Grizzled Old Traveler

Hiking the East Highland Way

2010-08-25T04:20:00.000-07:00

Observant readers of this blog will notice a new box on the margins. I'm currently writing a series for Gadling on hiking the East Highland Way, a 76-mile route through some amazing scenery. Check out the link for stories about my visits to Pictish forts, medieval castles, and beautiful countryside, along with my blunt opinion of haggis!

Last year I hiked the Hadrian's Wall Path. While that was a lot of fun the East Highland Way was more challenging. I'm not sure what my long-distance hike will be next year, but I'm sure it will be in Scotland! The far north near Cape Wrath, which is even more remote than the area I went to, looking very promising.

Haunted Graveyards

2010-08-18T02:39:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in my last post, I've been experimenting with some horror photography. I stumbled across the reverse color and black and white settings on my camera and have been snapping photos of castles, cathedrals and graveyards. On a recent visit to Escomb church, the oldest surviving Anglo-Saxon church, I took some photos in the graveyard. The church was built in 670 and I'll be blogging about it on Gadling next week. These graves are from the 17th-19th century. I like this one above, in a reverse black and white image.

Here's the same grave in a reversed color image. Check out the skull. It looks like something my kid would draw!

The trees make a nice backdrop to this shot.
I like the fade out to the left.

Here are some buildings on the River Wear at Durham. The greenery came out an interesting color. I have plenty more images of castles, stone circles, graveyards, etc., mostly normal shots rather than products of my fiddling with the settings. If anyone's interested in using them for their own projects, get in touch.

Horror photography!

2010-08-16T03:41:00.000-07:00

I just got back from hiking the East Highland Way in Scotland. While I was up there I discovered a new setting on my camera. In the "text" option for taking photos of print, there are four settings. One looks indistinguishable from a regular portrait setting, one is black and white, one is negative black and white, and then there's this one, a reversed color image. Looks like a cover for some Gothic horror novel! This is the cathedral at Durham in northern England.
Another view of the same cathedral. Not sure why the sky changed color.
Julián, my four-year-old son, took this one of Papa emerging from the grave.
This decayed tomb is carved in the image of a knight. What horrors lurk beneath?

Next time: more mucking about with the camera!

A Bangladeshi boat race in Oxford

2010-08-03T01:14:00.000-07:00

We're back in Oxford for our usual summer stay. We love it for being a very English town, and also because it's a very international town. Just a few minutes walk away from our house, the Bangladeshi community sponsored a boat race, using traditional canoes from their country. Many of the teams dressed up.
Here's a detail of one of the boats.
And the happy winners! You can't see it from this photo, but this team had painted their faces to look like cats. I'm not sure if that's something traditional or if they were just mucking about.
We were also treated to music and some tasty curry. It was a very different experience than the Eights Week boat race we saw last year!

The fourteen year-old who will sail solo around the world

2010-07-28T08:43:00.000-07:00

By now everyone has heard of Laura Dekker, the 14 year-old Dutch girl who has been fighting a court battle for the right to be the youngest person to sail solo around the world.

She has just won her fight after a Dutch court lifted the ban it imposed a year ago. She plans to head out from Portugal sometime in the next two weeks in an attempt to beat Jessica Watson, who is the current record holder at 16. She has been sailing solo since she was ten and was actually born on a yacht. . .while her parents were on a round-the-world voyage. Looks like there's a gene for sailing.

The news source for this post is significant--CBBC, which is the BBC's children's channel. The recent trend of young people doing incredible and dangerous travel feats, like this week's 12 year-old climbing the highest point in all fifty states in record time, can't go unnoticed by children around the world. Even my four-year-old son has taken notice. These kids are inspiring kids everywhere.

Is that a good thing? As a parent I'm torn. On the one hand I applaud anyone with enough courage to go for their dream, on the other hand I have to wonder if a fourteen year old is ready for such a feat. A normal kid that age obviously isn't, but Dekker is no ordinary kid. Even so, there's the high amount of danger involved.

So if Julián wants to do something equally amazing and crazy when he's 14, should I let him? Well, if I think he's capable of achieving it, I'd probably end up saying yes. I don't think I could bring myself to stand between my child and greatness. I'd be biting my nails the entire time, though, and probably shadowing him the entire way!

Ten reasons the Moon landing conspiracy theory is stupid

2010-07-24T14:24:00.000-07:00

Recently I discovered a friend had fallen for the "all the Moon landings were faked" conspiracy theory. I have to say I was disappointed in someone who usually shows keen insight and judgment, but a natural mistrust of his government had clouded his thinking. Governments lie on a regular basis, especially the U.S. government, but that doesn't mean they lie all the time. Here are ten reasons that this conspiracy theory, peddled by people who want to make a quick buck, is total bullshit.

1. The testimony of thousands of people involved in the project.

2. The fact that none of them in the past 40 years have blown the lid on the "conspiracy", despite the potential to get millions for their story.

3, The hundreds of professional and amateur astronomers worldwide who saw the reflected light of the lander on the Moon through their telescopes, and the countless people they showed this wonder to.

4. The fact that the Soviet Union, despite its extensive spy network and a very big motive, never called the U.S. on the "lie."

5. The fact that no other nation hostile to the U.S. has done this in 40 years.

6. The hundreds of pounds of Moon rocks divided up and sent to researchers in dozens of countries, including Russia. Moon rocks are unlike any rocks found here on Earth. Where did the conspirators get them?

7. The fact that actually going to the Moon is not a great physical or technological feat for an already space-faring nation, merely an economic challenge, and we're talking about the richest country in the world here.

8. A Nasa satellite has photographed the Moon landing site from space. Of course they're part of the conspiracy, but are Japan and India?
http://www.squidoo.com/apollo-moon-landing-photos-from-space

9. The weak arguments of the "hoax" has been debunked in several venues. Here's only one of the best.
http://www.xmission.com/~jwindley/

10. Given all the above reasons, it would be easier just to go to the Moon!

Photo of Charles Conrad Jr., Apollo 12 Commander, courtesy of NASA. This photo is not faked. People really can achieve amazing things when they try hard enough.

Traveling through Africa with Border Jumpers

2010-06-23T11:33:00.000-07:00

A very cool blog contacted me last week. It's called Border Jumpers and it's pretty much what it says on the tin. Bernard Pollack and Danielle Nierenberg are on a mission to visit nearly every country in Africa, writing about their experiences with a special focus on community groups, NGOs, and local people. Sounds a bit like the Africa Heartbeat project I've covered here before.

They started in Addis Ababa last year and so far have made it to an impressive list of nations. They've talked with conservationist farmers in Ghana and written about using traditional crops to fight climate change in Zimbabwe. These are just two of the dozens of projects they've covered.

As I discovered on my recent trip through Ethiopia and Somaliland, Africa thrusts beauty and poverty at you simultaneously. Just look at the above photo, courtesy of Border Jumpers, of a palm oil processing center. It's little more than a bunch of grotty drums and a lot of hot steam in an already hot climate. Yet the woman standing in front radiates grace, beauty, and pride.

Border Jumpers, Africa Heartbeat, and I are headed the same direction with our writing. We're experienced travelers who have learned that the world is not the big, scary place TV tells us it is. It's big alright, but filled with intelligent, kind people doing all sorts of interesting things. The single most important thing a travel writer can do is communicate that simple truth to as many people as possible. So check out those sites for some uplifting reading, and some facts about Africa the mainstream media don't bother to cover.

Climbing mountains in Spain

2010-06-14T03:48:00.000-07:00

It was stormy up in the mountains yesterday so the group Hiking in the Community of Madrid didn't get to do our planned excursion to Patones de Arriba. So instead, here are some photos of last week's hike up Abantos mountain above El Escorial, the famous 16th century palace/monastery. Of course we've all seen it before, so we climbed the mountain instead! The first part of the climb was a steep ascent, made easier due to plenty of shade from trees.
I spent a lot of time looking back over my shoulder. Hardly surprising considering the view.
This is what faced us. Looks like there's some great bouldering, just like at La Pedriza.
Like in many parts of the Sierra de Guadarrama, you can drink from the mountain springs.
Bullfight anyone? Nah, let's just get to the top of the mountain. . .
. . .and see these amazing views! There's another hike that goes along those ridges all the way to the peak in the distance. I'll have to try it sometime.
El Escorial looks like a toy from this height, but it's actually huge.
Now we're headed back down the mountain. Yours truly is on the left.
This cool house in the town of San Lorenzo de El Escorial is going to be the future headquarters of Hiking in the Community of Madrid, assuming someone donates a couple million euros. Can you imagine drinks and barbecues on those porches after a long day on the trails?

Photos courtesy Beau Macksoud and Cynthia Kane. My own camera is in Ecuador with my brother-in-law!

The Castle at Chinchón, Spain

2010-06-11T00:13:00.000-07:00

After hiking near Chinchón in the Comunidad de Madrid, we stopped at Chinchón's local castle. Actually it's technically a fort since it's made for artillery, but that's splitting hairs. This castle is a replacement for one destroyed by an artillery bombardment in 1521. The early 16th century saw the destruction of a lot of older castles that weren't designed to deal with modern artillery. The designers of this new castle, built between 1590 and 1598, kept the artillery threat in mind. Note that the bottom part of the wall is sloped with a glacis, to make cannonballs bounce off. There's also a drawbridge to stop people from charging inside.
The bridge brings you towards the main gate, which was sadly closed when we visited.
The escutcheon of the builder, Conde Diego Fernández de Cabrera y Bobadilla.
With the drawbridge up, attackers would only be able to get to the castle by crossing this dry, exposed moat.
Round towers helped deflect cannonballs, and those big windows allowed the castle's cannons to shoot out.
A view from the distance, showing one of the ruined towers. In 1808 during the Napoleonic Wars, the Polish Brigade attacked Chinchón and set off a giant explosion inside the castle. This is an interesting fort that shows how builders adapted to the artillery age. To see a more traditional castle, check out my post on the El Castillo de Aulencia.

A lowland ramble through central Spain

2010-06-09T09:18:00.000-07:00

I've been doing a lot of hiking recently, thanks to a new group called Hiking in the Community of Madrid. After a great time exploring the weird rocks of La Pedriza, the next trip was through the countryside around Colmenar de Oreja and Chinchón, two towns that retain some of their Renaissance splendor. The photo above shows the fine church at Colmenar de Oreja. There's a miraculous crucified Jesus there and the church shop has all sorts of Jesus schwag for sale, even a Jesus lighter! Sadly everybody was in Chinchón for a First Communion ceremony so I didn't get to buy one.
Unlike La Pedriza, this hike was an easy jaunt through rolling countryside, with orchards, vineyards, pasture, and open fields.
The wildflowers were out in full bloom. I guess I should have picked some of these for Almudena, but I've never liked flowers as a token of affection. It's seems to say, "Here, I saw something beautiful and killed it for you. Put it in a vase and watch it decompose as a symbol of our love." I think a roadtrip around Ethiopia makes a much better gift.
Lots of open space and fresh air!
And a friendly tree to greet us as we pass.
Like at La Pedriza, I found a sign to Julián. I was actually hoping for my son to become a Motocross champion rather than a bullfighter, but it's not really up to me. The organizers of the hike have some ideas for hikes that he can manage. At four he's already able to go six kilometers over fields. Some day he'll even be able to match his Papa!

Most of these photos were taken by Beau Macksoud and Cynthia Kane. Thanks for the pics!

Next time: the castle at Chinchón!

Hiking La Pedriza, Spain

2010-05-29T06:13:00.001-07:00

Last weekend I went hiking in La Pedriza near Madrid with a group called Hiking in the Community of Madrid. I already reviewed this great new group for Gadling, but wanted to share some more of my photos here. La Pedriza is a wilderness area above the town of Manzanares el Real, 45 minutes from Madrid. As you can see, it's pretty rugged, with lots of cool rock formations.
The photo below shows some strange markings they use here in Spain. While 99% of the world's population would assume it's an arrow indicating that the path goes to the right, actually it's to tell you that the path bends to the left. I would have never known that! You really need a guide in La Pedriza.
Here's the approach to a cool cave that used to be a refuge for bandits, Spanish Civil War guerrillas, and most recently a band of murderers. We were relieved to find it unoccupied. I was hoping to find some Civil War bunkers and fortifications like I did on a previous hike, but no luck.
La Pedriza is popular for rock climbers. There's some awesome bouldering opportunities too.
We also spotted a herd of Spanish ibex.
This tree growing out of the solid rock made me smile.
Check this out, a bar named after my son!
And some tagger uses my name! Maybe he's a fan of my writing. I was hoping to find something named "Almudena" to complete the family. Maybe next time. I'm hiking with this group again tomorrow, so stayed tuned for more photos of Spanish wilderness.

The first photo of a person

2010-05-27T03:58:00.001-07:00

This photo shows the Boulevard du Temple in Paris and was taken by Louis Daguerre in late 1838 or early 1839. While it isn't the first photograph (that honor went to Joseph Niepce in 1826) it's the first to show a person. Early photography had very long exposure times and thus it was hard to take photos of people. In fact, this photo took more than ten minutes and Daguerre didn't intend to capture any images of people at all. This busy street looks deserted because everyone passed by too quickly to make an impression on the emulsion. But if you look to the lower left you can see a man with his foot up. Apparently he's getting his shoes shined, and he stood still long enough to be captured on film.

This is a historically important shot and makes it into most studies of photography, but what most people seem to miss is that there are in fact two people in the photo. You can see the shoeshine boy as well, although he's not as clear. I've blown up the image below.

Poor people and children tend to be written out of history, and it's a shame that this kid, struggling to make a living and probably doomed to an early death in some nineteenth century tenement, has been ignored by later generations. So here's a bit of belated recognition. Sorry for being overlooked, kid. I hope that guy gave you a good tip!

The first image is courtesy Wikimedia Commons. If it isn't public domain by now then I don't know what is!

Choosing my next adventure

2010-05-22T05:59:00.000-07:00

We're getting to the halfway point of 2010, so it's time to start planning trips for 2011! Besides the usual research/pleasure trips to Oxford and Missouri, I'm thinking of going back to Harar, Ethiopia, for two months. I absolutely fell in love with this medieval walled city of Sufis, and I know someone who will rent me a house in the Old City.

As I've been planning my return, an old problem has cropped up. If I return to a country, I don't get to see a new country. This was always a problem with my return trips to India, another place I love.

Here are some alternatives. For the price of a two-month trip to Ethiopia, I could do three or even four shorter trips. One would be to The Gambia for ten days, a trip made cheaper by since my wife gave me a gift of a free ticket whenever I want to go. That was almost two years ago and I still haven't used it! Another trip would be two weeks hiking around Montenegro, with its beautiful coastline, rugged green mountains, and historic hilltop castles and monasteries. Even after these two trips I'd still have enough money to hike across Luxembourg and do some easyJet long weekend somewhere!

Tempting. . .but Harar is calling me.

I'm torn. What should I do?

Photo of Kotor, Montenegro, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Does being a travel writer affect the way you travel?

2010-05-19T01:36:00.001-07:00

On my writing blog I recently posted about celebrating a year working for Gadling, the most popular travel blog on the Internet. This got me thinking about how being a travel writer affects the way I travel. I also asked some of my fellow Gadlingers.

Like any pro, Tom Johansmeyer is always on the lookout for story ideas. He recalls a recent trip to Norwich, VT, to visit family.

