Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, is a mix of Soviet modernist architecture and beautiful medieval buildings. Throw in a city centre dominated by parks, great museums, the Dneiper river flowing through the middle, affordable hotels and cheap and tasty local beer, it has the makings of a great weekend away.
If you’re
looking for more from your trip than just a simple spot of sightseeing, there’s
(perhaps surprisingly) countless potential destinations to consider. For a spot
of adventure, here are the five must-visit countries you simply need to add to your bucket list.
Turkmenistan
We are just back from a trip to North Korea. What with missile testing on the one hand, and promises of "fire and fury" on the other it was, to put it mildly, an interesting time to visit. More entries on North Korea will be added here over time, although the priority is to write more detailed stories for the next Far Flung Places book coming out late 2017. In the meantime, here are a selection of propaganda posters from the country.
I used to pass by the cooling towers at Didcot on an almost weekly basis on the main rail line between Bristol and London. They dominated the landscape pouring columns of steam in the sky from the coal powered plant, some saw them as a blight on the green country landscape of Oxfordshire. I just though they looked magnificent, symmetrical and a marvel of modern architecture.
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| Enough for two rugby teams. The Plov man at work |
The 1970's was a pivitol point for terrorism. The IRA came up with idea of turning a car into a lethal weapon of destruction by loading it with explosives and then detonating it across Northern Ireland and the UK. The car bomb soon became one of the standard tools of terrorist groups. At the same time, half way around the world, in Sri Lanka, the Tamil Tigers were quietly developing the use of suicide bombings to such an extent that their methods, and successes, were studied and copied by terrorists around the world, particularly in the Middle East, Barely a day goes by now without hearing of a suicide bombing in the news.
It had to be a mirage. A large frosted glass full of beer with a frothy head standing ten metres high in the Gobi desert, as the sands beneath were being blown into small drifts by the strong winds.
You don't need to wait for Virgin Galactic to get their act together. You can buy tickets for a rocket today, down at the port of Sadarghat in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Of course this will not take you into space but down along the rivers of Bangladesh, and for a bargain price too.
This is the Passu Cathedral. The magnificent snow covered mountain spires that reach over 6,100 metres (21,000 feet) surrounding the small Hunza Valley village of Passu in north east Pakistan. My plan was to find a good spot for a photo, probably just off to the side of the Karakorum Highway on which I was travelling, and then head to the border town of Sost for an early bus the next morning into China. Yet, exactly as Rabbie Burns had predicted in his poem about the dangers of making detailed plans over two hundred years previously, things went awry.
It is easy to lose things.
I have lost count of the number of decent pairs of sunglasses I have lost in my
travels around the world. Yet to lose an arch, and not just any arch, but the
largest arch in the world, which could easily fit the Empire State Building in
New York into it with room to spare, well that seems to be a whole new level of
carelessness.
