Author Archives: Ursula The west coast of Vancouver Island is known for it’s wild storms. “Storm watching” features strongly in all the tourism literature from the area – it might be one of the very few times a person could be less than happy about beautiful weather. And we did have beautiful weather the day we stopped into the little district municipality of Ucluelet, […]  There is something disturbing about having more valuable belongings in your travel bag than a whole village has within it’s boundaries. This tension is inherent in travelling, particularly in photo-touring, in countries where wealth is poorly distributed. Although visiting under-developed areas – particularly with responsible operators – puts some much-needed cash into the local communities, […]  Never have I felt more like David Attenborough. You know: in that classic, ground-breaking twelfth episode of Life on Earth (1979), investigating primates and their “Life in the Trees”, where the broadcaster and naturalist finds himself face to face with an adult female mountain gorilla in Rwanda, and turns to talk softly to the cameras. We were in Asia, […]  There are some scenes so iconic that they could take place nowhere else. So it is with the leg-rowing fishermen of Inle Lake in the Shan Hills of Myanmar. They are so uniquely Burmese that images of these men – standing on the sterns of their boats with one leg wrapped around an oar – often feature in travel advertising and […]  It is only a short hop from Singapore to Indonesia by boat or plane, but it may as well be a whole world away (q.v. From Resort to Reality). Last month, after a week in the ultra-modern high-rise city-state of Singapore (Magical Flying Machines and Gardens by the Bay), my husband and I took a side-trip to […] |
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