▲  The Gladiator of Guitar
We caught Elvis Costello performing at the Albert Hall on Wednesday night and in the penultimate encore who should stride on stage to join him but – as Costello put it – the gladiator of guitar, Russell Crowe. OK it’s hard to tell from this photo (taken from the circle, with my phone), but that’s him.

▲  Skateboard Art
In the Brooklyn Museum while we were in New York earlier this month.

◄  Rockefeller Centre
While Maureen was exercising her credit card on 5th Ave I dropped into the Rockefeller Centre – yet again. Is there any limit to how many times you can enjoy the Rockefeller Centre?

▲  A Tempted Bishop
And yet another New York Rockefeller project, the Cloisters, a collection of European medieval religious structures. I liked this painting of St Andrew saving a bishop who is about to fall for the temptations offered by a woman who in reality is the devil. Of course, who else but the devil would be tempting a bishop? Said besotted bishop is clearly blissfully unaware of the devilish wings the lady is sprouting.


▲  Where do they get these names?
Like the Cat & Mutton – back in London yesterday I noted this intriguingly named pub on Broadway Market, just south of London Fields

I’m chairing the panel of judges for the 2012 Dolman Travel Book of the Year Award, the annual award for the best British travel book. Currently I’m working through the entries with my fellow judges Sarah Spankie of Conde Nast Traveller magazine, Susie Dowdall the Books Editor of the Daily Mail, Chris Moss who used to be travel and books editor of Time Out and Rachel Polonsky who won the 2011 Dolman Award for her book Molotov’s Magic.

We’ll draw up a short list in June and after we’ve all read the short list titles the winner will be announced at Hatchard’s Bookshop on Piccadilly on Wednesday 5 September. So far I’ve read four of the entrants, starting with Extreme Rambling, Mark Thomas’s account of walking the barrier wall between Israel and Palestine. I did my own little bit of wall walking when I was in those countries last December. Since then I’ve read three more Dolman entries:

In Praise of Savagery by Warwick Cairns recounts his meetings with Wilfred Thesiger and juxtaposes Thesiger’s account of his 1930s African wandering with the author’s more recent (and less pioneering) trek in the region.











To a Mountain in Tibet by Colin Thubron follows the author’s trek through Nepal to the border with Tibet followed by a visit to the holy Lake Manasarovar and a circuit of Mt Kailash. I walked the same route from Simikot in western Nepal in 1998. According to the Tibetans walking a circuit of Mt Kailash wipes out all the sins of your lifetime. Unfortunately your current lifetime only. Colin and I will both be talking at the Immrama Festival of Travel Writing in Lismore, Ireland from 7 to 10 June.



Travelling with Mr Turner by Nigel C Winter follows the route of Edward Turner, who managed Triumph Motorcycles for many years, as he rides from Lands End (the extreme south-west tip of England) up to John O’Groats (the north-east tip of Scotland). Mr Turner made the ride in 1953 on a 150cc Triumph Terrier, Mr Winter follows more than five decades later on a 900cc Triumph Thunderbird.

En route he reminisces about how much better things often were in 1950s Britain and the rise and fall of Triumph and the British motorcycle industry. In what sometimes feels like a previous lifetime I was an engineer and worked for a couple of years in the British car industry, just down the road in Coventry from the Triumph factory. Cars and motorcycles it was all falling apart at the same time and sadly it was the same tale of inept management, bolshy workers and misguided government interference.

Every now and then I bump into somebody who’s busy trekking around the world putting a ‘been there’ tick beside a list of every country in the world. You can have arcane arguments about what ‘been there’ means – is the airport transit lounge good enough? But the starting point is how many countries are there in the world?

The UN members list runs to 193 – since South Sudan joined – but what about Taiwan? Or Palestine? And Antarctica is clearly not a country, but it is a whole continent so surely it deserves a tick? My own list – with 154 ticks beside it – would stretch to about 240 ‘countries’. The Traveler’s Century Club has a list of 321, but they let you tote up 6 China ‘countries’: China, Tibet, Hainan, Macau, Hong Kong and Taiwan. The tiny UK even edges ahead of China with 7: England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man and two lots of Channel Islands

Last week I came across a new countries list – applying for a Russian visa you have to list every country you’ve been to in the past 10 years. And by year so if you’d gone somewhere every year for the past 10 years you should list it 10 times. Which takes an enormous amount of time using pull down menus for years and places.


