'I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.' With this sentence Karen Blixen opens her account of life on a coffee plantation just outside Nairobi. It was the 1920s, and this was British East Africa, not Kenya - part of the (by then fading) British Empire. The book presents a vivid, if at times uncomfortable, picture of African colonial life and the relationships between colonists and native inhabitants.
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Roswell would be a totally unremarkable town were it not for a single event - an event that quite possibly didn’t even happen, or at least not in the way that many believe it to have done. In the summer of 1947 a local man found some odd-looking debris on a ranch some 30 miles north of the town. Many of those who believe in UFOs are convinced that he had found a crashed spaceship, complete with its alien pilot who died in the crash. Sceptics are equally convinced that it was no such thing. But whatever the truth of…
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Sofia’s St. Alexander Nevsky Cathedral is not only a place of worship but also a memorial and a symbol of gratitude – the gratitude of the Bulgarian people to the Russian and Bulgarian soldiers who had earned the country its freedom.
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While Pyongyang is very much a showpiece city for the DPRK, the same cannot be said of Chongjin. This industrial city in the north east of the country has only relatively recently opened up to tourism. And it’s easy to see why. North Koreans, both as a government and a people, like to show visitors the best of their country. They want us to be impressed by their progress and modernity; they want us to see the nation as the success they believe it to be.
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While the monks of Glastonbury may have taken a vow of poverty and lived a life of abstinence and poverty, the abbot lived in a vastly different style. He had a magnificent house, as befitted the abbot of the second richest abbey in the country. His kitchen needed to be able to cater to the many great visitors who came to the abbey, including Henry VII.
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On a wooded hillside in the Aravalli range of hills in Rajasthan, north of Udaipur, is an exquisite Jain temple, intricately carved in white marble, Ranakpur. It has a cool serenity, its pale stone a welcome contrast to the vivid colours and assault on the senses that is India.
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When the Khmer Rouge prison Tuol Sleng, in Phnom Penh, was liberated by the invading Vietnamese army in 1979, the guards killed all but a handful of prisoners to try to prevent them telling of the horrors perpetrated there. Chum Mey is just one of thousands who were imprisoned here. He is also just one of a very few to have survived the experience – to have lived to tell that story.
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When Kim Il Sung, President of North Korea, died in 1994, the role of Leader passed to his son, Kim Jong Il, but the title of President did not. Instead, Kim Il Sung was declared ‘Eternal President’ of the nation, and the presidential office was written out of the constitution.
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Deep in the Thar Desert in the far west of Rajasthan is a golden city. A fairy tale fort sits on a ridge overlooking the town, still home to many families whose houses cluster within its sheltering walls. I loved Jaisalmer's remoteness, its border-town mentality, and the beauty of its golden architecture. And I enjoyed the personal stories of life (and death) as told by our Brahmin guide Gaurav.
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Rarely is a city defined so clearly by one single feature in the way that Newcastle-upon-Tyne is defined by its river. The city’s history has been shaped by the river, especially by shipbuilding; and now that the ship-yards are largely lost to history, the life of the city, especially its cultural and social life, continues to flow from the banks of the Tyne. A favourite walk in the city is along the Quayside past the Tyne’s famous bridges.
