Jeremy HildrethCategory Archives: Travel writing: the fun stuff
Adventure in Timor 4: A destination in the making
Day 7
Leaving my hotel about ten o’clock on Friday, One Last Bar is where I went first. Here I met a UN adviser named Scott who advised me that the next bar to go to was a Brazilian place down by the beach called Exotica. I took a taxi (it’s just outside of central Dili, [...]
Adventure in Timor 3: “The warrior spirit” embodied
“The warrior spirit” embodied
Adventure in Timor 2: Xanana’s hideout
In East Timor, Jeremy lifts the floorboards and climbs into Xanana Gusmao’s hideout.
Adventure in Timor 1: Something extraordinary happened here
Note: I wrote this in 2005; it’s only ever seen the light of day in the Saffron-produced ‘how to sell East Timor’ book I wrote and directed for an identity project in this tumultuous country. But I loved Timor. The country has just celebrated 10 years since its people voted for freedom from Indonesia (a [...]
Dispatch from Ghadames, Libya
With Saint-Exupery in a tent in the Sahara.
Dispatch from Kaliningrad 3: The Curonian Spit
Read Part 1.
Read Part 2.
You’d think you’d know it if you were on a mile-wide strip of sand with water on both sides. But the Curonian Spit is so heavily forested that you cannot see anything but trees when you drive along the main road.
The Spit is a geographical anomaly: it’s narrowness contributes to this, [...]
The problem with first impressions
…is that you don’t know what you don’t know, sometimes, when you’re looking at something.
Take, for example, this scene in Vilnius (where I am delighted to be living for the summer), which I photographed while jogging today.
It is a normal scene, a bit of urban decay, some concrete blight. Very common around here. You might [...]
Dispatch from Kaliningrad 2: Konigsberg transmogrified
Read Part 1.
There is a Baltic legend of the city Wanetha, a coastal conurbation which was sunk into the sea in retribution for the sins and errors of its citizens. Anybody familiar with this myth would certainly recall it when listening to the tale of Kaliningrad.
Konigsberg, as the city was called until 1946, was founded [...]
Why to bother keeping up appearances
I know Ignalina nuclear power plant is scheduled to close at the end of this year. And rationally I know that managing two atomic reactors — even if they are almost identical to the vintage Soviet RBMK-1000s at the heart of the Chernobyl hiccup — and keeping an aquarium have nothing to do with each [...]
Dispatch from Kaliningrad 1: The bridge to Tilsit
Stuck at the Russian border for 6 hours.
Readers respond