Travels

I have been fortunate to travel, Asia, the Middle East, India, North and East Africa, across Europe and parts of the Pacific. All these places have had influences in subject matter and how I perceive the world. I have travelled in military convoys, sat on the equator watching a president’s cortege pass, trucks with anti-aircraft guns fore and aft of the limousines, all followed up by the great man’s port-a -loo at a discreet distance.

I have been shown round the same city by street children and government aids and was able to frighten the aids with my knowledge of the sites that I was not meant to see. I have watched street rubbish collectors from Turkey to Yemen and much further afield, they have the same cry wherever one goes.

I have watched qat sellers in Africa and in Yemen take money from starving people whose wretched children clung round the purchaser needing food. I have been held at gun point in a remote forest clearing, taken prisoner by illegal charcoal burners on an industrial scale. I was only too glad that the fellow who was meant to be my minder had left his gun in the car. I have paid bribes to police officers who had not been paid for months to let my bush taxi go on. I have eaten bananas in a spot looking over the largest man made lake in East Africa with boy soldiers trying for rehabilitation. In the same village resolving a dispute over a Christian’s pigs defiling an irate Muslim’s tomatoes, again with bananas.