Choosing my next adventure

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.

The travel bug that just won't die

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.

My travel year: a look back and a look forward

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?

Forgotten Lands Remembered

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!

When Will I Get To My 26th Country?

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!