Tag Archives: road trip

The air pulsates with dry heat. The sky and earth vibrate with impossible colours. You are surrounded by rusted equipment, reclaimed tyres, and expensive solar panels; it is impossible to discern what is in use and what has been abandoned. Houses are fashioned from old campers and railway carriages, or lovingly created out of mud […]

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I do love road trips! And when I’m on one, other ones I’ve taken come to mind: whether it’s because of comparisons or contrasts. I’ve just spent some time winding up and down through the magnificent mountains of Western Canada – which counter-intuitively made me think of the straight and lonely stretches of highway through […]

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We had started planning the year before … My husband and I had been driving, in our usual hurry, from a friend’s house in North Carolina to an airplane in Nashville, Tennessee. Not far from Asheville, NC, we pulled a short way off the highway to visit the Blue Ridge Parkway Visitor Center. A working wifi, […]

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Think of Mongolia, and you think of nomads. Nomads on horseback, driving their herds of goats, sheep, cattle and horses across the vast, rugged expanses of Central Asia, are still an important feature of the Mongolian landscape. In spite of a 2.78% annual rate of urbanisation (according to the CIA World Factbook), Mongolia still has one of the smallest urban populations in […]

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Steering the car off the turnpikes and onto the Blue Ridge Parkway is like stepping back in time. One has to slow down instantly: the posted speed limit is never higher than 45 mph (72 kph), and the winding mountain curves ensure slower speeds in many sections. For the 469 miles (755 km) that snake through the valleys and passes […]

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