Friday 25 July – 330 pm – Maureen will be launching Carl Cleves’ book Tarab – Travels with My Guitar
Sunday 26 July – 9 am – Meet the Travellers
Sunday 27 July – 930 am – The Spirit of Adventure

• 27 July – The National Maritime Museum at Darling Harbour in Sydney is running a Souvenirs of Travel special exhibit from 5 July through 2 May 2009. As part of that exhibit there will be a one day seminar titled Trash or Treasure – Souvenirs of Travel where I’ll be talking about my own souvenir hunting experiences from 245 to 345 pm.

• 11 September – It’s been a long time coming but I hope to be launching a British edition of The Lonely Planet Story – to follow Australian/New Zealand, Asian English, American, Italian, Chinese and Taiwanese Chinese editions.

• 14-17 October – Ubud Writers Festival in Ubud, Bali.

Less than two weeks later, on Sunday 22 June to be precise, I had a magical view of Hong Kong as I flew on Qantas flight QF30 from London.

We came in over Macau, crossed the mouth of the Pearl River, flew by the south side of Lantau Island (the airport is on the north side) and then skirted the southern side of Hong Kong Island. This view is from above Hong Kong Island, looking across the island and Hong Kong Harbour to Kowloon and the New Territories beyond.

and click here for more views.

Less than two weeks later, on Sunday 22 June to be precise, I had a magical view of Hong Kong as I flew on Qantas flight QF30 from London.

We came in over Macau, crossed the mouth of the Pearl River, flew by the south side of Lantau Island (the airport is on the north side) and then skirted the southern side of Hong Kong Island. This view is from above Hong Kong Island, looking across the island and Hong Kong Harbour to Kowloon and the New Territories beyond.

We flew directly overhead classy Repulse Bay on the south side of Hong Kong Island.

Looking straight down Hong Kong Harbour towards Lantau Island where we’ll be landing in a few minutes at the new airport. Clearly in view below is the famous old Kai Tak  (famous for its white knuckle approaches over the Kowloon buildings). It’s been 10 years since the airport closed and the site has still not been redeveloped.

They’re both small, simple little houses although John’s home was definitely a cut above Paul’s. The first time he went there Paul described it as ‘posh!’ If you’re a Beatles fan and you’re in Liverpool, they’re well worth a visit. The National Trust operates a minibus four times a day from Wednesday to Sunday, which picks you up in central Liverpool, takes you to the two houses and drops you back in Liverpool 2-1/2 hours later. There’s a maximum of 14 people on each tour (they are small houses!) so you have to book the £15 tour ahead, you can do it from the National Trust website.

Mendips, John Lennon's childhood home

Quite apart from the Beatles connection the houses make a fascinating glimpse into everyday English life nearly 50 years ago. They’ve been authentically restored and refurnished as close as possible to the period. You can check how well that’s been done at the McCartney house because Paul’s brother Michael was a keen photographer and took numerous photos around the house, pictures which capture Lennon-McCartney before they became international stars. 

20 Forthlin Rd, where Paul McCartney lived

After a few days in Manciano (thank you for the use of your house Angelo!) and a daytrip walk to Montemarano (check the ‘Madonna of the cat door’ painting in the Church of St George/Chiesa San Giorgio, the painting has a circle cut through it close to ground level, at one point the painting was on a door and it was there for the church cat to make an easy exit?) we started our walk from Pitigliano and continued via Sovana, Sorano and Bolsena to Orvieto.

Click here for more on our Tuscan walking trip.

After a few days in Manciano (thank you for the use of your house Angelo!) and a daytrip walk to Montemarano (check the ‘Madonna of the cat door’ painting in the Church of St George/Chiesa San Giorgio, the painting has a circle cut through it close to ground level, at one point the painting was on a door and it was there for the church cat to make an easy exit?) we started our walk from Pitigliano and continued via Sovana, Sorano and Bolsena to Orvieto.

Etruscan tombs just outside the village of Sovana

Etruscan Walking

The Etruscans – contempor- aneous with the Greeks and predating the Romans – gave their name to Tuscany and there’s lots of evidence of their time in this region. Often the walk follows via cave, cuttings made through rock outcrops so that the pathway doesn’t have to climb up and over them. At times they can be impressively deep and narrow, like artificial canyons and gorges. Numerous Etruscan tomb sites dot the countryside.



walking through a deep via cave

Pitigliano

‘Christianity defeating evil,’ bas relief on the Church of San Rocco

The starting point for our walk is a hilltop town which simply springs up out of nowhere, pretty much like all the hilltop towns in this region. The walk started with a steep stairway descent from one of the gates out of the city wall and then straight in to a via cave.

Watch out for the farm guard dogs our walking notes warned us, nobody mentioned the guard geese




Sovana 
The next nights were spent in Sovana, a pretty-as-a-picture little village with the magnificently sombre and solid old Cathedral of Sts Peter & Paul, predominantly dating from the 11th to 12th century. The countryside around Sovana is dotted with Etruscan tombs including the Tomba Ildebrando, which takes its name from Ildebrando, who later became Pope Gregory although, of course, it’s far older than him and has nothing at all to do with him! Or the very nice bottle of Ildebrando white wine we had with dinner that night.

Bas relief beside the doorway to the Cathedral of Sts Peter & Paul

Sorano

The view of the town from our hotel window

Arriving in Sorano you felt like a medieval traveller, climbing up a steep stairway from the river and entering the town through an ancient looking gateway. The town tiptoes around its hilltop location and was virtually abandoned for a spell in the first half of the 20th century.

Bolsena 
On the shores of Lake Bolsena the town of Bolsena is a popular resort for Romans and neatly divides into two parts, the new town down by the lakeside and old town, like all the others we passed through, perched on a hilltop.