▲Visiting Pitcairn Island

The Russian ‘countries’ list counts up about 240 of them including some distinctly weird ones. The UN list is there and a lot of colonies, Gibraltar for example. Antarctica is there and some of the sub-Antarctic islands, but not the biggest of the lot South Georgia. Islands (Malvinas) is there, but not the Falklands. Pitcairn appears. Libya is still listed as the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, the old Gaddafi name for the place. Then there’s a place called Zair? Zaire perhaps? Except Congo, ‘the Democratic Republic of’ also appears, the current name for what used to be Zaire.

Then there are some really weird places which I don’t think many of us are going to claim we’ve visited – like Neutral Zone, Refugee, Refugee CL1 of Convention 1951Y, UN Organization and UN Organization Spesial Institution, Unstated Citizenship and Without Citizenship.

▲  On 5 March in Melbourne, Australia I got up at dawn and drove over to Port Melbourne to see the Queen Mary 2 arrive in dock. A couple of weeks earlier I’d stopped in at Rabaul on my way through Papua New Guinea, having arrived in the country by a very much smaller boat – powered by a 30 horsepower Yamaha outboard – as part of the back door to Bougainville route from the Solomon Islands. In Rabaul they were talking about the QM2 arriving in their volcano-rimmed harbour in a couple of weeks time.

▲ So it was very appropriate that on 4 May Maureen and I sailed out of New York on the QM2, bound for Southampton in England. These days it’s a 7 day crossing, slower than they used to do it even back in the Titanic days. Speaking of which we passed about 80km south of the final resting place of that iceberg victim. It was 100 years and a couple of weeks earlier that the Titanic went down. We passed even closer to the Andrea Doria which sank back in 1956, we were only about 25km from its location.

▲ Statue of Liberty & the Staten Island Ferry

The iconic Atlantic crossing is westbound and ends by sailing into New York past the Statue of Liberty. Travelling eastbound does mean you see the statue at dusk, no need to get up pre-dawn for your early arrival. Eastbound also means you have 5 23 hour days, going the other way gives you 5 25 hour days. No big deal, I thought, but it’s surprising how a little bit of jetlag (or boatlag) every day ends up feeling just as bad as one bigger chunk. I was surprised how out of it I felt by the end.

And on board – well you can eat a lot, I put on a little bit of weight even though I tried to avoid over-eating, jogged around the deck every day (1.9 laps to a km, it’s a big ship)  and visited the gym every day. And you drink a lot – a pre-dinner drink in one of the bars, more booze with dinner, a nightcap in another bar. The excellent jazz from the Simon Galfe trio was the best thing on the boat and they seem to have been there for a while, there are YouTube clips of them back to 2009.

Plus you read a lot and if you wish there are lectures, films, live performances, even a casino if you want to lose some money. Meanwhile a lot of ocean passes by although until the last day it was so cold and windy outside there wasn’t much demand for these loungers for watching the Atlantic disappear behind. ▼

Despite the dressing up – three nights were ‘formal’ – DJs and bow ties for the guys – it was surprisingly unglamorous most of the time. The buffet dining area (there are flash restaurants as well) is more cross-Channel (or cross-Tasman) ferry than international ocean bling.

I didn’t get the New York arrival, but at the other end we came in past the Isle of Wight and the Calshot sandspit that marks the entrance to Southampton Water. My father was from Calshot so it was an area I knew as a child. Despite all that maritime activity on his doorstep Dad ended up in the RAF, not the British Navy.

▲ Passing Calshot Spit

So an interesting week, something I’ve always wanted to do and now I’ve done it I certainly don’t intend to ever do it again!  Cunard’s pricing policy (you can pay way more booking from some countries than others) is very interesting. More on that in a future blog.

Friday 8 June to Sunday 10 June – the Immrama Festival of Travel Writing – Lismore, Ireland

Friday evening – I’ll be joining Jan Morris, Artemis Cooper and Colin Thubron to discuss Patrick Leigh Fermor, author of that travel classic A Time of Gifts. Artemis Cooper is currently writing a Fermor biography.

Saturday at 8 pm I’ll be talking travel!

 Wednesday 30 May – I’ll be in Moscow for the launch of Lonely Planet guidebooks in Russian.

Later in the year – I’ll be chairing the panel of judges for the 2012 Dolman Award for Travel Writing, Britain’s only award for travel books. More on that soon, when the long list of books is released.

Muang Khua, Laos - 2009

When Maureen and I arrived in Sydney the day after Christmas 1972, after a six month Asia overland trip from Europe, we had 27 cents left between us. In late 1973 we started Lonely Planet Publications ... read more