the idiot boy who flew

Some of Graham's travel stories with an emphasis on odd destinations, or a different view of the familiar. Must-see places and some to avoid. and encounters with unusual characters, usually in colourful places in Elsewhere. All stories copyright Graham Reid.
> travelstories/

Postcards From Elsewhere Available from the author through this website. Cost from elsewhere.co.nz is $NZ24.95 (plus $2.50 postage within New Zealand) WINNER: WHITCOULLS TRAVEL BOOK OF THE YEAR 2006 critical comments . . . "His engaging style makes these vicarious journeys seem especially real ... his marvellous ability...
> travel-books-by-graham-reid/

Short stories, satires, thinking-out-loud stuff and nonsense for your enjoyment, amusement . . . or otherwise. Just utterly Elsewhere.
> somethingelsewhere/

Essays and interviews in the world of the arts, architecture, design, journalism, politics and culture. And more, which appeal to the curious spirit of Elsewhere  . . .
> culturalelsewhere/

Norbert shuts off the small outboard and pulls the propeller out of the brackish water. He loosens the weeds which have fouled it and tosses them away. We sit in the silent stillness of Lake Martin beneath cypress trees and Tupelo gums, some of which are 300 years old. They have their roots in soil more than a metre below the still surface....
> travelstories/268/breaux-bridge-louisiana-in-cajun-country/

This is how every working week should start: it’s 10am on a Monday and already the aroma of fine Irish whiskey — people around here would say “the finest” — is filling our lungs. Outside the North Atlantic crashes on ragged rocks and the wind whips over green fields, but here inside Bushmills Distillery on the...
> travelstories/2616/bushmills-northern-ireland-the-sweet-smell-of-morning/

The plaque at the reception of the Clachaig Inn at Glencoe in the Scottish Highlands reads: “No hawkers or Campbells”. It is amusing -- I’m sure Naomi would be welcome should she show up in this beautiful but largely unpopulated region -- but it also reminds you of a fault-line of deep feeling that runs through...
> travelstories/3042/glencoe-scotland-the-past-on-the-wild-wind/

One of the guidebooks we took on a recent drive across America wasn't particularly helpful when it came to scenery. Then again, the Rock'n'Roll Traveler USA was always going to be more interested in directing you the field in which Buddy Holly's plane crashed, and the Taliesyn Ballroom in Tennessee where the Sex Pistols played the second...
> travelstories/258/natchez-trace-mississippi-the-highway-like-heaven/

The beach bungalow where the King once stayed, just a short stroll from the white sand shore, is a sad and sorry sight today. The roof has caved in, the windows are blown out and the walls look perilously close to collapsing. It looks even worse in the wider context of this beautiful Pacific playground. Over there at the lagoon where...
> travelstories/3051/kauai-hawaiian-islands-the-land-where-giants-walked/

Billy Scott is probably the most famous taxi driver in Belfast. He didn’t tell me this -- he was too busy telling me other things -- and I only found out later he’d appeared on television travel shows, podcasts and the like. That was understandable because Billy is witty, chatty, knowledgeable and over-flowing with Irish charm...
> travelstories/2966/belfast-northern-ireland-history-by-taxi/

Two years ago I was in and around Alice Springs, a town that trades on the idea it is close to Uluru. It isn't. The town has a fascinating, if brief, white-fellah history, the landscape in that part of the desert is spectacular, and as an outsider it was hard to get a grip on Aboriginal life in the area. The rumours were bad enough, the...
> film/2959/samson-and-delilah-a-film-by-warwick-thornton-madman-dvd/

Eventually curiosity gets the better of me and, on a typically empty stretch of tarseal some 100kms west of Alice Springs, I stop the car and climb a rocky outcrop. For the past half hour I have had the magnificent MacDonnell Range on my right but 10 minutes ago a strange, irregular wall of bricks ran parallel with the road on my left....
> travelstories/2940/outback-australia-the-speed-of-the-sound-of-loneliness/

