globalwanderings

I can’t believe we’ve been living up north (Ponte de Lima) for over a year already. As we are still in rented accommodation and waiting for our new house to be built, our traditional September getaway is restricted to just a couple of nights away. Of course, the whole point of living up north is the ease of travel to Galicia so it is no surprise that we chose to spend a couple of days in the Rias Altas, near…

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So I got the overnight train from Hubli to Goa. My ticket was to the end of the line – Vasco da Gama station arriving at 6am. However, I utilised a top tech tip that had been a real boon on this trip. Maybe not so new to more tech savvy readers, but this India trip was the first one I had made really good use of google maps on my phone. I could have been completely lost but when…

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Unlike most people’s conceptions of India, there are plenty of areas with a thinly spread population. Northern Karnataka is one such place. Subsequently public transport is rather sporadic, something I had already experienced. So for my next leg I decided to splurge 3500Rs (£35) on renting a car (with driver) for the 150km/4hr trip to Hampi. The first part of the trip was along narrow potholed roads across agricultural land – mainly sugarcane but also jowari which I found out…

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My previous post starts with the problem of getting a bus from Bidar to Bijapur and the fickleness of non existent timetables. this post will be no different. the previous day I’d been told there was a bus from Bijapur to Badami at 6.45am. Arriving at the station at the appointed time I was then told there was no direct bus but I had to get the 6.45 bus to Kerur and change there. That would arrive at platform 4….

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Sun 19th Feb 2023. I was up and about early and off to the bus station. I’ve often found in the remoter parts of India, bus timetables are a fickle thing. The guidebook may say one thing, people at the bus station say another and then the actual buses confound them both. Today I was told there was a bus to Bijapur at 9.30 but someone else said it was better to get the bus to Gulbarga and change there….

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We’d been in Thailand a month (Sep ’05) – all of that time in the steaming metropolis which is Bangkok. Although the wet season hadn’t been as bad as expected, our soi was still calf deep in water when we paddled off to our first holiday. We’d picked Ko Samet because it was fairly quiet, accessible and it promised to be one of the driest spots in Thailand in October. We were very pleasantly surprised – it wasn’t as developed…

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This is the first leg of another of those trips down memory lane. Between February and April of 1996 I hopped from Hawaii to Las Vegas and then southwards through Mexico and Central America to Colombia. I’ve scanned the photos from my dusty albums and tried to match the photos with entries from my old diaries. Being from pre-digital days one thing I’ve noted is how few photos there are. Developing reels of film was expensive in those days. I…

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Touring Nakhon Si Thammarat province April 07. It is said that in the 1970’s a few hippies stumbled across Ko Samui and found paradise, with powder-white sands, clear turquoise water and gently swaying palms. Over the next 30 years this paradise was swamped with ever encroaching development. Now, there seems to be more concrete than sand. However, perhaps not surprisingly, just across the water from Samui there are beaches near the fishing village of Khanom, which are still in pristine…

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