"We stopped at a rest station along the way, and I saw a flier for “The Strolling of the Heifers,” which is some local event. My first thought: I can use that! Even when I’m on the road and not looking for anything, I can’t help noticing opportunities, and recreation becomes work, which itself is recreation."

I do this too. Even walking in my barrio in Madrid I end up with a handful of fliers about cultural events and interesting shops, and any trip gives me far more leads than I can possibly follow. The constant search for story ideas becomes a compulsion for both of us.

"When I ride the bus from New York to Pennsylvania to see my son, I’ll get ideas (“Five Ways to Cope with Winter Bus Travel”) or run into situations worth covering (e.g., poor service). I even did a video review on a Port Authority hot dog," Johansmeyer says.

Annie Scott says being on the job makes her more active and aware, "I go out and see things even when jet lagged. I get up and try the breakfast at the hotel instead of sleeping. I try new foods that look scary. I'm less afraid to ask silly questions and explore inappropriate places because I know that my curiosity is validated; it's a professional tool."

Willy Volk agrees.

"I think I look around a lot more, and notice what might be interesting to OTHER people, as well as what is interesting just to me," he says.

Like them, when I'm on assignment I keep my reader in mind. Who that reader is depends on the market I'm writing for. The demographic for British Heritage is very different than Gadling. I'm always asking myself, "What are my readers interested in? What do they think is important?"

"It's our duty to go one step beyond the realm of the average tourist," says David Farley. "It's our job to gain insights about the place that can sometimes only come from a more immersed experience. Part of our job--or, at least, my job--is as reporter and fact-gatherer, which isn't always something the average traveler does. For that reason, when I'm on assignment (which is about 99 percent of the time I'm traveling), I always arrive in a place with a small cadre of friends of friends waiting for me. I also schedule interviews with people who will help inform my story, which is something I wouldn't do if I were just a tourist. Travel writing is a job, not a vacation, so when I'm on the road, it's a lot of fun but at times it's also a bit exhausting."

"I notice nitpicky things," says Laurel K. Miller, "like when hotel rooms are lacking enough electrical outlets/if they're in lame locations, if the bathroom doors open into the toilet, etc."

I get this way too, but only when I'm writing reviews of the actual place. Then I can get really nitpicky. The more expensive the place, the less forgiving I am.

Friends sometimes ask me if working on the road kills my enjoyment of travel. It never has, and it doesn't seem to bother David Farley either.

"Because I'm forced to interview people and cross a certain threshold that I wouldn't normally do as a 'tourist,' I end up having a more enriching travel experience. Then I try to shift that enthusiasm into my writing about the experience," Farley says.

"I actually think travel would be rather boring for me if I weren’t a blogger," Johansmeyer agrees.

But Miller says it's made her "jaded."

"While I'm grateful every day for this career, I no longer feel the need to take photos of every beautiful beach or sunset, and it's harder for me to be impressed by locations/service/food/accommodations," she says.

Miller also finds hopping back and forth between travel and regular life a bit strange.

"While I actually enjoy mixing up high end assignments with "real" travel, as I'm a broke-ass dirtbag journalist, I struggle with the schizoid existence of living large one day, and dealing with drunken idiots in bunkbeds the next. Even more bizarre, I wait tables and do other random jobs when I'm at home, to supplement my writing. I've actually had moments where I've worked at a restaurant one night, hopped a plane on assignment the following day, and later that night found myself dining at an extremely high end restaurant. I'll actually have to suppress the urge to bus a table out of habit," she says.

Having ridden across a desert on a crowded African bus one day, then had a picnic in an English park with my kid and his friends less than a week later, I can sympathize with the "schizoid existence" comment!

While it seems the consensus is that being travel writers affects how we travel, there are times when it doesn't affect me at all. These tend to be on my more adventurous trips, such as traveling in Ethiopia or Somaliland, or hiking Hadrian's Wall. I'm doing those trips for me, and even though I write them up for Gadling they are from a personal perspective. When you read my newsy bits for Gadling you're just getting facts. When you read my features, especially my series, you're getting me. So I guess I have a certain protectiveness with my dream trips. When I finally get to The Gambia to do my long-planned river journey, I will of course write it up for Gadling and maybe some other markets, but the trip will be all mine.

Photo courtesy Leo Stolpe. It shows me taking notes in the painted caves of Laas Geel in Somaliland. Yes, that's a Gadling shirt I'm wearing.

Teaching children to overcome fear

2010-05-16T01:19:00.000-07:00

Like most kids, my four-year-old son loves to climb. Whether it's trees, a jungle gym, or me, he wants to scale it.

Of course I love this. Both I and his mother were rock climbers in our twenties and we're hoping (or at least I'm hoping) he'll get into that too. Playgrounds nowadays have little climbing walls on the sides of the jungle gyms so I've been teaching him some moves. I've also been teaching him the right attitude, like when he turns to me and says, "I'm scared."

I've heard this from other kids in the playground, and the usual response from the parent is, "There's nothing to be scared of," or "Don't be a baby."

I never say that, because you should be a little scared when climbing. What I tell him is, "It's OK to be scared, but go ahead and do it anyway."

This was the biggest lesson rock climbing taught me. I took up climbing in college to cure my fear of heights. It didn't work. I was terrified every time I got on the rocks. But I learned to control my fear. It stopped affecting my ability to climb and didn't stop me from going out every weekend I could. Nowadays I'm happy to go up heights if I feel it's worth it. I even braved the Angel's Landing hike at Zion National Park and climbed up a dodgy leather rope to get to the clifftop monastery of Debre Damo, Ethiopia. I wouldn't want my son to miss out on experiences like that just because he's scared.

Yesterday we went to the "big boys park" and he said, "spot me." He proceeded to climb up a ladder that had rungs a bit too far apart for him, and then traversed some monkey bars that were twice as high off the ground as he is tall. I coached him through it and he looked pretty proud when he finished.

A few minutes later I was sitting on a park bench about ten meters away when I saw him do it himself. He flashed right up the ladder and had no trouble on the monkey bars either. I just sat there, too far away to help him if he fell, grinding my teeth with worry and giving him a thumbs-up sign.

Parents have to learn to overcome fear too.

Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Bits and Pieces from the Spanish Air Museum

2010-05-09T01:56:00.001-07:00

To finish off a week of posts on the Museo Del Aire in Madrid, I'm including some photos that didn't fit anywhere else. While the main attraction of this free museum is the great collection of aircraft, it has collections of related artifacts and engages in restoration work. The above photo shows some of the random bits lying around waiting for a caring hand. Can anyone out there identify this stuff?
The museum has a nice collection of airport vehicles, from mobile control towers to old firefighting equipment.
This is the first museum display I've seen dedicated to flare pistols. There was another one just for tachometers that I probably should have taken a photo of.
There's also a good collection of maps. This one shows positions during and right after the amphibious landing at Alhucemas in 1925 during the Third Rif War. I talked about this historic landing more in my biplanes and triplanes post.
This map shows the locations of airfields at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, along with the numbers and types of planes both sides had. What's interesting is that the Republican government had almost four times as many planes as Franco's forces, but that soon changed with various generals rallying to the junta and Germany and Italy providing equipment for the Fascist war effort. I apologize for the small size of these two maps but that's as big as Blogsmith will display them. Researchers who want full-size photos are welcome to contact me.
Here's an interesting rarity. This is a flag commemorating the Green March, a brilliant public relations event by the Moroccan government in 1975 in which an estimated 350,000 unarmed civilians marched across the border into the Spanish colony of Western Sahara. Spanish border troops were ordered not to fire on the demonstrators and soon left. The Spaniards had been planning to leave anyway after being ground down by a two-year war with Polisario, a Sahrawi independence movement. The Moroccans got the land but inherited the war. The region is still in legal limbo, with Morocco claiming it as theirs and other countries refusing to recognize their rule. Polisario still exists, although there's no fighting at the moment.

The flag is covered with symbols such as a map showing Morocco and Western Sahara as one land, a camel, and the number 350,000 to celebrate the large number of participants. Green is the color of Islam. While the Sahrawis are Muslim too, green was used to say that this was a movement of Muslims against a Christian colonial power.

Biplanes and Triplanes at the Spanish Air Museum

2010-05-07T06:48:00.000-07:00

Look familiar? Yep, it's the Red Baron's famous Fokker Dr.1 triplane! Well, actually it's a replica, but cool nonetheless. Welcome to my fifth installment of posts on the Museo del Aire in Madrid. This was only one of the planes the Red Baron flew, but it's the most famous because it's the one he made his last 20 victories in and was the one he was shot down in. No originals survive, although there are many replicas.

The Fokker Dr.1 had a maximum speed of 165 km/hr, a range of 200 km, and a maximum altitude of 6100 meters. It was 5.77 meters long, 2.95 meters high, with a wingspan of 7.19 meters. It was armed with two Spandau 7.92 mm machine guns. My four-year-old son loved this plane. He knew about biplanes but I don't think he'd ever seen a bright red triplane before.

While I usually take a dim view of Wikipedia, the entry on the Red Baron has a good collection of old film clips about him.
Boxy, but nice. the De Havilland DH-4 was a British zeppelin hunter in World War One. The Spanish bought 46 of them to use in their war in Morocco for surveillance, bombing, and supply missions. Its large cargo capacity proved handy in supplying positions that had been cut off, something that happened to the Spanish a lot in that war. It had a maximum speed of 220 km/hr, and was armed with two .303 Lewis machine guns and a dozen bombs. It could reach 6,700 meters in altitude, is 9.35 meters long, 3.09 meters high, with a wingspan of 12.93 meters.
We'll wrap things up with the Bristol F-2B, another British biplane that saw service in WWI and with the Spanish in Morocco. It played a key role in providing air cover for the landing at Alhucemas in 1925, which was the first amphibious landing to have air cover, and the first motorized amphibious landing. A total of 64 served in Morocco, often making close strafing passes on infantry that was dubbed "Flying Spanish style." Brave perhaps, but it led to twelve of them getting shot down. Armaments included a forward 7.7 mm Vickers machine gun, while the observer was armed with two .303 Lewis guns.

This weekend: a few more random photos that didn't fit in any of my previous posts!

Balloons and helicopters at Spain's Air Museum

2010-05-05T23:39:00.000-07:00

Welcome to my fourth installment about the Museo del Aire in Madrid. First we're going a bit retro with an artist's reconstruction of a daring attempt at flight in 1793. Spanish inventor Diego Marín Aguilera decided it would be fun to make a pair of flapping wings complete with bird feathers and jump off the top of a castle. He did his calculations correctly and managed to make it 360 meters before landing. Well, actually he crashed, but as the old pilot's saying goes, "Any landing you walk away from is a good landing" and Aguilera walked away with only a few bruises. It's doubtful that his flapping did much good; he had really developed a decent glider. Not bad for someone who herded sheep for a living. Unfortunately the ignorant peasants he lived with thought he was a heretic and burnt his contraption before he got to improve it.

Here's a diorama of the Spanish balloon brigade. There wasn't any information on this in the display, but it appears from the uniforms to be a reconstruction of the late nineteenth century. Most European powers had balloon brigades by then because balloons had proved useful in the American Civil War and Franco-Prussian War. If anyone has more information about these guys I'd love to hear about it.
Here's the product of another Spanish inventor, Juan de la Cierva. He developed the first stable autogyro, the predecessor to the helicopter, in 1923. That helicopter was called the C4 prototype, and the machine pictured above is a replica of a C6. Some improvements had been made but as you can see, it still looks very much like an airplane. None of the earlier autogyros flew very far or very well, but the C6 was able to make a distance of seven miles, proving that this alternative to the airplane had potential. The flight left from Cuatro Vientos (Four Winds) airfield outside of Madrid, next to where the Museo del Aire stands today. The C6 is nine meters long, weighs 900 kilos, and has a maximum velocity of 100km/hr.
I had to take this photo because my son has a helicopter much like this, complete with spinning rotors and a retractable stretcher. He runs search-and-rescue operations in our living room all the time. This is a Sikorsky-Westland S-55, an American helicopter introduced in 1949 and one of the first truly viable helicopters for regular use. Compare it with the C6 above and you can see how much progress aviation engineers made in 26 years. It has a maximum velocity of 180 km/hr, is 12.71 meters long, and 4.03 meters high.
I love retro Soviet stuff, although the Stalin bus in St. Petersburg is going too far. This Mil Mi-2 Hoplite is just the ticket, incorporating drab green Soviet chic with a timeless hammer-and-sickle motif. Introduced as a military helicopter in 1965, it is still in wide use today for basic transport, forestry, air ambulance, and fire protection missions. Some developing countries, notably North Korea, still use these for military purposes.

Coming up tomorrow: biplanes!

The strange little airplane that became a movie star

2010-05-05T01:32:00.000-07:00

Does this little plane look familiar? Perhaps it would look more familiar all banged up and flying over the Australian outback with Mel Gibson in it? That's right, it featured in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome!

Introducing the Transavia PL-12 Airtruk, which in the first scene of the movie flies down out of the skies to attack Max as he's driving his disabled police car across the desert with the help of a team of camels. Jedediah the Pilot, played by Bruce Spence, knocks Max off the top of the car and steals the vehicle. Later in the movie Jedediah and Max team up. The pilot flies a group of kids to safety with Tina Turner and a bunch of leather daddies in hot pursuit. Max clears the way for them in a cool fight scene but is left behind, doomed to be the eternal outsider.

The PL-12 was introduced by the Australian company Transavia in 1966 for bush work such as search and rescue, ambulance duty, and agriculture and is a compact, highly maneuverable vehicle perfect for post-apocalyptic hijinks. It has a maximum speed of 195 km/hr, is 6.35 meters long, 2.79 meters high, with a wingspan of 11.98 meters.

I've heard rumors that they're making another in the Mad Max series. I hope that's true, and I hope we get to see Jedediah the Pilot make a reappearance. He was always my favorite character. Hey Bruce Spence, if you happen to be googling yourself (no shame there, I do it all the time) could you tell us your memories of working with this cool plane?

Coming up tomorrow: helicopters and balloons!

Training the Luftwaffe in peacetime

2010-05-04T01:00:00.000-07:00

During the Spanish Civil War and World War Two, the Luftwaffe was the most feared air force in the world, but it came from very humble beginnings. After the Germans lost World War One, the Treaty of Versailles made them give up their air force. The rest of Europe didn't want any more Red Barons flying around!

Once Hitler came to power in 1933 he set about rebuilding Germany's military might. He wanted a strong air force, but couldn't have any planes and in the early years he was not yet powerful enough to defy the rest of Europe. So he ordered a fleet of these gliders to train his pilots.
It's called the Aisa/Schneider SG-38 Schulgleiter ("training glider") and it trained a whole generation of German pilots on the basics of flight. They were considered sports equipment and therefore didn't fall under the ban of the Treaty of Versailles. This was a common trick of the early Third Reich, which had lots of "sports clubs" and "sports equipment" to train its young men for the next round of slaughter and ruin.
Still, it's a pretty cool glider, even if it was used for bad purposes. It would take a fair amount of guts to go aloft in one of these! For those techies out there, it's 6.28 meters long, 2.43 meters high, and has a wingspan of 10.41 meters. It weighs 95.12 kilos empty. Maximum safe speed is 30 km/hr but one brave pilot got it up to 110 km/hr. The sign didn't say who that was but I'm betting he gave the Royal Air Force a bit of trouble.

These photos were taken at the Air Museum in Madrid, Spain. I've already posted some other photos from the Museo del Aire and will be posting every day this week, so tune in for some cool aircraft.

Tomorrow: The strange little airplane that became a movie star!

