Yearly Archives: 2016

Iceland, that tiny Nordic island nation in the North Atlantic, sits just barely outside the Arctic Circle and has more glacier-covered land than all of continental Europe. With a terrain that has been ground flat by successive periods of glaciation and rendered relatively tree-less by human predation, the winter landscape looks cold and white and eerily bleak from […]

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Namibia is big. It doesn’t seem particularly big if you are looking at a map of continental Africa, but that is only because Africa is HUGE. Namibia is the 34th largest country in the world. And if your bottom is on a seat in a truck, and you are being driven almost 4000 kilometres in less than two […]

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Everywhere you look in Hereford, in the British Midlands, you see history. As a city it dates back to Saxon times, when the Bishop of Hereford was first installed some time between AD 676 and 688. But it has operated as a cross-roads market-town for as long as anyone can remember. Today, its historical buildings serve as reminders of those past […]

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“What are water puppets?” asked one of our travel companions from Argentina. We were on a small bus from Hanoi to Halong, and had stopped in Yen Duc Village for a show and an early lunch. “Ahhh, they are a unique local entertainment; you have to see them once.” I replied. “But only once?” he responded, with […]

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If you start typing “Reykjavík” into a Google search, the second thing that comes up – after “Reykjavík” itself – is “Reykjavík weather.” No surprise, really. When I visited Iceland’s compact coastal capital city at the tail end of the nordic winter mid-March last year, he things that stood out to me most were the […]

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