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Daniel Banks
After 4 years teaching English in South Korea the time has finally come to push against the limits of my comfortable world again. This 'limit pushing' takes the shape of a three month visit back to my hometown before 8 months in Africa, overlanding from Cairo to Cape Town. Then finally in my foreseeable future I plan to go back to school to complete my PGCE. Hmm, I'll try and push harder next time...Wildman
Travel Blog Posts
January 3rd 2010
New years eve is one of those nights that never seems to quite work out as planned. It seems as though the more thought you put into planning it and the more excited you get about it, the worse it turns out. New Years Eve 1999 was a perfect example of this. People had planned what they were going to do months in advance and had paid extortionate prices for tickets to different events that were essentially an expensive festive rehash of the tripe they dished out on most other nights of the year. Consequently most people seem to have had an awful night that year. I certainly did, although I made the mistake of trusting that Plymouth Council could organise a piss up in a brewery. It turned out they couldn't and I found myself ... read more
December 28th 2009
I got my first taste of desert travel 10 years ago when i travelled through the kalahari. It wasn't at all how I expected. Our western image of desert is of vast seas of rolling sand dunes being slowly baked by the relentless tropical sun. I found that there were a hundred different kinds of desert, ranging from scrubland dotted with huge boulders and large outcrops of exposed rock as in the northern areas of Namibia, through the cold exposed wastelands of the Skeleton Coast before they became the huge rolling expanses of the dunes of Soussevlei. Egypt has is own unique desert landscapes; the steep and craggy mountains of the Sinia peninsula dominated but I have spent the last week in the black and White deserts of Western Egypt. It seems the whole Western Desert ... read more
December 19th 2009
Whoever invented single sex dorms deserves to be shot. Dividing us all up really creates a headache for the single male. I arrived in Dahab after almost 20 hours on the bus/ plane with minimal sleep. Knackered, I wasnt looking forward to the broken nights sleep inevitable in a dorm with the comings and goings off people out on the piss and the ubiquitous hippo breather. I didnt think it would be so bad though, as I had made sure I had reserved my bed in a mixed dorm. However, metres from solace, I was met by the face of a grinning boyfriend who had been allowed to take my bed in the mixed dorm and my bed transferred to the man room. He saw the annoyance on my face, and just grinned even more smugly, ... read more
December 13th 2009
It would be fair to say that Ewan McGregor is one of the men I envy most in the world. Let's face it, he's done a lot of things we'd all love to do. Not enough that he was in probably the best British film of all time in Trainspotting (and doing nudie scenes with the beautiful Kelly MacDonald), that he has romped around with Scarlett Johannsen, and that he was cast in perhaps the most desired role of all time in the Star Wars prequels; he has also already done my dream trip. Cairo to Cape Town, overland. However, when I say done, I mean it in a loose sense. Like saying that someone who has flown over Everest in a helicopter has 'done' the mountain, or someone who has walked around London for a ... read more
November 9th 2009
Duncan: A curse on Moors and Saracens! If it were not for their ungodly ways, Master Robin would never have left. What manner of name is "Azeem"? Irish? Cornish? Azeem: Moorish. Robin Hood - Prince of Thieves (1991) When teaching my students about England, 3 things always seemed to interest them the most. They didn’t really care about the famous architecture, and if I even dared to mention history they would all fall asleep almost instantaneously. They even got bored of Stonehenge when they found out that people weren’t sacrificed there. However, the 3 things that were always guaranteed to illicit interest were - The England football team - The fact that, in an average year, rainfall will be recorded on around 300 days (you should see the sheer horror on their faces). - And finally ... read more
October 30th 2009
Back in the UK It’s funny how certain things, be they objects, places actions or words, are invested with different rules and meanings in different countries. In fact, in no two cities that I have lived in have the rules been identical. For example, if you suggest to a local in Plymouth that they might, perhaps, be a sheep bothering villain, a few words would be exchanged, but if you were to do the same thing in Cardiff then the whole establishment you were drinking in would be trying to cut your throat with fleecing knives. However, in general, the rules are fairly uniform across a country. To extend my example, if you were to suggest to a group of lads clad in Burberry and sporting large gold sovereign rings, regardless of which British city ... read more
August 8th 2009
Most people who know me would probably suggest that I am rather opinionated, and have a lot of trouble accepting somebody else's viewpoint. Especially when I think it is total bolux. This has lead to a number of heated exchanges over the years, perhaps the most notable being almost getting into a fight with 6 boys from Efford who disagreed with my assertion that Plymouth was rubbish. These days I don't do anything as daft as randomly talking to inebriated groups of Ben Sherman toting boys, and restrict my debates to classrooms full of Korean women. Much more pleasant in every conceivable way, I'm sure you'll agree. As I am their teacher, I always get the final word in any discussion. And for some reason they usually take my word as gospel. I have them convinced ... read more
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