The Madrid Air Museum

2010-05-03T03:39:00.001-07:00

Last weekend the family and I visited Madrid's Museo del Aire. We were impressed by its collection of more than a hundred airplanes and helicopters, along with extensive displays of equipment, motors, etc. Needless to say, my four-year-old son loved this place. One of the curators told us it's the fifth biggest air museum in the world. I'm not sure who measures these things, but I'm willing to believe it. We took so many pictures that I'll be posting on the museum every day this week. So. . .on to the good stuff!

The cool retro jet pictured above is an F-86 Sabre and one of my favorites. Introduced into the U.S. Air Force in 1947 and serving with distinction in the Korean War, Spain bought 270 of them in 1955. It had a maximum speed of 1070 km/hr and this particular example was armed with six M2 Browning 12.7mm machine guns, a 20mm canon, and 24 MK4 "Mighty Mouse" air-to-air rockets.
Here's a front view of a Saab AJ-37 Viggen "Thunderbolt". This Swedish plane was at the forefront of design when introduced in 1971. It could land with just 500 meters of airstrip thanks to strong landing gear and the ability to reverse the stream of the nozzle. It had a maximum velocity of 2124 km/hr. Armaments included a 30mm cannon, 2 Maverick and 4 Sidewinder missiles, and 24 Bofors rockets.
The French Mirage III-E served in the Spanish Air Force from 1970-92. While Spain never used them in combat, other countries used them effectively in the Six-Day War, the Yom Kippur War, and the Falklands War. It had a maximum velocity of 2,350 km/hr and carried two 30mm cannons, 900 kg of bombs, one Matra R-530 and two Sidewinder air-to-air missiles.
Besides aircraft, the museum has lots of other air-related machinery, like this searchlight dating to 1915. It saw service in the German army in the First World War and in the Spanish Civil War to protect a hydroplane base in Majorca.

Tomorrow: How the Germans trained the Luftwaffe without breaking the Treaty of Versailles, which said they couldn't have an air force!

Missing Ethiopia

2010-05-01T07:14:00.000-07:00

I've been back from Africa for a bit more than a month now and have just finished my Gadling series on travel in Ethiopia. Now I'm feeling some serious post-travel restlessness. This is common enough. A Swedish photojournalist I traveled around Somaliland with is feeling the same thing.

When the going gets tough, the traveler gets going! Now that the weather is getting nice here in Spain I'll be doing some hikes in the mountains, plus possible trips to Toledo or other interesting spots. I'll also be headed to Segovia, a beautiful medieval walled city not far from Madrid.

Speaking of beautiful medieval walled cities, I'm in the early planning stages of a two-month trip to Harar, Ethiopia. I spent some weeks there during my Ethiopia trip and totally fell in love with the people and history. There's an entire library of books that can be written on Harar, and I want to write at least one of them.

Looks like I have a travel bug that just won't die.

Two ways to drive across Africa

2010-04-26T23:51:00.000-07:00

My two months of travel in Ethiopia was an epic trip, but it was nothing next to the African voyages of some people I know.

Previously on this blog I've mentioned my friend Thomas Tomczyk, who is motorcycling across Africa. He started in South Africa late last year and is now. . .I'm not sure where. When I was in Ethiopia he emailed me from Kenya, but he's since dropped off the map. I'm sure he's all right, though. He's like me, with a talent for getting into dodgy situations and then getting out of them.

Thomas' website, Africa Heartbeat, contains his stories and pictures of various NGOs and charitable projects he's covered along the way. His latest article is about Tunaweza ("Yes we can") a group of handicapped musicians in Tanzania who are pulling down barriers not only for handicapped people, but between religions--the members are both Muslim and Christian.

Hopefully he'll get in touch soon because I'd like to hook up with him later this year when he passes through the Sahara. Nothing like a reunion with an old friend in a scorching desert in summertime.

When Almudena and I were relaxing with a drink in a hotel garden in Gondar, Ethiopia, we met a South African couple who are driving around the coast of Africa. Steve Lorimer and Roxy Harvey converted a British Army truck into a cushy living space and set out to circumnavigate Africa from Morocco down the west coast to South Africa and then up the east coast, around the north and back to Morocco. Their website OverAfrica recounts this 25,000 km journey. They've had some tough spots, with breakdowns both mechanical and physical, but their journey has been mostly positive. I was especially interested in their account of The Gambia, where I plan to go next, and Namibia, which is also high on my list. Their site also gives lots of advice for doing your own road trip across Africa.

All this is making me want to hit the road again. . .

Book Night in Madrid

2010-04-23T15:19:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the feast of St. George. While he's better known in England and Ethiopia for slaying a dragon, in Spain he's honored as the patron saint of books. So last night Madrid celebrated La Noche de los Libros.

In the evening the family and I went to hear friend and fellow writer Lawrence Schimel read his bilingual children's books in the park near our house. He's written a bunch of them and had the crowd of kids, including my son, paying attention as well as you can expect. I later asked my son which book he liked best and he replied, "All of them." I guess he's not going to grow up to be a critic. I'm relieved.

Later that night I went to hear some more readings. The streets were filled with bearded men. Black sweaters were everywhere, even more so than usual in Madrid. Pipe smoke wafted through the air. Bookshops had set out stalls in the streets. Why can't every night be like this?

First stop was Entrelíneas Librebar, a cozy little café in my barrio that sells used foreign books and small press Spanish titles. As I arrived couple was singing and playing a guitar, and while that had nothing to do with books they were pretty good. Next up was writer Escandar Algeet reading from his Alas de Mar y Prosa. Some nice turns of phrase; pity his audience was so small. I was the only one there who wasn't a friend of his! This happens when you're a struggling writer. Trust me, I know.

Then I headed to Bukowski Club, currently my favorite bar in Madrid. As you can imagine from the name, it's home to a lot of literary readings for hard-drinking writers. The rum and coke I had there was twice as strong as the one I got at Entrelíneas. I arrived in time to hear the last poem of Roberto Menéndez's Campo de amapolas and didn't really get a chance to size up his work. The crowd gave him loud applause as he finished, though, so I guess he did well. Next up was David Panadero reading from Terror en pildoras, a study of episodic horror films. He had some interesting insights and I wished he had stayed on stage longer. I'll probably buy his book eventually.

I did buy one book at Entrelíneas--Jack Black's You Can't Win, in a Spanish translation titled Nadie Gana. This is a Beat memoir written in 1926, a generation before the Beat movement. It was highly influential on William S. Burroughs, among others. It's published in Spain by Escalera, a small press that specializes in translating Beat Generation literature, and publishing books by Spanish writers with a similar style. I've been looking for this book for some time. It's one of those titles I've mean reading to read for years but was waiting to stumble across at just the right time. That always makes for an important reading experience. Those who believe in coincidence won't know what I'm talking about.

By this time I was tired and more than a little buzzed so I didn't make it to another of my favorite literary cafes in Madrid, Café Comercial. I write there a lot during the day and once got photographed by tourists because I fit in so well with the cafe's reputation!

So all in all I had a great time. I wasn't sure whether to put this post in my writing blog or here, but decided it had to do more with settling in Madrid than writing, since I was strictly a member of the audience. It doesn't hurt to have a bit of crossover on your blogs!

Next Time: two adventurous ways to cross Africa! Yes, I know I said that last post, but how could I skip La Noche de los Libros?

"The Bookworm" by Carl Spitzweg (1850) courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Settling down in Madrid

2010-04-22T03:01:00.000-07:00

After two months in Ethiopia and Somaliland, and ten days in Oxford, I'm finally back home in Madrid. Actually I've been back for a couple of weeks but things got a bit unsettled when Almudena got stranded in England due to the volcano, so it's only now that I feel I'm settling.

I won't be doing any traveling until late June, when we head back to Oxford. I was planning on going to the Italian army archives in May, but a contact in Rome tells me I have to apply three months in advance! Now I'm planning to go in September.

So how will this grizzled old traveler deal with not being on the road for two whole months? Well, I have a lot of book writing to do, plus finishing up my series of travel articles on Ethiopia, plus keeping up with this blog and my writing blog. I'll also be enjoying Madrid's nightlife, hiking, and literary scene. So stay tuned, I may be at home, but I can still explore!

Coming next: two adventurous ways to cross Africa!

Photo of Plaza de Cibeles courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Such a happy day!

2010-04-16T05:11:00.000-07:00

This last Tuesday was the 13th, which here in Spain is like Friday the 13th in Anglo culture. I'm thinking that Spanish bad luck was taking a siesta because it didn't hit us until yesterday. First off, Almudena got stuck at Heathrow airport because of the volcano shutting down European airspace, and voting ended for this round of the Fresh Blood Contest. I lost by five votes! You can read about that disaster on my writing blog.

Perhaps next week will be better. . .

Passing through Oxford

2010-04-14T02:51:00.000-07:00

I'm finally back in Madrid after more than two months on the road. I spent most of that time in Ethiopia and Somaliland working on a book on the Battle of Adowa. My series of articles about travel in Ethiopia has already started on Gadling and at the end of the month I'll start one on Somaliland.

Before settling back in Madrid the family and I spent ten days in Oxford. Almudena was collaborating with the astronomy department while I did research at the Bodleian library for my book. Julián got to see his English friends and go to camp over the Easter break. We visited the Pitt-Rivers and Natural History museums (his favorites, especially the dinosaurs) and climbed trees but sadly he didn't reacquire the English accent he had last year.

We love Oxford and spent six months here last year. There's always so much going on here and we have a good circle of friends. We had a whirlwind social schedule, including a stroll with friends through Magdalen College gardens to take these photos, and managed to pack in a fair amount of work too, plus a traditional Sunday roast at our local pub. I even managed to go to the Odyssey 2010 f/sf/h convention.

Sadly, our trip was all too short, but we'll be back in the summer for a couple of months. In the meantime I'm planning on hiking in the mountains near Madrid, remembering my Spanish as I forget my Amharic, writing lots, and spending a week in Rome at the national archives.

Frightening flags

2010-04-12T04:09:00.000-07:00

As I've mentioned before, my son loves flags, so sometimes we check out Flags of the World, a great site where we can fly around the globe in an imaginary plane and look at all the colorful flags. This one, thankfully, is not among them.

It's is from the Benin Empire, and dates to the early 19th century. That empire is now defunct, probably because they weren't as good at chopping people's heads off as the competition. I have to say it's an odd flag. A nation's banner is supposed to symbolize its very essence, what it means to be part of that nation, and this is what the leaders of the Benin Empire came up with? Ah well, that was a while ago, and the world has changed right? Nope. Exhibit A: the flag of Saudi Arabia.

The Arabic is the Shahada, the Muslim article of faith, saying, "There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah." No problem there, but what's with the sword? Is this how they want Islam to be depicted? How about giving money to the poor, which is one of the five pillars of Islam, unlike lopping people's heads or hands off. Then we have Exhibit B, the flag of Mozambique, also a modern example:

Yep, that's a Kalashnikov! The flag was adopted in 1983 and is based upon the flag of the Liberation Front of Mozambique, which fought for independence from Portugal and eventually won. A Marxist party, it incorporates as its symbol a hoe, book, and gun, a common Marxist collection to show the unity of various parts of society. In the 90s the party dropped its Marxist ideology but hasn't changed the flag. Opposition groups have called for a new image, but so far nothing has changed.

Now I know it's not politically correct to criticize anyone's culture but your own, but I have to say, "People, change your bloody flags!" And I do mean bloody. How am I supposed to explain flags like these to a four year-old?

A week left for voting in the Fresh Blood contest

2010-04-07T12:41:00.000-07:00

My Missouri Civil War horror novel A Fine Likeness is still in the running for a publishing contract. It's a finalist in Dorchester Publishing's Fresh Blood Contest. After making it through the slush pile, I and the other eight finalists had our first chapters analyzed by the judges. Only five made it over that hurdle, and now it's up to the public to decide.

For this round the public is judging cover copy, often called the back cover blurb. The judges were pretty positive with mine, although they made some fair criticisms. Drop on by the contest website and check it out. If you like my stuff you can vote by sending an email to freshblood (at) chizinepub (dot) com with the subject line "Fresh Blood Vote: A Fine Likeness by Sean McLachlan". You should get a confirmation that you voted. Voting ends April 14.

I've put a lot of work and research into this novel, which inserts supernatural horror into real history. Jesse James even gets a bit part. I'd love to see it get into print!

You can also check out the book's fanpage here.

Painless travel with a four year-old

2010-04-05T09:40:00.000-07:00

I just traveled from Madrid to Oxford with my wife and four-year-old son. This involved a twenty-minute taxi ride, two hours waiting at the airport (where I photographed a cop playing solitaire), a two-hour flight, an hour bus ride and another short taxi ride.

Doing this with a four-year-old? Piece of cake.

My son loves travel. Perhaps it's genetic, but more likely it's because he's enchanted with cars, planes, boats, buses, basically anything with a motor. Plus we make sure of three things when we're traveling:

1. He has enough to eat. A hungry kid is a grumpy kid.

2. He's comfortable. Not too hot, not too cold, and that he gets enough sleep.

3. He's entertained. We always bring coloring materials and some books, as well as a surprise. Usually it's a big glossy magazine about trains or cars. This time around it was a scuba diving magazine. We've been watching Jacques Cousteau together and I've promised him that we'll do scuba lessons for his 16th birthday. Flipping through pictures of sharks and coral reefs burned up more than an hour of flight time.

If you follow these three simple steps you can be pretty sure your kid will have an enjoyable travel experience and you won't want to kill them before landing. My son has traveled a fair amount and we've had no major blowups. Of course, we didn't take him on our road trip in Ethiopia. We'll have to wait until he's at least six for that.

The travel bug that just won't die

2010-04-02T06:26:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the long silence, but if you're a regular reader of this blog or any of my other social media outlets like Facebook or Twitter, you know I've been in Ethiopia and Somaliland for the past two months. Besides writing, my greatest love is travel. I previously posted about my travel year of 2009, which included a lot of shuttling back and forth between Spain, England, and Missouri, plus a hike across England along Hadrian's Wall and a short trip to Holland. Fun stuff, but nothing truly adventurous.

This year started well with some adventure travel. Thanks to two of my publishers, I had the money to go to the Horn of Africa, a place I've always dreamed of visiting. When I was ten I read a National Geographic article about the monastery at Debre Damo, a medieval Ethiopian monastery on top of a cliff. The only way to get there is to climb up a dodgy-looking leather rope. I thought that was the coolest thing ever and thirty years later I finally got to do it!

Almudena joined me for the first three weeks and we celebrated our tenth anniversary in Ethiopia. We did the popular historic northern loop, taking in ancient sites such as the monasteries on Lake Tana, Gondar, Axum, and Lalibela. Then she went home and I headed east to the medieval walled city of Harar and further on to Somaliland, an unrecognized state that comprises the northern third of what used to be Somalia. It was cool to visit "Somalia" and find it peaceful and friendly, but my favorite place by far was Harar. There's a special feel to walled cities that I've noticed in Damascus, Jerusalem, and Segovia. They comprise their own separate worlds, and their inhabitants are very aware of their history and culture.

So is my travel bug satiated? On the contrary, it's just woken up! I'm off to Italy in May, and hopefully The Gambia this autumn. Also, I'm going to try to convince my publishers to send me back to Ethiopia next year. I made lots of friends in Harar and I'd like to visit soon.

