If you have never been on a road trip before, what would be your ideal first-timer destination? Could there be a better choice than California? We have made nine road trips in the US but our first remains in many ways our most memorable, and not just because it was the first. LA, San Francisco, the Big Sur, Yosemite, Joshua Tree … the list of iconic sights goes on and on.
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A short drive from bustling (and seedy) downtown Kingston, on a spit of land reaching out into the sea, lies the small and slightly shabby fishing community of Port Royal. Today it is hard to imagine that this secluded backwater was once described as ‘the richest and wickedest city in the world’. But its sleepy demeanour masks a notorious past.
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Dan Klennert is on a one-man crusade against today’s throwaway society, creating beauty out of objects others have rejected as no longer of use: ‘I do not form shapes, I collect shapes to create my forms.’ He works with junk metal and driftwood to create amazing and fantastical sculptures.
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There are several species indelibly linked in the mind with the Galápagos Islands, and one of these is certainly the blue-footed booby. The distinctive feet that give it its name, almost turquoise in colour, really are as bright and bizarre-looking as they seem in the photos!
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We travel to see things we cannot see at home: different cultures, different landscapes, different wildlife. It’s easy to think that because we share a common language, Britons visiting the US might find it too much like home. But I've never found it so.
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As one of the rainiest places in the US, the Olympic Peninsula coast is notorious for bad weather. So we counted ourselves fortunate to experience slightly damp but by no means unpleasant conditions.
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The only way to properly appreciate the vastness of Chile’s Salar de Atacama would be to fly over it; but a visit at ground level offers a spectacular sight of the varied colours of this unworldly landscape. Before you visit the Atacama you will no doubt read or be told that it is the driest non-polar desert in the world, with no significant rainfall for 400 years. It is surprising then to arrive at the Laguna Chaxa and see so much water!
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There is something a little bit different about San Antonio Palopo, one of the smaller villages on Lake Atitlàn. Most of the villages in this part of Guatemala are Tz'utujil, where bright reds and embroidered flowers are the preferred shades for huipiles, the traditional embroidered blouses. But the people of this village are Cakchiquel Maya; and almost without exception every woman and girl wears the same lovely shades of blue in narrow vertical stripes.
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Maybe a desert isn’t the obvious place to look for bird reflections, or indeed reflections of any kind. Deserts are dry, no? And the Atacama Desert in Chile is especially so. In fact, it’s the driest non-polar desert in the world, and has had no significant rainfall for 400 years. And yet, the shallow waters of its barren salt flats offer picture-perfect reflections of feeding flamingos.
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I sat motionless on the deck of our beautiful bungalow at Souimanga Lodge in Senegal. The Pied Kingfisher on the nearby fence gripped his just-caught fish in his long bill. I hoped to see him flip it and swallow it; my camera was poised to capture the moment. But suddenly the fish flapped its tail and twisted out of his grasp. Fish gone, the bird flew off, and I like him was left ruing the one that got away.