To be honest, I can’t tell you whether you can get a decent cup of coffee in Vancouver, coffee doesn’t interest me much. What I can tell you however is that you won’t be short of a cup. On fashionable Robson St right outside my hotel was a Starbucks, and two blocks down on the corner of Thurlow a couple more faced...
> travelstories/1784/vancouver-canada-a-users-guide/

  “This is my kind of Malaysia,” says Bob from laidback California as we enjoy Tiger Beer at the James Brooke Bar and Bistro near the relaxing riverfront in Kuching. “It’s got just the right mix of a quiet old town and all the modern amenities.”We clink icy glasses in agreement. Like me, Bob had...
> travelstories/309/kuching-in-borneo-malaysia-big-city-small-town/

Pale fingers of mist weave through the tree tops of the jungle. At just past dawn it is almost silent, only the faint call of birds and the distant putter of a long-tail boat on the Mekong River beyond the hill. I step onto the terrace of my hotel room into the balmy air. Already you can feel that the rains will come later today. I sniff in...
> travelstories/2917/golden-triangle-thailand-where-the-girls-are/

Curious what you find in the bottom of your bags -- and maybe keep -- after a trip away. I usually turn up napkins with scribbled addresses and notes, postcards and receipts, fliers from concerts or galleries, and the odd article torn from a local newspaper because it seemed so brilliantly incisive at the time. Mostly I throw such things...
> travelstories/2930/london-england-with-a-pinch-of-snuff/

“So, here we are on Norfolk Island,” said Richard as we stood by the baggage carousel and beneath the sign which read “Welkam tu Norf’k alien”. “Welcome to Norfolk Island,” I said pointing to the weird wording in the local dialect. He took it in, then added with the raise of an eyebrow: “And...
> travelstories/2907/norfolk-island-an-island-of-great-bounty/

In my travel book Postcards from Elsewhere I write about being in cajun country in Louisiana where the bayou seems mysterious and the food is exceptional. That chapter about Breaux Bridge and the people we met is reproduced here for your amusement. As I say, one of the great things about that part of the world is the food, so here is a...
> recipes/2887/louisiana-shrimp-etoufee/

My Canadian friend Bob would often tell me that there was a highway right outside his house, and then he’d laugh loudly. I didn’t think that was a laughing matter -- until I went to his beautiful ocean-side apartment in Victoria on Vancouver Island. As we sat on his patio sipping cocktails in the late afternoon he swept his hand...
> travelstories/2878/vancouver-island-canada-cocktails-by-the-highway/

>Uluru at the close of another cloudless day in the desert. In the designated “sunset viewing spot” a few kilometres from the big red rock, campervans and cars are arriving. In this tiny part of the seemingly endless landscape, largely silent except for the whistle of wind through scrubby Spinifex and myrtle trees, the air is alive...
> travelstories/1765/uluru-ayers-rock-outback-australia-into-the-great-wide-open/

For many decades, out of some kind of misplaced shame, many simply didn’t want to talk about it. In Belfast’s shipyards the name of the vessel once so proudly built there -- but which sank in 1912 to become the world’s most famous shipping disaster -- simply went unspoken. Even today, a century after the Titanic was being...
> travelstories/2672/belfast-northern-ireland-ghosts-of-the-old-missing-shippery/

One of the most cherished books in our house when I was a boy was a collection by Robert Burns, or “Rabbie Burrrns” as my mother said. The book was little bigger than a matchbox, its cloth cover an increasingly threadbare tartan, and the edges of the pages were painted gold. It was as much a treasure to look at as for the...
> travelstories/2674/dumfries-scotland-oor-rab/

In Kuala Lumpur which offers a colourful multicultural tapestry of life, it was a small but significant image: just before the expensive frockshop in the up-market Starhill Gallery opened the middle-aged cleaning woman in a headscarf snapped off the vacuum cleaner and answered her cellphone. Behind her on a massive flat-screen a barely dressed...
> travelstories/310/kuala-lumpur-malaysia-old-and-new-the-same-but-different/