I'm writing a series of travel articles about Ethiopia for Gadling, and when that's done in about a month I'll do a series on Somaliland. Plus I intend to get back to blogging here on a regular basis. The Internet connection in Ethiopia was terrible. Most of the country was on dialup! Stay tuned.

What to read when you're on the road?

2010-02-03T01:28:00.000-08:00

I've been nattering on about my upcoming trip to Ethiopia for some time now, but with less than a week to go, I'm busy getting sorted. One vital bit of travel gear requires serious thought--what to read?

Since I'm writing a book on the Battle of Adwa for Osprey Publishing, I'll be bringing a map of the battlefield and photocopies from Berkeley's excellent but sadly out-of-print 1935 volume The campaign of Adowa and the rise of Menelik, as well Marcus's A History of Ethiopia. These are essential for work, but what do I bring for pleasure?

The ideal travel novel should be compact, mass market size rather than trade paperback, thick so that it will last a while, engaging but not too dense. It should be a classic or current bestseller so that I can ditch it with the confidence that I can get another copy ten years from now if I want to.

After much searching through the chaos that is my personal library I've settled on The Reprieve by Jean-Paul Sartre. It's a mass market paperback (check), 345 pages of small print (check), intellectual but not obtuse (check), and since it's by Sartre I'll never have trouble finding another copy (check).

Now I need to find a hotel in Addis Ababa. . .

Image of Adwa tapestry courtesy Joshua Sherurcij via Wikimedia Commons.

The Killer Vespa

2010-01-26T02:28:00.001-08:00

This has got to be the coolest Vespa ever.

Introducing the Vespa 150 T.A.P., a girly Euroscooter painted a less-than-girly olive drab and equipped with a manly M20 75mm recoiless rifle!

I discovered this gem while blogging about tank museums, and was impressed by the clever mix of an inexpensive scooter and dangerous firepower.

France developed these in the late 1950s, when it was strapped for cash and mired in a bitter war with their colony Algeria. Vespas were fast, cost only 500 bucks, and light enough that they could be airdropped on parachutes, making them good rapid infantry transport. The shaped charge warhead on the M20 could penetrate 100mm of armor, capable of punching through pillboxes, buildings, and lightly armored vehicles. Since there was no recoil, they could be fired from the Vespa, although ideally they were dismounted and set up on a tripod. About 800 saw use in the war. Despite this, the French lost and Algeria became a nation.

For more pictures, check out this site, and this site (the second one is in French).

Voting has started in the Fresh Blood contest

2010-01-19T04:05:00.000-08:00

Well, it's finally started. I and the other eight finalists in Dorchester Publishing's Fresh Blood Contest had our first chapters analyzed by the judges and now public voting has begun. My Missouri Civil War horror novel A Fine Likeness got off without too many slings and arrows. The chapters, judges' comments, and voting information are up on ChiZine's website.

You know, I wasn't nervous about this contest at all, even though a publishing contract is the grand prize. Perhaps organizing my trip to Ethiopia kept my mind off it, but now that voting has started I'm getting a wee bit obsessed.

You can vote by sending an email to freshblood (at) chizinepub (dot) com with the subject line "Fresh Blood Vote: A Fine Likeness by Sean McLachlan". You can insert a different title and author, of course. If you do, feel free not to tell me about it. :-P

You can also check out the book's fanpage here.

My first week on Twitter: a travel writer's perspective

2010-01-09T06:08:00.000-08:00

I finally broke down and got a Twitter account (@WriterSean). I've been slow to get into the whole technology thing, despite being a cybercommuting writer. I didn't get my first mobile phone until two years ago, and then it was a slippery slope of personal blogging, getting a job at the world's largest travel blog, getting an account on Facebook, and now this!

I've been on Twitter exactly a week. I've done 52 tweets, am following 113 people, have 95 followers, and have been listed ten times. I have no idea of the significance of all this and I don't really care.

I got onto Twitter for two reasons: to give my novel's fanpage a higher profile in preparation for the contest it's a finalist in, and to network with other writers. As far as the first reason goes, I've only gotten one more fan from my first week on Twitter--a Missouri history writer I'm glad to meet. Of course it takes time to build a following, so I'll have to wait and see how well Twitter can be used as a promotional tool. There's a fine line between self-promotion and spamming; I have to tread carefully.

The second reason, networking, has succeeded beyond my wildest expectations. I've met tons of interesting writers. Most of them are travel writers and bloggers who found me because of my links with Gadling. Their advice and retweets have given me leads to three different stories already!

So all in all I think Twitter is worth the time if you have a specific reason for using it. If you just want to blab with friends and strangers there are better outlets for that. My wife, for example, is an astronomer. She doesn't need to network through Twitter because the astronomy community is small enough that everyone pretty much knows everyone else and they have their own networking communities. She talks to distant friends on Facebook, her chosen timewaster, so she doesn't need to add Twitter. For writers, however, Twitter is fast becoming indispensable.

My travel year: a look back and a look forward

2009-12-30T05:37:00.000-08:00

So here we are on the penultimate day of 2009. It was a pretty good travel year for me. I spent six months in Oxford and made a lot of friends there and got to hike the length of Hadrian's Wall. I also spent some time in Missouri and spent a long weekend in Amsterdam, doing some research in Delft and a couple of Dutch castles.

The year 2010 is shaping up to be even better. In fact, it will be the best year since my big Kumbh Mela year of 2001! I'll be spending seven weeks in Ethiopia, and Almudena will be joining me for three weeks so we can celebrate our anniversary. I'll also be headed to Rome for some research, doing the usual stop in Missouri, a couple of months in Oxford, and another long weekend in Amsterdam. I can't miss Amsterdam, after all! I'm also hoping to meet my friend Thomas somewhere in North Africa as he's on his final leg of his trip across Africa as part of the Africa Heart Beat Project. If we can't make our schedules jive, I'll probably end up spending a week in The Gambia.

What will 2011 bring?

Christmas in Swaziland

2009-12-24T09:03:00.000-08:00

Like I mentioned in my last post, my friend Thomas Tomczyk is riding a motorcycle across Africa as part of his Africa Heart Beat Project. He started out in Johannesburg, broke down in a shanty town 25 km into his journey, got his bike fixed, and is now on his way.

Right now he's in Swaziland, a small country nestled between South Africa and Mozambique. Actually, he may be in Mozambique by now, or somewhere else entirely. The last I heard he was in Swaziland. He recently posted an interesting article about animal conservation there and there are more articles to come as he will be featuring a different project for every country he visits.

You can follow Thomas' journey on his website and Facebook page, and here of course!

I'm off on an adventure of my own soon. From Feb. 9-March 27 I'll be in Ethiopia working on a book and a series of articles for Gadling. Almudena will be coming for part of the trip so we can celebrate our tenth anniversary!

I'm going to get back to studying the map of Ethiopia. Merry Christmas, Thomas, wherever you are!

Riding across Africa on a motorcycle

2009-11-30T09:04:00.000-08:00

OK, I'm officially jealous.

I've done a lot of adventure travel in my day but I've been outclassed as an adventure traveler by an old friend of mine.

Thomas Tomczyk has just started out on a motorcycle tour of Africa, starting in South Africa and passing through 22 countries before ending up in Spain.

He says that he's past the stage of travel for travel's sake (I know the feeling) and so he's set up Africa Heart Beat, an online project to showcase various innovative NGOs he meets on the way. I've already blogged about his project here for Gadling, as well as the array of gear he's taking along to keep in touch with his Facebook page, his blog, and his YouTube channel.

Thomas is a professional writer and photographer, so you can expect some good stuff coming out of Africa for the next eight months.

I'm looking forward to hearing his insights on such projects as an AIDS theater group in Botswana, and a Muslim-Christian vocational center in Mali. I'm also hatching a plan to meet him in May or June of 2010, probably in Niger, Mauritania, or Western Sahara. Stay tuned. . .

The oldest book I ever held

2009-10-23T07:40:00.000-07:00

I just got back from five weeks of research in Missouri, where I was working on a couple of articles and my next Civil War book. I also did some research for Handgonnes: The First Black Powder Infantry Weapons, a book I'm doing for for Osprey Publishing. In the process of doing that I delved into the rare books owned by the University of Missouri library, including some reproductions of 15th century Swiss chronicles with drawings of early handgonners.

A librarian at the Rare Book room asked if I had looked at the Nuremburg Chronicle, published in 1493 and a masterpiece of early printing filled with woodcuts.

"That's OK," I said. "I don't think there are any images of guns in there."

A slow smile crept across the librarian's face.

"We have an original, not a facsimile edition," she said.

"Oh, in that case I'll look at it!" I said.

One bibliophile can sense another.

So she brings out a heavy tome and I open it up, and am immediately caught up by the detailed illustrations of saints, cities, and historic episodes. The book is a seven-part history from Creation to Armageddon, with a history of the world in between. My Latin is pretty rusty and the Gothic script was hard to read but I struggled through a couple of pages just for the thrill of it. Many of the pages had marginal notes and even doodles written by a few different hands.

Getting to hold a 500 year-old book was an amazing experience. It is almost a century older than the second oldest book I've ever held, The Principall Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation, published in 1589. To read passages that had been read by people in the Renaissance gave a real connection with the past and a sense of how different their thinking could be. I liked how the author left a few pages blank between the end of history and the description of Armageddon, allowing later writers to fill in the details. He only left eight pages so I guess he didn't think the world had much time left!
A couple of hours later I was even rewarded with something practical--what is perhaps the earliest example of someone shooting at a target. I could have easily missed it, a tiny little figure on the lower right hand corner of a vast cityscape. There isn't much detail, but it's clear he's firing an arquebus, the first gun to resemble a modern rifle, although still at a primitive stage of development. The target is seven of his body lengths away, so perhaps 35 feet, not a bad range for such an early gun. A lucky and perhaps important find from an unlikely source. It was the only image of a gun in the whole chronicle, and I wouldn't have found it if it wasn't for a fellow book lover. You'll see the image in my book once it gets published late next year.

My wife is the Spanish Carl Sagan

2009-10-13T11:35:00.000-07:00

My wife, Almudena Alonso-Herrero, is featured in a series of online programs about Spanish astronomy.

Almudena talks about the formation and evolution of galaxies. She's very photogenic and does a great job! You can see the videos here. They're in Spanish.

Is this the start of a new career for her? Will she become the Spanish Carl Sagan? I don't mind as long as she doesn't start talking like him.

Image courtesy of NASA. It was made using the Hubble Space Telescope, which Almudena uses regularly. Do I have a cool wife? Yes I do.

Missing Oxford

2009-10-05T03:19:00.000-07:00

I left Oxford a couple of weeks ago and now I'm in Missouri researching my next Civil War book. I'm also doing a bit of fiction, as usual, including my novel-in-progress that's set partially in, you guessed it, Oxford. Write what you know and all that.

The problem is, it's making me miss Oxford! Just today I was editing a chapter that has a long descriptive passage of one of my favorite spots in town, and suddenly I had a severe case of homesickness.

What to do? I won't be getting back to Oxford until April at the earliest. Perhaps missing it will help me write about it. Or maybe it will simply make writing about it torture.

Ben Indick (1923-2009)

2009-10-02T08:31:00.000-07:00

I just learned from fellow writer S.T. Joshi that an old correspondent of mine, Ben Indick, has died aged 86. Ben and I had a regular correspondence reaching back almost fifteen years. I first met him back in my zine days, when he and I used to trade our little publications. He was a big science fiction fan of the old school, meaning that while his zine supposedly was an sf publication, it covered every topic under the sun, from politics to travel to his son's career as an opera composer. It was a real pleasure corresponding with him and reading his work. Others had the same experience. As Dave Langford notes in his latest issue of Ansible, Ben was awarded this year with the First Fandom Hall of Fame Award at the 2009 Worldcon in recognition of his longtime contributions to the community. Langford had been corresponding with him since 1976.

It's a shame when one of the old guard in the small press/fan community passes on. He had been active since before I was born, and I learned a lot of community history from him. He will be missed.

What have I been doing?

2009-09-25T00:24:00.000-07:00

OK, so I spend six months in Oxford and I barely blog about it. Sorry folks, but I got a bit distracted by the real ales, beautiful countryside, and watching my kid become bilingual.

I did get a fair amount done, however, and most of my experiences ended up on Gadling. As you can see from this picture, I hiked the length of Hadrian's Wall. I started out the day after my 40th birthday as sort of a midlife crisis. I figured walking 84 miles across England would be a nice way of celebrating my imminent decrepitude. I wrote a whole series about it for Gadling.

I also visited Avebury, which got written up, along with a friend's photos, as my 101st post for Gadling. I've also ranted about Americans hiding behind the Canadian flag, studying at Oxford, medieval churches and lost villages, and Alien Big Cats. Plus a whole bunch more. So yeah, I've been busy on the blogosphere.

So what's coming up in the next month on Gadling? A tour of Jesse James sights in Missouri, and a weekend in St. Louis. What's coming up on this blog? More musings about life in Oxford and what it's like to divide your time between three different countries. Stay tuned.

The Oxford Ghost

2009-09-15T00:14:00.000-07:00

In case you haven't noticed, this blog has been a bit sporadic lately. There's two reasons for this—my paid blogging gig at Gadling takes a lot of my online time and I've been in Oxford for the past six months. What does being in Oxford have to do with not blogging? Well, it's such a nice place I don't want to be on the computer if I'm not getting paid for it! But I'm going to try to blog a bit more often now that I'm leaving. I'm not saying that Missouri (where I'm going next) or Spain (where I'll be in five weeks) are boring, but Oxford is especially distracting. Too many beautiful buildings, green parks, and cozy pubs. I mean, I work at the building you see in the picture, do you really think I want to be on the computer any more than necessary?

Anyway, here I am on my last day. I saw Julian and Almudena off on the bus this morning. They're back in Spain now and I'm headed to Missouri tomorrow to research my next Civil War book. Oxford has been a great time for us. Julian became fully bilingual, Almudena did a lot of astronomy research, and we all met tons of cool people. It's weird to be here alone for this last day. It makes me feel like a ghost!

In the past six months we've seen three different Oxfords. When we got here in late March the university was still in term and the town was filled with students. That was fun because there were a lot of cultural events and talks at the university, and my local pub had a good open mike night. Soon the summer came and the students left, to be replaced by hordes of tourists. That made the city center busy and annoying, but didn't affect us too much in the residential area where we lived. Plus I could always hide in the library and write my books, with only the sounds of the larger and louder tour groups (usually Italian or American) filtering through the window to bother me.

Now as we come into autumn the tour groups have tapered off, and only a few early students have shown up. Oxford is a bit dead. I had a coffee at my favorite cafe looking out onto Radcliffe Square and had the place almost to myself. It's gotten cooler, the leaves are changing, and the ivy on the medieval colleges has turned red. I like Oxford at this time of year.

But now I'm off to a second dose of late summer in Missouri. I'll be visiting a great group of friends I haven't seen for too long and I'm planning a Jesse James roadtrip for Gadling. I'll be sure to announce it here when I write it up.

See you later. . .and I really will try to post more often. It's amazing I still have readers!

Photo courtesy Tom Murphy VII via Wikimedia Commons.

Ichthyoelectroanalgesia!

2009-08-08T03:24:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago a fellow writer invited me to tag along to a talk at Oxford University Press about the Oxford English Dictionary, the most complete English dictionary in the world. One of the editors told us about how they put the dictionary together and all the work that goes into it. They have hundreds of readers around the world who scour through newspapers, magazines, and books looking for new words or new uses for old ones. An interesting detail was that the editors reject the majority of words people send in because they are too new, too rare, too regional, or just plain misused.

