Travelogue
Singapore - Waiting To Exhale - 9 June 2011
Singapore is a sea-level blip barely north of the Equator. Once upon a time it was sparsely populated, disease-infested island ringed by mangrove swamps. Needless to say it had one of the unhealthiest climates in the world and was the kind of graveyard that killed off people in their droves. Until the early 1800s it was a backwater, a bit part in various empires. By the 19th and early 20th centuries it had been transformed into one of the jewels of the British Empire. Stamford Raffles was once a star of the British East India Company. When he arrived in 1819, with instructions to establish a “factory”, a trading settlement, on the tip of the Malay Peninsula, the island’s population was about 500 souls. Previously, he’d been the Company’s man in Penang, and latterly as governor of Java, where he had committed the cardinal sin of putting sound administration before profits. Economically, Singapore was slow to bloom. The East India Company lost its monopoly on the China trade and the company’s bureaucrats in Calcutta mismanaged the island’s affairs. It also had to compete with the Dutch in Sumatra, the new “factory” in Hong Kong, and also the French in Indo-China.The British invested heavily in their property. South of the city at Kallang, they opened a new grass airport opened in 1938. Imperial Airways flying boats operated from a slip on the edge of the airport, landing and taking-off from Keppel Harbour. “The Empire’s Greatest Airport”
Asuncion - The Mother of Cities - 31 May 2011
Asuncion is the capital and largest city of landlocked Paraguay, a country rarely on the radar and for most, off the beaten track. Steamy tropical heat, tin-pot dictators, violence, tragedy and cultural melting pot, Paraguay seemed to fulfil stereotypical views for many of Latin America. True, during its history, Paraguay has suffered
Potosi - Smoking TNT and Drinking Dynamite - 22 May 2011
It has been said that if the bones of all the slave labourers who died toiling in Potosi’s silver mines to make Spain rich were laid end-to-end, they’d stretch all the way from Bolivia to Madrid. Before Britain and its Commonwealth, there was another empire on which it could truly be said “the sun never sets”. The Kingdom of Castile
La Paz - Every Breath You Take - 16 May 2011
La Paz is one of the highest capital cities in the world. Life there is highly stratified, culturally, economically and geographically. Affluence is measured in altitude, with more of the former equating to less of the latter. The higher up you live, the poorer you are. By the time you get to the city airport, life is barely subsistent.La
Lake Titicaca - Living Between Water and Heaven - 30 April 2011
Lake Titicaca is the second largest lake in South America and at 3800 metres above sea level the highest navigable lake in the world. The lake is part Bolivian and part Peruvian, the border between the two snakes its way across the waters which are 80 kilometres wide at the broadest point and almost 200 kilometres from end to end. At over 8000
Cusco - Stone Temple Pilots - 25 April 2011
Cusco, the ancient capital of the Inca, sits high in an Andean valley. The modern name is a Spanish corruption from the Aymara and Quechua languages, which drew on mythical origins to name the city.The origin of civilisation in Peru can be traced back 20,000 years before the Incas, making the country one of the cradles of ancient cultures
Machu Picchu - The Temple of the Sun - 20 April 2011
Peru’s Machu Picchu has survived 500 years of rain, earthquake and landslides. The mountaintop religious retreat and citadel city is one of the world’s greatest archaeological achievements, built by Inca emperor Pachacutec probably in the 15th century, to prove his place among the gods. It’s an early start in the cold morning at Cusco
Nazca - Secret on the Desert - 10 April 2011
Nazca is a dusty town located on the Pan-American Highway between Peru’s second city Arequipa and the capital Lima. People usually pass through on their way from one city to the other. Just outside town is located one of the mysteries of the world, the Nazca Lines. The Nazca Lines are a series of ancient hieroglyphic drawings and symbols
Arequipa - El Misti and The White City - 3 April 2011
The road from Chile to Arequipa, Peru’s second city, takes you along a famous highway and through the dusty provincial centre of Tacna. San Pedro de Tacna, the southern most city in the Republic of Peru, is connected to Chile by road and by rail. The rail line was built in 1855 and is one of the oldest in South America. The