We were -- with a few exceptions in the café -- exhausted foot soldiers in the Art Wars. The small café where we found ourselves that late afternoon, on the corner of Rue de l’Universite about 15 minutes walk from the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, was our r’n’r refuge for an invigorating pastis, cold Belgian beer or...
> travelstories/2464/paris-france-clubbed-by-culture/

Bong comes out of her busy kitchen in the elegant Seri Nyonya Peranakan Restaurant to explain how she learned the Baba-Nyonya culinary style unique to the town of Melaka, here on Malaysia’s west coast. “No, they do not teach this in any schools,” she laughs. “You have to learn it from when you are very young. I...
> travelstories/308/melaka-peninsula-malaysia-the-cuisine-capital-of-malaysia/

When the serious rains come, that end-of-days Flood you may have heard about, the question won’t be, “Would I get on Noah’s Ark?”. It will be, “Quick, where is it?” In this, I can help. Noah’s Ark -- and you won’t believe this -- is in Hong Kong and if you’ve ever been to that exciting...
> travelstories/2615/hong-kong-when-the-rain-comes-they-run-and-hide-their-heads/

As a tourist carrying stress into Samoa you notice things by their absence. Ordinary, boring stuff like clocks and timetables, cellphones and power-dressers in black, graffiti and rubbish, and haste and urgency. And surprisingly, New Zealand accents. In 2000 fewer than 7000 New Zealand tourists flew the 3 1/2 hours to Apia, Samoa's...
> travelstories/303/samoa-a-stranger-in-paradise-2001/

As I looked across the manicured box-hedge to the garden where peacocks ambled, and then on up the orderly rows of grape vines marching towards the 18th century chateau, the thought occurred to me: if the prettiest part of Paradise -- with a cellar of more than 15,000 wines -- were transported to our world then it would look exactly like...
> travelstories/284/bordeaux-france-paradise-and-lunch/

The sky is a perfect and pale comic-book blue, the breeze as warm as a whisper. Palm trees line the white sandy beach, the very image of a Pacific cliché. In the downtown streets before the shops and offices open people make their sleepy, slow way to work. It is the start to yet another balmy December day in Honolulu. And on just such a...
> travelstories/2361/pearl-harbor-hawaii-sunday-morning-coming-down/

As the large drops of intermittent rain turned to persistent drizzle, people on the streets hurried to find shelter, but in this city of the dead there was very little. People disappeared into whatever tiny alcoves they could find, some ran to the gates, and the huge cemetery in the Recoleta district of Buenos Aires took on an eerie grey...
> travelstories/2402/buenos-aires-argentina-little-eva/

Among my hundreds of photographs in boxes or in my laptop are rather too many of variations on the same theme: a road ahead as seen through the windscreen. In some it is an unforgivingly straight line of bitumen to the hazy horizon with the Arizona desert on each side, in others it undulates through rural Georgia, in yet more it is winding...
> travelstories/2341/anywhere-elsewhere-the-romance-of-the-road/

There are things you do on holiday you’d never contemplate at home: like careering around a race track with your backside just centimetres above the tarmac. I’m throwing my go-kart into S-bends, accelerating out of corners, feeling the simultaneous rush of fear and laughter as I hit the hairpin too fast . . . I don’t...
> travelstories/2342/sunshine-coast-australia-land-sea-and-me/

As with most people who fancy themselves as a glamorously casual traveller -- able to pick up and run when a flight becomes available -- I would, for many years, pride myself on how economically I could pack a bag. Regular and brief trips to Los Angeles, Sydney or Melbourne made me skilled in the art of leaving things out. A weekend...
> travelstories/2243/travelling-light-its-in-the-bag/

