Stop here and have a look at this wonderful sight? Well perhaps, in fact it means don’t go any further … if you’re a tourist.

Shoes on the Danube has to be the most poignant memorial I’ve seen for a long time. Along the riverside are ‘scattered’ 60 pairs of old shoes, cast in metal. They mark the point where in 1944 the Arrow Cross fascists shot a group of Jews and threw them into the river. It’s a heart catcher and flowers and candles amongst the shoes indicates a lot of other people have been moved by it as well.


Click here for more views of Budapest.

Stop here and have a look at this wonderful sight? Well perhaps, in fact it means don’t go any further … if you’re a tourist.

Shoes on the Danube has to be the most poignant memorial I’ve seen for a long time. Along the riverside are ‘scattered’ 60 pairs of old shoes, cast in metal. They mark the point where in 1944 the Arrow Cross fascists shot a group of Jews and threw them into the river. It’s a heart catcher and flowers and candles amongst the shoes indicates a lot of other people have been moved by it as well.

St Stephen is the Hungarian father figure and in the sumptuous Basilica of St Stephen you can visit the Chapel of the Holy Right and take a peek at this glass case containing the Holy Right. The what? His right hand of course. They found it in Bosnia in 1771.

We made a small excursion out of Budapest to the postcard pretty little town of Szentendre. It’s a half hour train trip from the city centre and you can then take a one hour boat trip down the Danube back in to Budapest.

We finished our Budapest visit with an excursion to Statue Park, where images of the communist heavyweights (Lenin for example) and other unwanted heroes of Hungary’s days behind the Iron Curtain have been collected together. At the time of the invasion of Iraq I said it would be good if they could just collect all those no-longer-required statues of Saddam Hussein and preserve them for a similar use, as we know that was just another mistake in that shambolic exercise.

Even flying in to the Faroes can be spectacular, here’s my first view of the islands, a typical sheer cliff face on the island of Vágar as I flew in to the airport on the island. It’s then nearly 50km by road to the capital Tórshavn including a 5km tunnel linking Vágar Island to Streymoy Island.

Click here for nine more images from my Faroes photo album.

The National Museum’s prize exhibit is the wonderful collection of medieval carved pew ends from the old church at Kirkjubøur. This one illustrates a charming little Virgin Mary and cheerful baby Jesus.


Tinganes, the compact ‘old town’ centre of the capital Tórshavn, features numerous buildings with the turf-covered roofs which you’ll see all over the islands.


I was continually amazed by the places Faroes sheep can find themselves. They’ll contentedly graze on the top of knife-edged ridges with multi-hundred-metre drops straight down to the ocean. A tiny dot in the middle of this picture is another suicidal sheep, it’s at the Glyvraberg bird cliffs.

Almost every walk in the Faroes eventually ends at a sheer drop into the churning ocean below. This one was at Beinisvǿrð Cliffs, the sea is 469 metres (1538 feet) below. Oooh!

(well it was a calm day)




Right down at the southern end of Suduroy the village of Sumba is a typical Faroes
village.



































I really enjoyed my visit to the village of Gjógv on the island of Eysturoy, but perhaps it was just that charming name?


You’ll see turf-roofed churches, often beautifully sited, all over the islands. This one was at the village of Funningur, also on Eysturoy Island.

I spent my final day on the island of Mykines, where I walked the trail right down to the end of the island, the westernmost point in the Faroes.
































Looking back to the east from that end was yet another stunning view, no shortage of those in the Faroes, lots of places where you feel ‘wow, I am glad to be alive!’

Signspotting and the follow up Signspotting 2 can both be ordered from our website.

I’m a sign collector myself and a few of my photos pop up in Doug’s books. Click here for signs from my recent Africa bike ride. Or here for some favourites from three years back.

Signspotting and the follow up Signspotting 2 can both be ordered from our website.

I’m a sign collector myself and a few of my photos pop up in Doug’s books. Click here for signs from my recent Africa bike ride. Or here for some favourites from three years back.

