Football
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Our Week In Pictures
Saw this in Ljubljana, it gelled with us.. “We travel not in order to escape life, but in order that life may not escape us”. Monday morning, woke in a village named Vopovjle near Ljubljana airport, flew to Belgrade where our connecting flight was delayed and left us stuck in the terminal for five hours before we flew on to Sarajevo. Hard to comprehend that the bustling city of Sarajevo was ravaged by warfare, genocide and war crime atrocities a little over 30 years ago. The scars are visible but so is the conciliation in a city where mosques sit beside Christian churches and a line in the street depicts…
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A Photographic Catch-Up
When I was in my first job after leaving school – I left at 16 – I coupled working all day with studying at night on what in those days was called a correspondence course. Once the June exams were completed, I suddenly had a bucketful of free time, but was ambushed by a sense of guilt.. a kind of guilty feeling that I should – ought – to be doing something. It was like a guilty conscience forever tapping my shoulder. I’ve got that same feeling right now, after taking a pause from the travel blog, an unshakeable nagging feeling that there’s something I should be getting on with. So, without…
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Exploring The Algarve In High Season: Olhão, Tavira And Faro
The good news starts as soon as we arrive in Olhão. There, in the uppermost in-tray of the offices of our corporate airbnb host, is the Jiffy envelope I’ve been hoping to see, the one containing my replacement debit and credit cards and driving licence, all present and correct and ready for action. End of saga, at last. Incident forgotten. Having signed off in Carvoeiro with a proper Brits-on-holiday night, dancing to a very decent live band in the main square, we head along the Algarve coast to Olhão, a place recommended to us by, amongst others, Michaela’s Mum. Carvoeiro, holiday hotspot as it is, has been fun and we’ve…
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Cusco & The Rainbow Mountain: Life At Over 11,000 Feet
So now we enter the first part of this journey – there’s plenty more coming – where altitude sickness is a looming enemy, so as a result we have developed a strategy long before the day we arrive in Cusco. Flying in from Puerto Maldonado adds to the risk, coming straight from low lying wetlands to a city at 3,400 metres in less than an hour gives no opportunity for graduation, just a steep learning curve in which a large dose of being sensible is called for. We’re not always good at being sensible. Consequently we hatch a plan. There’s a certain regime to follow for the first 48 hours…
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Adventures In Turkish Football: Fethiyespor 0 Sariyer 1
The walk from Fethiye old town to the football ground is not your typical match day approach. This is not a walk through lines of terraced houses on streets leading away from a Victorian train station, nor is it an amble through a soulless industrial or retail park to a latter day all-seater affair constructed from concrete and steel which is all fancy scoreboards and cantilever. Instead, I keep the sea and the tour boats on my left and the laughter filled bars on my right until I reach the quaint sea canal, at which point I turn inland and follow the gently lapping waterway in the direction of the…
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Next Stop Nairobi
After what has been for us a lengthy spell at home in England – it’s just over seven weeks since we flew back from California – we’re on the cusp of what is potentially our most adventurous trip so far. Our first stop will be Nairobi, though only for a single day before we’re off on an 8-day safari tour of other parts of Kenya. Somewhat unusually for us, this initial tour is not self guided but one in which we will be taken between destinations and out into the national parks by pre-booked guides and agents – the logistics and complications of individually booked destinations made the pre-planned option…
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Rio Carnival: Pageants, Parties….And Pickpockets
I am so angry with myself for letting it happen. We came to Rio knowing everything about its high rate of petty crime, knowing it’s a centre of the theft universe, came here knowing we had to take extra precautions, be doubly careful, and yet we only reach Day 4 and it’s happened to us. As you will see. But first, the Maracana….. There’s still around 90 minutes till kick-off as we enter the stadium, plenty of time to watch both sets of supporters fill their respective ends and make a start on creating an electric atmosphere. They do just that, and they do it in style – the whole…
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Captain Fiendish & The Whirlwind Of Rio: The First 48
In my mind’s eye there is a British Airways employee, let’s call him Captain Fiendish, whose job it is to sneak behind a curtain just after all the passengers are settled in, and twist the AC control until it reaches the setting with an igloo logo as a temperature guide. As a result of his actions, the cabin quickly descends to unbelievably freezing and has every last passenger reaching for a combination of sweatshirt, hoodie and BA standard issue blanket, or, in some cases, all three. We understand the need for the comfort of AC but why oh why is it necessary to make it this bloody cold? Captain Fiendish…
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Adventures in Vietnamese Football
We depart briefly from our usual style of blog post to complete a report from our recent flirtation with football in Hue. Don’t run away, it may just amuse even those who aren’t football (soccer) fans. From the exterior the Stadium Tu Do looks like it could do with a bit of a facelift. Built in 1930 by the French who unimaginatively named it Stade Olympique, it bears all the hallmarks of a stadium which has received minimal investment since its creation. The ticket office is a little plastic table out in the street where a tiny ageing lady sells match tickets, pineapple chunks on sticks and bottles of water.…
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Tam Coc to Hue: Inside The Imperial City
The climb to the dual peaks of Hang Mua is a hefty ascent of over 500 steps which are so irregular and uneven that coming back down is almost as tricky as going up, but the magnificent views from the top make every bit of the effort worthwhile. Sweeping panoramas across the lush green paddy fields, towering karst limestone hulks and twisting rivers lead the eye eventually to the urban sprawl of Ninh Binh city. These views hammer home just how much water there is here: villages are islands and roads are causeways. At Hang Mua, gardens have been laid at the foot of the hills and a few cafes…
