Global Travel Writers: Articles

Finding Dylan Thomas in Old South Wales

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 01:22:00 -0400

You don't have to go searching for Dylan Thomas in Old South Wales. Quite the contrary - Dylan Thomas will come looking for YOU. Through exhibitions, museums, festivals, statues, cafes, pubs, street names, paintings, posters and snatches of words still hanging in the salty air.

Good Celts them all, the Welsh share the Irish bent for tale telling and, around Swansea, so many of the best ones concern the man Hollywood legend Shelley Winters dubbed "The Horny Welshman'. In 1950 she took him home for dinner where he drank pitchers of gin martinis served up in milk bottles by flatmate Marilyn Monroe while singing Welsh songs; the sort of ditties he'd learned at The Mermaid and The Antelope, his Swansea pubs of choice when "this sea town was my world."

I came late to the Welsh bard. Before Under Milkwood and Do Not Go Gentle, at least for me, it was Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Thomas is there on the front cover of the 1967 Beatles album, in Peter Blake's esoteric collage above Marlon Brando, beside Aldous Huxley, nearly clipped by cowboy Tom Mix' hat. Blake has confirmed that John Lennon - who is said to have sometimes carried a battered volume of Thomas on his person during his Hamburg and Liverpool leather years - was insistent on the inclusion.

As I leave Swansea and wind around its bay to Mumbles and the Gower Peninsula, on the pilgrimage trail to the Dylan Thomas boathouse and writing shack at Loughnarne, there's a copy of his Selected Poems on the car seat beside me. The back cover blurb is the right length for a traffic light stop. "Most notable for his verbal inventiveness, image-making power and almost pagan metaphysics, Dylan Thomas celebrated the glorious particulars of inner and outer landscapes in the face of weakness, mortality and decay." Not hard to see why Lennon liked him.

Far-flung to the Falklands

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 16:43:00 -0500

It's a long umbilical - 8,000 miles from Britain, 'the motherland', to the 200 islands which comprise the Falklands, deep in the South Atlantic Ocean, 400 miles east of the South American coastline, a thousand miles north of the Antarctic Peninsula. From the moment of first sight of the seemingly featureless panorama from an aircraft window it is hard to imagine two of the world's mighty nations going to war over what one claims under the name of the Falklands and the other Los Malvinas.

Over 25 years on from the war over sovereignty that claimed nearly a thousand lives, it is again an important port. Not just for its distinction as having the smallest and most remote capital city in the world but as a centre of the booming fishing license and burgeoning oil exploration industries, and as a gateway to the Antarctic Peninsula. There are no five star hotels on the Falklands but there are comfortable guest houses, decent meals at the Upland Goose Hotel and Malvina House Hotel and sufficient watering holes for an actual pub crawl to be possible.

Abu Dhabi powers ahead

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 18:55:00 -0500

Dubai may be the fastest-growing city on the planet. But its neighbour Abu Dhabi is rapidly emerging as the most powerful of the seven emirates making up the United Arab Emirates. As Abu Dhabi emerges from behind the shadow of the flashier Dubai, Glenn A Baker pays a visit to find out just why this is so.

Greenland

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 17:20:00 -0500

Our star writer Glenn A. Baker was in Greenland recently, but he's still thawing out his frozen fingers. SO...if you'd like a Greenland feature with images, please contact him using the above request form.

Israel - Tiny but Treasure-filled

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 20:17:00 -0500

For all its historical strategic significance as a crossroads of the world, for all its spiritual importance to Jews, Christians, Muslims and other faiths, Israel is not much more than a geographic flyspeck. The absurdly tiny dimensions of this compact country, just a tad bigger than New Jersey, means that visitors from much vaster lands find, to their astonishment, that one can drive from the lush green of the Galilee to the arid brown of the stony Negev in an easy afternoon. Yet within those close (and continually disputed) borders lie treasures untold.

Journey from the walled city of St. John of Acre (Acco) near the Lebanese border to the north, down past the vital sea port of Haifa, the Crusader ruins of Caesarea and the aggressive cosmopolitan street cafe flair of Tel Aviv, over to the Eternal City of Jerusalem, the untamed Beersheba, and the symbolic majesty of Masada, and up to the New Testament centres of Nazareth, Tiberias and Capernaum and you will have taken in places of residence, worship, inspiration and activity which have been revered, reviled and, at the very least, read about by millions upon millions over centuries.

Roads to Damascus

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 22:27:00 -0500

From Damascus all imaginations, if not necessarily all roads, lead eastward to the mammoth Crac des Chevaliers, the Castle of the Knights. Syria has only 183km of Mediterranean coastline and the only natural break in the mountain range that runs along it, from Beirut in Lebanon to Antakya in Turkey, is the strategic Homs Gap, where sits the imposing Crusader castle that so entranced a 20 year old T.E. Lawrence that he is reputed - acting out every schoolboy's dream of his day - to have climbed its outside wall barefooted. You don't have to take your shoes off to appreciate Syria - all that's needed is a willingness to be astonished at every turn.

