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5 Ways to Get Good Deals Abroad
Intro by Rupert Wolfe Murray. One of the purposes of this blog is to encourage people to travel and to write. I'd like to encourage people to write for this blog. I'm always looking for personal stories about travelling, or writing, and in this instance I'd like to...
Diary of my Scottish Book Tour
Some rather ridiculous impressions from my recent bike/book tour in Scotland...in diary format. The photo above is of the Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet, taken in 1987 by my friend Uli Zimmerman. 20 October, Edinburgh Today I will fly to Frankfurt, location of the...
How Aberdeen Helped me Live in Tibet
I have just cycled to the Scottish city of Aberdeen. It's sunny and I didn't know it was such an attractive city. Tomorrow at 2pm I will give a talk about my new memoir, 9 Months in Tibet, at a cool bookshop called Books and Beans. I will talk about how Aberdeen was...
Liverpool’s Gobi Desert — Part 2
Imagine you're a microscopic insect who has crawled through the hole in the middle of an old vinyl record. You look around, get your bearings but all you can see is a vast open space that stretches out to the horizon in all directions. There's nothing in the...
Liverpool’s Gobi Desert — Part 1
Camping is a paradox. On the one hand it's really simple -- you sleep outside -- but on the other hand it's really complicated: before you set off you must check you have a suitable tent (is it waterproof? do you have the poles and pegs?); do you have the right...
The Amazing Library of Liverpool
In my experience libraries are fusty places with fierce ladies telling you to be quiet, or big silent tombs where grim students bury their heads in books for hours on end. Many public libraries in Britain have been closed and others seem to be underfunded, under...
Hitching with a Migrant
I recently moved from Bucharest to Liverpool. During this transition I spent some time in London, where I got a phone call from a guy called Joel: “I work for BBC Radio 4,” he said, “and I’m making a show about hitching at night. I read your article about hitchhiking...
The Buzz of Getting Away
When I'm getting a train away from the city I often get a wonderful feeling of liberation. It's as if I’m leaving all my worries behind and heading into a bright new future where things will be different. I think some people have a similar feeling when they vote for a...
Romany Gypsies in Romania & Bulgaria
By Eion Gibbs Walking through Holland, Belgium, France, Italy and Slovenia the word gypsy didn't enter my thoughts once. This doesn't mean Traveller communities don't exist there, it's just that they're so far removed from everyone's daily lives that there was no...
Irish Travellers and Romany Gypsies
This article was written by Eion Gibbs, whom I met in Bucharest in April 2015. He was at the tail-end of a great walk across Europe, from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul, a ten-month epic in the footsteps of Patrick Leigh Fermor. After the furore I caused by...
- The Psychology of Travel - March 14, 2018