GUARDIAN Not everyone enjoys shopping, especially not blokes, and in particular not this bloke. That anyone can wring a scintilla of satisfaction from trawling around a store baffles me. But then I suffer from a rare congenital condition: I was born without a shopping gene. Or at least, I thought that was so. It seems that I’ve undergone a Damascene type conversion on the road to, er, Damascus. Continue reading
GUARDIAN Siwa Oasis has always been difficult to get to. A Persian army of 50,000 men perished while trying to reach this tiny speck in Egypt’s Great Sand Sea. Admittedly that was 500 BC, but the brutal landscape has remained pretty much the same ever since. Continue reading
GUARDIAN A Fairtrade holiday sounds as if it might be just a little too worthy and smug for its own good. Two weeks of unbleached cotton and a diet of organic lentils followed by the inevitable, if constipated, self-righteous after-glow doesn’t, frankly, tick any of my boxes. I actually like to enjoy my hols. Continue reading
GUARDIAN I wouldn’t normally associate a haunt like Xitang with the toothy gleam of Hollywood royalty. It’s hard to imagine high-octane players like Tom Cruise kicking back in an ancient Chinese water-village and much easier to picture the place filled with decadent opium dens and people idling on sampans. But incontrovertible proof was there to see: up on the wall in a restaurant – and it will soon be seen by many more on silver screens worldwide.
DAILY MAIL The walkie-talkie spluttered into life: “Darts in – top of the rump – a mother and subby, COME DOWN HERE NOW!” As we scrambled to obey our orders, I guessed that this meant that a mother and calf rhino had been spotted, and that we were giving chase. Continue reading
GUARDIAN This won’t make me popular north of the border, but here goes anyway: Hogmanay is for wimps. There, I’ve said it. If you want to play with the big boys during new year celebrations, you’ll have to travel a lot further afield than Scotland; and you can forget the end of December, too. Six thousand miles and February will get you the real deal. Continue reading
GUARDIAN The ceiling fans in Mombasa airport were barely able to paddle in the heat. What air they churned up only served to make the place welter some more, so I was pleased to escape it and travel a couple of hours north up the coast road to Kilifi and spend time in Baumontia House. Perched high on a ridge overlooking an enormous creek, it captured small breezes that came trickling out of nowhere. Continue reading
GUARDIAN Uganda has had a bad press for too long – reaction to my recent visit was predictably cliched, homing in on guerrillas and gorillas. I guess this is the only place on Earth where a country’s reputation is held to ransom by terrorists and primates – Joseph Kony (of The Lord’s Resistance Army) and Dian Fossey’s charges have a lot to answer for. It’s time to set the record straight, as there’s much, much more to the very heart of Africa. Continue reading
GUARDIAN I swung in a hammock and looked across to the neighbouring islands – but my view was partly obscured by a man who sprawled in his chair like a waxwork in the tropics. He drawled: “I’ve been given the nod, the job’s in the bag … High Commissioner. Not bad eh?” Continue reading
GUARDIAN It’s a bargain 29 bucks to escape from the city that never sleeps. The silver Amtrak heaves out of Penn station and hugs the banks of the Hudson river on a spectacular journey north towards Montreal. I wave goodbye to Manhattan, listening to the evocative clanking of a bell and the doleful siren song of the train bouncing across water the colour of Prada tan trousers. Continue reading
Nick Maes 