Built from basalt and limestone in the 12th century to garrison thousands of troops, The Crac ders Chevaliers has thirteen towers, and inner and outer walls separated by a moat. Though not long in the possession of its builders (who eventually handed it to the Turks and went home), it was famed throughout the warring world as an impregnable edifice. From its ramparts now, on a quiet day between tour groups, when sole occupancy is a not unreasonable delusion, it seem as if the known world could lay futile siege for a year without dislodging a stone.

Of Prancer, Dancer, Rudolph and a man called Claus (Christmas in Lapland)

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 21:15:00 -0400

"It was not for the world's most adventurous and visually edifying skiing that I landed myself in Rovaniemi - the confluence of the Polar Road and the Arctic Ocean Road - a few days into a new year. I came at the behest of the eternal child inside us all; I came to give life to a dream of longstanding. I wanted to meet Santa and discuss affairs of state." So writes Glenn A. Baker about his journey in Finnish Lapland to spend time with the Jolly Red Gent, who receives and answers over a million letters a year, from children in more than fifty countries.

He finds the glossiest and most seductive travel brochure come to life. Snow-covered from October, it is one of the world's premier winter wonderlands; an accessible; enveloping realm of fells and cliffs, reindeer and sled-dogs, shimmering ice crystals and snow-laden pine trees.

Photography by David McGonigal

All dressed up in Harajuku

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 21:13:00 -0400

Harajuku, one of 29 stops on the above-ground Yamanote Line in Tokyo, boasts a street culture wildly flamboyant and imaginative. Not since San Francisco's Haight Ashbury district was in full flower forty years ago has there been anything to quite compare with it. The regular cadre of chameleons who gather on the bridge over the railway line each Sunday have made the suburb famous. The mostly middle-class high school students decorate themselves elaborately as Goths, Punks, Space Cadets, Little Misses Muffett and Bo Peep, Ghouls, Marie Antionette, belles of the ball, comic book heroines, rivals of Sherlock Holmes, parodies, carnival queens, lost prophets and patients escaped from care

Be it an elite social identification, a rebellion against schoolyard discipline, a protest against media-directed uniformity, or true artistic expression, there is an almost religious dedication to the whole process. Nothing about it is casual or half-hearted. As an observer you sometimes feel that you are in on a film shoot organised by a very avant garde European director. As one of travel's great passing parades, it can amuse and entertain even the most inured celebration seeker

The Misty Mountain Hop To Dalat

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 21:11:00 -0400

Each year more than half a million visitors make their way on Highway 20 from Ho Chi Minh City or Highway 11 from Phan Rang up more than 4,000 feet to the old 'Summer Capital' nestled among waterfalls, forests, lakes and hills in the Cao Nguyen Plateau of Lam Dong Province in Vietnam. The French lavished attention upon Dalat because it was not a Vietnamese city as much as it was their creation and their proud domain. At its peak, from the 1920s to the '40s, it educated the children of governing officials throughout the Asian region, maintained the faith of the occupiers in cathedrals and churches, and established, through comfortable villas and alpine cottages, gardens, public buildings and lakes, an ambience of European civilisation.

With Citroen and Peugot taxis, plentiful European fruits and vegetables, a mild and misty climate, recreational hunting and royal patronage, it was a posting worth pursuing. American President Theodore Roosevelt even had a hunting lodge there. Today all the elements of that extraordinary history are in place, intertwined with the culture of the Montagnard people. A very different Vietnam.

Reykjavik- The Steam Also Rises

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 21:09:00 -0400

Icelanders, let it be known, are not adverse to a good time. Even an official tourism guide for the 'Capital of Cool' declares that: " the nightlife scene in the city centre at weekends is one of hedonistic mayhem". The rise in profile of what was once dismissed as an "unlikely tourist destination" has been dramatic. It is no longer just a place to fly over. At the 2003 Guardian/Observer Travel Awards Iceland was decreed Favorite European County by British readers. Singer Bjork is at the head of a creative community that has reshaped Rekyjavik as one of the most culturally vital cities in Europe - one surrounded by a thermal wonderland of geysers, springs, lava flows, mudpots, craters, active volcanos, glaciers, waterfalls. In 1992 the geothermal spa complex known as Blue Lagoon instantly assumed the status of one Europe's most popular attractions, drawing more than two thirds of the country's annual visitor intake, which now exceeds the population by a good 30,000.

Photography by Glenn A. Baker