Common Sense and Whiskey

South Atlantic Ocean Reading List

In a little over two weeks time, we'll walk aboard the world's last working Royal Mail Ship, the RMS St. Helena, for a trip to two of the world's most inaccessible spots: The islands of St. Helena (the place of Napoleon's final exile) and Ascension.

Should you ever find yourself sailing the south Atlantic Ocean, you will of course want to read up on it ahead of time. Please help yourself to our reading list. As we get ready to hit the road, here's the best we've found:

Napoleon by Paul Johnson - a tight, 187 page summary by an acclaimed historian.
Waterloo by Andrew Roberts - same kind of summary, in 132 pages.
The Osprey military histories - numerous volumes.
Rites of Peace by Adam Zamoyski - dry, academic history, including more about philandering early 19th century royals than anybody should know. Still, more than you knew.
Napoleon & St. Helena by Johannes Willms - niche thing you'd only seek out if you were going to St. Helena,  or if you just had to read everything in the world about Napoleon.
The Emporer's Last Island by Julia Blackburn - quirky story of the author's own journey to St. Helena - on the same ship we're traveling on.
Turtle Island by Sergio Ghione - nicely written tale of a month on Ascension Island.
Island Base by Captain Bob McQueen - how Ascension was transformed into a staging place for the Falklands War.
The Sun Never Sets by Simon Winchester - Winchester travels to the remaining outposts of the British empire. Simon Winchester's great.
Sailing Alone Around the World by Joshua Slocum - scant coverage of St. Helena, which Slocum visited on his 1895 - 98 voyage.

We like the Bradt Guides, because they dare to go where other tour book publishers don't. And in this case it's a good thing, because The Bradt Guide to Ascension, St. Helena and Tristan de Cunha is about your only guide.

News sources on the web:

The St. Helena Independent - a newsweekly, new every Friday.
South Atlantic News - from the South Atlantic Remote Territories Media Association. You know them. Don't you?

I've been stymied in my search for a really god map. Maybe out there on the road....

Bookmark this page and check for photo coverage on EarthPhotos.com.

The Arrival at Casablanca

Excerpted from the eventual book, Common Sense and Whiskey:

7:48 a.m., Saturday Nov. 20, Casablanca: I’d have never believed we’d have left on time. At 7:40 there wasn’t a train in sight along quai deux. At 7:45 we were underway from Casablanca Gare de Voyageurs, right on time, on the express to Marrakesh.

Gare de Voyageurs was dark but not foreboding at 7 a.m., friendly and do-able, with a short queue for billets and hot café available. Pictures of the new, young King Mohammad hadn’t yet replaced his father in the magasin.

At least at first, we were alone in our premiere classe compartment for six, the sun playing cat and mouse with clouds in a tropical-style rain, big drops but cool, a torrent that looked to occur only here just onshore. The low eastern sun made the clouds in the western sky foreboding blue.

Premiere classe cost 100 dirhams, ten bucks, for the three hour ride into Marrakech, and the Sheraton Casablanca wanted seven dollars per LaBatts. We drank two and a half round trips on the Marrakech Express in an hour last night.

*****

Royal Air Maroc’s 747 had delivered us right on time, six hours forty minutes flying time from New York Kennedy to Casablanca Mohammed V International. A twenty dollar grande taxi would surely be the most expensive in Morocco but it was a long ride, more than 45 minutes, at first through the Oulad Salah Zone Industrielle and alternately, fallow brown land. Just after dawn, with the sun so low, the fair weather clouds were lit orange from below in a definite November chill.

Horse-drawn buggy drivers in distinctive Moroccan pointy-top hooded djelaba robes and pedestrians alike stamped their feet and blew into their hands. Scooters and funny French transports. Kids with backpacks surprised us on their way to school on Friday, the Muslim holy day (they go a half day).

People stood in ones or twos on the roadside, it seemed like at random, and since we saw no buses or bus stop signs, we couldn’t tell why.  Most of the women wore head cover. Given that you see people standing absently at the roadside all across the developing world we didn’t take their loitering as indolence - it just looked that way.

Travel Around the Old Soviet Rim

Travel in former Soviet lands has a special place in my heart. When I first began to travel a little off the beaten path, in the late 80's and early 90's, the lands from the Arctic east of Finland to the Adriatic east of Italy, and all the way east to the Pacific Ocean, were in greater or lesser spasms of turmoil. Some of my fondest travel memories include wicked cold, gloomy trains and bad sausage - all part of the experience of travel in the dying Soviet Union.