En route we passed the Faroes iconic island Tindhólmur. It would be a slightly oval shaped cone, grass-covered and rising steeply (everything in the Faroes rises steeply) to a knife-edged ridge. Except somebody has taken a knife to that knife-edge ridge and neatly chopped one side of the island off. So the green slope on the north side rises to the ridge and then the island simply disappears. From the south side it’s a sheer rock face. Surreal.

From the island’s one tiny car-free settlement you can walk west to the extreme western end of the Faroes. En route you cross a footbridge over a deep channel and pass a lighthouse before emerging on a headland above two sea stacks which are the only nesting place on the Faroes for gannets. There are plenty of other seabirds around the island, but the big attraction is the prolific puffin population These small birds with their brightly coloured beaks fill the northern hemisphere penguin gap. Apart from at the Galapagos Islands, right on the equator, penguins are strictly a southern hemisphere bird and puffins are a bit penguin-like, except they can fly. With whirring wings so they look rather like a children’s toy with the speed turned up high.

A day on Mykines not long enough? There’s the friendly little Kristianshús hostel and café ready to look after you.

The Faroes? They’re a group of islands directly north of Ireland. Way north, the capital Tórshavn is at 62º North, that puts it about a degree north of Anchorage in Alaska, or two degrees south of Reykjavik in Iceland. Their status? A kind of semi-independent offshoot of Denmark. We didn’t put them in the first edition of The Travel Book, our assessment of every country in the world. There were so many complaints the Faroe Islands were the one ‘country’ we added to the second edition.

Vestmanna
Today I started in Tórshavn and drove northwest to Vestmanna to take a boat trip to see the soaring bird cliffs and the thousands of nesting seabirds including puffins. They’re the bird everybody wants to see in the Faroes, but I was equally impressed by the suicidal sheep. They contentedly graze on impossibly steep slopes where it’s clearly impossible for them to have got there without rock climbing equipment.

Eiði
Next stop Eiði, yeah I know it’s unpronounceable as well. A steep walk above the village takes you to a cliff top lookout above the twin rock stacks known as the Risin and Kellingin, aka the prince and the hag or the giant and his troll. This ill-intentioned pair had lassoed the Faroes and were trying to tow it away to Iceland, but they spent so much time squabbling they were turned into stone.

Don’t come to the Faroes if you don’t have a head for heights. Every walk seems to end at a sheer drop with the sea a couple of hundred metres directly below you. You worry that if a gust of wind doesn’t push you off a stray sheep will come by and do the job.

The Faroes? They’re a group of islands directly north of Ireland. Way north, the capital Tórshavn is at 62º North, that puts it about a degree north of Anchorage in Alaska, or two degrees south of Reykjavik in Iceland. Their status? A kind of semi-independent offshoot of Denmark. We didn’t put them in the first edition of The Travel Book, our assessment of every country in the world. There were so many complaints the Faroe Islands were the one ‘country’ we added to the second edition.

Vestmanna
Today I started in Tórshavn and drove northwest to Vestmanna to take a boat trip to see the soaring bird cliffs and the thousands of nesting seabirds including puffins. They’re the bird everybody wants to see in the Faroes, but I was equally impressed by the suicidal sheep. They contentedly graze on impossibly steep slopes where it’s clearly impossible for them to have got there without rock climbing equipment.

Eiði
Next stop Eiði, yeah I know it’s unpronounceable as well. A steep walk above the village takes you to a cliff top lookout above the twin rock stacks known as the Risin and Kellingin, aka the prince and the hag or the giant and his troll. This ill-intentioned pair had lassoed the Faroes and were trying to tow it away to Iceland, but they spent so much time squabbling they were turned into stone.

Don’t come to the Faroes if you don’t have a head for heights. Every walk seems to end at a sheer drop with the sea a couple of hundred metres directly below you. You worry that if a gust of wind doesn’t push you off a stray sheep will come by and do the job.

Hernando Calvo Ospina
A Colombian journalist on assignment for the French paper Le Monde Diplomatique, Mr Ospina wasn’t even visiting the US when he ran into Homeland Security problems. His Paris-Mexico City flight had to divert to Martinique in the Caribbean to refuel because, when the plane was out over the Atlantic, Homeland Security decided they disliked Mr Ospina so much they didn’t even want him flying over the US! The Air France aircraft had to make a lengthy diversion around US airspace, hence the refuelling stop. Click here for more on this story, including the interesting question of what the US might do if Cuba started to demand passenger lists of US aircraft flying over Cuba and occasionally demanded they divert and fly around the island. US flights to Central America routinely fly over Cuba, including my Miami-San José (Costa Rica) flight in early May. Click here for Calvo Ospina’s own story.

