Escaping To The Chateau
A little introduction for the uninitiated (amongst whom we include ourselves!): “Escape To The Chateau” is a BBC TV reality show that has been running now for four seasons (with a fifth on the way) and seems to have developed a bit of a cult following! The series revolves around a somewhat eccentric...
“Paris In The Springtime....”
Ah…Paris in the Springtime. Sounds like one of those “romantic” songs or movies from the 1950’s! But the weather forecast was gloomy - unusually cold for the time of year with daily periods of rain, even thunderstorms. But weather forecasts, particularly for northwestern Europe are about as accurate...
Feesten Langs De Vecht
Back to Hilversum. It’s a couple of years since we last stopped by, but scarily, close to 40 years since we “emigrated” here and nearly 27 years since we packed up and had ourselves “written out” of the bevolkingsregister indicating that we’d left for good! Oh...but how the city has changed. It was...
Oh.....Fado!
Goodbye to the Cloud.... Finally....in Lisbon and it’s goodbye to the Silver Cloud, our home afloat for the past 16 days and to the 230 of our new best friends! It was an interesting itinerary over the 16 days, six very different countries (seven if you include Western Sahara) and around 4000 miles...
Paradise For A Day
Agadir, a major port city on Morocco's southwestern coast was almost totally destroyed by an earthquake in February 1960 when some 15,000 people were killed in the 15 seconds the quake lasted. A new city was built a little to the south and in the 60 years since the disaster, Agadir has become not on...
Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic
If you accept the claims of a few, the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) is a vast arid chunk of the Sahara bordered by Mauritania to the south and east, Morocco to the north and the Atlantic to the west. From 1886 when Spain claimed the area as theirs until Franco's death in 1975, the territo...
Pork ‘n Cheese
The former French colony of Senegal, independent since 1960 is one of West Africa's most stable countries. Although the country has had its up's and down's since independence, it appears to have largely escaped the rampant, destructive corruption and frequent coups that have bedeviled most of its ne...
Africa’s Smallest
A former British colony, The Gambia is mainland Africa’s smallest nation with fewer than two million people and apart from a short Atlantic coastline, the country is entirely enclosed by Senegal. The Gambia's capital (also far-and-away Africa's smallest), Banjul is little more than a dusty, sand-blo...
Snow Skiing in Salone
After getting off to a somewhat promising start to its post-colonial existence, the former British colony of Sierra Leone (or "Salone" as the local trendies like to call it) has lived through several decades of near-existential disasters. The country was blessed with an impressive array of natural r...
Drive By, Buy and ‘Bye
Lonely Planet's guide to West Africa describes Cote D'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) as "....a stunner....a true tropical paradise...a country that is striding towards economic progress...". Well, we're just going to have to take their word for it! We spent a little under five hours in the country. Ostensibly...
Hail To The Chief
The twin cities of Sekondi and Takoradi, in the west of Ghana close to the border with Cote D’Ivoire are our final stop in the country. Until the port of Tema, east of Accra was built in the 1960’s, the “twin cities” were Ghana’s main port both for trade and commercial fishing. These days, the citie...
“Shackles In Darkness”
Without apology, I’ve taken the title of this entry from a short handbook on the Trans-Atlantic slave trade written by a couple of Ghanaian academics and tourism professionals, one of who (Robert Kugbey) was our guide when we visited St George Castle in Elmina, for several hundred years, one of the...
Journey to the Centre of the World
While not quite exactly at both 0 degrees longitude and latitude, Ghana is as close to the centre of the world as makes no difference! The capital, Accra is just 11 minutes west of the prime meridian and five degrees north of the equator. So our guide, Francis in welcoming us to Ghana on our arrival...