With my own personal souvenir pieces of the Berlin Wall in my bags (that I had proudly chiseled from the wall myself), I spent the night on the floor of East Berlin's Lichtenberg Station in the first days of 1990, having missed the late train to Prague, where the revolution still surged ahead. From Tallin, Estonia, we watched Finnish TV with considerable alarm (and couldn't understand a thing they said) as they displayed maps of the nearby Sosnovy Bor nuclear plant's leak on 25 March, 1992. Once on a train bound for Moscow, I woke up with a bag of potatoes at my feet where my camera should have been. I found the camera several compartments down the aisle. I've forgotten what happened to the potatoes.

Here are a couple of new articles about trips around the former Soviet Union's still unkempt borders that you can take today:

- A few years ago we sailed across the Black Sea on a working ferry (not a luxury cruise liner), the M/V "Yuzhnaya Palmyra," from UKR Ferry shipping company, Istanbul to Odessa, Ukraine. This same company puts on what is probably a little more adventurous travel experience elsewhere across the Black Sea, from the Georgian port of Poti to the Ukranian port of Ilychevsk.

Read about it in the article The Ukraine-Georgia Black Sea Ferry is no package tour from georgiandaily.com, which starts like this: "The ferry connecting Ukraine and Georgia across the Black Sea is, depending on one's point of view, either a tourist experience from Hell, or one of the world's last properly adventurous sea voyages."

I'm in.

- This morning comes the BBC article Belgrade-Sarajevo railway reopens after 17 years. The former Yugoslavia wasn't part of the old Soviet Union. But when Russia's dominion collapsed, the former Yugoslavia was thrown into much worse paroxysms than much of the former Soviet space.

As the article puts it, in the 1970's & 80's "Golden Era" of Yugoslavia, "People could start the day in an Ottoman-style cafe in the Bosnian capital before taking an easy six-hour ride in comfortable carriages to party in Belgrade."

Put me down for that one, too.

*****

The book to read is Murderers in Mausoleums, Jeffrey Tayler's Moscow to Beijing adventure around the old Soviet rim.

(Top photo, of the UKR Ferry Shipping Company's M/V Yuzhnaya Palmyra at dock in Istanbul, from the Turkey Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. See also the related Ukraine Gallery and Georgia Gallery. Bottom photo, of a pedestrian street in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, from the Former Yugoslavia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)

The Last Royal Mail Ship and Guest Blogging Plans

In about six weeks time, we'll be off on the world's last royal mail ship, the RMS St. Helena, traveling up the middle of the south Atlantic ocean from the Namibian port of Walvis Bay to the islands of St. Helena and Ascension. St. Helena is among the most remote places on earth, some 1800 miles east of Brazil and 1200 miles west of Angola. Ascension, a dependency of St. Helena (itself a British Overseas Territory), lies some 600 miles further north.

St. Helena is most known as the place of final exile, and death in 1821 of Napoleon. It was chosen to hold Napoleon because of its remoteness and in fact, still today has no air field. The only scheduled service to St. Helena is via the RMS St. Helena. Ascension, meanwhile, is a communications center, sending out the BBC's World Service broadcasts to Africa and South America, and is the home of various NASA and satellite tracking stations and military installations. The RAF used Ascension as a staging area during the Falklands War. (Here's the weekly Ascension newspaper The Islander.)

We'll report on our trip here on CS&W. We'll also be guest posting on the blog associated with the travel booking site CheapoAir.com.

In March of 2007 we were booked into a quick trip to Barcelona but a snowstorm prevented us from reaching our flight at JFK airport. With several days off and nowhere to go, we booked last minute tickets to Ecuador on CheapoAir.com, at a good price and everything worked great, so we can heartily endorse them. Check out Cheapoair.com's blog and use CheapoAir.com for Cheap Tickets. We're listing them from today in our travel tools under "Cheap Tickets." Try 'em.

(See photos from Ecuador in the Ecuador Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. See also the South Atlantic News for coverage of St. Helena, Ascension, Tristan de Cunha, South Georgia and the Falklands.)

REAL Road Trips

Two remarkable trips:

Cycling Home from Siberia and
Hitchhiking the North Caucasus.

Action Plan: Australia

I've set this up to post while we're over the Pacific en route to Sydney. Come with us here on CS&W, and we'll post what I imagine (high speed internet willing) will grow to a sizable bunch of fairly unruly, unedited photos here. Here's the action plan:

Common Sense and Whiskey Road Trip

Common Sense and Whiskey gets a bit sparse for a day or two as we travel to ATL today, LAX tomorrow and from there, SYD, arriving Tuesday a.m. local time.