I gave them a word that probably will get rejected. Ichthyoelectroanalgesia! If you know your Classical languages, you know this means using an electric fish as a pain reliever. I came across the word in an archaeology article about old Roman and Parthian medical recipes, including one that involved pressing an area of your body that's giving you trouble against an electric fish. Apparently the low charge will relieve the pain. No, I haven't tried it.

This word stuck with me for a couple of years until I got swept up in the zine movement of the mid Nineties. Actually it started way before that, so I was hitting the second wave. Anyway, I produced my own zine dedicated to travel and archaeology and called it, you guessed it, Ichthyoelectroanalgesia. I only did four issues before I went on to other things, but I had a distribution of about two hundred and met lots of interesting people through the mail, including some I still correspond with.

I Googled my beloved word and found that two archives have copies of my zine. I've passed into zine history! One is for science fiction fanzines, which is strange since mine wasn't an sf zine, but I did trade with some sf fanzines so maybe that's where they got it from.

I'm also very proud I got to stump an editor at the OED with a word. :-)

Missouri history book wins award

2009-07-23T08:39:00.000-07:00

Earlier this year I blogged about an interesting new book on Missouri history, Mystery of the Irish Wilderness, by Leland and Crystal Payton of Lens and Pen Press. This is a fascinating account of an Irish Catholic community founded in the Ozarks that mysteriously disappeared during the Civil War. It's solidly researched and filled with the beautiful photos for which the Pyatons have become well known in Missouri.

Well, their hard work has finally paid off, and they've won a gold medal at the 2009 Independent Publisher Book Awards for Best Regional Non-Fiction.

Congratulations Leland and Crystal. You deserved it!

The Thunderbird photo and False Memory Syndrome

2009-07-09T06:05:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I was chatting with a fellow writer about a book she's writing on legendary beasts. One of my favorites is the Thunderbird, a giant dinosaur-like winged creature that haunts the American Southwest, and the conversation turned to the strange role I've played in the story of this mysterious creature.
Let me say at the outset that I don't think the Thunderbird is real. With all the aviation, birdwatchers, and development in the United States in the past century, no giant flying monster could have remained undetected. My skepticism, however, makes this story all the more interesting.

The Thunderbird is part of Native American religious belief, but that creature is like a giant bird with feathers. The more modern Thunderbird is always described as reptilian, which makes some cryptozoologoists (people who study unknown animals) think it's a pterosaur. Supposedly there was an article in the 26 April 1890 edition of the Tombstone, Arizona, Epitaph, about two cowboys shooting a creature with leathery wings like a bat and a head like an alligator. They dragged it back to town and nailed it up to a barn, its wingspan covering the barn's entire length. I haven't seen this article myself, but I know that frontier journalism often played with the truth. Mark Twain got started on fiction while working on his brother's newspaper in the Nevada Territory!

Some photos have turned up over the years. The most famous one shows a giant Thunderbird nailed to a barn with some cowboys standing nearby. I can't show it to you because it doesn't seem to exist, at least not anymore. Many investigators claim to have seen it or even owned a copy, but nobody has one now.

This is where it gets weird. I remember seeing that photo. My memory is of a fairly clear black and white image of a Thunderbird nailed to the roof of a barn, its wingspan almost equal to the barn's length. Men in old western costume are lined up on the roof and in front of the barn. I remember it looked like a rather poor cut-and-paste job. It was common for frontier people to pose next to and on a barn after a barn raising, so perhaps someone added the Thunderbird to a real photo. I even remember where I saw it, in a paranormal magazine at Bookman's, a used bookstore I used to work at in Tucson, Arizona. For some reason I didn't buy the magazine.

This must be a false memory. If the picture existed in a paranormal magazine, it would have been located by dedicated cryptozoologists by now. My experience is just like other people's, in that I have a very clear memory of the event and I no longer have the photo. Some people claim to have seen it in the possession of someone else. Others had a copy and lost it. In my case, I saw it in a magazine I didn't buy. I have unwittingly become part of an urban legend.

Weird, huh? What's going on here? Paranormal investigator Jerome Clark theorizes that the idea of the image is evocative enough to implant a false memory. Perhaps I read about the photo and created the memory? I wonder if ten years from now my writer friend will be writing another book on monsters and will be pulling her hair out trying to find that image of the Thunderbird she remembers seeing.

Oh, and not all memories of this photo are alike. This article includes the memory of a different image of the Thunderbird, and other reports say the creature was nailed to the wall of the barn, not the roof.

While I'm careful to use only public domain photos in this blog, I'm not sure these are. If they are really as old as they appear to be, than they are in the public domain. They could simply be old fakes. If they are modern fakes, then I'm in breach of copyright, but the only way the creator could sue me is if they admitted faking the photo! I'll take that chance. :-)

First photos of a three year-old

2009-07-06T08:13:00.001-07:00

My three-year-old son Julián wanted to learn how to use our digital camera, and this is his first photo. Not bad! This is, of course, yours truly and Almudena. We're at the cafe at St. Mary's church on Radcliffe Square, Oxford. Julián wanted to take a second picture and told us just how to pose.

Yeah, we have a Ph.D. and three Masters degrees between us and this is how he wants us to be remembered. He even made Mama put on his little green hat.

Dowsing for graves

2009-06-30T03:03:00.001-07:00

In the course of my research I come across some strange stuff. I've been invited to Cass County, Missouri, to present one of my history books and while searching around their historical society website I discovered an article on dowsing for graves. Apparantly two volunteers who have been participating in recording local cemeteries use a rather unorthodox technique to find them, and have published their methods in case you want to try it out for yourself.

First you need to practice on a marked cemetery to get the hang of it, and then you can venture off into likely spots to find unmarked graves. The technique is so accurate you can even tell the height and sex of the body by how the dowsing rods move.

While you're probably getting skeptical by this point (I know I am) the author claims she has actually tested this method by using it on a family plot and found three unmarked graves. When the funeral home checked two of the spots, they found coffins.

Hmmm. When I go to Cass County for the reading, I think I'll ask to see this in practice.

Back to a different Oxford

2009-06-26T06:05:00.000-07:00

I spent most of last week in The Netherlands doing some research for my next book and writing articles for Gadling. I had a great time and managed to see the grand opening of the Amsterdam branch of the Hermitage. I'll be posting more articles on Gadling next week, including a feature on Delft and one on Dutch castles.

Now I'm back in Oxford, but it's not the same as when I left. Two weeks ago the students were in the throes of exams. Now they're finished and most have left, to be replaced by ever-increasing hordes of tourists. I'll miss not having the students around; they are a big part of the atmosphere in any university town, and now that term has ended there will be fewer functions at the university. The best lecture I saw was by archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson about his Stonehenge Riverside Project. There won't be any more of those until September. Now I'll have to deal with big crowds of people walking agonizingly slowly through the center of town.

So far it hasn't been so bad. I suspect the economic downturn has slowed things down. Amsterdam had noticeably fewer people than when I last visited, and my traveling companion who was there last November said it was even slower than before, strange considering he was last there in winter and now it's summer. Maybe bad economic times will give me some respite from the tourist hordes this summer.

A book a week

2009-06-07T02:28:00.000-07:00

Fellow blogger and Missouri writer Donna Volkenannt, who describes herself as "a full-time grandmother and part-time writer, editor, and reviewer", has started a new blog where she discusses a new book every week. Every Monday she will review a book she's read.

The first book she's looking at is Secret Keepers by Mindy Friddle. This sounds like an interesting regional tale set in South Carolina in the Eighties. I won't steal Donna's thunder by repeating much here, just go over to her A Book A Week blog and check it out for yourself!

Eights Week in Oxford

2009-06-02T03:57:00.001-07:00

We just celebrated Eights Week here in Oxford. This is a rowing race in which eight-person crews from all the colleges vie to bump their way to victory. Thirteen boats line the river in order of the finish from the previous race. To get further up in line for the next race, you have to bump the boats in front, thereby switching places. This stretch of the Thames, locally called the Isis, the very narrow and encourages lots of bumping. Occasionally one of the boats gets bumped so hard it sinks!
The boats eagerly await the starting cannon.

Silly hats are an important part of any English boat race.

The cannon blasts and they're off!
Here's a bump in the making, but the folks in green managed to slip away.

Not all boats on the Isis are up to the challenge.

Donnington Bridge affords a good view.

Hard at work on the oars.

My son and I were very disappointed that nobody sank. Maybe next year!

Settled in Oxford

2009-05-23T01:31:00.000-07:00

We've been in Oxford for two months now and we've really settled down, meeting the neighbors and making friends. The problem with Oxford is that it's such a nice place with so much going on that it's hard to focus on work! We've both been trying the discipline ourselves to get enough work done each day, but as you can see from some of the posts in my other blog, I've had mixed success.

Julián has been loving Oxford. His English is much better. Back in Madrid I was the only person who regularly spoke to him in English, so while he understood everything, he didn't say much. Now he's rattling on in English, even when he's playing by himself, and he's even picking up a bit of an English accent!

The school we have him at is good too. It's a Montessori school, and that allows him to pursue his own interests, mostly things related to geography like maps and animal cards. He's also producing two or three drawings a day.

I like the diversity there too. Most of the kids are bilingual or even trilingual, and his best friend is a little Nepali guy who is so much like him I beginning to think they're twins separated at birth. His school back in Madrid is mostly Spanish kids, with only a few North Africans and South Americans, so I'm glad he's getting to interact with so many different kinds of people. The best part is that he doesn't notice the differences at all; they're just the kids he plays with! Growing up in a whites-only neighborhood and a whites-only school, I had to unlearn a few things. Hopefully he won't have to unlearn anything.

Posting on Gadling

2009-05-15T08:58:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone. Yeah, it's been two weeks since I posted on this blog. I've been pretty busy with various writing projects, including a new gig as a travel blogger on Gadling. I just started yesterday and should have a post or two on there every day from now on. As an introduction they sent me a bunch of interview questions and posted the interview here. They didn't use them all, so here's the rest of them. It's been so long since I posted you probably need to be reminded who I am anyway.

Favorite travel author? Sir Richard Francis Burton. He was an adventurer in the nineteenth century and helped discover the source of the Nile. Burton was able to pick up a language in only a few days and learned more than twenty in his lifetime. Unusually for English travelers of his day, he had a real sympathy and understanding of the African, Asian, Arab, and South American cultures he explored.

You may become the leader of any country in the world. What country and why? How would you rule? The United States because I’d have the most potential to make a change in the world. Hopefully I would get to rule as an absolute dictator so I could force a switch over to renewable energy and say goodbye to Middle East politics forever.

Person you’d most like to interview for Gadling? Sir Ranulph Fiennes, the adventurer.

Favorite tourist trap? The pyramids in Egypt. They’ve been a tourist trap since the days of Herodotus, but they’re so stunning it just doesn’t matter.

Hotel, hostel, or other? Couch surfing with friends.

Dream travel destination? Ethiopia. I’ll be going there in early 2010, so keep an eye out for my trip report!

Most remote corner of the globe you’ve visited? The border of Pakistan and Afghanistan (on the Pakistani side!). Sadly, that's Taliban territory now, so I guess I won't be seeing it again.

The ideal vacation is... me, a small backpack, a strange country, and no guidebook.

The most unusual food I’ve ever eaten is... Fried eel, in Denmark. Oh, and the various mystery meats I’ve had in some of the more remote countries I’ve visited. Best not to dwell on that too much.

Where do you hide your emergency cash? This is a family website so I better not say.

Leeches or mosquitoes? Mosquitoes. They’re harder to avoid and carry more diseases.

Favorite foreign dish? Restaurant? Pretty much anything Ethiopian. Currently my favorite restaurant is Merkato Ethiopian Restaurant at 193 Caledonian Rd., London. The owner brews his own tej, an Ethiopian mead or honey wine. It’s delicious, as is his cooking!

Worst place to catch a stomach bug? Anywhere is the worst place when it’s happening to you. The worst place I caught one was Cuzco in Peru. A beautiful city that I saw nothing of for my first two days staying there. That time in Allahabad, India, was pretty rotten too.

Solo traveler or group traveler? Solo is my preference, but one of the reasons I married my wife is because she’s one of the few people I can travel with for long periods of time without wanting to kill. She also found me ginger ale to settle my stomach when I was sick in Cuzco. Any woman who can find ginger ale in Peru at a moment’s notice is a keeper.

Connected or disconnected (re: phones, computer)? When I’m at home I’m way too connected. When I’m on the road I want to be totally disconnected.

Favorite music to listen to while traveling? None. I want to hear the sounds of the place I’m in.

First culture shock experience? When I was sixteen I was an exchange student in Denmark. My host family owned a farm. I was jetlagged and disoriented when I got there, and the first thing that happened was I discovered there’s a nasty variety of stinging grass in Denmark. The second thing I discovered was that the Danes serve fried eel as a delicacy. Then the horses started getting friendly with each other. All this happened within my first five minutes. The trip got better after that.

How did you get started traveling? I went on an exchange program to Denmark when I was sixteen and got hooked. I worked as an archaeologist for a while and that got me lots of travel. Now as a freelance writer I still get to travel.

How did you get interested in travel writing? By reading it. When I was a teenager I loved the old Victorian travel narratives. Most were horribly stuffy, but some of the adventures these folks had were truly amazing.

Type of traveler -- vagabond, luxury, camper, package, adventurer, etc.? Vagabond/adventurer when I have the time, but more and more of my trips lately have been work related. Even my trip to The Gambia later this year is partially to do a magazine article!

Favorite Gadling story? The Cuba series has gotten me terribly jealous. I need to get there.

Favorite means of transportation? I love trains, especially in India because you get to see the countryside and meet lots of people.

Other jobs? Freelance writer. I’ve written several history books and a couple of guidebooks. I also appear in magazines occasionally.

Favorite travel book? Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al Madinah and Meccah by Sir Richard Francis Burton.

Where would you buy a second home/retire? I love Oxford for its academic atmosphere and good pubs. I’m not sure the weather would agree with me when I’m in my seventies, however.

Country with the most beautiful women? Spain. Why do you think I live there?

Favorite foreign film? Kagbeni, a Nepali film. It’s a remake of the famous story The Monkey’s Paw and features beautiful shots of the rugged Nepali landscape. It’s also a really creepy ghost story! I reviewed it here.

Worst armpit visited? Taftan, on the Pakistani side of the Iranian/Pakistani border. It’s a sandy dump of a place strewn with trash and feces, both animal and human. The air is thick with flies, and the streets thick with pickpockets. I got my pocket picked the first and only hour I was there. They only got $5 in Iranian rials, but it’s the thought that counts.

Languages spoken? English (obviously!), Spanish, and I can kind of bluff my way through French and German. I learned but have forgotten Arabic, Latin, and Danish for lack of anyone to practice with.

The first thing I set out to pack is...? Spare contact lenses. They’re not easy to replace on the road. The second thing I pack are my glasses, just in case.

When I'm not writing for Gadling, I’m...? Writing for someone else, playing with my son, reading, hiking.

Most recent trip? To London, to attend the London Book Fair.

Celebrity you’d most like to sit next to in first class? Neil Armstrong. I’d love to talk to him about what it was like to walk on the Moon.

New Writing Blog

2009-05-01T04:19:00.000-07:00

I have teamed up with eight other writers to start Charge of the Write Brigade, a blog dedicated to the genres of fantasy, science fiction, and horror. It promises to be quite a useful blog. I hope to learn a lot myself, since I'm one of the least published writers on it! The first post, by yours truly, went online today.

