Empty streets with closed bars, Caceres, Spain The Camino a Ítaca has been circling for weeks now, waiting for the city’s plague status to be lifted. Cities and towns across the region, shut off from each other in order to try and stop the spread. One of the measures that has been taken is a…
COVID has created our own Siberias. My next installement on the Camino de Ítaca travels from Vladivostok all the way to Extremadura. Click over to the original Spanish version or the English one below. We were somewhere around Chita on the blurry edges of Mongolia and China when the vodka really started flowing. I remember,…
A place close to my heart, just north of here where the scorched summer earth becomes green once again. Cool water runs off the sierra and where the wines are meant to enjoyed, not examined. Writing in Roads and Kingdoms about a toast to an old friend.
State Road 24 in North Florida. We bought bait, beer and breakfast biscuits, alligator meat was sold by the pound and they had homemade jams. This is ‘the south’. I had flown into JAX the night before from Madrid. Jetlagged and groggy, the morning’s fishing came early. Southeast out of Gainesville down southern highways in…
The scene of the crime I had narrowly avoided massacring a dozen newly hatched chicks in a box, whose chirping had accompanied us up from Qax. Stumbling backwards as the rusted-out Soviet-era bus corkscrewed us deeper into the Caucasus, I instead tumbled into the lap of heavily mustached Georgian-speaking shepherd. He didn’t smile… Writing in…
Writing in the local paper. Local issues with a global take. I never translate literally and the editor trims at will to make it fit. Here’s my version, then theirs. Sunday afternoon in the Calle Moret in this everlasting climate-change-denyer’s indian summer. At first glance everything looks the same. Graffiti splatters the shuttered shop windows…
Caucasus welcoming party. Waiting for tea. Stories behind the images. Writing about a search for honey and ending up with vodka in #roadsandkingdoms because it’s always #5oclocksomewhere More pictures in the link. http://nonotfar.blogspot.com.es/2018/01/raising-different-glass-in-roads-and.html?m=1 . . . . . . . #azerbaijan #caucasus #caucasusmountains #welcomingparty #vodka #vodkatasting #vodkatales #honey #nonotfar #oldmen #streetscape #streetscene #tea #drinkingchai #chai…
Writing in the local paper. Local issues with a global take. I never translate literally and the editor trims at will to make it fit. Here’s my version, then theirs. After the last class before the summer break the other day, a group of students and I went across the street to the bar to celebrate what was…
Malaga means grapes, and has for a long time. While the ancient Greeks were spreading philosophy and art throughout the Levant, they thankfully left behind the art of viniculture on the Costa del Sol. The pious Muslim traveler Ibn Battutah, who passed through in 1350, may have frowned on it, but even centuries of Muslim…
What’s the difference between an A and an O? Cross the border at Oroville and see how a thin line can change more than just the spelling of a valley. North of the 49th parallel in the Okanagan lies a string of some of Canada’s premier tourist resort cities. Canadians migrate here every summer to enjoy…