We'll keep a running commentary as we do the Australia circle tour, Sydney to Melbourne to Perth to Broome to Darwin, a short hop up to Dili and back, then across the "Red Centre" by train, the continent north to south, Darwin to Adelaide, aboard the Ghan. Click the little "Subscribe" button just under the masthead to subscribe for free in your reader.

Photos will post on EarthPhotos.com as we go. Bookmark this link and check it regularly for new pics.

The Friday Photo Quiz will resume in September. For now, "Cheers, Mates."

(Photo of tall ship in Sydney Harbour from EarthPhotos.com.)

The Road Ahead

It’s been a lovely summer in the southern Appalachians, with hardly a day in the 90’s, and I rue its passing in advance. Especially since where we're traveling, we'll be greeted by the shank of winter. One thing that can be said for southern Australia just now: it’s not tourist season.

On our first trip to Australia, some 14 years ago, we ran the east coast Port Douglas to Hobart. Now it’s time for the circle tour of points west.

And so we’re off in a few days, for our late summer replacement holiday. Replacement, because for reasons I’m beginning to get over now, Australia wasn’t our first choice of destination.

Not that we won’t love cruising aboard Sydney’s ferries. I have the idea that weather permitting, my camera and I will just hop aboard and see where we go. Melbourne holds out the promise of an Australian rules football match, Melbourne v. Carlton, a rivalry, I gather. R W Apple’s 1996 New York Times love letter to Perth is reason enough alone to fly west.

We’ll stop in Broome and Darwin and scoot across the Timor Sea for a brief visit to Dili before the big finish, one of the world’s great train journeys aboard the Ghan, across the “Red Centre,” the continent north to south in 51 hours and ten minutes.

We’ll post a fairly raw, unedited stream of photos to EarthPhotos.com. Give us a bookmark and watch here starting about the third week of August. And we’ll have the odd thing to say about the things we see right here on Common Sense and Whiskey. Why not subscribe?

As we say in the Appalachians, y'all, "Come go with us.”

(Photo of Hobart from the Australia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)

Welcome. No, Really.

Mauritius began badly.

-    The last bag came up the thing at the airport, followed by the bag man. "C'est tout." But we were still owed a bag. I went over and conferred, showed the receipts on the back of the ticket.

Everybody talked. Bag man walked back down the carousel and a few minutes later our last bag came up with one other. Very strange.

-    This made us the last people from the entire plane through customs, where the line stretched interminable because inspectors were dumping almost everybody's bags onto the counter, including one man who brought a quarter of all the shirts in India to sell in Mauritius. They have signs and announce on the plane that drug smuggling carries the death penalty here. I guess they mean it. They wanted to poke around in my bag a little, looking at the film cannisters and camera and asking questions, but it wasn't a scary thing, just irritating. So now we'd invested an hour in Mauritius and so far just cleared customs.

-    We had 2000 Rupees from India left over and not a bank in this airport (there's two) would buy 'em. Didn't want 'em. Indian Rupees are not money here.

-    Hertz ain't got no cars for rent.

-    Europcar does, but I can't rent one here. This is crazy, but if you don't have a reservation when you fly in, you can't take possession of a car at the airport. You have to go to a hotel or another car rental office. This is so taxis can get at least one fare from you, and I am not kidding. Our hotel was 50 kilometers across the island, so we struck a deal with the Europcar man: We'd get a cab to some place called Shandrani, at four kilometers the closest hotel, and he'd bring a car over.

-    At the end of the six dollar cab ride, a keen-eyed bellman whisked our bags in the direction of the Shandrani front desk, while Europcar man was nowhere in sight. Sigh.

Finally he showed up and we had a seat in the open air lobby. "I have no right to do business here," Mr. Europcar announced.

He ran an Amex draft and filled in 15,000 RM (nearly $1000) and wanted me to sign "in case you make an accident." Plus 1080 RM/day times three days plus 12.5% government tax. I didn't sign that, or any other as it turned out, but the long and short of it was we got ourselves a white Daihatsu Charade with no a/c. Now the Shandrani porter, who'd been camping on our bags, rolled 'em out to the Charade, staking a claim for his tip.

Gee, we'd only been in Mauritius a couple of hours and already we'd rented a car!

From the eventual book Common Sense and Whiskey by Bill Murray.

(Photo of Grand Baie, Mauritius. See more photos in the Mauritius Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)

Where to Go in Australia

Speaking of East Timor and points south (previous post), our itinerary to Australia is now set. We'll do essentially the circle grand tour, starting with Sydney and Melbourne, make a brief stop in Perth. We'll head up to the Kimberley coastal town of Broome and on to Darwin, from where we'll make the brief hop up to Dili, East Timor on Air North. On our return to Darwin, for the big finish, we'll board the Ghan, rail service through the Red Center all the way down to Adelaide.