London Book Fair Attracts Global Publishing Community

2009-04-27T08:04:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in my last post and my other blog, I recently attended the London Book Fair. This year's theme was India, and the Indian companies had a large section in the middle of the exhibition area. Not only were there lots of publishers, but there was also a concerted effort by Indian printers to become a rival to China for affordable printing services. The Indians put on some good cultural events like interviews with prominent authors such as Vikram Seth, and a troupe of Indian dancers would pop out of nowhere at random moments to do their thing. I just wish they gave away free curry like some publishers gave away free beer!

Lesser-known countries were there too. Iceland had a big booth with some beautiful books. Azerbaijan had a booth promoting both its publishing and its tourism. Dubai was promoting an upcoming children's book fair. And despite being in the "United Kingdom", Scotland and Wales had booths of their own!

Two other booths caught my eye. One was for the Muslim Writers Awards, taking place May 27 in London. The shortlisted titles were on display and included a lot of interesting work by Muslim women. I also liked the booth for the African Books Collective, which distributes African books to overseas markets. They had a huge range of titles from all over the continent, but sadly none from The Gambia. I guess I'll have to wait until I get there to find out more about that country's writers.

The London Book Fair: Sodom Or Shangra-La?

2009-04-24T07:45:00.000-07:00

I spent most of this week at the London Book Fair, a massive meeting of agents, publishers, and printers from around the world. It was a truly international fair. Englishmen gave sales pitches in Mandarin, Arabs chatted in Norwegian, and the freebies included everything from Saudi dates to Icelandic postcards. Books can really bring the world together. Or is it money that brings the world together? Whatever.

I must say some aspects of the fair bothered me. Business suits were far more in evidence than tweed jackets, and I didn't see anyone reading anything other than a contract until lunchtime of my second day. Then I saw a woman actually reading a book! Surrounded by this feverish buying and selling of writing talent, I felt like pulling a Christ-in-the-temple move and throwing the moneylenders out, shouting "Get thee to a library!"

Mixed literary metaphors aside, the fair gave me a quick education in the sheer immensity of the publishing world. It also gave me a new appreciation for the business end of the process. If it wasn't for these folks, my books wouldn't be for sale anywhere, and wouldn't be available in several different countries. I had an enjoyable and productive time, as you can read in my other blog, and I'll be posting more about the fair in this blog and that one.

Next time: trying to scam a free press trip without knowing Russian.

Outlaw Tales of Missouri Is Published!

2009-04-17T08:16:00.000-07:00

This week TwoDot Press, a subsidiary of Globe Pequot Press, released my latest book, Outlaw Tales of Missouri. The last in what I call my "Missouri trilogy" of state history books, it covers the famous and not-so-famous characters that gave Missouri the nickname of "The Outlaw State".

I've dredged the files of the State Historical Society of Missouri to find forgotten stories and little-known facts, like the tale of the Yocum brothers, who made their own silver currency in the Ozarks that was valued more than money issued by the federal government. I've also looked at familiar tales from new angles. No book on Missouri outlaws would be complete without a chapter on the James brothers, but rather than focus on Jesse, I concentrate on his older brother Frank, who got into outlawry earlier and got out sooner. Unlike Jesse, he managed to die a peaceful death.

It's a fun read, if I do say so myself, and fans of Missouri history and the Wild West will find a lot here they like. Civil War buffs will like it too, since there are chapters on the notorious William Quantrill and a lesser-known rogue who went under the alias "Harry Truman" but who was definitely NOT related to the president from Missouri!

The book is available here. My other Missouri history books include Missouri: An Illustrated History and It Happened in Missouri.

Eating Dogs And Other Arctic Survival Tips

2009-04-15T14:06:00.000-07:00

I've been reading a lot about Greenland lately in preparation for writing a novella set in Viking Greenland. One of the more interesting titles has been Those Greenland Days, by Martin Lindsay. It's about the 1930 British Arctic Air Route Expedition, written by one of the surveyors. Not exactly from the Viking era, but I've already read all the Viking sagas, so now I have to read more of the modern stuff.

I also have a personal connection to the expedition, and you may too. The explorers were studying the weather and terrain in preparation for a Transatlantic air route now used for flights between London and other northern European cities, and New York or Chicago.

But the expedition had a lot more to contend with than jetlag. They faced frigid temperatures, 100+mph winds, and remote wilderness with no chance of immediate help. They risked the real threat of being cut off and running out of food in the bleak interior of Greenland.

But they were prepared. They had a lot of dogs along to pull the sledges, but the animals served another purpose too. If the food ran out they could eat them. This had been the practice of the Inuit for centuries, and famous arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen had realized it was good insurance when he led the first expedition across Greenland in 1888. Apparantly dog tastes pretty good and is quite nutritious, and you can feed dog meat to other dogs if you still need a sledge team.

Animal rights are for people in comfortable climates. It's a bit hard to think about it, but it's our modern comforts and resources that shield us from some of the harder truths of survival.

Hopefully I won't have to eat any dogs to survive walking across England this August.

Policewomen In Wet T-Shirts

2009-04-06T14:41:00.001-07:00

It's always nice to come back to England. This week my local paper The Oxford Times reported that the Thames Valley Police would be issued new uniforms. Officials said they wanted a more modern, comfortable, cool look. I must say the new uniforms do look better, especially since they're ditching the silly bowler hats, but about halfway through the article we come upon the real reason for the changes. The old-style white shirt became transparent when wet.

Now getting your shirt wet is a common enough thing here in Old Blighty, so I feel a bit cheated. Why did I never see a policewoman in a wet t-shirt? At the first hint of rain (i.e., every day) did the fair ladies of the Thames Valley Police all take a personal day? Did they not see the crime-fighting potential in all this? They could have had criminals, who are predominantly young males, running to them instead of away from them. They could have given lectures to youthful hoodlums and actually gotten them to listen, or at least stay put and stare. Why has the government missed yet another chance to solve this country's spiral into chaos?

And what will this post do to my google ads?

Settling Down In Oxford

2009-04-02T13:39:00.000-07:00

Sorry I've been so silent this past week, but Almudena, Julián, and I just moved up to Oxford for a six-month research trip. I'm ensconced in the Bodleian Library researching two books while Almudena is working with the astronomy department. Julián is starting in a local school next week so I'll have much more time to post after that. Taking care of a three year-old all day is exhausting!

So far we've been exploring the two local parks, the local pub called The Fir Tree (serving a fine Sunday roast and guest ales) and getting in a bit of work. Today we took another look at an old pagan grove and Norman church in the village of Iffley that I blogged about last year. This weekend I'll be attending Oxfringe, a local literary festival. I'll be reporting on that next week. Busy, busy!

First Battlefield Of A Black American Regiment Preserved

2009-03-24T02:33:00.000-07:00

The Missouri Department of Natural Resources has recently aquired the site of the Battle of Island Mound and plans to preserve it as a state park. About fifty miles south of Kansas City, it was here on 29 October 1862 that the First Kansas Colored Volunteers defeated a large Confederate guerrilla force in what was the first engagement of an American black regiment.

The First Kansas had been organized by Jim Lane, a radical abolitionist senator from Kansas. The regiment was, in fact, illegal, as Abraham Lincoln had expressly forbidden him from arming blacks. Senator Lane was convinced that the only way the North would win the fight on the frontier was if it armed the black population. The First Kansas was made up of runaway slaves from Missouri and Arkansas, free blacks from Kansas, and mixed black/Indian volunteers from the Indian Territory.

The Department of Natural Resoucres plans to have the site fully open to the public in time for the Civil War Sesquicentennial in 2011.

I wrote about this battle for an issue of Missouri Life magazine several years ago and am currently pitching a book proposal on the regiment, so this comes as great news to me. Another researcher, Chris Tabor, has made an excellent website on the battle. He has also written a short monograph on the topic titled The Skirmish at Island Mound, now sadly out of print.

More Spanish Civil War Fortifications

2009-03-23T00:47:00.001-07:00

As I mentioned in my last post, a friend and I recently explored a series of bunkers in the mountains north of Madrid. They dated to the Spanish Civil War and were part of Franco's siege of the capital. We also came across a couple of barracks. They all look pretty much the same. The concrete is about a foot thick, strong enough to hold off anything except a direct hit from a bomb or artillery shell. We found nothing inside although I suppose at the time there would have been bunk beds and some other simple furniture. The doorway was protected by a small curved wall and a firehole, but the other sides were blind, so these were not meant to be defended except in case of surprise.

Beer, Bunkers, and Bullfights

2009-03-22T05:55:00.000-07:00

Last Friday, Shawn #2 and I hiked through the mountains from El Espinar to San Rafael. The trip was about 12 kilometers through rocky terrain. It wasn't the kind of hike I expected, because instead of trails most of the way was dirt roads. As we admired the boulders I noticed one in the distance that looked strange.

A closer looked revealed a bunker dating to the Spanish Civil War! It overlooks the town of Cercedilla in the valley below and was probably built by the Fascists as they tightened the noose around Madrid.

It was open, so of course we went inside, around a blind corner, and up some steps. . .

. . .to get a commanding field of fire over Cercedilla.

We decided not to restart hostilities and continued on our way, only to come across a road and an asador, the Spanish equivalent of a bar and grille. After a couple of drinks at the bar, and resisting the temptation to order steaks, we continued on and saw a couple more bunkers before getting to San Rafael an hour and a half before the next train back to Madrid. We quickly discovered San Rafael is a boring town so we retired to another bar and watched bullfights on TV while downing more beer. One brave matador did such a good job he was awarded the bull's ears, an honor in bullfighting.

All in all, a great hike, although with all those beers I don't think I got much of a workout.

Collecting Barf Bags

2009-03-16T07:42:00.000-07:00

After the postive response I got to my post on collectible barf bags, I couldn't help but do an interview with Paul Mundy, dedicated baggist and the man behind bagophily.com, one of the leading websites for the hobby of airsickness bag collecting and trading. Thanks to Paul for doing this interview and allowing me to post an image of the beautiful and odd design of the Finnaviation bag.

So the first thing everyone is wondering is: why barf bags? How did you get into this?

Do you have children? If so, you probably know that as soon as they get into your father-in-law’s car, they will throw up. We started to collect bags to cater for such emergencies: they’re good at protecting the interior décor of luxury cars. After a few years we discovered the chemical alternative – Dramamine – a simple pill prevents carsickness and has the added advantage of making the child drowsy. Just think of the benefits – no more splatter on the seats, and no more “are we there yet?” every three minutes. Our modest collection of bags went into a box.
A couple of years later my wife was clearing stuff out, and she wanted to throw the bags away. But some of them were pretty – I remember a very decorative Air Afrique with Yoruba masks. So I started to collect them.

What's the prize of your collection? Are there any rare bags you're still trying to get?

Finnaviation is every baggist’s dream bag. It shows a stylized reindeer barfing ice cubes. And I have one!
The Space Shuttle bag is probably the most sought-after bag on the planet. It’s a sturdy bag made of canvas that fits over your face like a horse’s nosebag. Can’t be too careful in zero-gravity. It has a clear plastic base so you can inspect the contents. A lot of thought went into its design. And doubtless the price pushes up the cost of the shuttle by a couple of million. I wish I had one.
Air Force One? Got one of them, but they’re pretty boring – a plain white plastic bag that comes in an envelope with instructions: "Motion sickness bag (For use during moments of stomach upset): If an upset stomach is anticipated, remove bag from this container and keep ready for use. Do not be embarrassed by this precaution as even veteran travelers are subject to occasional motion sickness.”
I hope that once Obama has dealt with the financial crisis and health care and Iraq and Afghanistan that he will find time to have a better bag designed.

Do you dream about barf bags?

No. But it sounds like a good idea. I’ll let you know if a bag features in my next dream.

Have you ever used a bag for its originally intended purpose? Was it a rare one? (I promise to tell my own air sickness story if you tell yours, or even if you don't)

No, but my wife and son have often done so. On one ferry trip from Denmark to Norway , my son and I were decorating some plain white bags with crayons. We hit a big wave, and he threw up. I’m happy to say that he had the presence of mind to miss the bag and puke on the floor. What’s your story?

Well, I didn't blow chunks myself, but I came close. I was in an eight-seater Cessna in Peru. We were on a special flight over the Nazca Lines and the plane kept banking hard from left to right so everyone could get a clear view. They'd supplied us with bags, boring little plastic baggies, not real airsickness bags at all. I was doing fine until the Dutch girl in front of me grabbed her bag and filled it. The smell of vomit filled the tiny cabin, and I nearly lost it. Luckily that was near the end of the flight so I made it back to Earth with my stomach and bag intact.

Have you ever gotten in trouble for swiping a bag?

I was at passport control once when the bags I had stolen on board the plane fell out from under my jacket onto the floor. Embarrassing, but luckily there were no other collectors around, so no mad scramble for bags ensued.

Do you collect other airline ephemera?

No. I used to pick up safety cards to swap for bags, but my wife has banned this. She thinks the plane will fall out of the sky if there’s no safety card in the seat pocket in front of you.

There's a small but active group of bag collectors on the web. When did baggists start realizing there were others out there with the same interests?

I first realized there were kindred souls when I created my own website. I wanted to learn how to do websites, and bags are an idea way to start: they’re colourful and entertaining. I created my site, then did a search – and found that there were already several other sites devoted to this noble avocation. Some collectors were already in contact with each other – they meet at collectors’ fairs and the like. But the internet makes contact and trading so much easier.

So where do you see the hobby headed? Is it in a growth period right now?

Sadly, it’s going commercial. Most of the trade now seems to take place on eBay. The bags-for-cash business is growing, with some bags fetching hundreds of euros. That’s good in some ways – it means that rare bags have a value, so non-collectors put them on the market rather than throwing them away. But it means there’s an increasing gap between the hobby collectors (like me – I don’t buy or sell) and the pros.

Amadis of Gaul--Classic Fantasy

2009-03-12T09:25:00.000-07:00

Friend and fellow writer Sue Burke has started the epic task of translating the classic fantasy Amadis of Gaul from Medieval Spanish into modern English and she's putting it up chapter by chapter for free on the web.

I hadn't heard of Amadis until I moved to Madrid. Sue describes it best. "Published in Spain in 1508, this novel is a masterpiece of medieval fantasy. It inspired a century of best-selling sequels in seven languages and changed the way we think about knights, chivalry, damsels in distress, and courtly life in castles. These books made Don Quixote go mad and imagine himself a heroic knight-errant like Amadis."

I've been reading along and find it very entertaining. It reminds me a bit of Orlando Furioso, which was probably inspired by Amadis. Lots of quests, knightly battles, and honorable derring-do.

Sue is publishing a new chapter every Tuesday and a commentary every Thursday. Her translation is excellent (she's a tireless student of Spanish) and her commentary brings the world of Late Medieval Spain to light. This book is well worth a read for anyone interested in the origins of fantasy fiction or anyone who simply loves a good read.

As Sue says, "This book drove Don Quixote mad. What will it do to you?"

Some People Will Collect Anything

2009-03-07T14:02:00.000-08:00

If you follow this blog you'll know that I like to collect paper ephemera, especially postcards, but it never ceases to amaze me what some people will find collectible. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Dutchman Niek Vermeulen has the world's largest collection of air sickness bags. That's right, barf bags. Presumably unused barf bags. At last count he had 5,468 of them from 1,065 airlines.

