejo region is these things and more. But trying to describe this region beyond these finite products is for me a futile exercise. As with […]
Sometimes, when doing research you can kinda get lost in the prosaic, asking the same questions at each hotel you encounter on a site visit–how many rooms does the hotel have? Do you have interconnecting suites? Is there a 24hr gym? Is wifi included in the rate? It is important to shake free of these […]
The year is 1999, I’m a nerdy 7-year-old obsessed with dinosaurs, planet Earth, and sci-fi video games. I hear the TV talking about some grown-up commemoration on the other side of the ocean, in the United States… some vice-president with a strange name. They’re celebrating the 30th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission. Nothing too […]
You are called papa not ‘patata’, you were not born Castillian: you are dark like our skin, we are Americans, potato, we are Indians. – Pablo Neruda, Ode to the Potato Similar to other fuels on a grand scale, the quest to harness sources of consumable energy has been the cause of migrations, the root of […]
I am not a person who wears a hat well. Top-hat or touk, I’ve never been able to quite pull it off. I envy those boys looking beatific in a beret, languidly posing in a Parisian cafe smoking Gauloises. I am not a milliner’s delight. When behatted, I tend to look a little like a […]
In good news, the world of travel is moving towards a greener, cleaner way of sashaying across the globe. Trufflepig is right in the scrum on these efforts. We are tickled pink that whatever momentum Al Gore attempted, Greta Thurnberg is striking into a butterfly effect. But this is not an article about environmentalism or […]
July 21, 1969. My parents were traveling to Spain on their honeymoon, racing their tiny, overpacked Fiat 500 convertible beyond the laws of physics. They pulled over at a cafe in Tossa de Mar, a Medieval town in Catalonia, hastily parking the car on the sidewalk. It was very early in the morning (or very […]
[This article was originally published 27 November 2019] As I sit here writing this, winter has just begun to take hold in Southern Ontario. Meanwhile, on Somerset Island, 3400 kilometres as the crow flies from where I sit, the tundra and the northwest passage have been in winter’s grip for months. Way up in Northern Nunavut, perched […]