The 13 months of Encircle Africa circumnavigation really only had one aim inherent in the idea of circumnavigation: to get back home. Almost four months after my return, I have managed to complete a first draft of what will hopefully become published literature. I am also still asked what it… Continue reading
Around AD 150 a man called Ptolemy sat in Alexandria. This was probably not unusual for the time. Perhaps, in need of a break, he watched the fishermen coming to harbour beside the long lost pharos lighthouse. Modern Alexandria lines the same harbour of ancient times Ptolemy was… Continue reading
Up until 1975 Lourenço Marques was the largest city in Mozambique. Almost overnight it disappeared from the maps of the region. Its disappearance wasn’t the result of war or pestilence, but that of a name change. As Maputo, the city remains the largest in the country, the capital, and home… Continue reading
Being a Croydon boy, it’s sometimes difficult to be proud of the place I was born and brought up, faced with the obvious jokes and the ugly post war buildings. For its faults, of which there are many, Croydon does have things to be proud of. For one, it isn’t… Continue reading
To some January is National Tea Month; to others every month is Tea Month. Tea was first drunk sometime before 1000 BC in Asia, and has become the world’s most popular beverage after water. It made it to Europe only with the voyages of Portugal’s Age of Discovery in the… Continue reading
January 9th 2013 sees the London Underground celebrating its 150th anniversary. Shortly after 1 pm on January 9th 1863 the inaugural train of the world’s first underground railway left Paddington station for the three and a quarter mile journey. Queen Victoria had just celebrated her silver jubilee, and Lord Palmerston… Continue reading
The first time I crossed the equator into the southern hemisphere in Africa (in 2009) I was heading to hospital. It was a four hour journey along Gabon’s Ogooué River on a speedboat with eight roaring outboard motors, about fifty other passengers, and small cockroaches wandering about the lifejacket beneath… Continue reading
Encircle Africa was the first solo and unsupported overland circumnavigation of continental Africa by public transport. It came as somewhat of a surprise to me that I would be attempting to achieve something never completed before in such as manner. Africa’s a big place; the second largest continent. So I… Continue reading
Naming Christmas Two crewmen aboard the British ship Cygnet were the first recorded humans to step foot on Christmas Island in March 1688, though the uninhabited island had been first sighted back on Christmas day in 1643 by William Mynors. On 6th June 1688 it was claimed for the British… Continue reading
A man Perhaps the title should read ‘many men, multiple plans, finally a canal – in Panama’ (though it somewhat ruins the palindrome). All I knew of the Panama Canal was that it was a canal in Panama. I win no prizes for knowing that. A birthday gift of Graham… Continue reading