Mairead Maguire
Two days after I arrived in Texas the Northern Irish Nobel Peace Prize winner had much more trouble with Homeland Security. Arriving in Houston from a conference in Guatemala she was pulled aside and didn’t get through immigration for two hours, by which time she had missed her flight home. She was hosting the Guatemala conference along with three other female Nobel Peace Prize laureates, click here for her full story.

You can’t do much when even flying over US territory can cause problems, but sometimes there is the option of bypassing the US and its problems. Last year I had a choice of flying Bogota-Miami-London or Bogota-Madrid-London – same flight time, same cost, just swap American Airlines for Iberia. I did.

Hernando Calvo Ospina
A Colombian journalist on assignment for the French paper Le Monde Diplomatique, Mr Ospina wasn’t even visiting the US when he ran into Homeland Security problems. His Paris-Mexico City flight had to divert to Martinique in the Caribbean to refuel because, when the plane was out over the Atlantic, Homeland Security decided they disliked Mr Ospina so much they didn’t even want him flying over the US! The Air France aircraft had to make a lengthy diversion around US airspace, hence the refuelling stop. Click here for more on this story, including the interesting question of what the US might do if Cuba started to demand passenger lists of US aircraft flying over Cuba and occasionally demanded they divert and fly around the island. US flights to Central America routinely fly over Cuba, including my Miami-San José (Costa Rica) flight in early May. Click here for Calvo Ospina’s own story.

Mairead Maguire
Two days after I arrived in Texas the Northern Irish Nobel Peace Prize winner had much more trouble with Homeland Security. Arriving in Houston from a conference in Guatemala she was pulled aside and didn’t get through immigration for two hours, by which time she had missed her flight home. She was hosting the Guatemala conference along with three other female Nobel Peace Prize laureates, click here for her full story.

You can’t do much when even flying over US territory can cause problems, but sometimes there is the option of bypassing the US and its problems. Last year I had a choice of flying Bogota-Miami-London or Bogota-Madrid-London – same flight time, same cost, just swap American Airlines for Iberia. I did.

Leonard Cohen on stage just outside Melbourne

Then in mid-April in London we saw Van Morrison perform his classic Astral Weeks album live at the Albert Hall. ‘Who else would we like to catch this year?’ I asked Maureen.

‘Al Stewart,’ she replied. Al Stewart may not be as well known as those other three although Year of the Cat was a big hit for him in back in 1976. We’ve always loved his music-and-history connections and, sure enough, the morning after we got back from Los Angeles (click here for my LA drive in an electric Tesla) we discovered he was playing in Newcastle-upon-Tyne that night. So off we went on the train.

A lot of Newcastle in one shot, beneath the Tyne Bridge (a miniature Sydney Harbour Bridge from the same time and off pretty much the same drawing board) you can see  the pedestrian Millenium Bridge, the Baltic Centre and The Sage concert hall, where we saw Al Stewart perform.

Apart from a terrific concert we also had a look around Newcastle and on our way back to London spent a day in York, principally to see the city’s amazing medieval ‘Minster,’ the largest medieval cathedral in England. For more on York and Newcastle check Lonely Planet’s England guidebook.

Bits of history we imbibed from Al Stewart’s performance (he’s terrific at talk-between-the-songs):

• That mysterious bulge in the border of Jordan is ‘Churchill’s hiccup,’ when the borders of the country were being drawn at Versailles after WW I – from the song A League of Notions.
• Who else would do a song about Charles the 12th of Sweden, his disastrous attack on Russia and defeat by Peter the Great (‘he wasn’t called “the Great” for nothing’) – from the never released The Coldest Winter in Memory.
• And who else could turn the ‘front porch presidential campaign’ of William McKinley into a love song – Like William McKinley from his new album Sparks of Ancient Light.

