Home Archive by category "Thoughts" (Page 3)

Category: Thoughts

Annoying travel personalities. No.1 The Presumptuous Opportunist

The first in a hopefully short series about the annoying bastards I encounter travelling This first character, the Presumptuous Opportunist is most prevalent on the African continent and will always be the kind of friendly, chatty guy that normally is a pleasure to encounter in the street, as they can offer an insight into people’s lives. Their true nature will only become apparent when it’s time to pay the bill, when it’s evident that they never had any intention of…

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Toilet of the month

A celebration of Ethiopia’s most notable cultural heritage. Once in a while, a piece of toilet architecture stands out head and shoulders above the competition, sometimes enough to make a whole month of dragging yourself around UNESCO World Heritage Sites and unique geological creations somehow worthwhile. This glorious example tucked away in the back-end of Abozo in southern Ethiopia will surely soon be turning this quiet little village into a major tourist hub, as the masses flock to get a…

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Dear Terrorists

Dear Terrorists I have to say I am not happy. Admittedly I am not normally jumping up and down like some demented puppy at your usual work but this time its got personal. Twice in one week you’ve launched attacks just around the corner from where my friends live, first in Abidjan, Ivory Coast and now in Istanbul. Of course there are a lot more people who are entitled to be far more annoyed with you than I am, after…

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Top ten language tips for the hard of thinking traveller

Just because you have a doctorate in speaking English loudly while waving your arms about, doesn’t mean you have mastered the art of communication as you travel around the world. Buying a melon with grunts and pointing may be an admirable skill but you’re missing out if you don’t learn at least a bit of the local language wherever you go. With English being the most international language and native English speakers being the most bone idle of linguists as…

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A brief explanation

Dear readers A few words are in order as you may notice a change in my output over the next few months because I am off to Egypt to study Arabic for at least three months. The strict educational term for this is, “a fuck load of work”, hence I may not have the time to devote enough of my ailing brain cells to keeping you up to date with the world’s toilet facilities and other such vital geopolitical issues….

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It's all about me

That nice man Jonny Blair, of Don’t Stop Living blog has kindly included me in his series on World Travellers, where I have given some details of my travels and answered some of his questions. If you haven’t heard too much about me already please check out the piece on Dontstopliving . Jonny has been to more countries than most and is a mine of useful information, so by all means check out his blog as he is more successful than…

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Learning to love the cockroach

If you haven’t stayed in cockroach infested dumps, you haven’t traveled, as someone famous ought to have said. Anything else is just plain tourism. The scuttling horror of the cockroach, that all right minded travelers must dread, is one that you never truly get used to, no matter how often you share a room with them and I have done so more than most on my tours of the world’s less salubrious destinations. Some indefinable trait of unpleasant, alien otherness…

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Inspiration for travel bloggers

Staring out over the broad, arid plains of the travel blogosphere, strewn with Twitter inanities and rehashed Google searches, a few eruptions of brilliance pour lava flows of inspiration into the barren surroundings. Alas, none of them are mine, destined as they are to remain muddy pools of indifference in the shadowy recesses of the genre. It is however, these moments of volcanic intensity which should remind us its time to up our game and strive, at least for a…

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The most important book in the world?

The title may make a grand claim, so I had best state my case clearly. Looking at the picture below you may have rightly assumed it to be a Quran, but I am not making a case for the Quran in itself, although a reasonable argument could be made. If we are just talking about books as defined by their title, the competition is probably down to a three-way race between the Quran, The Bible and the Torah. Judaism may…

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African Facebook dictators

You have to sympathise with modern dictators, there’s so much more work to do than the good old days and as we all know keeping up to date with your social media accounts is a time-consuming business.  Admittedly it does seem to defeat the point of being a dictator by having to worry about your public image but such are the social pressures in the 21st century, it was so much more simple when you just had to say, “agree…

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