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Walking Commentary

Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023

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Sports Service

June 19, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

The numbers 7, 34, 46 and 93 probably don’t mean much to you. They represent four of my favourite motorcycle racing champions who carried those numbers for most of their wins. Texan Kevin Schwantz only won the world championship once and though he carried 34 the rest of the time and it’s been retired in his honour, he chose to use #1 for the 1994 season. Who? 

Texas 2013: Marquez takes poll and then wins his first MotoGP
[Read more…] about Sports Service

Filed Under: Anchoritism, Fake Memoir Tagged With: booklink, michael aylwin, motogp, rugby, travel

Bolivia II

June 10, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

I have a strong memory of leaving a pizza bar in the palindrome town of Oruro. The word Oruro sounds like aurora to me though I don’t think there’s any etymological link. Oruro is a mining town some 3700 m above sea level in the southern altiplano of Bolivia. Mining had been going on 400 years when I arrived and curiously, 9 of every 10 people were still of direct Aymara and Quechua descent. Think Inca when the Spanish arrived in The Andes but they were the Tiahuanaco for millennia before that. Which had a great benefit for me since Oruro is the hub of Bolivia’s folk traditions. The boisterous singing and dancing is particularly enjoyable with the local ‘brandy’ Singani and a beer that made for the most terrible hangover headaches.

Silver mine; devil and cigarette in the very dark entrance way.
[Read more…] about Bolivia II

Filed Under: Fake Memoir Tagged With: altiplano, bolivia, ecology, malcolm gladwell, travel

Timeless Yesterdays and Now.

June 9, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

Yesterday morning, I shaved off my pandemic beard. It was a sunny day with a slight breeze so I took myself to the garden and trimmed it before wet shaving it clean. Not that you care to know such stuff but there it is, I did it.

And yesterday afternoon, I noticed new boreholes in our weeping willow. You know, the kinds of holes you’d assume were woodworm if you found them in your antique table. I sawed off a slice from a branch I’d pruned and paint-poisoned a couple of years ago.

Sushi O'Clock
Sushi O’Clock © Simon Robinson 2014
[Read more…] about Timeless Yesterdays and Now.

Filed Under: Anchoritism, Fake Memoir Tagged With: booklink, eve curie, photos, radium, travel

Business, Rambler Maintains

June 7, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

A problem with writing about business travel is that sometimes you can’t name the parties, Rambler maintains. Such trips are maintained to be solely for business. But experiencing new cultures always exposes new things to see and it challenges a rambler to find the new ways needed to see them.

Rambler maintains that these ramblings solely represent the rambler’s biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual people, places and events and does not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of other ramblers. Rambler maintains, to remind and warn you, that these ramblings may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual people, places and events or experiences of this or any other rambler.

[Read more…] about Business, Rambler Maintains

Filed Under: Fake Memoir Tagged With: antonio tabucchi, booklink, photos, travel, uleg bek

Suffering Tourists

June 6, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

We spent a very pleasant ten days over Christmas in Lanzerote in 2017. There weren’t too many tourists though the number grew noticeably as the New Year approached.

At one point, we rented a car and took in a day of excursion north from our hotel in Playa Blanca. We visited lichen coloured but otherwise bare volcanic terrains formed less than three centuries ago. We drove past La Corona that erupted 20,000 years ago. We looked out from Mirador del Rio over to the island of La Graciosa which von Humboldt reputedly called ‘Hell’ when he visited in 1799. Hell wasn’t just about volcanic fires and brimstone, it was a name for a place at the bottom of the earth, somewhere unimaginably far away like Timbuktu in Mali or Tatouine in Tunisia. It has been said that stories of pirates and treasure on La Graciosa from the 1760s were the inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Treasure Island. Ah yes, Sir Walter Raleigh was mentioned in the Piracy Museum at Teguise; the English pirate Walter Raleigh.

La Graciosa © Simon Robinson 2017
[Read more…] about Suffering Tourists

Filed Under: Fake Memoir Tagged With: césar manrique, geology, graffiti, lanzerote, photos, pirates, robert louis stevenson, tourism, travel, volcano

Bolivia I

June 2, 2020 by Simon Robinson 2 Comments

I have three episodes from Bolivia to share. Let this be the first.

Theman had an acute sense of the absurd such as we’d all get if only we could keep our eyes open.

I was lucky enough to work with Theman in two countries. He was technically proficient, an expert in his field and professionally, utterly dependable. He was a devil for the details, an incisive and dogged detective. Which are great attributes for a surveyor. And besides, he was great company to travel with.

  • La Paz 1994
  • Oruro Shopping 1994

We first met in the Andes, up on the altiplano in Bolivia and a few years later we had a second encounter in the deserts of Niger. We were three months in the one, six months, on and off, in the other. There was a lot of time to exchange old blusters and experience new absurdities.

[Read more…] about Bolivia I

Filed Under: Fake Memoir Tagged With: andes, bolivia, geophysics, photos, surveying, travel

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