Thanks for reading. This blog is an opportunity for me to capture some of the diversity of my writing interests. My muse tend to appear on my shoulder as I board an international flight although not all of my writing is inspired by travel and foreign places. These blogs have been the basis of a novel (Flowers of Baghdad) but there are a few other writing projects in progress besides. Please feel free to leave a comment. Or two.
An echo in my ear when the towers came down in New York was an American woman on the news, completely mystified, asking why do “they hate us so much?” The question resonated over the incident and in the press over the next few weeks and months.
I am still messing with this thing sent down by RocketXL. But it took someone else to point out,as they sat across the table from me, that the screen was not reflective. The sort of blinding obvious quality I would have liked to think I would have picked up but had not.
While the new airport is currently being built (a massive enterprise which we are all looking forward to seeing complete – the current airport crowds and bustle resemble the New Delhi railway station, not a first world air port) you can find yourself being shuttled to and from you aircraft by bus and walking to…
Well, in this case, in the side mirror. The perpetual (and petulant) feud between the two cities about which is the better of the two is no doubt only going to be exacerbated by news out today that Melbourne has eclipsed Sydney in the number of domestic tourists hitting town and now ranks as the…
They follow you around this place. Sometimes they silently appear from behind golden pillars with authentic fake coins to sell. Sometimes they rise out of the ground in the middle distance, shimmering among the rocks, and silently beckon to you to come and look at some ancient wonder, their dark robes flapping in the hot,…
After extracting the eBook (from RocketXL) out from the embracing clutches of the LA Weekly back pages I managed to resist being distracted by it for all of about an hour. After which I decided it was time for an early lunch and bit of an exploration. I was initially taken by the cover and…
The Internet is a pretty amazing place. But you all know that. Still, every now and then you get a pleasant surprise which is a change from the usual “shock and awe” that attempts to penetrate our dulled www senses. This surprise was a Sony PRS-505 eBook which landed on my desk today. But the story…
Vietnam is endlessly fascinating. Because it is Vietnam of course. But mainly because its people are polite, energetic, entrepreneurial, curious, engaging and well, just Vietnamese. They are charged up about building their country and raising their standard of living in the pell mell pursuit of the West. Fortunately they are not completely corrupted by that…
A week ago I met with a fellow blogging traveler – traveler and blogger that is. A first for me, meeting someone through the internet that is and then catching up face to face. There was some irony in driving off to the meeting given there was a sense of ignoring all the advice (mostly…