Islandboy

Ah, Polska.... A brief but enlightening encounter with a fascinating, once mighty, country. Poland is a thriving and exciting place to be, but always history abounds........ read more

Last days in the Baltics. It would be easy to say I have a grasp on this area of the world, but like many of these old cultures, it is hard to understand the mind set of the people without living amongst them for some time. However, during my 2 or so weeks of travelling around this, very Eastern, part of Europe, I feel glad to have come here, and happy with my time, and the people who I have met along the way. Before making my next trip Belarus, I looked around Vilnius and felt somewhere entirely different to either Latvia or Estonia. Something, I couldn't quite put my finger, what it was anyway. From the start , the Lithuanian s seemed much more friendly and this perhaps came from Lithuania being the least visited ... read more

Brothers from different Mothers When I crossed over the border into Mongolia, by train a month or so previeously, I realised that I had in fact never really crossed a border before. Taking planes, illiminates the ability to actually see border crossings and how close together most countries live. It makes you realise that in the UK we have been lucky in the past to never really have borders and no doubt it has saved out bacon on numnerous occaisions. In these fragile relationships, always held together or pushed apart by geography, politics and cultural difference, it is interseting to see when one 'country becomes the next' and what changes or, in fact doesn't. Take for example the poor old Mongolians, sandwhcihed between a rock and a hard place with Russia to the north and ... read more

I've been pretending to myself that I will write up all of the great times and memories that I had on my travels for almost a year now and starting to realise that it was perhaps too much of a grand task to imagine that I might have the motivation and drive to want to spend hours, days or even weeks, typing away in the hope that I might capture all of these moments before they slowly disappeared. So, as for Mongolia, The Land of the Blue Sky, without doubt the most beautiful, untouched, epic and haunting of places I have ever visited, it is once again up to pictures, for now, to convey the sense of unparalleled awe I felt in the short time I spent there. Try clicking on the pictures so you can ... read more

Parting isn't meant to be easy. It's hard to say why I came to Japan in the first place. I knew that I would struggle with cultural differences, language barriers, parting with old friends, and most obviously loneliness. When I decided that I wanted to move away from my cozy life, great job, fantastic friends and girlfriend at the time, you could say that I was leaving it all behind. In fact in the 2 years that have past since I said goodbye to the familiar shores of Blighty, I have been asked numerous times why I came to Japan, and the truth of the matter is I am still not sure and can never give a satisfying answer to anyone including myself. Even more so, for all the times that I sat alone in that ... read more