Sketching and Painting Holidays
The things I get up to when I’m not leading holidays! The brief sounded reasonable enough: paint a mural onto a garden fence. It was right up my street – the project, that is. The location was Tolga, in the Atherton Tablelands, northern Queensland. It was rather a large fence, long and relatively low, which … Read more
Yes, I suppose I did steal the title for the new trip. But it’s appropriate – the rare, endangered corncrake is significantly present on the unpolluted island of Colonsay. The words slip easily off the tongue; and besides, I loved that book. Any similarity ends there, though and there is definitely no criminality involved in … Read more
I had a choice: A second snorkel over the reef with the possibility of seeing green turtles, or to stay behind on the catamaran and ‘relax’. The morning snorkel had been pleasant, but the visibility was poor; the waters green-brown and murky after the recent heavy rains and flooding. The reef here, too, is not … Read more
Some people can paint standing up. I’m not one of them. Despite the recent gift of one of those water-pen thingies – an empty plastic tube with a smallish brush tip, which you can squeeze to fill with water and then dip into your colour – I can never quite get the hang of where … Read more
Ocean Breezes… so delicious, they named a cocktail after it. Alright, so it wasn’t ‘they’, it was ‘we’… because we have inadvertently invented a new drink, which became such an integral part of our trip. Sneaking around to someone’s room before dinner – usually Alison’s, because she had brought the bottles in the first place … Read more
The man in the railway office was rather gruff when I asked him if I could leave my backpack there while I went for a hot drink. Tall, slim and bearded, dressed from head to toe in pristine white, I didn’t recognise him; perhaps he was new. ‘Big boss,’ confirmed Raja. He wasn’t always … Read more
When I’m asked, as I am with rather surprising frequency, ‘Where’s your favourite place in Morocco?’, I always give the question just consideration. Then, despite the many wonderful spots which jostle for my affection, I concede that there is one place above all others in this country where I love to be, and my answer … Read more
And there it was! The same hump of succulent, twisted, dusty-green tubes nestled into a hillside of purple-brown lava, and standing proud against a pale blue backdrop: part sea, part sky, it was difficult to tell where one ended and the other began. I spied it as I rounded a sharp bend, just as I … Read more
There’s nowhere quite like the Dolomites. Towering columns of orange-grey and jagged, ochre pinnacles stretch impossibly into the misty clouds, where the last remnants of snow sparkle deep in the crevicies. The still waters of Alpine lakes reflect the spruce trees, while dwarf pine and azalea line the stony paths. It’s been a few years … Read more
Where does my love of islands come from? Is it inate, from being born and raised on a large one of sorts, albeit encompassing several countries? Or from my more recent past, living on Tanera Mhor (one of the Summer Isles), during four extraordinarily happy years? When I had the chance to visit the Isle … Read more
