Category My Book
Angst In Ankara Station Part I – Extract From My Book
The story starts as we were travelling to Syria from Istanbul in May 2009……. Calm Before The Storm We had a 4 hour stopover in the Turkish capital so set off to explore. First we needed coins for the lockers, but were one short. Luckily an upright English teacher called Neil came to our rescue. […]
Dark Beer In Eastern Europe
A feature of my regular travels in Eastern Europe with my buddy Hamish is to hunt out the local dark brew, infinitely preferable to the gassy blonde variety. In my forthcoming book I rate twenty-two different dark beers, with an undisputed number one amongst them regaled within my musings. The darker beers tend to be stronger […]
Panoramas of Eastern Europe
Its great to get high in an altitude sense to get a different perspective on your surroundings. Here are a few of my favourites from the East of Europe. Prague is probably my favourite city in Europe. I fell in love with the Bohemian capital during an inter-rail trip in September 1992, when I visited […]
Meteora
Meteora literally means ‘Suspended In The Air’ in Greek and is the name given to the area high up on a rocky outcrop above the town of Kalambaka in Thessaly in Northern Greece. The UNESCO World Heritage site is home to six monasteries (twenty were built originally), perched seemingly precariously on the rocks. The monasteries […]
My Forthcoming Book Extract Five – Going Large In Bucharest
In 2011 I visited Bucharest for a day at the start of the journey to Moldova, Crimea and Northern Ukraine. Whilst there we visited a big building…….. The Palace of the Parliament in central Bucharest is the world’s largest civilian building with an administrative function and the second largest building in the world after the Pentagon in Washington DC. It is […]
Sarajevo Trams
The capital of Bosnia & Herzegovina has the oldest tram system in Europe and the second oldest in the world after San Francisco. It opened on New Years day 1885 with the city used as a guinea pig for the Austro-Hungarian empire, of which Sarajevo was a part at that time. It was a test […]
MY BOOK EXTRACT – ON A TRAIN FROM GEORGIA TO ARMENIA
To set the scene, Hamish & I were embarking on an overnight train from Batumi on the Black Sea Coast of Georgia to Yerevin, the splendid capital of Armenia. We had booked a berth each on the overnight sleeper and were hoping against hope that we had a private compartment. We were therefore somewhat displeased […]
NUCLEAR SUBMARINE – MY FOURTEENTH TRANSPORTATION THEMED BLOG FOR THE APRIL A-Z CHALLENGE
I have never been on a nuclear sub (the foxtrot was non-nuclear), but during one travel experience I certainly imagined that I had. The occasion was a visit to Balaclava submarine base in the Crimea, then very much part of Ukraine. We toured the once secret venue that used to house the Soviet nuclear submarine […]
FOXTROT SUBMARINE – MY SIXTH TRANSPORTATION THEMED BLOG FOR THE APRIL A-Z CHALLENGE
In 2013 I visited Kaliningrad, the Russian enclave on the Baltic Sea sandwiched between Poland & Lithuania. As part of the open air maritime museum, there was the opportunity to scramble inside a decommissioned Foxtrot submarine. This was a cramped experience up there with the Chu Chi Tunnels in Vietnam and one of the few […]
My Forthcoming Book – Extract Four, On A Train Bound For Yugoslavia
To set the scene, I was on my first inter-rail trip in 1987 aged twenty-two with my mate Poll. Three days into the trip, Poll had lost his passport near Munich and had to be issued an emergency one by the British Consulate, designed to get us home by the most direct route. Undeterred, we […]
