One of travel’s delights for me is discovering wonderful incongruities. Like this coffee-seller in Aleppo Souq. While there’s nothing unusual about finding coffee-sellers in Syrian souqs, they’re usually armed with a traditional coffeepot or thermos, tiny ceramic or plastic cups, and a container of fresh water to wash them in. What’s so incongruous about this … Read more about Travelling: incongruities #1
There are a few reasons as to why I keep thinking about that turtle crossing the road in Syria: one, as I said, was because I’d been reading about Freya Stark’s ‘virtues of travelling’; I’ve also been thinking about the things that make travel exciting (unexpected events, the element of surprise, those serendipitous moments, incongruities); … Read more about Travelling: textures
I’m reading the biography of the great female traveller Freya Stark, ‘Passionate Nomad: the life of Freya Stark’, because I’m writing a book on Syria and Freya spent time there. I’m up to an enlightening chapter about Freya’s time in Yemen when she was the leader of an archaeological expedition. She intensely disliked her two … Read more about Travelling: virtues of a traveller