Departing Bolsena on the last day’s walk to Orvieto


Orvieto

Saving the best for last we climbed up from the lake and crossed open country, with another diversion to an Etruscan tomb site, before arriving in beautiful Orvieto. The stunning Duomo with its huge fresco by Signorelli alone is worth the visit. And Rome is only an hour away by train.

James Starley’s inventions were of a much more human scale and we encounter a number of them almost every day. Assorted elements of the modern sewing machine are Starley inventions. So is the differential, the package of gears without which a car would have difficulty getting its driven wheels around corners. Hop on a bicycle and you can be thankful for Starley’s invention of the modern bicycle wheel with its alternating spokes which made it lighter and stronger. His Ariel bicycle of 1871 is considered to be the first true modern bicycle and the Starley family’s manufacturing made Coventry a major cycle centre. His nephew’s Rover bicycle company lives on today as a car manufacturer, Land-Rover, and the word ‘rover’ still means ‘bicycle’ in some languages, such as Polish.

Sadly Coventry’s monument to this engineering pioneer, just inside the ring road on Greyfriars Green, is a battered affair, long overdue for the application of some civic pride. Assorted Starley bicycles can be seen in Coventry’s excellent Transport Museum, the city’s worth seeing for this museum and for the beautiful cathedral.

James Starley’s inventions were of a much more human scale and we encounter a number of them almost every day. Assorted elements of the modern sewing machine are Starley inventions. So is the differential, the package of gears without which a car would have difficulty getting its driven wheels around corners. Hop on a bicycle and you can be thankful for Starley’s invention of the modern bicycle wheel with its alternating spokes which made it lighter and stronger. His Ariel bicycle of 1871 is considered to be the first true modern bicycle and the Starley family’s manufacturing made Coventry a major cycle centre. His nephew’s Rover bicycle company lives on today as a car manufacturer, Land-Rover, and the word ‘rover’ still means ‘bicycle’ in some languages, such as Polish.

Sadly Coventry’s monument to this engineering pioneer, just inside the ring road on Greyfriars Green, is a battered affair, long overdue for the application of some civic pride. Assorted Starley bicycles can be seen in Coventry’s excellent Transport Museum, the city’s worth seeing for this museum and for the beautiful cathedral.

Travel around Haiti is, from Ian’s experiences, hard work, tiring and often exasperating. It was also undeniably colourful as he plunges into encounters with voodoo, zombies and, of course, those Tontons Macoute. In 2003 he returned for a brief return trip, things hadn’t improved much.

The Comedians - Graham Greene
Haiti becomes another waypoint in Greeneland, that series of world weary destinations the great British author weaved his magic around. Mr Brown, one of the ‘comedians’ of the tale, has plenty to be weary about. His mother, who abandoned him at the age of 12, summons him to her deathbed to gift him with the Hotel Trianon, closely modelled on the real life Hotel Oloffson in Port-au-Prince. It’s fun for awhile, but then Papa Doc and his Tonton Macoutes come to power and Haiti is not a good place to own a hotel.

Click here for more on the Orient Express

We are meeting friends in Tuscany to spend a week walking, so how to get there from London? EasyJet would be cheap but dull, the Orient Express sounded much more interesting.

The original Orient Express made its first run from Paris to Constantinople (the city on the Bosphorus had not yet been renamed Istanbul) in late 1883. As more lines and tunnels opened and trains became faster and more luxurious the Orient Express became a byword for luxurious train travel. Services started from London with a connecting boat across the channel and connections were made to Zurich, Vienna, Venice, Budapest, Athens and many other European cities.

The Depression interrupted services, World War II halted it completely and after the war European travel increasingly took to the skies. The glamour era of luxury train travel across Europe was over. In the 1970s the surviving carriages of the Orient Express were often just add ons to regular train services and in 1977 the remaining carriages, glamorous old wood-panelled and brass-plated anachronisms from the 1920s, were withdrawn and the Orient Express was finished.

But only briefly. Later that same year the chairman of the British company Sea Containers bought some of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits carriages at an auction in Monte Carlo, tracked down more of the historic rolling stock around Europe and in 1982 the Orient Express was back in action.

Maureen boarding the Orient-Express


We boarded the British section in London and after a rather dull bus ride on the EuroShuttle train under the channel found ourselves on the most interesting of the historic old Wagons-Lits carriages. Built in La Rochelle in France in 1929 carriage 3544 had been laid up for a spell in the depression and was used for a period after the war as the Dutch Royal Train, but for three years during the war it had served as a brothel in Limoges. Now there’s train travel with a history.  

Lalique glass in the Cote d’Azur dining car of the Orient-Express

On Saturday afternoon I managed to trip over a chair, fall full length across the room, crash my head against the corner of the wall and arrive on the floor bleeding profusely. Maureen did the British thing, called 999 and asked for an ambulance. Ten minutes later medical assistance arrived. On a bicycle.

It makes perfectly good sense, I wasn’t about to die, I could find my own way to a hospital to get stitched up and he probably arrived faster than a real ambulance would have found its way through Saturday afternoon London traffic.

We leave for Venice tomorrow on the Orient Express.

On Saturday afternoon I managed to trip over a chair, fall full length across the room, crash my head against the corner of the wall and arrive on the floor bleeding profusely. Maureen did the British thing, called 999 and asked for an ambulance. Ten minutes later medical assistance arrived. On a bicycle.

It makes perfectly good sense, I wasn’t about to die, I could find my own way to a hospital to get stitched up and he probably arrived faster than a real ambulance would have found its way through Saturday afternoon London traffic.

We leave for Venice tomorrow on the Orient Express.