Bariloche – Of Good Spirits, and Bad Ones
There are spirits in these mountains, they never leave, they have never left.
High in the Patagonian Andes, I nestle amongst my clothes for warmth. The air is bright, alive with life. I can breathe again.
The cordillera rises, like a spiny dinosaur. The rock face creeps down the bare [...]
Buenos Aires: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
27th March 2008
After the riot, spectacle and melodrama of Iguazu, we returned to Buenos Aires to see that riots, spectacles and melodrama were hitting the big smoke in our absence. First off, the tail end of a tornado had swept through the city the day before we returned, [...]
Visitng Iguazu Falls on the Argentine/Brazil border
The Autumn/Fall Collection is out on display in Iguazu this year, in a blaze of striking monochromes. Set against a fabulous variety of greens in the dense rainforest foliage, which extends over miles of the region across the Brazil/Argentine border, a startling array of Blacks and Whites marked the [...]
Buenos Aires – “I left my Tango shoes in London..”
I left my Tango shoes in London.
It is sad, but true. The obsession with Tango is one shared by many a woman, charmed yet further by the seductive charms of the Strictly Come Dancing men. It is a dream that envelopes the holder in a smoke [...]
THE FOLLOWING EXTRACT IS WRITTEN TO A FRIEND DURING THE MATCH LAST NIGHT. IT IS NOT TO BE TAKEN AS A SERIOUS REFLECTION OF ANYTHING ELSE ON THIS PAGE.
” I am pathetic, i know, but now is the time of year i become a civilised football hooligan.
I have watched the entire second half of the [...]
10th March 2008
Well, not so much an extraordinary day perhaps, as a series of quite ordinary things which felt quite extraordinary here.
Dance
After a weekend of walking through markets, parks, the dockside and brunching in our neighbourhood, we felt the urge to see something different last night. We had visited the Centro Cultural Borges on Saturday night, [...]
MARCH 9TH 2008
BUENOS AIRES - THE EARLY DAYS
“Never to return from the Pampas?”“Have you fallen in love with a porteño?”“Or a gaucho?”“Do you plan to come back to us?”
And just plain..
“Where the hell are you?”
Yes, my dear family and friends, these are the kind of messages you have been sending me as I have [...]
FEBRUARY 28TH 2008
DAY ONE - BUENOS AIRES
The Romance of Cuba has been left in the 1950s, circa 2008, whilst Buenos Aires beckons, with the pointed red fingernail of a porn star…
Landing in BA
My first day in BA was spent in the equivalent of landing in some dodgy hotel in Kings Cross - no, worse, maybe Aldgate [...]
TWO MINUTES TO SUNSET
It was the call that thousands had been waiting to receive: “Can you make it to the Port of Beirut within three hours?”
Thousands of people now were haranguing their national embassies on an hourly basis. Priority lists seemed to lie in disarray, as those people in close proximity to the embassies in [...]
Asalaam Ailakum from Pakistan.
Eight days later, I am beginning to gain some perspective and digest my experiences here like paan, bitter at the beginning with short shots of sweet throughout. I have always identified in some way with Pakistan. My father’s family came from this side of the border pre-Partition, and the Punjabi dialect they [...]