He's not alone. An international network of "baggists" swap air sickness bags at Bagophily.com, "the magical world of air sickness bags". The site features news and views from the world of barf bag collecting, as well as a Hall of Fame and gallery.

I don't want to hear anyone tell me I'm weird for collecting postcards ever again.

Two Million Postcards From Strangers

2009-03-03T04:25:00.000-08:00

A lot of people say written correspondence is dying out. With the advent of email and cheap telephone calls, people send far fewer letters and postcards than before.

But it may be due for a comeback. A postcard swapping organization called Postcrossing just sent its two millionth postcard last week. Postcrossing melds the internet with good, old-fashioned snail mail by having an online database and forum through which members can meet other postcard collectors--or deltiologists, if you prefer. The main activity is a random swap. A user requests to send a card and is given the address of another user and a code. The user sends the card, and when it's received, that person enters the code into the online database and the sender is now next in line to receive a card.

After only three and a half years in operation, Postcrossing has more than 80,000 members in 192 countries and just last week a member in Norway received a card from Germany that was number two million through the system. Postcrossing founder Paulo Magalhães said,

"The best part of the whole process is probably what’s done 'offline' - choosing the postcard and writing it up. And then, of course, there’s the thrill of getting a surprise in your mailbox, a postcard that was especially written for you, from anywhere in the world. The Postcrossing community has extended the 'offline' side of the project, by creating meetups that take place in several different cities in the world. There is even one happy story of a couple who met each other through Postcrossing and are now married and living together in Finland."

Postcrossing is a lot of fun and brings back the time when a trip the the mailbox wasn't just a weary search through bills and junk mail. I joined a couple of months ago and have already gotten some great cards in the mail. Actually, since my profile mentions Julián likes cards with trains and cars, about half the cards I receive are actually for him! If you're a member or if you decide to join, check out my Postcrossing profile.

Vacationing in Extreme Weather

2009-02-22T06:13:00.000-08:00

Now here's a tourism agency with balls.

The Isle of Harris, in the Outer Hebrides northwest of Scotland, is trying to get people to visit in the wintertime. That's right, visit an island that has nothing between it and the North Pole except a few hundred miles of windy North Atlantic. Where this week's weather forecast calls for fog giving way to three days of rain. Where the high this month was nine degrees.

So why winter in Harris? Well, besides cozy pubs, a unique island culture, and local crafts such as the famous Harris tweed, there is the stunning landscape, made lush by rain and rugged by scouring winds. The topography is so unusual that Stanley Kubrick used it to portray the surface of Jupiter in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bird watchers and wildlife enthusiasts will have plenty to see, such as rare golden eagles, otters, and whales in the unspoilt seas and countryside. Hikers can challenge themselves on the windswept peaks, and history buffs can explore the region's past, which has included Vikings, monks, and hardy crofters. Folklore is alive and well in the Hebrides, replete with Celtic music and traditional tales of ghosts, kelpie, and heroes. The island's very remoteness means that its culture has not been overly affected by tourism.

But why winter? Wouldn't it be better to go in summer and have a chance to actually see the sun? The Winter Harris website disagrees. There are more rooms available in winter, you see, and the rough weather can be an attraction in and of itself. With all the emphasis on extreme travel these days, braving the Arctic winds seems like it fits right in.

Like the website says, "What's the worst case scenario? Listening to an Atlantic storm in front of an open fire." I'd add a pint or two of heather ale or a glass of scotch.

Searching For Black Holes

2009-02-18T02:19:00.000-08:00

Almudena got mentioned in an article in El País today. She's going to be leading a team studying the effects of black holes on star forming regions in galactic nuclei. They'll be using the infrared detector on the new Gran Telescopio Canarias in La Palma, Canary Islands for 200 hours to get images of these regions. This has been her speciality for several years now and it's nice that she's finally getting some media attention. She even got interviewed for a sicence website! I'll be giving that link once the interview gets posted.

Snowy Oxford

2009-02-17T07:15:00.000-08:00

We were up in Oxford last week doing some research and spent much of the time snowed in. At least we were snowed in some nice bookstores and pubs! We also managed to grab some nice photos. The one above is the famous tower of Magdalen College, taken from our hotel window.

Across the street from our hotel was Merton College.

I also nabbed this nice sunset behind Magdalen College. I can't wait to be living up there for six months!

Ethiopian Mead

2009-02-13T14:00:00.000-08:00

Sorry for not posting for more than a week, but I had a busy trip to England that started with getting diverted to Bornmouth for three hours, getting practically snowed into our hotel in Oxford, and trying to travel around England in the snow and slush while writing an article for British Heritage.

Anyway, I got the article done, got some nice snowy shots of England that I'll post later, and then spent a couple of spare days in London researching my next book proposal and enjoying the city's nightlife.

One place I stopped with my friend/former housemate/drinking buddy Michael was Merkato Restaurant and Wine Bar on 196 Caledonian Rd. This is in the center of one of London's Ethiopian communities and is the best Ethiopian restaurant I've tried. The owner brews his own tej, an Ethiopian honey wine that's a bit different from European mead. It's cloudy, slightly sweeter, and has a bit of a different flavor thanks to some added spices. There's a detailed webpage about tej here, and there's even a Facebook group for tej fans. One wine bottle of tej is plenty for two people, even two seasoned veterans such as Michael and myself. If you get to London, try this restaurant, and try the tej!

Midlist Writer Awards Spirit21 the Premio Dardos Award

2009-02-02T09:52:00.001-08:00

Last week Donna over at Donna's Book Pub awarded my other blog, Midlist Writer, the Premio Dardos Award. The award is given in recognition of cultural, ethical, literary, and personal values transmitted in the form of creative and original writing.

By accepting the award, I must follow two rules:

1) Accept the award by posting it on my blog along with the name of the person that has granted the award and a link to their blog.

2) Pass the award along to blogs I find worthy of this acknowledgment.

I'm passing the award on to Shelina Zahra Janmohamed at the Spirit21 blog. Shelina is a leading voice in moderate Islam in the UK. Her work appears in the Guardian and other media outlets. She spends a lot of effort on encouraging Muslim women to speak out for themselves. It's interesting that the Western media spend so much time saying Muslim women need a voice but so rarely give them a chance to have one. Shelina has broken through this barrier and her blog and articles are well worth reading. I don't agree with everything she says (otherwise there would be no point in reading her) but her posts always give me something to think about.

It's Official: Kebabs Are Bad For You

2009-01-28T08:09:00.000-08:00

In the film Casablanca, the corrupt police captain Louis Renault tells Rick Blaine that he's shocked, shocked, to discover there's gambling going on at Rick's Café Américain. A moment later a croupier hands him his winnings.

Yesterday the BBC reported that British health officials are shocked, shocked, to discover kebabs are high in calories, fat, and salt. The favorite food of binge drinkers, harried commuters, and penny-pinching backpackers, this slime on a stick apparently has an average of just under 1000 calories, the entire daily requirement for salt, and well over daily levels of saturated fat. The kebabs were tested without the rich fatty sauce that's usually slathered on as a final step in preparation.

Officials in 76 councils tested the nutritional value of 494 kebabs. The worst offenders had 1,990 calories, more than twice the daily requirement of salt, and more than three times the daily requirement of fat. More than a third included ingredients not on the labels, including several with pork. Two of the kebabs that included pork were sold by shops that claimed to be halal, meaning that they supposedly followed Muslim dietary rules that forbid pork.

But the question remains--will this make the fattest country in Europe change its dietary habits? Probably not, considering that everyone already knows kebabs are bad for you. This is probably why they are mostly eaten by people who have just been on a bender.

On the positive side, discarded kebabs make great foraging for urban England's growing population of wild animals. When I lived in Elephant and Castle, the local fox, dubbed "smokey", lived well off of kebabs and other junk food he found in the dumpster and on the sidewalk.

After Captain Renault pockets his winnings, he blithely orders Rick's Cafe closed. He's under political pressure to do so. I wonder, after the officials at the Local Authority Coordinators of Regulatory Services made their report and satisfied their bosses, did they light up a fag and pop down to the nearest pub for a pint?

Interview Delayed

2009-01-27T12:27:00.001-08:00

Due to some technical difficulties at the station, my radio interview has been put off until the same time next Tuesday. Sorry for the inconvenience! You were listening, weren't you?

Getting Interviewed On Radio

2009-01-26T06:51:00.000-08:00

If you're in the St. Louis area, you can hear me on "John Brown's Mindset" at about 1:30 p.m. local time Tuesday, January 27, on KTRS 550 AM, St. Louis. I'll be talking about Missouri history, writing, and my latest book, It Happened In Missouri. Hope you'll tune in!

Forgotten Lands Remembered

2009-01-23T05:00:00.000-08:00

I recently stumbled across an excellent site called the QSL Museum, featuring old QSL cards. For those who aren't familiar, a QSL card is a postcard acknowledging receipt of transmission from an amateur radio operator to another operator or shortwave radio listener. QSL cards were the Facebook of the pre-Internet era, reflecting the creator's life and surroundings, and are still used today. The QSL Museum has hundreds of them online, dating back to the early years of radio in the 1920s. The ones that really caught my eye were from countries that no longer exist. Many thanks to Thomas Roscoe of the QSL Museum for permission to post these.
From 1895 to 1958, French West Africa was a federation of colonies that included the modern countries of Mauritania, Senegal, Niger, Mali, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, and Benin. It went through several political permutations, but most of the time was administered by a French governor in Dakar, now the capital of Senegal. When I go to Gambia this year, I’ll keep an eye out for ephemera from French West Africa. It was a British enclave in the middle of this vast colonial federation.
Somalia has been in the news recently because of the continued fighting and the rise of piracy, but it’s always been a contentious area. This region has strategic importance but it seems that no one power is ever able to control it for long. When the colony of British Somaliland existed from 1884 to 1960, it was surrounded by Ethiopia, Italian Somaliland, and French Somaliland (now Djibouti). British Somaliland gained its independence in 1960 but only kept it for a few days before deciding to join Italian Somaliland as a bigger nation.

Somalia is theoretically a unified country today, but after the central government collapsed in 1991 the area that once was British Somaliland declared itself the Republic of Somaliland. No country or international body has formally recognized it and the republic’s government hasn’t ruled out reunification with the rest of Somalia. It appears everyone is waiting to see if the Horn of Africa can get its act together. In the meantime, the republic’s citizens are enjoying a stable currency and relative peace. Do I see a trip in my future? Almudena and Abha are willing to go to Ethiopia, but will they follow me to Somaliland?

While not technically a country, the Penguin Islands caught my eye because I'd never heard of them. The reverse of this card gives a good description of the islands and the DX (long range transmission) expedition. Amateur radio operators like to go to obscure places and send commemorative cards to those they talk to. The colonial cards were probably not from a DX expedition, but rather Europeans working in the colony.

All 22 of the Penguin Islands are uninhabited and measure in total 10 sq. km. There's some sort of shared rule over them by Namibia and South Africa. The card doesn’t mention which island they went to, but I bet they went to Hollam’s Bird Island (S 24° 38' 0 E 14° 31' 0) which is the largest and furthest away from the shore. If you’re going to go off into the wilderness to do some Dxing, you might as well go as far as you can!

¡Viva Presidente Hussein!

2009-01-20T05:33:00.000-08:00

Today I'm off to a big inaugeration party at one of Madrid's posh hotels. I'm very happy that Julián will grow up thinking there's nothing strange about a black man being president of the most powerful country in the world. Barack Hussein Obama will be the first president he remembers. I'm glad he's too young to remember Bush!

To celebrate the occasion, I've created a new Facebook group called "President Hussein" and other Cool Names. This is a semi-serious group advocating tolerance of unusual names. Feel free to join. The description is below.

"When people hear the name 'Hussein' they tend to think of a pot-bellied Middle Eastern dictator. Well, there are millions of people named Hussein and most of them are pretty cool. One just became president of the United States, despite being hounded by certain media outlets about his middle name.
"This is a group to get rid of the stigma of foreign-sounding names. You don't have to be a Democrat to join (I'm not), you just have to be able to hear a foreign-sounding name and realize it doesn't sound foreign somewhere else in the world.
"By the way, my middle name is Geldard. Bet you haven't heard that one before!"

George Washington Wasn't All He Was Cracked Up To Be

2009-01-18T08:41:00.000-08:00

I once read an interesting anecdote about everyone's favorite hemp farmer, George Washington. He was in the habit of showing off his strength by cracking walnuts with his fingers. This got him a reputation as a man of incredible strength and probably helped the morale of the Continental Army as they froze at Valley Forge. But like almost every other story about the Founding Fathers, it isn't quite the whole truth.

You see, I can crack walnuts with my fingers too, and I'm not a man of incredible strength.

The trick is this. Find a walnut that's already a bit cracked, not so much that people will notice, just a thin crack that runs at least a third of the way along the seam. Any bag of walnuts you buy at the store will have at least a couple. Then hold it firmly with your fingers and press down on the seam with your thumb. After a bit of effort it makes a satisfyingly loud crack and impresses everyone at the table.

So Washington wasn't that strong, or at least he felt he wasn't as strong as he'd like to be and used this little parlor trick to show off.

Oh, and his army didn't freeze at Valley Forge. The men built warm winter quarters.

There are a lot of myths in popular history, but most are easy to see through.

Facebook Culture

2009-01-16T09:29:00.000-08:00

As I said in my last post, I've joined Facebook. It's an interesting little world. I've already hooked up with a lot of my old Tucson crowd, now spread over several states and a couple of countries. I've even had a few of my blog readers request to be my friends! So it's fun.

One thing I've noticed though is that it's all very frivolous. "Well yeah," you say, "It's a social networking site, what did you expect?" OK, I expected it to be a bit light, but I didn't expect people to be spending real money to send their friends virtual balloons and birthday cakes. I mean come on.

But is it really so frivolous? In her excellent book Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour, anthropologist Kate Fox says that all this social networking, texting, and twittering is important for its very frivolity. It replaces the day-to-day casual interaction our species got from millennia living in villages or wandering in tribes. Now we live in sprawling suburbs or impersonal cities, and we don't get the friendly "Hello, looks like we're in for rain" that we exchanged with the farmer two fields over, or the semi-concerned "Is your mother over her lumbago?" from the second-cousin-twice-removed at the village well.

Apparantly we need that, and it only took a generation without it before modern civilization found a way to replace it.

But I'm still not paying good money for virtual puppies.

Tuna Lickers Return to Tokyo Auction

2009-01-15T07:30:00.000-08:00

The BBC has reported that tourists will once again be allowed into Tokyo's Tsukiji fish market. Local officials imposed a month-long ban because of numerous incidents of tourists fondling, licking, and even riding the giant tuna that supply Tokyo's restaurants. Auctioneers apparantly found the tourists' antics distracting, and diners in the famously clean nation probably didn't like the idea of their sushi being sexually harassed. Workers also complained about too many camera flashes going off and trouble keeping the stall temperatures cool enough with so many visitors coming and going.

But tourism is a powerful economic force. The fish market is the largest of its kind in the world and draws thousands of visitors a year, who show up as early as five in the morning to watch the loud and competitive auctions. The market moves almost 3,000 tons of fish a day, including the giant tuna that are the most popular attraction. The spokesman for the market says that visitors will once again be allowed in, but they will have to follow the proper sanitary codes.

In other words, please don't lick the fish.

I'm On Facebook!

