Generally as a tourist you’d probably tend to avoid travelling to a country during an election period, but as a traveller who goes on three-week plus trips, sometimes, you can’t avoid them. I’ve been in four elections in four different countries. In 1997, I witnessed a phenomenon rarer than El Niño: Chilean Parliamentary elections – only […]
The Opera House in Manaus
I love opera. You have voices singing in unnatural cadences, laterally challenged men and women earnestly pretending to be dashing gay blades and gazelle-like femmes fatales, plus scenery from ancient China, Egypt or Valhalla. It is the campest of musical forms, and, like drag, it involves suspension of disbelief and immersion in a pre-arranged fantasy. […]
Chile and Argentina
[Note: This is the very first travel writing I ever did in the mid 1990s and as such, it needed a little mopping up. The images can’t be clicked to be enlarged, as they had been scanned poorly. Apologies.] My first trip to Chile and Argentina lasted five weeks and was during one February and […]