New travel series on Iraq

Back from the dead? Well, not really. I still get a fair number of hits on some of the posts here but I don't have any immediate plans to revive this blog. I did want to mention that I've started a new series for Gadling, which is about traveling in Iraq. I spent 17 days in the country last month and I'm writing a long series about my intense yet mostly positive experiences there. It's called Destination: Iraq. Check it out!

And if you do want to read a blog by yours truly, check out my Civil War blog.

Hiking the East Highland Way

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

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!

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!

Traveling through Africa with Border Jumpers

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

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!

Hiking La Pedriza, Spain

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.

Does being a travel writer affect the way you travel?

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.

Bits and Pieces from the Spanish Air Museum

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

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

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

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

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!