Leonard Cohen on stage just outside Melbourne

Then in mid-April in London we saw Van Morrison perform his classic Astral Weeks album live at the Albert Hall. ‘Who else would we like to catch this year?’ I asked Maureen.

‘Al Stewart,’ she replied. Al Stewart may not be as well known as those other three although Year of the Cat was a big hit for him in back in 1976. We’ve always loved his music-and-history connections and, sure enough, the morning after we got back from Los Angeles (click here for my LA drive in an electric Tesla) we discovered he was playing in Newcastle-upon-Tyne that night. So off we went on the train.

A lot of Newcastle in one shot, beneath the Tyne Bridge (a miniature Sydney Harbour Bridge from the same time and off pretty much the same drawing board) you can see  the pedestrian Millenium Bridge, the Baltic Centre and The Sage concert hall, where we saw Al Stewart perform.

Apart from a terrific concert we also had a look around Newcastle and on our way back to London spent a day in York, principally to see the city’s amazing medieval ‘Minster,’ the largest medieval cathedral in England. For more on York and Newcastle check Lonely Planet’s England guidebook.

Bits of history we imbibed from Al Stewart’s performance (he’s terrific at talk-between-the-songs):

• That mysterious bulge in the border of Jordan is ‘Churchill’s hiccup,’ when the borders of the country were being drawn at Versailles after WW I – from the song A League of Notions.
• Who else would do a song about Charles the 12th of Sweden, his disastrous attack on Russia and defeat by Peter the Great (‘he wasn’t called “the Great” for nothing’) – from the never released The Coldest Winter in Memory.
• And who else could turn the ‘front porch presidential campaign’ of William McKinley into a love song – Like William McKinley from his new album Sparks of Ancient Light.

The Wide-Mouth Frog Backpacker did indeed have a dog that was truly 'enorme'









From Quepos a bus service shuttles north a few km to Manuel Antonio and its popular little national park. I wasn’t so enthusiastic about the park (it could do with some love and care) or the resort huddling up to the park entrance, but never mind I’d enjoyed my Costa Rican travels. I did see plenty of wildlife in the park including lots of lizards (one really big one), agouti (think of a rabbit-size tail-less rat) and white-faced capuchin (some of them amazingly nonchalant about my presence only cm away from them).


On my way back to Quepos I stopped for a look at El Avion Bar. It features a Fairchild C123 military cargo aircraft (think a smaller, older, twin-engined Hercules), the sister aircraft to one of Ronald Reagan/Oliver North’s Iran Contra aircraft which got shot down over Nicaragua in 1986. One of the crew – Eugene Hasenfus – parachuted out (the flight crew were killed) and his capture by the Nicaraguans blew the cover on the messy affair. I have a beer to note this reminder, once again, that one man’s freedom fighters (in this case Mr Reagan’s) are another country’s terrorists.

The Wide-Mouth Frog Backpacker did indeed have a dog that was truly 'enorme'









From Quepos a bus service shuttles north a few km to Manuel Antonio and its popular little national park. I wasn’t so enthusiastic about the park (it could do with some love and care) or the resort huddling up to the park entrance, but never mind I’d enjoyed my Costa Rican travels. I did see plenty of wildlife in the park including lots of lizards (one really big one), agouti (think of a rabbit-size tail-less rat) and white-faced capuchin (some of them amazingly nonchalant about my presence only cm away from them).

On my way back to Quepos I stopped for a look at El Avion Bar. It features a Fairchild C123 military cargo aircraft (think a smaller, older, twin-engined Hercules), the sister aircraft to one of Ronald Reagan/Oliver North’s Iran Contra aircraft which got shot down over Nicaragua in 1986. One of the crew – Eugene Hasenfus – parachuted out (the flight crew were killed) and his capture by the Nicaraguans blew the cover on the messy affair. I have a beer to note this reminder, once again, that one man’s freedom fighters (in this case Mr Reagan’s) are another country’s terrorists.

I spent a couple of days at the Nicoya Peninsula beach town of Montezuma. Well this is familiar I thought as soon as I arrived – Kuta (Bali) in 1975, Goa (India) in 1977, Hikkaduwa (Sri Lanka) in 1979 and Phuket (Thailand) in 1981 - all had the same feel as Montezuma (Costa Rica) in 2009. The only trouble is I wasn’t the oldest visitor in town when I was at those other places!

