TSAVO PARKS

Suddenly the buffalo attacked and the driver speeded up the jeep without warning. The man on the left fell on his wife, the wife fell on me and hopefully I did not fell on the driver. Not because of these falls, I supppose, the bufallo decided to stop the atack and we all laughed.
I do not know whether this is a dayly scene in Tsavo East Park, but it happened! The rest of the day passed with less emotion but more beasts. Lunch was in the hotel inside the park, with a view to a herd of elephants. Later we left the park at the Voi gate, passed the town and drove to Tsavo West Park. The two parks have a long common border, the highway and the railway separating both, but not at Voi. The night was passed at Salt Lick Safari Lodge, a surprising hotel with the rooms built in hut-like houses above wet grassland, the dining room with direct view (not even glass windows) to elephants drinking on a pool and the reception door shut by night to avoid animals entering. From my room I saw elephants passing by!
The following morning we were graced with a tour to see buffalos, girafes, deers, zebras, cobras,monkeys, pheasants and so, including a somnolent lion lying around bushes. As a standard extra for everyone on gorgeous sunny days we saw perfectly Mount Kilimanjaro in the distance, at the best of its superb.

BAALBEK AND ANJAR

From Beirut it is up and up and up the mountains. No harm anyway, the enthusiasm to see Baalbek is too great. You look left and it is a nice valley, green and populated. You look behind and it is the magnificent coastal plain of Great Beirut. Then you reach Mt. Lebanon' hights and it is down and down and down. The Bekaa Valley, extense and fertile-looking, is in front of you, the syrian mountains also, more in the distance. As you reach the valley continue eastwards till Anjar. It is a huge ruined city, said to be "a unique testimony to city planning under the Umayyads". Take your time and stroll around, think about how all great human achievements do perish. When your soul is happy return back, go to Zahle and proceed North through the valley, in the middle of fruit trees and other plantations. When arriving in Baalbek breathe fully and begin enjoying such a marvel: a phoenician city, then Greek Heliopolis, then romanized to huge structures un-paralleled anywhere. The Temple of Jupiter, the Temple of Bacchus and the Great Court are some of the features not to miss. Once again take yout time and try to feel in your skin as in your mind how much History is made of change.
On the return do not miss one of the vineyards chateaux which accept visits and wine tasting. Take your time and think how, whatever the changes of History are, there is allways some pleasure along the road.

422 METERS BELOW SEA LEVEL

This is currently were stands the water level of the Dead Sea; later it will be even lower, as the volume of liquid is receding every year, due to the capture of the river Jordan waters.
I have been three times at this lowest area on the land surface of Earth. The first, coming from Amman, was on the Jordanian side of the lake and included a lunch in a hotel facing the waters and a bath on its greasy waters with the classic picture of reading a newspaper while floating. The second, coming from Jerusalem, was on the Israeli side with a very similar tourist programme. The third, a few days later, was just passing by on a trip from Tiberias to Jerusalem and bypassing Jericho, which was not possible to visit because of the state of play of the relations between Palestine and Israel.
While descending from any of the two capitals, which are built on high ground, one must obviously pass by level zero. In both cases the points of the mean sea level are duly indicated by marks. You can see a picture of me on the Jordanian mark and imagine as if half my body was under water and the other half above water.

LOCKERBIE

The name of Lockerbie has again resurfed in the news, because of the Scottish Government's decision to allow the only convicted person of the plane's bombing to go free on compassion reasons.
In he Summer of 1990 I had a few days of political meetings near Limerick, Ireland and decided to go by car after inviting my old parents to come along. We used the weekend to travel: having crossed the Channel we headed North, instead of taking the short way through Wales. Before reaching the (un-controlled) border between England and Scotland, we took a detour to visit the Hadrian's Wall, a World Heritage site, as we did the next day in Northern Ireland to visit and walk on the Giant's Causeway, another WH place. Some ten minutes driving after the border we turned right to respectfully visit Lockerbie, a familiar name to me since in 1988 the PANAM flight 103 exploded in the skies and most of the wreckage landed in the village. I got a feeling that, given the plane was flying at around 800 kilometers per hour at an altitude of some 10,000 meters, the explosion may have ocurred still above England space and then inertia and gravity led the parts of the plane to finally touch down in the scotish village.
The next morning we crossed the North Channel from Stranraer to Larne.

