travel

In the Emerald Hotel

elevator

After nine months, one hundred and twenty-seven flights, one hundred and ten hotel rooms (fawn walls and twenty-four-hour corridors) and two hundred and sixty-five thousand frequent flyer miles, I’ve arrived on this high plateau called exhaustion. Nothing much grows here: a few leathery-leaved plants, xerophytes adapted to low moisture, low fertility and air freshener and there’s us, the travellers… Continue reading →

Showering in New Zealand

shower_nz_2May 2016

New Zealand is a small, bifurcated country just to the right and a little down from Australia. It has over 15,000 kilometres of pristine coast, hundreds of inland lakes and rivers, spectacular waterfalls and an average annual rainfall of between 600 and 1600 mm. In other words, there are plenty of ways to get wet in New Zealand; the least satisfactory of all these is the ensuite shower… Continue reading →

Construction sites in Paris

construction_paris

November 2012

Paris has some of the finest construction works in the world. Louise holds that I am wasting my time, and that a guidebook on building sites is useless because by the time they are plotted on maps, photographed, captioned and then published in some slim (or fat) volume to be sold alongside the Lonely Planets, the Frommers and the Rick Steve’s by some papeterie on the Rue de Grenelle, the construction will have been completed and the high-viz workers and the traffic barriers will have departed. This is a common misconception which holds that building works are ephemeral; the truth is that they are as fixed and permanent a part of our cities as the cathedrals, palaces and park benches where the privileged prayed, ate and lounged while feeding cake to the pigeons… Continue reading →