Dawn in Hanoi – the calm before the storm

  To truly appreciate the early morning calm of dawn in Hanoi you really need to endure the full frontal assault of the night before in the old city. It is here that the full gamut of bars, restaurants and nocturnal services endeavour to lure the abundance of tourists and locals alike into wallet emptying rapture. Terms like hustle and bustle don’t do justice to the relentless hard sell from personnel stationed outside each venue. Menus are thrust under your…

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Telegraph pole art in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

Street art with a difference in the Dominican Republic. Once in a while, whilst wandering city streets around the world you come across a great creative idea that could be transplanted almost anywhere to brighten up a cityscape. The decorated buildings of Tirana in Albania or the Soviet apartment blocks of Central Asia were two such examples.  Santo Domingo has used a different canvas: telegraph poles. Few would claim that concrete poles or creoste soaked wooden ones do much to…

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Nobody runs in Gonzague

A bit of everyday life in the suburbs of Abidjan, Ivory Coast There’s a wonderful lack of urgency on the sandy streets of Gonzague, this ramshackle development stretched out along the pedestrian unfriendly, coastal route to Grand Bassam. Why hurry anywhere, when you can dawdle in the sun and sea breeze, chat to neighbours or a shopkeeper, making a trip to the shop last twice as long as any westerner would? A goodbye to a parting guest might become a…

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Soul of the city: Kiev, Ukraine

It took me two weeks to work out what was wrong with Kiev and that’s because, on the surface of it, there’s nothing particularly wrong with it at all. Eventually I came to realise that all was not as it should be. Strolling its boulevards and broad streets, the European will feel at home amongst the grand 19th century architecture, after all this was an era when Tsarist Russia was so enamoured by life to their west that French was…

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