We were at the end of our visit of the veterinary faculty of Perugia, a town with a long Roman and Etruscan heritage. Three months of preparations, five days of inspections, interviews, and team meetings plus a final presentation in the main building of this prestiges veterinary school lay behind us, to find out …
Category Archives: Travel
Ana and the Mercury Mine
Ana wasn’t on time – she was five minutes early …. This usually is fine by me, but not after a party with one of Belgrade’s finest rock music bands and a subsequent tour with the die-hards through Ljubljana’s limited, but still surprisingly wild nightclubs, resulting in hardly more than a couple of hours …
Botos-cor-de-rosa
It was when the waters of the Rio Negro tried and failed to mix with that of the Solimões, to form the mighty Amazon, that we saw them for the first time – hunting dolphins, a whole pod of them. These clever mammals were taking advantage of a phenomenon that was once described as …
Cashless, yet not penniless in the jungle
Senhora Silva might not have been much taller than five feet, but she was running a “tight ship” in her little supermarket on a small Balsa wood float, on the Parana do Mamori, one of the many contributories to the Amazon just South of Manaus. Together with Josef and João, my companions, we had …
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A night at the Theatre….in the Amazon
The non-binary actor was walking fast in small circles carrying a oszillator , that was producing some alien, distorted words or just sounds that filled the room. Then the light went off and there was a scream …. A few moments later the actor was suddenly walking through the audience, cast into the rays …
Brasilia and the legacy of Oscar Niemeyer
I couldn’t have been more than eight or nine years old, when at our local church, which was a converted farmhouse with a thatched roof in the North of Germany, the villagers had been invited to an unusual spectacle: a member of the parish had travelled to Brazil and had come back with a …
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The Northern Pantanal and the Tiramisu effect
It had been impossible to find some sleep… It was 4 o’clock in the morning, the power cut had started 6 hours earlier and it was 32 degrees in a room with next to no ventilation. It was then, when a group of howler monkeys were starting with their morning concert in the wildlife …
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The cathedral of peregrination
The early September sun is about to climb above the roof of a conference centre in the middle of Antwerp, that can claim to feature a “Room with a Zoo” as well as a meeting room guarded by the life-sized model of a Central African Okapi. The first rays of direct sun light are …
The Sixth Fort
The last bar had just closed and with the streets now deserted, I took a stroll through a world that had disappeared over a hundred years ago, in a place that was so charming and peaceful, that it provided the canvas for one of history’s most chilling narratives….. I was in Sighisoara, one of …
Hiking in Transylvania
I realised that it had been a mistake to pass the last petrol station on the fertile plain near Sibiu, before starting the long ascend along the Transfăgărşan Road, which is crossing the Transylvanian mountain range from the North to the South. The forecasted 150 km of reach, the fuel gauge had indicated, had …
The Blue Vet Diary 