No matter how many times you look at Mount Tongariro, you feel the same awe when first seeing it emerge from the white. Its snow-swept sides, its changing colours throughout the day, its valleys carved from ancient glaciers and its twelve cones blasted through the earth’s crust over millennia, together paint a landscape of immense beauty.
Continue reading “Sleeping in the shadow of Mount Tongariro”
Seen from the heavens, Mount Taranaki is an inverse bomb crater. Instead of a smouldering hole at ground zero surrounded by a graduated ring of devastation, Mount Taranaki is a colossal peak covered in thick life, with mankind’s eradication of nature ring-fenced by a perfect circle surrounding the summit.
Continue reading “Walking the deep past of Mount Taranaki”
Marco Polo took half a lifetime to reach the Orient, another half to return to Venice. My ancestors took half a year to reach the antipodes, and they never saw their homeland again. Today it takes half an hour to cross a country, half a day to cross a continent. Continue reading “The Space-Time Contraction”
The RĂo Guadalquivir in Spain’s south is the artery that flows through the corazĂłn heart of AndalucĂa, ebbing through CĂłrdoba and Sevilla before spilling out into the lungs of the Doñana wetlands. At the river’s mouth lies SanlĂşcar de Barrameda, a town famed for its manzanilla wining and its seafood dining. Wanting to experience these two essential ingredients of SanlĂşcar, I went to the source of it all: the marinero district of Bonanza, home of men who spend more time at sea than at land. Continue reading “The Fishermen of SanlĂşcar de Barrameda (Feature)”
Lives and Times 