General

At the end of the street was the entrance to Ryozenji, Temple 1 of the 88 temple Shikoku pilgrimage. I had arrived here 46 days earlier, eager yet cautious about the epic walk I was about to undertake. Ryozenji was a tranquil Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Tokushima, a city on the island of Shikoku, Japan's fourth island. To see this beautiful temple for the second time meant I had officially closed the circle and completed one of the world's great pilgrimages. I looked at Ryozenji now through the eyes of someone who had lived a lifetime in the…

2024 was the anniversary of my first camino. It was twenty years since I first set out on the road to Santiago and I planned to walk the path again. I'd had a milestone birthday a few months before I did the first camino, and I'd celebrated another milestone shortly before I was due to undertake this one. I was planning to mirror the route I first walked as a novice pilgrim back in 2004. The bags were packed, the flights were booked, and then things took a turn that meant I had to cancel. Camino 6, the third Frances,…

I turned 50 recently. That's half a century. 1974 was the era of Watergate and the Vietnam War. Abba were rocking Eurovision with 'Waterloo'. The Russian menace was threatening to overrun the west. English politics was in turmoil. Joe Biden was a toothless Washington hack. China was run by an ageing and brutal dictator. There was conflict in the middle east. How so much has changed since I was born.  Even though I've been of a mature vintage (and in denial about it) for a decade, I can no longer escape the tag of being middle aged. If normal life expectancy measures…

A LIFE IN THE DAY OF MACAU Ask Chat GPT where can you find replicas of London, Venice and Paris situated within a Portuguese metropolis, where the sun never stops shining and the entire population is Chinese, and it will either respond by saying that it cannot answer such a crazy question, or it will direct you to a faraway land that seems too fanciful to be real named Macau. Its a land of casinos and churches, vice and virtue rolled up into a picture postcard peninsula of promise and riches. No one who witnesses its charms will ever be…

MADE IN TAIWAN Taiwan, an "independent" island in the Pacific, precariously close to a gigantic neighbour that looks at it with a mixture of disdain and desire, is a faraway land of mystery and opportunity. In the modern world, when one thinks of Taiwan the first thing they think of is impending war. Conventional wisdom suggested an invasion, if it were to come, would not occur before 2026. This was 2024. I'd probably dodge a proverbial bullet if I went this year.Not a country that's very high on peoples' dream destinations, I was drawn to Taiwan by a mixture of…

Caminos are to pilgrims what drinks are to alcoholics: one is too many, two isn't enough, and three isn't half enough. The Caminho Portuguese, after two instances of the Camino Francés, was like the difficult third child who had upstaged the first two better behaved ones. Were I to walk another, it might make things right with the world again. Now, I must state the walk in Portugal was not that bad. A bad experience can result from sickness, injury, being abducted, robbed, getting gored by a bull, or simply not making it out alive. The Caminho Portuguese was, at…

It was a quiet Olympic Games in 2021. With spectators banished from the stands, and some competitors unable to participate due to never ending Covid pandemic, the titanic battle between the world's greatest athletes was a more muted affair this year. Those who wanted to travel to the games to support their fellow citizens could only do so from the comforts of their own homes, and the great city of Tokyo did not get the opportunity to showcase its many charms on a global stage. While an international sporting competition may have been a good excuse to visit this thriving…