My recent travels

The last six months travels have taken me from Old Europe (Vienna, Prague and Budapest) to the third poorest country in the world (Burkina Faso), and from the New World (New York City and Washington DC) to one of the world’s last great wilderness areas – Botswana’s Okavango Delta.
IN December I visited some of Europe’s oldest and most famous Christmas markets. Read all about the trip in this Sunday Independent article.

In February, 2010, I went to Burkina Faso in West Africa, for the Festival of the Masks. Festima, The Festival of the Masks, is held bi-annually in the third-poorest country in Africa, a former French colony, one with few or no natural resources, only a 13% literacy rate, where people live on less than a US$1 a day, and life expectancy is only a whisper above 47. And yet, and yet…Burkina Faso has had the vision and courage to attempt the almost impossible – to keep alive a tradition whose origins are lost in the mists of time – the culture of the Masks. This occasion is unique in Africa, the only festival of its kind which showcases different forms and expressions on the same platform at the same time. This is the 10th anniversary of Festima, started 20 years ago by a group of students, and today Mask Societies from Benin, Ivory Coast,  Nigeria, Togo, Mali and Guinea, have come to join their Burkina Faso “brothers and friends”, as M. Maryse Dabou, Festima’s Commissioner General, puts it, to “safeguard, conserve and preserve” the tradition of the masks. He goes on to say that the theft of cultural treasures such as these from West Africa is second only to drug-trafficking, and berates those who deal in “our sacred things’ as “predators”. He warns us that although we can meet and watch each group of Masks as it makes its way through the dimly lit little town to the arena, whatever we do, “ne les provoquez” – Do not provoke them, or mess with them – that’s potentially dangerous.

In April I went on a classical music tour to NYC and Washington DC, with Richard Cock, one of South Africa’s most popular conductors. So the itinerary read: Joshua Bell playing Bruch at New York’s Lincoln Centre; Mozart’s Magic Flute and Puccini’s Tosca at the Metropolitan Opera; a visit to the prestigious Juillard School of Music; Broadway shows; the Cirque de Soleil under the Big Top; the Museum Mile with the world-famous Guggenheim or Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art; concerts at Carnegie Hall; the celebrated young pianist Joyce Yang playing Beethoven at the Strathmore Centre, Washington DC; Washington DC’s Space Museum and famed National Gallery, its world- famous ballet, a Georgia O’Keeffe exhibition, and what about some Duke Ellington and late night jazz? In between, there would be Times Square, Central Park, Harlem, DC’s famous war memorials, the White House, the Lincoln Memorial and a cruise on the Potomac river. Whew!

And then in May, off to the Orient Express’ three beautiful camps in the Okavango: Eagle Island Lodge, Kwai River Lodge and Savute Elephant Camp. The Savute Channel has water in it for the first time in 28 years – and the lions have taken to it as if they have been swimming all their lives. Nothing, in my opinion, can beat the Delta, for tranquillity, natural beauty and the best sunsets in the world.

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