Chilling at the Nilaya Hermitage Finally the wedding celebrations had come to a close and it was time to move on. We had a leisurely breakfast down by the beach on another beautiful morning. The weather had been superb since we arrived; blue - very blue - skies, about 28-32°C during the day and humidity probably in the 40% range, dropping to a very comfortable 23 - 24°C at night. And these perfect conditions would continue for the rest of our stay in Goa. Donna had booked the four of into Nilaya Hermitage, a boutique hotel on a hilltop near Arpora village about ten kilometres north of Sinquerim Beach. The Nilaya driver picked us up at the Taj Holiday Village and we were soon checked in by the highly efficient Dorothy and shown to our rooms. ... read more

To Burma's Far North In 2007 we had finally been prompted to visit Sri Lanka by the fact that good friends Yves and Ashleigh Ogier were running a boutique hotel in Kandy, The Kandy House. Since then they had moved to Burma to run another small hotel, this time in the far north of the country near Putao, the northernmost town (10,000 inhabitants) in Kachin State and only some 100km and 150km respectively from the Indian and Chinese borders. This was really in the middle of nowhere, and far from the usual tourist trail, so we thought it was a good opportunity to check out an area there was otherwise very little likelihood of us ever visiting. We took a very early non-stop Silk Air flight from Singapore to Yangon w... read more

The Truth about Cars in Cuba If you ever wanted to know why there are so many old cars in Cuba, it goes like this: 1. After the Revolution, the Castro regime legislated that any car bought before then could continue to be owned, sold, or passed down the family. 2. Any car bought after that could not be disposed of in any way (other than giving back to the state) So, 1950's cars are worth taking care of, worth repairing, and carry a high value in one of Cuba's only free markets. Any post-1960 car, beyond a certain point, is not worth spending money on since it has no re-sale or inheritance value. Even the state is bound by this, so there are fields full of rusting 1990's cars bought by state rental car companies ... read more

Trinidad, a Gem of Colonial Style Leaving Cienfuegos we travelled across some fairly uninteresting rolling hills for about an hour to Trinidad, where the restaurant supposedly booked for lunch was full to the rafters. We drove out instead to the Valle de los Ingenios, part of the Trinidad World Heritage Site. The landscapes here are big and quite attractive, but there is not a whole lot to see; it was a principal sugar cane production area until the region’s economy took a nose-drive in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the ruins of some forty sugar mills (ingenios) apparently lie buried beneath the vegetation. At an old eighteenth century estate, Manaca Iznaga, developed by a Spanish slave-trader and sporting a 44-meter water tower, ... read more

Friday morning, jet lag awoke us atrociously early, but at least it afforded us a leisurely breakfast in the lobby before we left to drive the length of the northern coastline of Havana Vieja and Centro. The 8km Malecón (seawall) built in 1901 by the then American administration takes you past several interesting landmarks of Cuba’s wide-ranging history - from the Spanish era (grandiose), through American (largely utilitarian), British (global-colonial), Mafia (oddly communistic) and Post-Revolutionary (predominantly poor examples of 1970’s architecture - little seems to have been built since then). Along the way we passed the US Special Interests Office set up by Carter in the late 1970’s and the scene of laughably simplistic finger-pointing propaganda billboards from both sides of the ideological divide. Right opposite the b... read more