Wheels within Wheels – The Making of a Traveller by Dervla Murphy
I bought this book a while back and then left it sitting in the bottom of a drawer. Bad idea. If there’s anyone who shouldn’t be shut away, it’s Dervla Murphy.
She flew out of the pages.
Tsavo, Kenya
We turn our wheels west, from Kilifi towards Tsavo.
It’s hot, and there are five of us in the 4×4 … and about 250km to go.
En route – London to Addis Ababa
We arrive at Heathrow … ready. Outside cold winter presses against the glass, and our mobiles ping with the last twitches of the lives we’ve just left.
By morning we’ll be in Addis Ababa.
Flying into Prague over the Vltava River
This is our first visit to a city we know of but do not know, and we have just one October weekend to make its acquaintance.
The Vltava River is the eye-catcher as we fly in.
Walking in Extremadura in the spring of 2018
Seven of us – female, and last together decades ago at school in Zimbabwe – leave our lives in England, South Africa, Spain, France and Australia, and head off for a week’s reunion in Extremadura.
The plan, born from a cyber whim, somehow, suddenly becomes real.
My apologies for the silence. The end of the year in London was such a rush that I failed to post a note on The Phraser about where I would be over Christmas and the New Year.
Forgotten Kingdom – Nine Years in Yunnan, 1939-48 by Peter Goullart
This is a travel book that unfurls like a lotus flower. It has happiness at its heart but is grown out of hardship in the steep-sided valleys of south-western China.
The decade is the 1940s and the location is the province of Yunnan, geographically cut apart from the rest of China and still webbed with tribes, traditions and traders.
