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 …
Category Archives: Travel
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 …
Timisoara
Robert Popa was indignant when I entered his consulting room in Timisoara, in the most western corner of Romania, and the image I saw was just all too familiar to me: Robert had just examined a one-year-old terrier with a non-weight bearing lameness that had for all of two weeks not responded to rest …
Hearts, Guns N’ Roses
“She’s got a smile that seems to me Reminds me of childhood memories Where everything was as fresh As the bright blue sky Now and then when I see her face She takes me away to that special place And if I stared too long, I’d probably break down and cry….” (Sweet Child …
The Blue Vet Diary 