Welcome!

The Great British coast line is a most unusual and interesting place. It is long; 11,073 miles, with a “wiggliness” factor, more properly known as the Hausdorff Dimension of 1.25. This is wiggly indeed, and by comparison, the Australian coast measures 1.17, and the South African coastline a baby-smooth 1.02. I am not sure who spends their life calculating the relative wiggliness of coastlines, but some do, and we are grateful for their efforts. It is a coast that offers power stations, towering cliffs, retirement homes, smuggler’s inns, jagged rocks, smooth sand and genteel hotels; it offer walkers a variety […]

The Future of St Helena Here is where I engage is some crystal-ball gazing, allow myself to snatch snippets of conversation that float aimlessly through the air, reinterpret other conversations and simply draw conclusions from my long, dull and probably erroneous history. In all, my comments may be considered flippant, may prove to be well off the mark, but there again, what else can one expect from a subjective report from a brief visit to St. Helena? It is clear that the island community of St. Helena is neither going to be abandoned nor allowed to relentlessly decline. It is, […]

The interior of St Helena is dark, mysterious and fascinating Creeping through the thick cloud-forest, wishing that I had brought a machete, wiping the rain from my eyes and the perspiration from my face, I was wondering how I had got into this mess. The flora was lush, the tree canopies high and with multiple shades of green; the birds noisy, and wind blowing through the myriad of leaves completing the overwhelming presence of the forest. We were deep into a jungle, periodic glimpses through the vegetation showed hills covered by flax, a thick and useless crop now that the […]

Visiting St Helena – An Astonishing Island Travelling for eight days for a four-day business trip, and then spending eight days wending my way home does seem peculiar in this day and age; as I write this, ensconced in a comfortable seat on a Lufthansa flight from Munich to Montreal connected to the world by wifi, I marvel that I started my journey home on Friday last week, and it is once again Friday. It is the sort of journey that one thought was consigned to the mists of time, but here it is. And travel in this manner is […]

RMS St Helena – Nautical but Nice “The RMS” as she is fondly known, is an odd ship; built in 1990, it was probably old fashioned before she was launched, and she remains the lifeline for the remote and rather wonderful island of St. Helena, with periodic service to the island of Ascension that lies some 700 miles to the north. The voyage to the island from Cape Town takes six days, and far from being monotonous, she offers a wide variety of activities ranging from people watching to the gymnasium to the movie offerings and of course the food. […]

Five days ago I boarded the RMS St Helena at a distant and apparently little-used dock in Cape Town, and today I am sitting in a guesthouse in Jamestown, the Georgian capital of the remote island of St. Helena. One could tell that the dock was little used by its casual approach to security imposed by a number of cold looking chaps huddled round looking like discarded chess pieces. However, we set sail with no worry, and gradually pulled away from the Cape toward the remote rock in the Atlantic Ocean called St Helena.   It was journey back in […]

On board the RMS St Helena. A truly magical journey   It is very odd to be here, on a working ship, miles out into the South Atlantic, with an expensive and intermittent wireless access’ of course, having any access at all is pretty unusual, but these are unusual times. There are 100 passengers on board the RMS St. Helena, including one gentleman who is lying in the hospital bed attached to a drip. We are a curious group, comprising Afrikaans workers heading (presumably) to work in the tuna processing plant, or in construction perhaps, “Saints” heading home after a […]

The Joys and Sorrows of Wandering Even by my own rather peripatetic standards, 2014 has started off to be a year of much travel. It is the first of July, and in the first six months of the year I have covered 89,500 miles, and during those wanderings have been as far distant as North Korea, Adak in the Aleutian Islands and now to St. Helena in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean. I travel only partly for personal pleasure; one of the joys of owning a travel company that specialises in travel to the more outlandish parts of […]

Adak: Land at the end of the Aleutian Islands There are strange places, remote places and surprising places but, in my humble experience, very few strange, remote and surprising places. Adak is most certainly all three and more. Lying at the far west of the Aleutian Islands, with only the uninhabited islands of Attu and Kiska beyond, Adak is the most westerly inhabited village in the United States. It sits confidently at 178° west, due north of Tonga and only about 700 miles from Russia. In a word it is isolated and in the middle of nowhere.   It does, […]

From La Tour de Carol a train runs down through the Pyrenees  from La Tour de Carol to Barcelona; it is a wonderful journey through Catalunya. Let me be the first to reiterate powerfully that I love trains; I would also hasten to add that since a peculiar childhood, influenced by a father who was totally enamoured by public transportation, I have collected, read, studied and loved timetables. It is a curious interest, perhaps, but no reason to move a couple of seats away from me in a waiting room. There are many fine train rides, often collected in glossy […]

The annual Toques et Clochers wine festival is a real treat I realise that I have a lifestyle that borders on the unusual, and for that I am grateful. I am able to wander, see odd and disparate places, meet fascinating people and gather a treasure trove of useless facts with which I can pepper conversation for months. March 2014, however, has been exceptional. It has been a month of flying, North Korea, a stamp auction in Hong Kong and a day in Macau, selling a flat in London, a wine conference and speed tasting in Tbilisi and now a […]

Wine Tourism is fun! I try not to be silent for so many days, but honestly, a combination of Georgian hospitality and the fascinating people of the International Wine Conference have led to a temporary paralysis; one that I am happy to relate is now over, and I am ready to report. It was the second conference that I have attended of the wine genre, and I can think of no good reason for having delayed participation in this astonishing industry for so many years. Wine folks are different; interesting, convivial and enthusiastic, albeit with a curious vocabulary, their deep […]