AH SURE AZURE

Category: Travel

  • Concrete and Conservation

    Concrete and Conservation

    When you find yourself on the other side of the globe to your only son, -me in Corfu and him in New Zealand, you give thanks for modern technology that allows you daily chats.

    His work on vast concrete projects involves drastic changes to the landscape as roads are rolled out and huge foundations are dug out and filled with many tons of concrete for tall buildings.The tensions between progress and preservation, making people lives better and ruining ways of life, is never more stark.

    I’ve chosen to live on an island prized for its natural beauty and exotic flora and fauna. Our chat this morning was about damming either end of a stream and draining the middle to allow a construction project to go ahead. One of his duties yesterday, was to listen to a talk on water filtering so that the drained water was uncontaminated when it was allowed back into the water system.

    Before that, however, all the fish and reptiles had been removed. There’s a company that moves reptiles to new habitats. There’s a company that moves fish to new habitats. Halleluiah! Someone cares. The NZ authorities care enough to enforce these regulations and require their contruction conglomerates to employ Health and Safety officers on a range of topics to provide real education to the guys on the ground.

    It feels good to know that far away, on the other side of the globe, the Earth is being cared for in such an enlightened, detailed way. This is the good news for today. You won’t hear it broadcast on any Media channel. It seems like Good News don’t sell.

    Sweet Chestnuts in Corfu

  • Ropa Valley/ Ermones Walk

    First Weekly Walk of the Season 2020/2021

    The first of the season’s walks with the intrepid Hilary Paipeti, author of the Corfu Trail, kicked off today along the Ropa Valley, starting from the Dizi Bar where we met for coffee.

    We wound our way in to the back of the Theotoky Estate, admiring the vines and olive trees, so beautifully tended. At this time of year, the olives are not yet ripe, but the grape harvest is in full swing.

    At every step is a flower you never noticed before, wild mint or aniseed flavouring the air or a lizard disappearing into the undergrowth. The Walnut and Quince trees are laden this year, with Persimmon still too green to pick.

    It was a warm day with a balmy breeze, the ground dry and easy to traverse. Conversations flowed as old aquaintances were rekindled and new ones made. About half the group repaired to Nafsika restaurant for a lazy lunch on the verandah, watching the waves roll on to the beach as a strong breeze started up. The sun shone with a brilliance on the undulating green/blue of the sea and the waves thundered in. Everyone left looking forward to next week’s walk from Sinarades. 10.30 meetup at the square, for an 11am start.

  • African coincidences

    African coincidences

    Reading Dervla Murphy’s Ukimwi Road, a description of her trip through Kenya and Uganda in 1992 by bicycle at the age of 60, I came face to face with my own increasing antiquity. I assumed it was set way back last century then realised, I had been in Kenya myself before the book had been written. 

    I went there in 1985 with a bunch of friends renting a jeep and driving around the Rift Valley. It was the same time as Karen Walker was murdered in the Masai Mara, and Dervla mentions seeing her distressed father in Nairobi in his vain attempt to track down her killers, some seven years later.

     Ukimwi is the Swahili word for AIDS. Dervla became resigned to the fact that her trip would be hijacked by the constant reality of HIV positive people everywhere sick or dying. She was seen as a Western person who must be able to help them. 

    Then I tune in to a podcast with a Jesuit in Hong Kong. He is just back from a trip to Kenya, Addis Ababa and Johannesburg where he has been highlighting the notorious business of drug mules between Johannesburg and Hong Kong. He is entertaining and self effacing, but his blogs have lit a fire in the East African media leading to the number of mules arrested at Hong Kong airport reducing to 2 or 3 from over 100.

    Women are enticed by people who offer great hope of fortune overseas and then forced to conceal drugs in their bodies. Long terms of imprisonment or the death penalty lie ahead of them when they are inevitably picked up at Hong Kong airport which has high caliber police that detect the slightest change in behaviour signalling drug carrying.

    I think of the web and how this exposes women to scammers skilled in enticement. I think of the women I know myself who have been deceived and scammed via tinder and other online apps. How close we can come to deadly intrigue and exploitation.

    And I think of Dervla Murphy, on a bike in the jungle of Uganda, fearless, unarmed, without a phone in 1992, the year my son was born. How impervious she was – still is – to influences that might sway her from her path. I feel a connection with her. Long before I read any of her books, I heard my mother talking about this classmate of hers in Waterford who used to have to miss a lot of school to mind her mother and who took her 9 year old daughter on a bike trip across the Peruvian Andes in 1977. The year I was born, 1963, she cycled all the way to India from Ireland.

    She still lives in County Waterford and travelled for the sheer joy of it, ‘refusing to believe in disaster until it is finally manifest’ – as she wrote in ‘In Full Tilt’ about her 1963 journey. 

    My mother is now gone but I recognise in Dervla some of the grittiness of my mother – the physical toughness, adventurousness and joy of travel for its own sake that stirs up so much in me.