Cessna152

Port Moresby has a bad reputation. Papua New Guinea conjures images of steamy jungles, of verdant hillsides, of distant tribes with bones dangling from their noses. Its name seems to reach out and say: Come here if you want adventure! Come and see nature in the RAW! What is doesn’t usually conjure, at least to me, was violence and mayhem. Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea’s edgy capital, is a place to avoid if the media is to be believed. Travel advisories warn of the extreme violence that can befall a visitor foolish enough to step off a plane there. The chance of being robbed is very high, they say. The chance of meeting a bad guy is almost probable. The chance of being hacked and thrown into a cockroach infested pit something to consider. The main ... read more

The French founded Kingstown in the year 1722. Back then, it was a mosquito-infested settlement of rudimentary wooden dwellings with a small port to service transport ships. A few years later, the French grew weary of the heat and passed it over to the British. Then the British passed it back to the French, who scratched their heads and wondered what to do with their tropical slice of island. In the end, they decided to do what all the other islands were doing and planted some sugar cane, coffee and tobacco. Today, instead of sugar cane or coffee, bananas are the country’s biggest money-maker, closely followed by tourism. Being one of the latter who enjoyed eating the former, I was looking forward to seeing as much as I could in the one day at my disposal. ... read more

Litter was everywhere. It was as if a dumper truck had simply spewed its contents into the street. Random men were lazing about in whatever shade they could find – inside doorways, under trees, besides walls – all of them chewing khat, the ubiquitous drug of choice for men along the horn of Africa. For thousands of years, from the wilds of Yemen to the northern reaches of Kenya, millions of East African men (and sometimes women) had been chewing away on lumps of green leaves to get their stimulation. From what I could see, the men of Djibouti loved it, for all were munching away on the government-approved euphoria, cheeks bulging, teeth stained green. Every morning, fresh lorry loads arrived from neighbouring Ethiopia, which was then distributed among local khat sellers, who sold ... read more

I woke up feeling fed up again. The reason was self-evident: it was my birthday and I was going to be spending it alone in a foreign city. And not just any foreign city, but Charleroi, one I knew next to nothing about apart from that it was in Belgium. I opened my laptop to find out more. What is Charleroi all about? Charleroi, it turned out, was the fourth largest city in Belgium. It was, by most accounts, a dump, long past its heyday, with some of the highest unemployment rates in Belgium. The city was wallowing in its faded industrial past and only had one tourist site of note – a photography museum. In 2010, a Dutch newspaper described Charleroi as the ‘ugliest city in the world’. More recently, a reviewer of ... read more

I suspect nobody outside Norway has heard of the town of Moss. And why would they? Moss is a small coastal settlement sixty kilometres south of the capital, Oslo, with nothing of note except a few factories, a small harbour and a museum. Locally, I suppose, Moss’s paper mills make it somewhat famous among the people who live in the region. And perhaps some of its factories ought to be more well-known, especially the one that manufactures key cards for international hotel chains. The town’s biggest draw is the Moss Industrial Museum. Inside this illustrious establishment, exhibitions of milling and papermaking equipment abound. The museum’s website claims it also runs workshops enabling local children to make their own paper. When I read that the museum was full of Norwegian glass, I vowed to visit it myself, ... read more