News from the North

North: the spirit of Saint-Louis Once we leave Dakar the country gets arid in a hurry. The landscape is dominated by stands of huge baobab trees, clusters of gnarled limbs reaching skywards from their absurdly thick trunks as if pleading for some kind of arboreal salvation. Some few are selected by a mysterious avian algorithm for group accommodations; I counted twenty separate nests on one particularly large baobab, while others all around it lay empty. There are also thorn trees not quite like East Africa's acacias, a thick-barked species from which foliage grows in sporadic dense clumps, etcetera; but this is unquestionably the land of the baobab. The road is excellent the whole way north, two smooth broad lanes with gravel shoulders. A wide swathe to either side is generally dusted with trash, mostly plastic bags, proportional to the density of the local population. We pass a children's hospital, a giant mosque towering above a bizarrely large roundabout, pale long-ho...

"You know," I said to Gavin, "I've spent ten days around here, that's way more than I've spent almost anywhere else I've travelled to. I thought I'd get a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the place than if I'd just spent a few days." "And did you?" he inquired. "Nope." Moalboal may not have hidden depths, but it is an interesting place. Or at least there are far more boring ones. For one thing, the geology is striking: the earth for many miles around this peninsula essentially consists of a vast coral atoll which rose above the sea millennia ago. You don't have to dig very far -- in fact, half the time you don't have to dig at all -- to come across the bedrock of dead coral; jagged, striated, fractally pockmarked, and extremely hard. The result is a brittle and infertile land. Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be coral farmers. There are virtually no actual fields within a five-kilometer ...

198x: Muskoka, Canada, a couple of entirely unlicensed dives with my father. 198x: Dominican Republic, again an unlicensed dive with my dad. 2000: Krabi, Thailand, 5 dives (PADI Open Water course.) Great reefs, great beaches, an excellent place to learn. 2002: Byron Bay, Australia, 2 dives. Choppy but pretty good. 2002: Great Barrier Reef liveaboard, Australia, 11 dives (PADI Advanced course.) Just superb. 2003: Dahab, Egypt, 4 dives. Very good. 2003: Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, 2 dives. Pretty good. 2003: Caye Caulker, Belize, 2 dives. Not bad I guess. 2004: Galle, Sri Lanka, 2 dives. Nice wrecks with meh visibility. 2005: Catalina Island, California, 2 dives. Beautiful kelp forest, frigging freezing. (February.) 2005: Nungwi, Zanzibar, Tanzania, 2 dives. I still have the scars, but good diving. 2006: Muskoka, Canada, 2 dives. Freshwater but homey. 2010: Great Barrier Reef liveaboard, Australia, 11 dives. A little more dived-out than eight years earlier, but still truly excellent, esp. t...

So first of all let's talk about the cats. The Internet has an inordinate fondness for cats, right? So too does Istanbul. In the evening it is not uncommon to see three or four feral cats perched or prowling along any given short stretch of street. Black, ginger, chiaroscuro and (mostly) patchwork, in the Sultanahmet and Taksim districts alike 1 they wander into and out of cafes, they walk straight down the middle of streets like they own them, they trade glares with the two-toned crows that roost here, they rest beneath cars and on windowsills. I do not doubt that some of them have ascended the minarets of the Blue Mosque, climbed into the galleries of the Hagia Sophia, patrolled the harem of the Topkapi Palace, descended into the cistern built for Byzantium 1500 years ago, and even crossed the bridges across the Bosphorus to Asia Minor. (It's also possible that given my, um, idiosyncratic authorial history, I notice urban animals more than most. But everybody notices a...

Myanmar! Shrouded in mystery, hidden for decades behind a shadowy steel curtain of tyranny! The land that time forgot! The last nation untouched by the corrupting influence of the West! Right? Yeah, not so much. It is a fascinating place, though. Still deeply culturally independent, and still more economically influenced by China than by the West, though that's changing fast. It's also quite a visually extraordinary place. Especially in Bagan, land of ten thousand temples (once literally): Spot the Buddha! I took, at a conservative estimate, approximately nineteen zillion pictures, of which these are but a sample. More to come.

So. Rangoon. In a way it's like every Asian city rolled into one, but poorer. Blistering heat, cracked pavements, foot-high curbs, Stalinist towers linked by thick anarchic tangles of electrical wires, occasional colonial buildings whose stains and tarnish cannot conceal their magnificent bones, dense fields of sidewalk stalls hawking food and every cheaply made article under the sun, ancient automobiles of every description converted into taxis. (Yesterday I rode in a red Volkswagen van which I think was older than I am to the Savoy Hotel, a converted colonial mansion, where I ate at Kipling's restaurant and drank at the Captain's Bar while watching Tottenham Hotspur play Chelsea. I suppose I should have quaffed gin-and-tonics rather than Dagon beer to make the colonial kabuki play complete. Note to HP Lovecraft fans; Yangon/Rangoon's original name, for some 500 years, was Dagon.) It's located at the juncture of three rivers, not far at all from the ocean,...

"Bagan. Shit." That dusty land of many temples. And you mean many . Eighty percent of them razed or devoured by the ravenous mile-wide Irrawadday River, and still nearly three thousand of them remain, crammed into a mere hundred or so square kilometres of dusty land. More than two thousand pagodas and monastery, ranging in size from "chapel" to "cathedral", all red brick covered by whatever may remain of weather-eaten plaster, occupying the foreground, background, and skyline in every direction, jutting into the sky above rice paddies, bushes, cactus walls, thatched farmhouses, five-star hotels, an eighteen-hole golf course. Some remain original, but most have been reconstructed -- unconvincingly -- "What about you, Marlowe? Do you think my reconstruction methods have become...unsound?" "I don't see...any method at all...sir." -- but they're still magnificent, eerie, mindbending. Especially at dusk, when the hordes of fer...