It's still chilly in the south in August, with average lows of 41 (5C) in Melbourne. That makes for uncrowded flights and hotels that aren't full of Americans. Broome and Darwin beckon, with highs in the upper 80's (around 30 or 31).

Watch here for photos and pithy commentary throughout.

This will be our third visit, once in 1995 and another just a transit through Brisbane, really, to Papua New Guinea. See photos in the Australia Gallery and the Papua New Guinea Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Please email your favorite Aussie photography tips and suggestions.

Havana in Pictures

The folks at Painet have made me aware of a photographic trip to Cuba in October that's apparently okay with the U.S. government. Florida based photographer Bill Bachmann leads the trip. His portfolio. The offer.

Lemonade from Lemons Made in China

Out of The Ashes of our China trip rises: A trip to Australia.

Three days after we very reluctantly canceled a trip to see the longest eclipse of the 21st century on 22 July because of China's crazy quarantine policy (read the story here), ethnic Uighur/Han rioting killed some 156-odd people in Urumqi, which the Chinese news agency Xinhua called "the most serious (rioting) with the highest death toll in Xinjiang since the founding of New China in 1949." The day after the eclipse we had been scheduled to fly to Urumqi for four days in Xinjiang - in Urumqi and Kashgar - before continuing over the Torugart Pass to Kyrgyzstan.

Perhaps some trips are just ill-fated. We'll reschedule all that, eventually. We're just hoping we can make it to Kashgar before the death of its old city.

But for now we've scrambled to salvage some summer travel. Onward and upward, or rather, downward and under, we're now scheduled into Sydney next month. Details are still pending but we're expecting to enjoy the trans-continental Ghan train service, and to call in New Caledonia and East Timor, too. Expect a travelblogue here starting mid-August.

Most People Are Trying to Get OUT: Prison Tourism

"I have visited more than 140 prisons and slept in about half of them," says Jan de Cock in this weekend's FT magazine. The book resulting from his prison tourism, Hotel Prison, is available in Dutch, German and French for now. de Cock has established a foundation "to raise funding to improve the condition of prisons worldwide," as he tells Deutsche Welle.

In several articles on the web, de Cock recounts experiences like this: "I went to a prison in Congo and stayed for four weeks. It was so dirty and food was so scarce that two inmates every week died." In this article, "Jan spoke of literally hundreds of prisoners in Benin held indefinitely in confinement without legal recourse or advocacy for having been found within 300 meters of a crime scene." Here, de Cock tells us that in Japan, "Prisoners were only allowed to speak during one hour at dinner... and they would be sent to isolation if they spoke at other times or even looked the guards in the eyes.”

A little more fanciful and probably a little less deadly, here are five jail hotels where you can pay to be in prison.

(Photo from EarthPhotos.com.)

Um... well, they're not palindromes. Are they... skin diseases?

Quick: What are Akrotiri and Dhekelia? WHERE are Akrotiri and Dhekelia?

It had me stumped. It's one of the fourteen British Overseas Territories - right up there with the better known Caymans and Falklands and Bermuda. Another, Pitcairn Island, has a teeming population of 67. Akrotiri and Dhekelia is listed at a whopping 15,000, making it the fifth largest BOT.

If, like me, you can't place them, have a look at the map, which lists all fourteen, after the jump.

Antipodal Equivalent of Century Old Worst Journey

When I was younger, the book The Worst Journey in the World, the story of an ill-fated expedition to the South Pole almost a hundred years ago, made a big impression. Now comes a modern day equivalent, as told in the BBC story:

Relief as Arctic quest concludes

In the words of the modern day expedition leader expedition leader Pen Hadow,

"We've learned a lot about what's possible and what's not possible."

So far we've made it to all the continents except Antarctica, and we've  yet to make it to the North Pole. But we have made it as close as Disko Bay in Greenland. Here's a story, and there are photos in the Greenland Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Chinese Newspaper's Remotest China Travelogue

Familiar with the Wakhan corridor?

Yeah, likewise. It's the mountain pass that links China with Afghanistan, and you'll find it outside the provincial town of Tashkurgan. The new Chinese English-language daily Global Times has a long feature article, with photos, called Silk Road Lost & Found about China's extreme southwest.

Tashkurgan County runs along the Chinese borders with Afghanistan, Pakistan and Tajikistan. As the article notes, "Tashkurgan is not your typical tourism destination: It takes at least 14 hours and 3,000 yuan to get from Beijing to Tashkurgan county town via two local flights and a local bus."