Curiously enough, the place I know best in Kota Kinabalu, the capital of Sabah on the northernmost tip of Malaysian Borneo, is the airport. In the course of a few days I was there five times; while going to and from Brunei, then the city of Sandakan where I went to see orang utan and took in a city tour, and finally when I flew back to KL,...
> travelstories/2219/kota-kinabalu-sabah-headlong-into-the-future/

The dramatically beautiful island of Kaua’i -- a 20 minute flight from Honolulu and not to be missed -- is where Nature shows off in the towering cliffs and deep valleys of the largely impassable Na Pali coast. However Kaua’i, known as the Garden Island, is also a place of intimate details and easy to self-drive around,...
> travelstories/1754/hawaii-where-nature-shows-off/

Warning: this article contains sexually graphic and amusing content.   There was no suitable excuse to be standing outside Barcelona’s Museu de l’Erotica. It was a dreary mid-morning and the sky had a hangover. So did I. The previous evening, which stretched close to dawn, I had stumbled on the district known as El...
> travelstories/2036/barcelona-spain-sex-and-drunks-and-rocknroll/

It was at a mayoral dinner function in Seoul recently and I had got dressed up. For the previous few days my young interpreter had seen me in jeans and an open-neck shirt -- so I guess it was her surprise at my well-groomed appearance in dinner jacket, pale pink shirt and red tie that made her startled. “You are very handsome, Mr...
> travelstories/2023/san-francisco-and-seattle-are-you-talkin-to-me/

Half an hour out of Bordeaux I stop the car so we can gasp at the beauty of a crumbling chateau on a picture perfect hillside. Ten minutes later I do the same above a valley deliberately posing for a photograph. A few kilometres further it’s for an old stone house by the roadside. The day is clear and radiant blue, the breeze warm,...
> travelstories/1930/the-dordogne-france-where-centuries-roll-back/

In New York's Village Voice, for 20 years until 1995, there was a weekly comic strip called Stan Mack's Real Life Funnies in which artist Mack guaranteed all the dialogue was a genuine, overheard conversation. And really, you probably couldn't make them up. Here are some genuine, overheard comments - not all by Americans I have to note -...
> travelstories/1958/europe-america-and-elsewhere-idiocy-spoken-here/

People like me -- men mostly, I suspect -- don’t like shopping. We certainly buy things, but what some people call shopping seems to entail hours of looking with little to show for it. That’s browsing and that isn’t me. I go to shops and buy things. Sometimes very stupid things. Which explains why I have a...
> travelstories/1928/melbourne-australia-altshopping-tips-for-those-who-dont-shop-but-buy/

In small-town Blackball the locals have a saying: “Blackball, the centre of the universe . . . the part where nothing moves”. It helps to have a sense of humour when you live in the centre of a silent universe. These days Blackball, less than half an hour inland from Greymouth, can only boast five major buildings other than...
> travelstories/1929/blackball-new-zealand-they-wont-make-them-like-this-anymore/

Taipei - population about 2.5 million - must be the easiest city in the world to leave. A million motor scooters, yellow dust from China, sometimes unbearable heat ... for the tourist it's always time to head home or to the quieter, cleaner but usually more dull cities on the east coast. But some people have business in Taipei, then time to...
> travelstories/1924/taipei-in-taiwan-a-visitors-guide/

The day after I returned home from Thailand I went to a well-known menswear store on Queen St to buy a tie, not something I can recall having done before. But if a man has had a handsome black silk suit made by one of the thousands of high-quality tailors in Bangkok for a mere $260, a gentleman needs a tie. When the friendly assistant in the...
> travelstories/1907/bangkok-thailand-to-shop-or-not-that-is-the-question/

Roger pulls his four-wheel drive around another bend through the bush and there before us, in the middle of the rough road, is a fawn. Roger brakes gently and we come to a dusty halt. The fawn starts abruptly, looks directly at us for a full half minute, then bounds off into the dense bush. It won’t be the last deer we will see today....
> travelstories/1895/waipari-taupo-into-the-empty-valleys-full-of-life/

