The Last Blue Mountain: Tales of a Travelling Englishman
Language: English
Pages: 384
ISBN: B00TNT9VH2
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
From Gabon to Guyana, Shangri La to Kamchatka, through rainbow markets and exuberant rainforests, across impressionist landscapes and a high altitude desert, author James Chilton's delightfully diverse collection of travel writing will whet the appetite and feed the imagination. The Last Blue Mountain takes readers far off the beaten tourist tracks and onto uncharted trails of natural beauty and cultural diversity. Chilton reveals his enthusiasm for travel - he's visited some seventy-eight countries to date - and his love of food, beauty, flora, fauna and, above all, the people he meets along the way. Witty, articulate and with sharp observations, his engaging and often humorous snapshots are illustrated throughout with evocative pen and ink sketches.
merchants and colonial grandees. Like Miss Haversham, they rested in sad and decaying splendour under a web of lianas that twisted their way over fretted balconies and decorated dormers. A sunbeam sometimes caught the coloured glass of a door so that a brief splash of green, red and blue appeared as a jewelled brooch on a withered façade. Possibly loved, universally uncared for but occasionally occupied, they were the remnants of the commercial success of this teak trading town. Along the
he was to serve. It was growing wild beside the track – artemesia, hogweed, thistle, garlic and a couple of other unlikely candidates and we looked at each other in much the same way that those gathered at Tyburn may have considered their imminent fate. However, seated in his giant tepi shaped chooma, warmed externally by a log fire and internally by vodka from a mountain of bottles, we tucked into all of these local weeds; cooked, sweetened and seasoned, they were excellent eating. All the
Empire of Guiana. Robert Schomburgk in Riesen in British Guiana wrote, ‘We stood on the borders of an enchanted land’ but by1882 a visiting English yachtsman described it as ‘… a hopeless land of slime and fever’ and James Rodway in his book Guiana says, ‘Formerly a land of mud and money, it is now a wilderness of mud and mosquitoes’. In between, the country changed hands nine times and its borders, particularly those with Venezuela to the north, are still in dispute. V.S. Naipaul and Evelyn
calls of possible prey, nerves taut and eyes scanning the position of each unfamiliar noise; it was a drive down the north/south gravel highway. My guide was Viktor, a young man the size of the King of Tonga, who overflowed his seat in the Landcruiser like a beached whale. “Why Viktor?” I asked. “It is from the Italian,” he replied. This seemed unlikely but I was none the wiser and neither, it turned out, was he. Viktor steered his tank around the cratered road with a chubby finger from one hand
hours of death; anointed with garlic butter and lime juice, they did not die in vain. At Gate 17A, the other 98 passengers for the Falkland Islands, the MV Explorer and the frozen south eyed each other up. Suddenly we were aware of our own youthfulness and fitness. The brochure’s description of steep stairs, narrow corridors, precipitous and icy gangplanks had seemingly gone unread by those who now waited leaning on a stick, checking a pacemaker or breathing heavily from the strain of standing.