Judging from the map, that local bus just might set out from Kashgar, and we'll have photo coverage of Kashgar here on CS&W in just over two months time, as we'll be traveling there to have a look at the famous Sunday market, and then move on over the Torugart Pass into Kyrgyzstan.

(Map from Global Times.)

Related articles by Zemanta

• Across China on the Silk Road (slideshare.net)
• China's march to modernity: Xinjiang city's rapid development (telegraph.co.uk)

Finding the Remotest Place on Earth

Surprising results in the article Where's the remotest place on Earth? in New Scientist magazine summarized by this map: "less than 10 per cent of the world's land is more than 48 hours of ground-based travel from the nearest city."

Having traveled between Kathmandu, Nepal and Lhasa, Tibet (Tibet, like Greenland, looks very remote on the map), I'd note that the "ground-based travel" the article refers to must be by big, hearty vehicles.

Leaving Kathmandu by LandCruiser, we arrived at Xigatse, Tibet's second city, on the third day.

There's a larger map alongside the article itself.

(Map from New Scientist magazine.)

Where to Go Next: Rwanda?

Where's the next cool place?

It's standard travel magazine fodder. Over time, Travel & Leisure has variously decided it's Montenegro, Mongolia or maybe Minneapolis, and most recently that I can find, they say it's back to the Bahamas.

Cool Travel Guide has a compilation of 2009 lists (from Buenos Aires to Beirut to Bangladesh, it's pretty much anywhere you're already thinking about going). There's even a site called wheretogonext.com.

Our prediction as a destination you'll be hearing more about: Rwanda.

We're about halfway through the fifteen year anniversary of the 100 days of Rwandan genocide that began on 6 April 1994 when the then Rwandan president's plane was brought down, and resulted in as many as 800,000 deaths. Today the Kigali Genocide Memorial Center, opened five years ago on the tenth anniversary, tells the tale from a perch overlooking the capital city.

The standard press at fifteen years mostly talks about reconciliation. The travel press is much farther down the road. Much of the travel infrastructure is so new that it's been built responsibly and eco-wise. And the numbers are up, with over a million arrivals last year.

On our own visit to Rwanda, nine months ago, we found a desperately poor country where people queue in villages, even in the shadow of the capital, to collect drinking water in jerry cans. But that vague, uneasy sense of danger (you'll know it if you've felt it) just didn't exist. And, as often in poverty, we found some of the nicest people you'll meet anywhere on the planet.

And then there's the big draw, the Virunga Mountain Gorillas, by far and away worth making the trip by themselves. We've written a lot about the Rwanda and the gorillas, but that was back before we began listing everything on CS&W in a handy index, so here are links to some posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

Top photo: The cool, verdant Virunga mountains, where Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo come together. Next photo: The Kigali Memorial Centre. Next: People queue for drinking water outside Kigali. Below: Virunga gorilla.

(See the Mountain Gorillas Gallery and the Rwanda Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)

Follow These Round-The-World Trips, in Progress

My web friend and fellow southerner (at least he lives in the south nowadays), Rick Ingersoll, aka the Frugal Travel Guy, is taking us all along on his round-the-world vacation. He and his wife Katy are now in the Swiss Alps. Follow along on his blog.

Gary Arndt, who runs the site EverythingEverywhere, has been on the road for two-plus years now. He's also in Europe at the moment. Check out his really interesting post titled How I Manage A Travel Blog On The Road.

Our own big round-the-world adventure began the day after Christmas 1994 and lasted until April 1995, covering 22 countries, and we've since done two more, shorter RTW trips. In 1995, there were no blogs, so the only coverage that lives on is the occasional story from back then (some of which are here).

In a couple of months, though, we invite you to join us here on CS&W as we explore Urumqi & the Kashi (Kashgar) Sunday market in western China, and then cross the 12,310 foot (3752 meter) Torugart Pass into Kyrgyzstan and travel on to Kazakhstan from there.

Disappointing List of Top Travel Destinations

This list of Americans' top ten travel destinations, from RickSeaney.com, is completely, entirely depressing:

1. London
2. Rome
3. Paris
4. Cancun
5. Punta Cana
6. Puerto Vallarta
7. Barcelona
8. Venice
9. Florence
10. Amsterdam

My fellow Americans, where in this list is the imagination!? The curiosity about cultures different from your own!? Any sense of the vast, wild, vivid planet!?

For anyone inclined to push just a little harder than Big Ben and the Eiffel Tower, come along with us this summer on Common Sense and Whiskey. In July we'll visit a few places a little off the West Europe/beach circuit: Szechan and Xinjiang provinces including the Sunday market at the ancient town of Kashgar in China, and then passage into Kyrgyzstan and on to Kazakhstan.

Not a margarita or a hammock in sight.