God knows what I was thinking when I went to Ullungdo. It certainly wasn't for the well-advertised local attractions which are, in no particular order, dried squid, dried seaweed and -- its special delicacy -- pumpkin candy. Ullungdo is a spectacular lump of rock a few hours off the east coast of the bickering Koreas. It rarely makes...
> travelstories/267/ullungdo-south-korea-the-lure-of-the-lair/

The Sir Douglas Quintet out of Texas didn't have too many hits in the 60s but they cracked one successful and catchy single as the decade drew to a close. The band sprung the biggest hit of their career with a paean to the small town of Mendocino 250 kilometres north of San Francisco. San Antonio-born band leader Doug Sahm had relocated to San...
> travelstories/299/mendocino-california-life-in-the-mellow-lane/

To the best of my knowledge the words “upgrade” and “Mr Reid” have never appeared in the same sentence. Certainly I have stayed in some luxurious hotels -- Sorrento’s Grand Hotel Cocumella (right) gets passing mention here to make you envious -- but I knew about them in advance. Yes, a couple of times I have...
> travelstories/1666/up-where-i-belong-luxury-accommodation-in-cairns-2007/

Because I always travel cheap I usually forget that not everyone does. Sure I've stayed in some of the world's most luxurious and most private hotels -- but that's what happens unfortunately when you win travel writing awards sponsored by the Small Luxury Hotels of the World group and they insist on putting you up in their exotic and...
> travelstories/1799/seoul-south-korea-soul-to-seoul-a-bloggers-journal-2008/

It is a curious thing, but as big Australian cities boast about themselves and claim their points of difference, they all start to sound similar. Each will tell you of its wonderful seafood restaurants and café culture, hip bars and high-end shopping . . . The interesting thing about Cairns -- the gateway to Tropical North Queensland -- is...
> travelstories/307/tropical-north-queensland-2007-big-and-wide-but-compact/

About 10 or so years ago I spent a few days in Turangi on the southern shore of Lake Taupo in New Zealand's North Island. I was on an assignment for the Herald. I wish I could say the story involved fishing in a town that boldly asserts it is the Trout Fishing Capital of the World but, in deference to people are dedicated to that sport, I admit...
> travelstories/301/tokaanu-new-zealand-2007-small-towns-on-a-slow-up-spin/

The view at sunset from these steps is spectacular. Old men have gathered to smoke cigarettes and silently watch the orange orb sink below a horizon punctuated by distant spires and domes. The view the other way is more problematic. And pretty ugly. This is EUR -- Exposizione Universale di Roma -- a district on the southern outskirts of Rome...
> travelstories/297/eur-italy-the-facades-of-fascism/

Gazing across the rolling Yarra Valley less than an hour from inner-city Melbourne, the eye can take in columns of grape vines m in orderly lines over low ridges, expensively manicured golf courses, and huge steroid-expanded homes running to many millions of dollars. In the distance lie the blue shimmering hills of the Great Divide.This is...
> travelstories/298/yarra-valley-victoria-australia-art-in-the-hills/

The young man behind the counter at the Art Gallery of South Australia gets talking as I'm buying a catalogue. He comes from somewhere else too but has been in Adelaide, a city with a population approximately that of Auckland, for over a decade. "I haven't seen a traffic jam for 11 years," he says -- and as an Aucklander I add that...
> travelstories/296/adelaide-south-australia-the-great-indoors/

To be honest, I’d only been to Dunedin twice previously -- and I left early both times. A few years ago I spent a night there on my way to somewhere else, and when I was 17 I arrived as snow turned to soggy sludge in a cutting wind. I fled to the airport after an utterly miserable couple of hours. I should have liked Dunedin better on...
> travelstories/291/dunedin-new-zealand-the-old-hometown-looks/

Good historic hotels are getting harder to find. Increasingly the elderly pubs of the nation are being gentrified and scrubbed clean. Their walls are being painted up nice, a colour consultant is hired, and the big boys move in and take what was once the character of the place and reshape it into something more . . . marketable? The history...
> travelstories/294/ross-south-island-of-new-zealand-home-is-where-the-hearth-is/

