New York- In this vlog I return from deeply troubled Ukraine to the safety and security of Schengen Europe. All the while not sleeping in a hotel, just powering through from one leg of the journey to the next.
My Journey from Ukraine to Santorini
Category: Travel
Crossing Borders: Kuwait to Saudi Arabia
Dubai- I have a new episode on my Fabled City channel about my recent travels from Kuwait City to Dammam, Saudi Arabia. It was a highly unconventional trip in that there is no formal, established method for an international solo…
Crossing Borders-From Iraq to Kuwait
Kuwait City- Yesterday I went by taxi, foot, and bus from Basra to here in Kuwait City in my bid to explore the Middle East’s newly liberalising visa/border policies on the ground. I wanted to compare this crossing with that…
Fabled City: Journey to Jerash
Amman- I’ve finished my fourth and final episode in my Jordan series by ambling around the barely ruined ruins of Jerash in the eponymous governorate north of Amman. I’d wanted to visit this site for decades and finally just made…
Among the Ancients-Back in Petra
Amman- I spent two very long days hiking around the remains of the Nabatean kingdom in Petra in Jordan’s Ma’an governorate. I first explored this site back in 1998 when the surrounding area was far less developed and it was…
Fabled City Episode 6 Dropped
Beirut- The last part of the Cyprus segment of my Fabled City video series is now up. I take the viewer along the ethnic-Greek side of the UN buffer zone, the ‘Green Line’ that cuts the Cypriot capital of Nicosia…
Fabled City Episode 5 Is Now Live!
Beirut- The 2nd segment of my Cyprus series is up on my Fabled City channel is online . If I do say so, I’m really happy with how this is going so far despite it not taking off like a…
Fabled City Larnaca Episode Is Up!
Beirut- Just dropped the early part of my Cypriot adventure on my Fabled City channel I’m trying to get going. So episode 4 is done and episode 6 is in the can ready to go but I still have to…
Fabled City Episode 2 Now Up!
Beirut- I’m starting to speed up my Youtube creator workflow here a bit to where I can hopefully start cranking out episodes for my Fabled City channel faster/more efficiently. I’ve come up with a nutty little workaround to make the…
A Passage to Arabia Begins
Beirut- I’ve finally got my first (official video up on my new Fabled City Youtube channel. I set up the channel before I left NYC but didn’t fully realise how much work it was going to be. And I at…
From Stoicism to Cynicism on Cyprus
Larnaca- I have a new piece out this week on The Redline Podcast site on the election of Nikos Christodoulides as the republic’s new president, it’s youngest and therefore first post-1974 generation leader. This island has long fascinated the hell…
Binge and Purge
Larnaca- Making use of my time between rounds of the Cypriot presidential election , I’m doing a major, vastly time consuming purge of “big tech” that clouds (pun intended) my small world. It all started with me hastily buying a…
From Rome to Ruins
Nicosia- After exhausting myself in the best possible way covering the presidential election here, I was back at the hotel up very late merely thinking about the story I was planning to write the next day ie today for Australia-based…
Landed and Lost in Larnaca
Larnaca- After my hyper brief visit to Athens described in the previous post, I landed in the EU’s southeastern extremity and eastern Mediterranean’s closest thing to stability. In the damp, cold night I somehow found the apartments I had stayed…
An Athenian Whirlwind
Athens- I had a slightly longer than expected layover than expected in the modern Greek capital yesterday and made a mad dash into the city centre to try and visit the Acropolis before racing back to my onward flight to…
Return to Orwell’s Catalonia
Barcelona- After a series of difficult decisions and taking an unusual amount of personal risk, I’ve finally escaped from my going-nowhere existence in NYC brought on by what has seemed like (some of which is pure clickbait e.g. “The Case…
The Corona Incident
Corona- This escape from the the most dense, dithering, and deadly area hit by the pandemic came about as I pieced together imaginative fragments of mind and memory. For years I’d kept New Mexico in my back pocket as not…
Rock Me Amarillo
Amarillo- After exploring the history of terrorism in OKC and Norman, I headed for the principal city in the Texas panhandle. I didn’t plan this leg of the journey very well, or at all really. Amarillo was the last stop…
Stormin’ Norman
Norman- Heading west out of Joplin I quickly crossed into Oklahoma and towards its eponymous state capitol oft abbreviated locally as OKC. I steered straight for the city’s elegant memorial plaza commemorating those killed in the 19 April 1995 truck…
All Joplin, No Janis
Joplin- After back to back Coronas, I posted up in southwestern Missouri for a few nights to gather my thoughts before heading further south and west. My night drive from Springfield, “Queen City of the Ozarks,” was a white knuckle affair.…
Crown of the Ozarks
Corona- I departed Memphis toward West Memphis once again to find Corona, this time in southern Missouri’s green, quiet Ozarks region, A convoluted series of rural roadways led me to yet another back of beyond situated in Oregon County that…
Coronita (Little Corona)
Corona- As mentioned in the previous post, I realised it made way more sense to go to Corona, Tennessee as a stand alone day trip from Memphis mostly based on that virtually no data existed on Google about the place…
Driving in Memphis
Memphis- After the family Civil War bucket list adventure in Chattanooga, I began my westward journey in earnest. My next planned stop was Corona but I decided to cool down in Memphis for a few days after so much relentless…
“No Mask, No Gas”
Moorestown- Finally venturing outside New York since the crisis began in earnest (which I’m dating as 16 March when at 20h (8pm) when non-essential businesses were forced to shutter) my friend and I stopped for fuel in southern New Jersey…
A Ukrainian Night
Kyiv- Spent a whirlwind less-than-24-hours in the much talked about of late Ukrainian capital the other night. Kyiv. or Kiev is you prefer the Russophone transliteration more common to Westerners, struck me as a magnificent city. Walking around town is…
The Heartbeat of the World
Thera- Having come to Greece, or the Hellenic Republic as it’s actually called in English or Hellas more colloquially, for over two decades, I have a deep attachment to the place. But my personal history and relationship is a very…
The Island of the Unfinished Temple
Naxos- I’ve just spent the last ten days on an island in the heart of the Cyclades that for decades I’d either passed by or stopped briefly to change ferries. I hadn’t intended on visiting this splendid place at all…
A Secure Place
Dubai- After a somewhat tense month in Iraq and Syria, I popped down the the UAE for a few days before making my next move. So here I am for the moment in a spotlessly clean, efficient, authoritarian, stable monarchy.…
Stepping Into the Mosaic
Beirut- It had been twelve and a half years since I’d last set foot into Lebanon’s cacophonous seaside capital. In July of 2006 I arrived here to cover the war that had suddenly erupted between a troika of war fighting…
A Stoic Island In the Middle
Larnaca- I spent three very tranquil days on the southern Cypriot coast where I didn’t do much other than walk around in the rain and sample savoury vegan cuisine as the hours rolled by. I’d longed for years to visit…