Baffin It’s a common fact among travellers to realize fully what they got themselves into only when checking in for the outbound flight. I was no exception and few minutes after the counter glowed a nice 82 pounds for my backpack it dawned upon me the suspect that trouble might be at hand. I took some minutes not because I was slow in catching up with the true meaning of it, but because I was at the beginning distressed that 82 pounds did not make a nice round metric 40 kg figure. Then, in brief succession, I noticed the camera and [View Full Entry]

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A large crowd gathered on the second day of January of the new Millennium, around the tiny harbour of Hanga Piko, in Easter Island, to cheer the departure of the six brave participants of the first backgammon championship to take place in the vast Southern Pacific Ocean. In the following three weeks a long series of games would have raised one player, just one, to a throne reigning over the greatest surface of Planet Earth, even wider than Russia. This is not a responsibility to be taken lightly, and indeed all the entrants felt the great weight of the endeavour, and [View Full Entry]

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Scoundrels in the Sky ‘What’s going on?’ were the only words coming out my splitting headache. ‘…Looks like the donkey man flew last night’ ‘What do you mean… flew?’ ‘He just left. The Sirdar paid him in advance. We are stranded here, unless, of course, you are willing to carry the loads’ It was all very confusing. I was hammered by a hangover but I had not touched a drop of alcohol in the last three days. Altitude. We had left three days before from a place called Jomoson, a collection of huts around a landing strip where our Pilatus [View Full Entry]

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Gabriel was pissed off that morning. Indeed. The boss was in a rotten mood, and the morning messages at the office did not raise the latter’s spirits. That damn favourite planet of his, the same he spent so much energies and hopes for the future on, even one of his own kids, was a fatiguing and not at all rewarding effort. Just an endless cry of complaints and little common sense. He ended up summoning His own private rainman, Count Negroni, who prescribed a biblical treat of the deadly concoction bearing the same name, and now God was hangover and [View Full Entry]

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Sailing round the corner. Rituals mean something to humans. They mean something more to sailors. Pick up one of them, soak him thoroughly and salt him down for some thousand of miles of rough waters as far S as latitude 55. It might take months. Sometimes years. Steal him good harbours and shelters for weeks. Hide him warm waters and sunny beaches for a long, long while. Even the toughest will be ready to stop and rest for a while. Now give him a ducked, small and safe little cove, view on snowy peaks, cheap moorage and jolly good company. Give [View Full Entry]

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Argentina, 2002 It hits you from the very first steps, out of the domestic airport. When the wind blows from the brownish waters of the Rio de la Plata, many strikes of smoke cross the coastal avenue, hit the arrival building, fly over the runway to mix with the kerosene smell, then joins the thousands others evaporating around every corner of the huge city behind. From poor barrios to flashy cloistered properties, from the dirty unpaved streets of the southwest hair-raising neighbourhoods to the cypress-shadowed placid canals of the artificial Venices of luxury along the Delta, the smell raising to the [View Full Entry]

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The Top Ten Series: Vietnam 1. War? What war? This thin slice of Southeast Asia has been bombed, napalmed, mined, gassed and poisoned into oblivion for years. French, Cambodians, Chinese, Americans and, last but not least, Vietnamese tried their best to slaughter Vietnamese. Coming from a country where after 60 years way too many idiots are still making a huge fuss and cannot come to terms with what, compared to the Vietnam conflict, was basically a pub brawl in terms of cruelty and losses (I refer to the Italian theatre of operations), I expected dislike, contempt and a certain dose of [View Full Entry]

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