This is the place where words fail, where comparisons seem inadequate or, at best, only marginally helpful. This is where sheer scale overwhelms you, has you gasping. If this were a natural phenomenon you could demur to a higher authority, make reference to the hand of God raising it up from the earth, say something about being humbled in...
> travelstories/295/seattle-and-the-boeing-factory-2005-we-have-lift-off/

Paul shoves the cap of his beer bottle into his jacket pocket and settles deeper into the wooden chair. "You know what I say to people who come here and find we don't have television in the rooms or cellphone coverage? I say, 'So what part of the name West Coast Wilderness Lodge' didn't you understand?" We laugh and clink bottles...
> travelstories/293/british-columbias-sunshine-coast-under-the-endless-blue/

There's a much repeated reason why the men of Outback Australia are so tight-lipped. "Flies. Open your mouth and a fly gets in," says a weather-beaten guy in a faded Akubra at the bar outside Brisbane. He's merely repeating the myth but, by his subsequent silence, confirms the cliche of these men for whom large expanses of dust and...
> travelstories/289/the-australian-outback-the-man-who-knew-too-much/

The day before our Pacific cruise a brief news item caught my attention: a volcano in Vanuatu was spewing ash and thousands of villagers were being evacuated amidst fears of a major explosion. Maybe our restful cruise to Vanuatu would be more dramatic than anticipated? The following day as we cast off from Auckland few other passengers...
> travelstories/288/southwest-pacific-the-lonely-sea-and-the-sky/

On a hot and cloudless morning in the arid Outback, Doug taxies his single-engine Cessna onto the rocky runway at Arkaroola, a strip of man-made flatland some 500kms north of Adelaide. He makes a routine safety check, kicks the plane into fast-forward and we rise into a blazing blue sky, looking down on a parched landscape of scrub and dusty...
> travelstories/287/the-australian-outback-dry-land-dry-characters-dry-throat/

There's always some mild embarrassment when you don’t enjoy some place everyone expects you will. "Oh, you'll love Whistler," they all said. But I didn't. Admittedly I didn't see it at its snow-covered best and I’m sure this town just north of Vancouver is very pretty and vibrant in ski season. But I was there...
> travelstories/285/beyond-whistler-canada-and-the-road-goes-on-forever/

Giuseppe the concierge welcomes us with a slight bow and a broad smile, then waves us towards the front desk. I am flattered and surprised that he knows our names, but the reason becomes apparent as we sign in. We are the only two guests in the 50-room Grand Hotel Cocumella which occupies a balcony seat in the pretty town of Sorrento across...
> travelstories/286/sorrento-italy-where-life-takes-a-holiday/

The weather was perfect: fiercely cold, low mist and a chilling drizzle. This is ideal when you are at Denniston, because only in such miserable conditions can you get some small appreciation of what life must have been like here a century ago. At 600 metres above sea level and with the coast barely visible through the rolling mist, this...
> travelstories/283/denniston-west-coast-new-zealand-damned-and-damp/

For me there are two ideal kinds of lie-down, totally relaxing, long weekends away with a good book. The first and most obvious requires endless tropical warmth and hours of sunshine, and a beach or pool within waddling distance of the deck chair and buffet.The other is . . . Well, it’s sort of what we got when we went to the Golden Sands...
> travelstories/281/northland-new-zealand-after-the-flood/

So, five years on from 9/11 and what have we learned? Mostly that with heightened security arrangements we have yet to figure out a way of getting masses of people through airports without causing frustration, delays and rancour. As one who likes to fly -- yes, the seats are still uncomfortable but someone feeds you, brings you drinks, there...
> travelstories/280/canada-driving-and-blogging-from-bc-a-compendium-of-on-the-road-blogs/

