“José Palacios, his oldest servant, found him floating naked with his eyes open in the purifying waters of his bath and thought he had drowned”. And so begins ‘The General in his Labyrinth, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. First published 1989. Simon Bolívar, a brilliant military tactician who liberated much of the continent of South America from centuries of Spanish rule, died at … [Read more...]
La Paz, Bolivia
One famous thing about La Paz is that it is the highest Capital city in the world and sits at about 3,500m above sea level – some bits are higher, some lower. Another famous thing is that it hosted the Dakar Rally for a couple of days (this) January 2017. I was lucky enough to travel with the Dakar Rally and stay in La Paz for a day and a half. Apart from work, my mission … [Read more...]
Dakar Rally – A View From the Inside
Descriptions of this year’s Dakar Rally in the media, once it had finished, ranged from ‘Brutal. Punishing. Exhausting. Back-breaking. Insane’ (Top Gear); … the jaw-dropping beauty and brutality of the most prestigious off-road rally on the planet. (Red Bull) The Longest and Hardest Rally in the World (Red Bull) For me – I don’t get to see much of the action … [Read more...]
Pandora’s Box – The Greatest Lessons
When I arrived and lived in Chile at the end of the ‘80s and the beginning of the ‘90s the country was at the end of an 18 year right wing dictatorship. The dictator, General Augusto Pinochet had called a referendum to decide on the future of the government, and he’d lost by a narrow margin. It was a point of pride for Chile that they had ended the dictatorship with an … [Read more...]
Las Islas Juan Fernandez – a great travel adventure
Asked to write about my greatest adventure. Hmmm. There’ve been a few and so I decided to narrow it down to adventures for which I have access to photos, and having said that I have to apologise for the quality of these images – they are scanned from photos which I thought at the time extremely top notch. The destination is Las Islas Juan Fernandez, and the reason I call … [Read more...]