2009-01-13T06:03:00.000-08:00

Sorry I haven't posted for a few days but last Friday I got the page proofs for Outlaw Tales of Missouri and I've been busy going through them. It goes to press next month and should be available by March. Page proofs are the last chance to catch any errors before going to press, so I've been reading them carefully.

I've also been slacking off with that great 21st century timewaster--Facebook. You can find me at Sean McLachlan, Network: Spain. There's a tool that you can use to invite everyone on your email account's address list but I'm not going to use it. You have to give them your password! They say they don't sell your name to mailing lists and automatically delete your password. I'm sorry, but I simply don't believe that. If I haven't added you (or don't know you) feel free to send a friend request. This is probably the only way that my Arizona, Missouri, London, and Madrid circles of friends are ever going to meet.

Snowy Madrid

2009-01-09T07:35:00.000-08:00

Am I still living in Madrid? I woke up this morning and snow was coming down fast and thick. It's been snowing all day, and though it's tapered off a bit it doesn't look like it's going to stop. I've never seen this much snow in Madrid, so I went out and took some photos of my barrio.

Lots of other people were out snapping pics too, so I probably won't be the only Madrid blog posting on this!

This snowy Jesus stands in front of an old restored hospital, now a geriatric center. My wife's great uncle used to work here. I posted about this beautiful building earlier.

This is Quevedo, a famous poet from Spain's seventeenth century Golden Age. I think the snow perfectly accentuates his hose, flouncy coat, and powdered wig to create a classic yet stylish winter ensemble. I respectfully call him La Reinona Gorda, "the fat drag queen".

A Classic Novel from Ghana

2009-01-08T05:24:00.001-08:00

I just finished reading All the Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born, by Ayi Kwei Armah. It's an excellent read and the second-best book I read all year, after Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo. Armah wrote this novel in 1968, only eleven years after Ghana got its independnece, and he is often considered to be from the "second generation" of African writers. The first generation wrote around the time of independence and was filled with optimism. Things went bad quickly, though, as Armah's book shows.

The story follows an unnamed man who works in a railway office. He refuses to take bribes or be in any way involved in the corruption that's enriching his friends and destroying his nation. He knows his stance is pointless, because the corruption will continue with or without him, but he stands on his principles. It's a relentlessly pessimistic book, although the writing is beautiful and one corrupt official gets a hilarious comeuppance near the end. I highly recommend it, but not if you're in a good mood.

When Your Child Scares You

2009-01-05T09:44:00.000-08:00

Julián's obsession with flags continues. He likes looking at our visual dictionary because it has pictures of all the world's flags (along with lots of cars, his other obsession) and he also likes the Flags of the World site because it has an interactive map, a coloring section, and lots of regional and city flags too. I never thought a three year-old could get so focused on something. A couple of nights ago we were on the website, flying around Africa in our imaginary plane, and I showed him the flag of Chad:

He asked me, "Where's the crest?"

"There is no crest, kid," I replied.

He hopped off my lap, pulled the visual dictionary off the shelf, opened it to the flag section, and asked, "What flag is this, Papa?"

He was pointing to the flag of Andorra:

OK, now I'm worried.

Interesting New Book On Missouri History

2009-01-05T09:42:00.001-08:00

I've written three books on Missouri history and I'm still amazed at how many interesting stories there are still to be told about this state's fascinating past. One of them is the tale of a dedicated Irish priest who set up a colony for Irish immigrants in the rough hill country of the Ozarks. Mystery of the Irish Wilderness by Leland and Crystal Payton is the latest release from Lens & Pen Press. The Paytons are well known for their beautiful photographs of the Ozark region, and like their earlier books this volume is filled with them. The text is interesting too, telling of Father John Joseph Hogan's efforts to develop and serve two different colonies in widely separated regions of Missouri, one in the northern prairie, and the other in the Ozarks near the southern edge of the state. The first colony prospered, but the other disappeared during the chaos of the Civil War.

The Paytons meticulously reconstruct what could have happened to the colonists, and found that at least some seemed to have returned to the region after the fighting stopped. Most, however, moved away to parts unknown, so an enduring air of mystery still surrounds Hogan's Ozark colony. To complete the story, the book covers Hogan's rise to become the first bishop of Kansas City and St. Joseph's, and the successful fight by twentieth century preservationists to get the "Irish Wilderness" declared National Forest.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in Missouri, Irish-American, or Catholic history. I also enjoyed the Paytons' book See the Ozarks, also from Lens & Pen Press, about the development and reinvention of the rural region into a major holiday center. It's full of images of vintage postcards, a hobby of mine, so it was an easy sell for me!

When Will I Get To My 26th Country?

2009-01-03T10:40:00.000-08:00

I just added a fun new gadget at the bottom of this blog, showing the countries I've been to. I think 25 isn't too bad, huh? But it's only 15% of the world's countries! There are huge swathes of the planet I've never even glimpsed.

Well, this year I'm going to see country number 26. For Christmas my wife has promised me a flight to The Gambia. Spanair does cheap flights from Madrid in partnership with the Gambian government, which is trying to promote tourism. Most people go to the beach resorts, but I'll be heading up the River Gambia to see the interior. I'll also be trying to meet Gambian writers. And I'm sure my friends on Postcrossing will be bugging me for Gambian postcards!

But when? I'm not sure. Writers tend to be poor at the beginning of the year, when there are few deadlines. I need to go to England next month to research an article, and then we'll be living in Oxford from April through September, so guess it will have to be in the fall, unless I get an unbearable travel itch (and an unexpected windfall) that sends me off to Africa early.

In the meantime it's looking to be a good travel year for me. I need to go to Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam for work, and I plan to hike the length of Hadrian's Wall when I'm in England.

So what did I get Almudena? She took me to El Corte Ingles, the big department store chain in Madrid, and picked out an espresso machine. This is a great deal for me. She doesn't want to go to The Gambia, but I get to share the espresso!

Reading A Book Twice By Accident

2009-01-02T06:55:00.000-08:00

Over the holidays I started reading Gorillas Were My Neighbors by Fred C. Merfield, a big game hunter in the French Cameroons during the first half of the twentieth century. It's a fun little book from a different era, when hunters led huge safaris through the little-known jungle blasting away at animals with gleeful abandon.

As I started reading it I recognized a couple of the stories he told, but I figured they were common tales from Africa and I had read them somewhere before. It took until I was a third of the way through the book before I realized that I had read them before, in this very book. It had been sitting on my shelf since I bought it at a library sale twelve years ago, and for some reason I'd forgotten I'd read it. I guess this means my library is getting out of control. I've met people who have bought the same book twice because they forgot they already had a copy, or they simply couldn't find it on the shelves!

Remarkably, Merfield was a bit of a preservationist, calling for limits on hunting seventy years ago. He also had a lot of respect for the local cultures, although he also pointed out any flaws he saw. This is a refreshing change from modern political correctness, which sees only the good, and traditional (and modern) racism, which only sees the bad. Merfield spent most of his life in Africa, and unlike a lot of colonial officials he worked and lived with Africans. This book is well worth a read for its engaging style, exciting anecdotes, and insights into traditional cultures. Affordable used copies can easily be found at all the usual online outlets.

My Favorite Travel Post for 2008

2009-01-01T11:06:00.000-08:00

Looking back at this blog, which I started in March of this year, I see I've written 108 posts. Not bad for a beginning blogger! I think my favorite post was about the day I didn't see a yeti. It was certainly an eye-opening experience for me.

Do you blog about travel? What was your favorite post? Send me a link at seansontheweb (at) yahoo (dot) com and I'll post it here. It could be a favorite trip, a great photo you took, or some cool postcard someone sent you. Check out my other blog for similar "best of" posts I'll be covering from across the blogosphere.

This Week's Madrid Travel Tips

2008-12-30T08:46:00.000-08:00

My latest travel tips to Madrid are up on PlanetEye. This week I write about a multicultural fair in Plaza Lavapiés, a very cool Egyptian cafe, and the Titanic exhibition. Drop on by and check it out!

Flags Of The World

2008-12-26T07:12:00.000-08:00

Hmmm, never seen this flag before? Well, that's because it's not for a country but a website. To feed Julián's continuing interest in flags, I found Flags of the World. It's the Internet's biggest site devoted to vexillology (the study of flags) and has images for more than 75,000 flags. They have all the countries, of course, as well as regions, cities, military flags, etc. This is Julián's favorite site at the moment, even knocking demolition derby clips on YouTube into second place. The interactive world map is the best way to navigate the site, and there's a section for blank flags to print out and color. Suddenly our refrigerator has become covered in flags! Below is the flag of Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of Denmark that recently voted for more independence, but not full independence.

Below is the regional flag for the western province of Ilulissat Kommuniat, Jakobshavn. Glaciers and snowflakes. How appropriate!

And here is the flag for the big island just off its coast, Qeqertarsuup Kommuniat, Godhavn. Northern lights above a whale.

Hmmm...all these flags are on a white field, so they don't show up too well with a white background. They are all rectangles, as are most flags of the world with the exception of Nepal. Are there any other exceptions?

I Discovered A New Country

2008-12-23T07:07:00.000-08:00

Actually, it was there all along, but I'd never heard of it. I've been to 25 countries and I'm a big fan of maps, so I can tell you where most countries in the world are. I can't remember the last time I came across mention of a country I'd never even heard of, but it happened yesterday.

So what is this country? Niue, a Pacific Island nation northeast of New Zealand with fewer than 2,000 people. It's 269 square kilometers in size. Nieuans have their own distinct language and culture. They also have several articles on Wikipedia. Apparantly they're big into the Internet on Niue.

They're also trying to increase their tourism industry, even though they only have 90 hotel rooms. The islands offers have lots of unspoilt beaches, great scuba diving and snorkeling, and visitors get the bragging rights of having been to a country most people haven't heard of. Hopefully I'll get there someday!

This Week's Madrid Travel Tips

2008-12-21T08:41:00.000-08:00

My latest travel tips are up on PlanetEye. This week I talk about my favorite sandwich shop in barrio Malasaña, a cool museum that was once an artist's house, and the shrunken heads at the Museo Nacional de Antropología.

Today I finished my last deadline for the year, so you'll be seeing more posts from me for the next couple of months until crunch time starts again!

Muslim Lingerie A Hot Item in Syria

2008-12-18T01:45:00.000-08:00

Talk about breaking stereotypes.

The BBC just ran an interesting article on the Syrian tradition of presenting a new bride with lingerie. Apparantly the female relatives all get together and buy frilly g-strings and bras for the lucky woman. It's gotten hi-tech now with heart-shaped underwear that sing songs, and sound-sensitive bras that fall off when you clap. Reminds me of that old American TV commerical for The Clapper ("Clap on! Clap off! The Clapper!!!).

Since this all happens within the context of marriage, there's nothing unIslamic about it. In fact, the article states that in Islamic law, not getting satisfied is valid grounds for a woman to divorce a man. I didn't know that. I wonder how often that actually makes it though the courts? One of the producers of this stuff points out that it actually helps support religion, because if a couple is satisfied with each other they won't go looking elsewhere. A sizzling home life stops you from sinning.

There's an entire street dedicated to lingerie at the Damascus souk. I missed it somehow when I was there in 1994. Perhaps I saw women's clothing and ducked down another alley, assuming I wouldn't be welcome. Or perhaps I was too fascinated by that amazing bookshop behind the Blue Mosque. My loss!

This Week's Madrid Travel Tips

2008-12-14T04:08:00.000-08:00

Check out my page on PlanetEye for my latest travel tips. This week I give you a tour of some of the strange shops of Madrid (in case you need to look like a bullfighter or Dracula this holiday season) and I review an intimate café and a smoky rock bar.

Support Your Local Bookstore This Christmas!

2008-12-12T06:46:00.000-08:00

A message from the Author's Guild.

I've been talking to booksellers lately who report that times are hard. And local booksellers aren't known for vast reserves of capital, so a serious dip in sales can be devastating. Booksellers don't lose enough money, however, to receive congressional attention. A government bailout isn't in the cards.

We don't want bookstores to die. Authors need them, and so do neighborhoods. So let's mount a book-buying splurge. Get your friends together, go to your local bookstore and have a book-buying party. Buy the rest of your Christmas presents, but that's just for starters. Clear out the mysteries, wrap up the histories, beam up the science fiction! Round up the westerns, go crazy for self-help, say yes to the university press books! Get a load of those coffee-table books, fatten up on slim volumes of verse, and take a chance on romance!

There will be birthdays in the next twelve months; books keep well; they're easy to wrap: buy those books now. Buy replacements for any books looking raggedy on your shelves. Stockpile children's books as gifts for friends who look like they may eventually give birth. Hold off on the flat-screen TV and the GPS (they'll be cheaper after Christmas) and buy many, many books. Then tell the grateful booksellers, who by this time will be hanging onto your legs begging you to stay and live with their cat in the stockroom: "Got to move on, folks. Got some books to write now. You see...we're the Authors Guild."

Enjoy the holidays.

Roy Blount Jr.

President

Authors Guild

The Guild's staff informs me that many of you are writing to ask whether you can forward and post my holiday message encouraging orgiastic book-buying. Yes! Forward! Yes! Post! Sound the clarion call to every corner of the Internet: Hang in there, bookstores! We're coming! And we're coming to buy! To buy what? To buy books! Gimme a B! B! Gimme an O! O! Gimme another O! Another O! Gimme a K! K! Gimme an S! F! No, not an F, an S. We're spelling BOOKS!

Yours,

Roy

Learning the Flags on Embassy Row

2008-12-11T03:04:00.000-08:00

I was a single dad for the past nine days because Almudena was off in Oxford and Bonn for work. She brought me back a nice bottle of German mead, so all is forgiven. One of the nice things about taking care of Julián solo is I get to take him to school. It's right next to where Almudena works so usually that's her job.

Julián loves the bus. He already has several "bus friends", some of the drivers know his name, and he likes to read the numbers of the passing buses. Must be his mother's mathematical mind. His school is along embassy row, so I've been teaching him the flags. There's no better way to show off than to have your three year-old shout out, "Look, the flag of Colombia!!!"

What strikes me is how much the embassies symbolize their countries. The French embassy is a marble palace. The Japanese have a clean, modern office building. The American embassy is a fortress.

And the embassy of Canada, my own country? A little office in an upper floor of a nondescript building tucked away on a side street. Ah well.

This Week's Madrid Travel Tips

2008-12-07T09:56:00.000-08:00

Yes, my postings on this blog have been a bit thin lately, but that's because I've been buried in work, not to mention being a single dad while Almudena works in Oxford and Bonn. I did post on Planeteye this week (it's a job, after all). You can check out my reviews of a great Indian restaurant and a literary café, and a recommended reading list about the Spanish Civil War here.

History and Travel in Britain

2008-12-05T05:12:00.000-08:00

The Christmas issue of Timetravel Britain is now up. This free webzine about historic British travel has been around for several years and is always fun to read. I've contributed several articles to it, although I don't have anything in this issue. Check it out.

And if you want to see some of my articles, you might want to read about the Imperial War Museum, Southwark Cathedral, and a tour of Roman London. You can find more from yours truly in the site's index.

This Week's Madrid Travel Tips

2008-11-30T12:29:00.000-08:00

I've posted this week's travel tips on PlanetEye. It's a month since I got this job and it's been a lot of fun. It gives me a great excuse to go out at night. "Research" has become a euphemism among my friends for "going out and having a good time." I need more jobs like this.

This week I cover two art exhibits, one on Star Wars and another on the art treasures of the Catalan monastery of Montserrat. I also review a pretty good restaurant in the heart of downtown. You can see my latest postings here.