4.335 METERS ABOVE SEA LEVEL

A journey by coach from Ollantaytambo to Puno looks like an adventure. Ollantaytambo is on the valley of the river Urubamba, better known to tourists as the Sacred Valley, in the Cusco Region; Puno is the capital of the Region with the same name, more to the South, on the Altiplano. The road passes by two interesting Inca villages, Calca and Pisac, this one with a major site of an Inca's fortress ruins; just after Pisac it crosses the river and begins climbing, as the valley comes to an end and is replaced by a canyon. From here till reaching the main highway linking Cusco and Puno it becomes a secondary road for some 60 kilometers, almost all the time up and up, the further up the more the vegetation gets rare. Here and there, towns and villages appear, notably San Pedro, which has the important Inca ruins of Raqchi, one of the holliest temples of all the Empire. Much later in the desolated landscape the coach stops for pictures: it's the separation point between the regions and the highest point in the road: a panel reads 4.335 meters above sea level. It's the highest spot I have been in so far! To the left, on the adjacent valley, I see passing the tired-looking train bound for Cusco. From here it's just going down till populated Juliaca, but not that much in fact: Juliaca is at 3.825 meters. Half an hour later on a now rather flat road the coach reaches Puno, by the Lake Titacaca and one feels happy for finally seing it.

THE BEST TRAIN STATIONS

Journalist Jaime Cuninngham recently published in NEWSWEEK a laudatory article about the best train stations he has spotted. I do not take this kind of exercises as something with the value of a doctrine, just a laudable point of view of a person with a degree of specialisation on the issue and who has travelled long enough to minimize the risks of what he has missed. Interestingly he chooses 9 "best" worldwide train stations, instead of the classic figure of 7 which has been favoured since long ago.
Let me divide the nine stations in two groups, those where I have been and those where not. I have been in St. Pancras (London), Grand Central Terminal (New York), Chhatrapati Shivaji (Mumbai), Central Station (Antwerpen), Central Railway Station (Maputo) and Atocha Station (Madrid). I have not (yet) been in Dare des Bénédictins (Limoges), Lahore Railway Station and Hua Hin Railway Station ( Hua Hin, Thailand), in spite of having already visited Lahore and Lomoges.
For several years the Maputo, earlier Lourenço Marques, station was very much familiar to me and I often passed by: the bank in which I worked was just some hunfred meters form the huge square which ensures the arquitectonical proeminence of the railway building. The one in Antwerp, which has enjoyed a big refurbishment years ago, is familiar to be, through my twenty years of living in nearby Brussels.
Had I been asked to pick one as the "biggest" I have no doubt on the choice: that in Mumbai (earlier Victoria Terminus). I suppose it is the number one, worldwide, in terms of size and number of daily passengers, but by "biggest" I do not mean it, rather the quality of its arquitecture and the overall beauty of the building. It is a real masterpiece and that's why it has been deservedly classified as a World Heritage site. Have a look at the picture!

TOWERS IN THE MIDDLE OF RIVERS

Few castles in the middle of rivers? Well, what about church towers in the middle of rivers? May be even fewer, or may be not.
The fact is that I know two of them and have passed by. Both are in the rivers, lakes and canals system which links Moscow and Saint Petersburg by water, a gigantic public works project carried on during the harshest period of Stalin rule. A lot of villages were "sacrificed" by the project and are now below water level. In some cases the towers of the respective churches were high enough not to be fully engulfed by the waters, so they now remain lone witnesses of a bygone past.
Free of charge, I allow you to see them as exactly as I did from my boat.