Paula & Nick Rowlands
Paula - Here we are fulfilling a long-held dream of travelling the planet. Through our travelblog have fun joining us along the way!Charmita and Olarse
Nick - I also will have fun reading Paula's travelblog.
"The mythic quest [for the perfect pint of a great beer] is more about the quest itself than it is about the object of the quest. The mythic quest is really a voyage of self-discovery, and it is therefore about the things we discover and the pints we drink along our journey. It is about the places where we go in our search for that perfect pint, and those with whom we share that experience on life's cold and windy days" (Bill Yenne, The 250-Year Quest for the Perfect Pint)
As a sesquipedalian stylist, he can throw a word like 'eponymous" into a sentence without missing a beat.
-- Campbell Patty, "The sand in the oyster", The Horn Book Magazine, May 15, 1996
"In German, there is a word, Kunstlerschuld, which means "artist's guilt", the emotion a painter feels over his frivolity in a world in which people work in a rut that makes them gloomy. Perhaps there is also a sort of traveler's guilt, from being self-contained, self-indulgent, and passing from one scene to another, brilliant or miserable makes no difference. Did the traveler, doing no observable work, freely moving among settled, serious people, get a pang of conscience? I told myself that my writing - this effort of observation - absolved me from any guilt; but of course that was just a feeble excuse. This was pleasure. No guilt, just gratitude." (Paul Theroux, The Pillars of Hercules)
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Most popular (up to entry #35) -
#22 Paula writes about The Great Wall and Terracotta Warriors
#13 Nick writes about the east coast of Brazil
#21 Nick writes about Beijing
Travel Blog Posts
March 10th 2011
(P) Known as the Brightest Jewel in the English Crown, Barbados was the first Caribbean island to be settled by the British, in 1627, and it was the first colony to produce sugar - which it still does today, although tourism brings in more cash. It was always protected from invasion by easterly winds and the fact that it is more than 100 miles from the rest of the Lesser Antilles. The east coast is wild and rugged, where Atlantic waves crash onto shore. The west is the opposite, with the gentle tide of the Caribbean sea spalshing the lightly golden sands. On this coast is located the famous Sandy Lane. We decided to take an early holiday this year, and Barbados was just the place. Although we were travelling economy, we managed to get seats ... read more
Isle of Islay
Published: September 16th 2010Europe » United Kingdom » Scotland » Argyll » Isle of Islay
August 1st 2010
For Steve’s stag weekend, we went to the Hebridean island of Islay, off the west coast of Scotland. I met up with Allan in Glasgow and after a lager on Thursday evening we flew early Friday morning, on a Saab turbojet. On this dull morning, the water droplets on the plane windows were dispersed as soon as the propellers were switched on, and to reinforce the small scale of the operation, the chief stewardess announced “I'm Helen and I am your cabin crew today!” To be fair, there were only 39 seats in total, and less than a third were occupied. A short hop over such dreamy-sounding waterways as the Firth of Clyde, the Sound of Bute and the Sound of Jura took us to Islay, just a handbrake turn before the Atlantic Ocean, a place ... read more
August 31st 2009
(P) Getting on the plane to head back to Blighty proved to be quite a kerfuffle. We had posted some stuff home but, as it turned out, not nearly enough! We both had laptop bags; mine contained a laptop and plenty of papers (perhaps passable as reading material for a very fast reader). Nick's laptop bag contained a multi-region DVD player and a carry-wallet stuffed with CDs. He also wore a t-shirt and 3 long sleeved tops, with 2 jumpers tied around the waist; as well as a large raincoat whose pockets were heaving with books and an underwater camera. For my 'handbag' I had a large bag that contained a thick photo album. Additional to the small wheelie case for hand luggage, for 'reading matter', Nick had a briefcase stuffed with photo frames and books ... read more
August 12th 2009
(N) August got off to a great start for us; my team at work won a competition that took us on holiday for a week to the Pacific island of Rarotonga! It’s probably the best prize I ever won. The brochures describe Rarotonga as “a perfect circle of rock, whose centre is a volcanic peak draped in dense green jungle, which runs down to a beach of white sand lapped by blue sea”. Such is the position of the international dateline that when we left New Zealand, it was Sunday evening and we were 11 hours ahead of the UK; but when we arrived in Rarotonga, we were 11 hours behind, in the early hours of Sunday morning. This took us a bit of time to figure out. Even though it is just 32km in circumference, ... read more
July 31st 2009
