(Language warning!) They’re sitting in the seats behind me. 76J and 76K in the 380. One is wearing shorts and a ‘wifebeater’. It went something like this, in loud voices used to projecting over the sound of the dogs on the back of the grinding ute. My laptop was on my knee so I made…
You betcha. In the inelegant scramble to haul over the edge of a two meter overhang, sections of pelt were left on the sandstone, and down an indented shin the claret seeps. You don’t notice the latter until the hot water of the shower hits the skin that evening and startles you awake.
I wrap up at SIMaid tomorrow and wonder that the last week of April should mark the anniversary of so much that has happened over the last year. Most of it (not SIM I hasten to add) has been stuff I would not have scripted into the fabric of the life of my worst enemy…
I was thinking of Herbert Money this evening as I picked my way through the smokey warm dark evening of a boisterous Dhaka street. He wrote home in 1927 from Peru recounting his delight at being witness to a revolution in the streets as a President was told he was no longer needed. Actually I…
Apparently the French had a saying that went something like “the Vietnamese sow rice, the Cambodians watch it grow, the Laotians listen to it grow.” I think they were onto something there. This place is nothing like any other Asian city I have been to. It’s actually not a city in that sense and long…
The words fingered into the dust of the battered little Renault van in front of my taxi in from the airport suggested this was going to be a very different place from Algiers. Not that I go around looking for differences. In fact the reverse is true. But “Lord of the Rings” above an exhaust…
The Genie from Fez strode the streets, enjoying the morning and pretty much minding his own business, which he had to do given he was from out of town, when he noticed a man and his donkey nestled into a driveway in Rue Rouget de I’Isle. The donkey was hitched to a small cart into…
Rooster and Cockerel lived in a bachelor pad on the heights above Algiers. Though very much the same they were in fact two very different beasts living in the same town. At six o’clock every morning Rooster would drag his tattered tail out onto the balcony. He had no idea where Mecca might be located…
There was a canary called Farouk. He sat in the window behind a dirty curtain installed when the French were in control and trilled his song across a filthy narrow lane three stories above the cobbles. Three tenements down his trill was answered by another, though Farouk did not know his name. Farouk was a…
Ha, now I know I’m alive – this place is more edgy than sleepy old Verdun. Taxi at the airport? No such thing. Just Boris the Bullet Dodger and all his dodgy mates in their little, dusty Chevrolets. Yes, Chevrolets. More Cevy compacts than tiny French cars. How much to the city? Francais? Nah mate.…