Halfway up the long, ever-climbing road where the numbers on the letterboxes are in the many thousands we see small flecks of white on the side of the road. Damn, but it is getting cold up here in the clouds, so I pump up the car heater and turn on the wipers to clear away the tiny drifts of snow. Finally we arrive at number 8100 on the...
> travelstories/279/coastal-trek-lodge-vancouver-island-canada-where-the-wild-things-are/

We were in a crowded post office in Venice when I said to my mother-in-law Sue, "You know the first thing you pack when you travel? Patience." We needed it that morning. We were sending home unwanted clothes and a few souvenirs. We'd queued to buy the box, queued again to have it weighed and get the necessary paperwork (in...
> travelstories/278/travel-with-seniors-practical-advice-for-older-travellers/

In 2005 smalltown Cameron in southwest Louisiana washed away by Hurricane Rita and I suppose battered to hell again by Hurricane Katrina. It seemed tragic and . . . Well, let me tell you my memory of Cameron, a place we stayed in for one very long night while driving the Gulf Coast before heading up to Breaux Bridge then on to New Orleans....
> travelstories/275/cameron-louisiana-the-stink-of-shrimp-and-petroleum/

PART ONE: LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO AMERICA My fans are troubling me in America. You expect it in the Monte Vista Hotel in Flagstaff, however. This character-filled landmark within whistle-blow of the Santa Fe rail line and just off Route 66 has hosted any number of famous characters, living and dead. From Zane Grey and Humphrey...
> travelstories/273/america-driving-across-the-country-april-may-2004/

In the city of Los Angeles -- which is 19th-century Spanish for "the land where men walk on four wheels" -- it sometimes seems that only the socially disenfranchised take the bus. That's not entirely true, of course. Every day any number of good honest folk ride the MTA -- but so, too, do veterans of the alcohol wars, strange men...
> travelstories/272/la-by-bus-carless-in-car-town/

Drive through America's southern states tuned to country music radio stations and you'll hear it; Letters from Home by John Michael Montgomery. It's real catchy, was still in the top 20 of the country charts after six months, and you can guess what it's about. But in case you miss the sentimental message the video is even more literal:...
> travelstories/270/austin-texas-2004-deep-in-the-arse-of-texas/

The first thing you see when you come out of the Bernauerstrasse underground station in Berlin is the ruin: no houses down one side of the road, just overgrown and scrappy wasteland spotted with slabs of crumbling concrete and rusting reinforcing steel. It is as if the homes which once stood here had been hastily bulldozed and their skeletons...
> travelstories/259/berlin-another-brick-in-the-wall/

"The thing with Napoli," said Alfonso leaving a pause for effect, "is the tourist people they love it or they do not. But I understand why they do not. The city, she is . . . " To be honest I can't remember exactly what he said next about his birthplace, but it could have been something like this: that Naples is noisy and...
> travelstories/263/naples-italy-you-have-been-warned/

In a flat field outside the small town of McMinnville in northwest Oregon is a building so large that cars visibly slow on the highway so the occupants can take a look at it. Even in America -- the birthplace of bigness -- this enormous squat A-frame with its frontage of glass panels is an outstanding structure. And it houses one of the...
> travelstories/266/mcminnville-oregon-howard-hughes-spruce-goose-folly/

The Romans hadn't seen anything like him before, this strutting little fanatic who was so gifted with words he could move a crowd to mass action. A born propagandist, he was often invited into the homes of the wealthy for their amusement as they listened to him rant over the dinner table. But when he finally took complete power -- without a...
> travelstories/269/rome-italy-the-man-who-shook-the-world/

The handbrake might give you a bit of trouble, says John as he finishes a litany of idiosyncrasies about his beautifully restored 1957 Mark Two Zephyr. I have already heard it can pop out of second, to put in a measure of Valvoline with the petrol, to check the water daily, and that riding the brakes downhill might lead to them overheating and...
> travelstories/257/east-coast-north-island-of-new-zealand-hawkes-bay-the-long-way/