That nice man Henrik at Every Country in the World website has kindly included a profile of me, where you can learn about some of my favourite places and experiences and some not so favourite things. Check out the other travelers on the site as there’s a wealth of travel experience between them that you’ll be hard pressed to find elsewhere www.everycountryintheworld.com/grahamaskey/
I have to say I was a trifle surprised to learn that our building manager considered me a potential member of Isis. Given that the number of middle aged, white Englishmen who had left our green and pleasant land to wage violent jihad in the Middle East has consistently hovered around the zero mark, at least no one could accuse him of ethnic profiling. Having already passed a pleasant two months in the apartment with my friend Ziad, that had…
Thinking of driving in Egypt? Don’t! Unless you are considering shortening your life span considerably or have an uncontrollable urge to invest in car body repairs. Don’t take this to mean Egyptian drivers are unskilled: it actually takes great skill to avoid getting killed in the malestrom of automotive chaos that is Egyptian traffic. In fact, they have the lowest road death rate in Africa, not far behind the European average. What you need to understand is that they operate…
How Coronavirus and Brexit have shaped my travels and plans for the year ahead
What’s so important about black, women travelers you might ask? For starters, recent years have seen a lot more of them, either bloggers, journalists, YouTubers or Instagrammers. Irrespective of their identity there’s plenty who are simply good at what they do, covering the whole range of travel styles, from back packing to luxury. Many are westerners but Africans are also adding their own insights into the subject. There’s simply no reason to imagine that what they’ve got to say is…
I’m sure most of you would recognise Latin music when you hear it, even though you might have trouble describing it. “Sounds like salsa”, you might say before some pedant informs you, “actually this is merengue”. Terms like bossa nova and rumba float indefinably in the public consciousness, with echoes of plastic buttons on the rhythm options on cheap, 1970’s electric organs. At least for old farts like me. Maybe these days it comes as a largely ignored, free sample…
Friends and the fragility of life for the long term traveller The life of the long term traveller isn’t all cocktails by the pool, surrounded by beautiful people. In fact, on my budget it’s never about that and besides, the last thing the beautiful people want is some shabbily dressed, ugly old git like me hanging around cramping their style. Not that I’m trying to say it’s a shit life but after six years mostly on the road, the prospect…
I think it’s fair to say that I’m better qualified than many to know what dangerous public transport really is. I’ve been hurtled the wrong way down a motorway against the oncoming traffic, protected only by the driver blaring his horn. I’ve been flung around whilst overtaking on blind bends over a precipice while the driver talks on his phone. I’ve shot past the flashing lights and wailing siren of an ambulance speeding its way to an accident, because our…
No doubt you’ve all heard wonderful things about Colombia, so there’s no point in me repeating them all here is there? So, at great effort and minimal expense I made an intrepid search to discover all the rubbish bits about the country that other blogs won’t tell you about. The tragic failings of paper tissues Whoever it was in the Colombian, paper serviette design department, they didn’t get the message that the whole point of the object is to remove…
With the internet’s wonderful ability to distribute our opinions to all and sundry, no matter how ill informed or deluded we may be, maintaining a truly shit hostel has become an almost impossible task. Try hiring a sex pest to work behind the desk or cultivate a family of cockroaches in the bathroom and you’ll tend to find your establishment slipping down the rankings on hostelworld.com fairly quickly. Back in the halcyon days, before even the Lonely Planet had written…