I write to you from Pyin U Lwin, née Maymya, roughly seventy horizontal kilometers east and a thousand vertical meters up from Mandalay, in Myanmar aka Burma. It's a town originally built by the British as their summer capital; every year their civil service would move here en masse for several months to escape the brutal heat of Rangoon. They left behind a church, a clocktower, a number of magnificent colonial buildings now converted into hotels or government offices, the loveliest botanical gardens I've ever seen, and sizable Indian and Anglo-Burman populations. There's also a railway station, of course, on the line from Mandalay to Lashio, which in turn was one terminus of World War II's famous Burma Road. But enough of history. If ever a nation has had too much of history, it is this one, and today, at last, it seems to finally be shrugging off history's yoke. Today the streets of Pyin U Lwin bustle with thousands of motorcycles (and scores of horse-carria...

This is a phenomenal book. The other Mantel I've read is WOLF HALL, which is a terrific book and I don't begrudge it its Booker one bit; but it isn't a patch on A PLACE OF GREATER SAFETY. No, I take it back, I suppose do begrudge the WOLF HALL win a bit, because the implication is "if you read just one Hilary Mantel book, make it this one!" and that ain't so. One thing she does phenomenally well here, and I can't think of any other examples at all come to think of it, is portray a cohort of colourful, intelligent friends who by virtue of being in the wrong place at the wrong time seize - and are seized by - History. But they were by no means destined for it. If the aristocrats had been just a little less corrupt and incompetent, they could have tottered on for another 5-10 years before revolution came, and then it wouldn't have been Camille/Danton/Robespierre's revolution. (And what then of Bonaparte?) As a result, the character's don't ...

To celebrate her completion of the California bar exam S. and I drove over the mountains for a weekend in Reno. Yesterday I ventured into the desert for a little day trip to a tiny town named Gerlach, which some of you may perhaps have heard of, or, who knows, even driven through. For reasons too convoluted and implausible to explain here I happen to have passed through it quite a number times in the past, but due to various factors I have never really had the opportunity to stop, look around, and take some pictures from the nearby roads. At least until now. No shit, there I was. Desert lions, I presume. Lonesome clouds drift over the Black Rock Desert... ...where I suspect it's going to be a very dusty year. The road beckons onwards... ...to startlingly gorgeous Pyramid Lake.

My odd little squirrel book appears to have won a bronze medal at the ForeWord Book Of The Year Awards . Yeah, I'd never heard of them before I was nominated, either, but I gather they're legit, if minor: somehow affiliated with the American Library Association, and "selected by a panel of librarian and bookseller judges." The amusing thing is that the gold medal (for fantasy) went to a book about pirates; the bronze-medal winner is of course about animals; and the silver medal went to a book about ... wait for it ... animal pirates . This was a jury that cannot be criticized for not knowing what it likes!

Out of curiosity, and/or in my capacity as a tech blogger , last month I decided to experiment with enrolling a couple of my previously published novels in Amazon's KDP Select program for 90 days. Books in KDP Select can be loaned for free to Amazon Prime members, and you can also make them free to purchase for 5 of those 90 days. The downside is that you agree to make your book digitally exclusive to the Kindle platform while it's part of KDP Select. As is often the case, it's not clear how well this plays with the Creative Commons licensing for my novels; even if I agree to make my book exclusive to Kindle, other people can make it available for download for free. But I did remove the two books in question -- my thrillers Invisible Armies and Night of Knives -- from the other paid market where I've made them available, Apple's iBooks (where they've only sold a tiny handful anyway.) Then, as an experiment, I made Invisible Armies free for a Wednesday-t...

Start with the default state of humankind: poverty and insecurity 1 . In the cities, this means slums: tin-roofed shacks jammed up against one another, sometimes for miles; shit-strewn streets; spaghetti tangles of pirated power or local generators, if any; sardine-packed minibus taxis; unemployment; gangs; hardly any health care. Things don't seem so bad in rural areas, except you're easily victimized by disease, drought, politics, and, more insidiously, population growth: the land that fed your ancestors enough that they grew and multiplied isn't sufficient to feed your family, because you're more numerous than they were. This would be much less of an issue with better inputs - seeds, fertilizer, etc. - but we're talking subsistence farming here. Development. Meaning what? Not GDP growth, necessarily. The short version is, things getting better . Real health care. Real education. Work that turns into a job that turns into a career. Things built to a higher stand...

I maintain a Flickr set of all my very bestest pictures, and these are its entries from my latest wanderings. Click through to view large versions. (Apologies for the repetition from previous posts, but it's handy to have 'em all in one place.) Spooky monk, Lalibela, Ethiopia. Wall, Axum, Ethiopia. Sign, Djibouti. Salt pearls, Djibouti. Salt field and volcanoes, Djibouti. Salt lake, Djibouti. Tree in lava field, Djibouti. Pigeons, Delhi. The Jantar Mantar, Delhi. Pines, Van Vihar, Manali, India. The Spiti Valley, India. Himalayan zoom, India. Himalayan desert, India. Stok La, Ladakh, India. Sunset, Ladakh, India. Marine Drive, Mumbai.