(P) As we left Stewart Island, the furthest south that we would travel, we realised that our grand tour was coming to an end. We caught the Stray bus to Queenstown where we had previously spent a little time back in March, but now this time we allowed ourselves several days to soak up this town “fit for a Queen” and also to allow us to have Nick’s birthday present in of a day’s snowboarding lessons in the nearby Cardrona valley :) Born out of the gold rush, mining in the Shotover River first attracted settlers to the area in 1860 (58 kilos was the most discovered in one day!), the Shotover became the second largest gold-bearing river in history after the Klondike in Canada. Nowadays, adventure tourism is the main draw, and Queenstown has rightly ... read more
57. What life is this if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare
Published: December 5th 2009Oceania » New Zealand » South Island » Stewart Island
July 15th 2009
(N) By the start of July, we had both stopped working, as our visas had expired. We spent the first day of the month cleaning and packing up the flat into boxes, throwing some warm clothes into a couple of smaller cases because the next morning was my birthday and we were flying down to Christchurch to start on the 2nd part of our South Island trip. You know you’re getting old when…the first birthday present you open from your partner is a tube of ‘deep wrinkle corrector’…! Fortunately the presents got better from there, and I am now looking forward to a snowboarding lesson when we are further south. Also to celebrate, we upgraded from a hostel for the night and stayed in the futuristic Hotel So, with its capsule-style feel and mood lighting, and ... read more
56. Independence in Whangamomona; plus snow on the volcano, mud baths, bungy-jumping & shark diving
Published: September 23rd 2009Oceania
June 30th 2009
(N) Just as should happen in the UK, there is a public holiday in New Zealand to celebrate our Queen’s Birthday. To make the most of this extra day of freedom, we decided to travel the approx 300km down the western side of the North Island to New Plymouth, the nearest town to the volcano named Mount Taranaki. It was not just the volcano that interested us, but also the nearby micronation of Whangamomona (pron. “Funga-mo-mona”) that we would pass through on the way. It was good weather as we left Auckland but shortly afterwards the heavens opened and it was like that for the whole day; just cloudy grey skies as far as could be seen in every direction, so we knew it wasn’t going to change anytime soon. For several hours we drove south, ... read more
55a. Bungy from Auckland Harbour Bridge
Published: June 21st 2009Oceania » New Zealand » North Island » Auckland » Central
June 19th 2009
"Bungy as we know it today started with a small group of individuals who have been throwing themselves from huge towers for centuries with nothing more than a few vines tied to their feet - the people of Vanuatu in the Pacific", says the blurb on the AJ Hackett website, the company that has replaced vines with thousands of pieces of thin white elastic all meshed together. The principle is still the same though! Nick's sister Alex and husband Cevan arrived into New Zealand from Sydney at 1:45pm on Friday afternoon, and by 2:30pm the four of us were in the AJ Hackett office booking our bungy jumps. We got strapped in our harnesses, and walked along the inside of the bridge, to the special bungy pod, 40m above the blue-green waters of Auckland harbour... Cevan ... read more
55. There are no foreign lands. It is the traveller only who is foreign (RL Stevenson)
Published: August 31st 2009Oceania » New Zealand » North Island » Auckland » Central
May 31st 2009
(N) One weekend in May, we went for a drive around the south of Auckland, firstly stopping at Otara Market, which is billed as a real mix of Pacific Island, Maori, Asian and Pakeha (European descent) stallholders each Saturday, creating a uniquely New Zealand multicultural experience, where Pacific Island elders sell traditional cloth, next to their younger counterparts selling satirical t-shirts and streetwear, with Indian and Chinese and fast food stalls all competing for business. This was a pretty fair description, as there plenty of Pacific Islanders, as well as bearded Sikhs, head-scarfed women and Chinese grocers. As well as a selection of Maori t-shirts and Polynesian music CDs (complete with a live singer), the market was mostly fruit and veg; a mixture of the familiar (apples) and the exotic (Fijian ginger), and a good chance ... read more
April 30th 2009
(P) On Good Friday we went to St. Patrick’s Cathedral in the centre of Auckland to witness the procession around the city enter the Church, led by volunteers carrying a full size cross. Around midday we picked up our old college friend Andrew from the airport and headed further up north from Auckland, predictably called Northland, and, as we had recently turned back our clocks, it was not until just after sunset that we arrived at our destination of Paihia, our base in the Bay of Islands area. One part of the car journey up there was especially impressive as we came up into the brow of a hill and suddenly the jagged Whangerei Heads came into view straight ahead, surrounded by Bream Bay, and as it was dusk the water appeared almost cloud-like and the ... read more
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