Rohingya, Myanmar, Bangladesh, New York City & Akayed Ullah
26 December 2017 | Living
My visit to Mandalay in Myanmar for the Irrawaddy Literary Festival was all about the disastrous campaign against the Muslim Rohingya people of the country’s Rakhine State. Myanmar’s genocidal campaign against the villagers in the district led to thousands of deaths a...
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Saudi Madness
22 December 2017 | Living
I love absurd countries, which is why I wrote Bad Lands and Dark Lands. Countries like North Korea, which threaten the outside world with nuclear Armageddon, but in fact couldn’t make something as simple as a bicycle. Any country – and again North Korea is a perfect e...
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Detroit – a city on the way up?
17 December 2017 | Places
I’ve blogged about Detroit a number of times over the years including when I drove through Detroit in 1994 on a coast-to-coast Odyssey in a fine old piece of ‘Detroit iron,’ a 1959 Cadillac. Or more accurately Detroit chrome.
▲ Here I am with that ’59 Cad...
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Postcards – how long to deliver?
16 December 2017 | Living
One day I’m going to mail off my last postcard, although at the moment I still regularly send off a couple of cards from my travels. One to my about-to-hit-93-years-of-age mother and one to Maureen’s even older aunt.
I’ve blogged in 2014 and again in 2016 about the...
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Death on the Highway
12 December 2017 | Living
My April to July trip from Bangkok to London along the Silk Road this year gave me plenty of opportunity to muse about safety on the roads. There was no question that we went through some countries where the roads were horribly unsafe. There was general agreement that...
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