Tomorrow I head off to Boston and New York, to get a taste of a proper winter. Apparently in Boston it'll not even get above zero during the day, BBC forecasts for Boston and NY. It is a short business trip to see my collegues on the US side of Nature. I haven't been to the East Coast for ages, so it'll be good to revisit. Sadly I'll not have much time for fun and games, as it is an out and back trip, with a day in each.
Still plenty of thinking and writing time.
Recently in travel Category
Yesterday, I heard an interesting programme about who owns space. Clive Andersen talked to the various people who have claims on bits of space, from the moon to the immense diamond star, nicknamed Lucy. The programme had a curious balance, at one take mocking these people and how they are selling paper worth nothing, but at the other taking them seriously and analysing the business model at face value.
How to make a pinboard for a map of the world.
I wanted to make a simple fun present for my wife Lucy earlier this year and thought about making a map pin board for her. It is surprisingly difficult to find the right materials, so I thought I'd write this up for Google's benefit.
I had chosen a good map of the world for us to plot our travels on, National Geographic have a wide range of colours and styles. If you are in London, then Stanfords is the best place to go, but most large book stores should have a choice of maps, amazon cannot help you.
To make the actual pinboard, I had initially thought of using layers of cork floor tiles glued onto hardboard. This would probably work and the materials are fairly widely available, but the resulting board would have been very heavy.
So I went along to my local wood yard to ask what they suggested and they had a piece of sundeala, which is the same material that pinboards are made of in schools, it is soft compressed wood pulp I think, but perfect for the job. It is fragile though, so we made a frame from some decorative edging using a mitre block. We used wood glue to attach the frame to the sundeala, as nails might have come through the frame.
Fun project, which took less than an hour to complete and we can plot where we have been and where we want to go in the world. We are a bit euro-centric with outposts in north and south america, but we have plans to visit the rest of the world too.
I'm yearning to be somewhere warmer and sunnier at the minute, I've spent some of the weekend sorting through slides and remembering warmer days last summer. This picture is one of a set I took in Greve in Chianti, last July.
I really like markets in France and Italy, as I've discussed on here before, I'm constantly amazed at the freshness, variety and quality of the food for sale in them. Our market are a poor comparison, though they do have the benefit of better weather in France and Italy.
I was in Brazil in 1999 and found it a wonderful place and it has left a lasting impression on me. I was there for a few days training at a multimedia company. So I had two experiences, one the car from hotel to machine gun protected corporate enclave, very friendly people at the company, but intense security.
The other much more free experience in the evening, walking around the markets and into Japan Town. Getting offered sex on sunny streets with pimps and dogs in the background, feeling uncomfortable taking pictures, as my camera felt too intrusive. Evenings were fun, hanging out in bars drinking Caipirinha, made with local cachaça. There is a different ambience in the local bars, people get up and sing or play guitar. It is not karaoke, but a remembering of the older songs, kind of a tradition, if only forty or fifty years old. I suppose like the now famous Cuban music scene, but taking influences from all of the vast country that is Brazil.
There is also that South American feeling of "'even if it is broken, leave it alone". Roads and buildings are put up shiny and new, then gradually decay over the years to be ripped down and replaced. Much of São Paulo is like the pictures below, the new and the old, cheek by jowl.
Today I found these pictures via Anne Galloway. They depict street scenes and the busy seemingly disorganised life that is São Paulo. There is a random mix of poverty vs the money represented by glass steel and concrete. Noise, architecture and never quite knowing what each street will bring to you. Yet it feels a very real place, almost friendly, yet holding on to itself, as if neither of you trust one another.
If I can find my pictures of the city, I'll scan some of them and put them here.
Lucy and I are vaguely thinking of going there next year, it looks like this and this or this. Anyone I know been and have some ideas or experiences. I'm planning on getting the Lonely Planet or similar and having a root around online, but thought that my collected readership and google might have some opinions.
Comment away below, please.
I'm back now in London and feeling more hemmed in and intruded upon. Cities are strange places. I've spent the bulk of the previous week in the middle of the French Alps in the Ecrins, in a summer only village called La Berarde. About 40-50 people live there in the summer and only one in the winter, though others stay on too. It was also the very end of the season, so really quiet.
The difference between that sense of emptiness and the competitive, hectic noisy and smelly city life is great.
I still quite like cities, even London, but being this crowded makes people snap at one another.
Against that I doubt I could live somewhere like La Berarde all year round, I've become too used to my comforts and culture. I like my cinema, my wide range of restaurants, the diversity and quality of the food, the bars and the shopping.
So like many tourists it is the change of states that makes one notice things, be it the ice on the glacier or the chewing gum on the Strand.
Camelback and similar drinking systems are a really great idea, you can sip on the move and ensure that you stay hydrated. However a dangling hose and dusty conditions can mean that your drinking end gets a dunk in the grit and ends up manky. One good idea I read a while back, not sure of source, was to cut a small hole in the base of a camera film case and then slide this onto the hose, removing the mouthpiece first. You can then use the cap to enclose the end in a protective box. So, remove mouth piece, cut hole in film canister base, slide onto hose, replace mouth piece and then put lid on film case. This works perfectly for most straight mouthpieces, the newer bent camelback ones don't work as well. I use a platypus, so don't have a problem. Makes drinking dust and dirt free, thus more hygenic.
Another interesting thread from the UKclimbing.com website, this one on how long it might take the Alps to recover and rebuild the permafrost that holds the mountains together. A variety of mountaineers and glacier researchers have contributed and it is still open for discussion. There is some good stuff in there, plus quite a lot of ecological banter.
