Yesterday we departed Nairobi at 1209 and rolled out to Eldoret. We had spent the morning touring Kibera, the slum famous for being the largest in Africa and for being, well a slum. For many it is a place of convenience as they come into town to work, Kibera offering a place of cheap accommodation.…
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I am in Gare L’Est, a significant point in the novel I started writing ten years ago, Ironically it’s where I am to catch my train up to Verdun and was not a place I was planning on visiting. But here I am in a coffee shop lost in its cavernous halls, drinking crap coffee…
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Dahl baht and rice looks pretty much the same at either end of the digestive tract. It’s delivered on a silver tray in some sort of order. Delivery at the other end is another matter altogether. At Saugauli Junction train station it seems to me that the vast majority of everyone’s Dahl baht is sprayed…
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Scrubbed timber has no smell. The burnt brake pads and the metal wheel flange create their own dust and heat and smell which lifts in the warm afternoon, hangs in the humid air and is pushed aside by the train as it sighs up to the platform. I watch the handful of people who angle…
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We flee from New York at a clickety blur at the end of the day. We have done so for an hour now and the sun is just setting across an industrial landscape that is old brick buildings (a few soft with refurbishment, the rest hard in broken abandonment), vacant weedgrown lots, rail-tracks, water towers…
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Any town that can straight faced call a Metro stop (and suburb) Foggy Bottom has to have something going for it. That the train line stop is underneath the George Washington University Hospital suggests someone in the planning department might have had a sense of humour as well. Indeed, this town has a lot going…
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Bruce Elder in the Sydney Morning Herald asks this question and asks for suggestions that might help small communities attract more visitors. What do you want to see when you visit these small places? Given we are visiting a comparatively small town at the moment, and given that we spent a cosy afternoon in a…
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On a train from Liverpool to London and a short while after leaving Lime Street we pull into a suburban station. Into the carriage climbed a wild eyed man in his late forties, mop of hair coiffed back onto his collar, rings in his ears, spare tire around his waist and shirt hanging out. Stumbling…
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