Never mind, I lazed around at Hotel Amor de Mar right on the water’s edge, ate at restaurants (and drank at bars) along Montezuma’s busy little main drag and went across to Isla Tortuga to do some scuba diving – Costa Rica makes 30 different countries where I’ve tried the scuba diving.




My Costa Rican travels also include some zip lining at Monteverde and volcano watching at Arenal and La Fortuna.

I spent a couple of days at the Nicoya Peninsula beach town of Montezuma. Well this is familiar I thought as soon as I arrived – Kuta (Bali) in 1975, Goa (India) in 1977, Hikkaduwa (Sri Lanka) in 1979 and Phuket (Thailand) in 1981 - all had the same feel as Montezuma (Costa Rica) in 2009. The only trouble is I wasn’t the oldest visitor in town when I was at those other places!

Never mind, I lazed around at Hotel Amor de Mar right on the water’s edge, ate at restaurants (and drank at bars) along Montezuma’s busy little main drag and went across to Isla Tortuga to do some scuba diving – Costa Rica makes 30 different countries where I’ve tried the scuba diving.




My Costa Rican travels also include some zip lining at Monteverde and volcano watching at Arenal and La Fortuna.

Departing the San Carlos bus station in San José

Click here for more on the Arenal National Park and its amazing volcano:

Departing the San Carlos bus station in San José

La Fortuna stands a few km north of the active Arenal Volcano and – hardly surprisingly – most of the activity is centred around the smoking peak.

A giant ceibo tree in the Arenal National Park.


I did some walking through the Arenal National Park to a lookout on the 1992 lava flow – so did this band of French-Canadian high school students.


I had lunch at the Arenal Observatory Lodge – now here is a place with a view to kill for.

And I climbed up to the crater lake at the adjacent Cerro Chato peak

Click here for more on my current Lotus – a Lotus Europa – and my Toyota Prius.

In Los Angeles today I had a quick test drive in a Tesla – the electric-powered rocket ship with a battery pack made up of 6,831 lithium ion cells – not unlike the batteries in your mobile phone or laptop computer. My drive was just a sprint down the freeway and back, but I was sold, I’d have one!


In fact in a fashion I’ve already had two halves of a Tesla. On the go you can see its relationship to the Lotus Elise I used to own in Australia, the LA Tesla demonstrator car was even the same colour as my Lotus:

And when I stopped at the traffic lights it was totally silent, nothing running at all. Just like my Toyota Prius.

Click here for more on my current Lotus – a Lotus Europa – and my Toyota Prius.

Racing through the jungle:












and disappearing into the distance:

Racing through the jungle:












and disappearing into the distance:

Tanzania – where I pedalled my bicycle last month on a section of the Cairo to Cape Town Tour d’Afrique – never descended into inter-tribal chaos or civil war and nobody accuses Julius Nyere of impoverishing Tanzania to top up his own foreign bank account. Instead he simply impoverished Tanzania through his own misguided economic plans. He also peacefully handed over power in 1985, although unfortunately it took 21 years of single party rule (his single party) before he decided it wasn’t necessarily such a good idea.

The State of Africa makes a fascinating introduction to what has gone on in many of the countries of Africa and it’s a great read, guaranteed to make you reel back in open-mouthed shock at the sheer greed, cruelty and outright stupidity of so many of the continent’s leaders. But there is another story. I’ve now made a dozen trips to 21 different African countries over 20 years. I’ve flown right up the west coast from Cape Town to Casablanca, I’ve driven down the west coast on the Plymouth-Banjul Challenge, I’ve climbed Kilimanjaro, scuba dived off Zanzibar, gone whitewater rafting on the Zambezi, visited some amazing Roman ruins in Libya, Tunisia and Morocco  and now I’ve ridden a bicycle 1100 km across Tanzania and Malawi (click for the first part or the second part). I’ve never had anything but a good time in Africa, I’ve met lots of good people, I just wish more of them could enjoy the benefits of having some good government.