My Map Pins (34): Independence Day in Vilnius, Lithuania (23rd April 2021)

 On February 16^th every year, Lithuanians come together to celebrate their Independence Day. In Vilnius, celebrations begin around 5pm when it is already dark, with the lighting of thirty symbolic bonfires in the streets of the capital. Yes, you read that right. Massive bonfires in the city streets. How could that not be a good idea? But hey, it’s a party! A very jolly crowd in full independence-day-spirit trails around the city from one huge fire of logs to the next. Pretty well the whole city comes out for this. Alcohol is consumed, songs are sung, flags are waved. There are little stalls like the cabins from a Christmas market selling hot foods and mementos. It’s a night-out for all the family.

As it happens, I knew absolutely nothing about any of this when, in 2010, I drove into Vilnius (from Riga in Latvia via Kaunas) on, er, February 16th. I had no idea it was the National Day. I did know that it was brutally cold. Scarily cold. And there was a humongous bonfire right outside my hotel window. It crossed my mind that perhaps this was some odd Baltic approach to keeping the city warm at night. But any excuse for a party. I pulled on my coat and went off to mingle. More of an observer, really, than a party-goer. But I did manage about five bonfires, I drank some very quaffable beer, and ate some curious pastries, I discovered the old town, and I learned about the fierce independent spirit of the Lithuanians. So all good.

what3words /// The simplest way to talk about location

What3words: passion.shop.shelter    

Photo from http://www.lithuanianstories.com/

Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com 

My Map Pins (33): Australia (posted April 2021)

 I have only been to Australia once. I went for eight days in 2001. It was a business trip, travelling on my own, with meetings in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane, and Hobart. So quite a lot of hopping around, a map-pin in pretty much every state (except for Northern Territories and Western Australia), but tragically not much time for sightseeing. Three things stay in my memory. I did get a weekend where I took a hire-car and drove up the Gold Coast from Brisbane to a simply gorgeous seaside town called Noosa. That would be memory number one. The drive was lovely. I stopped off at Australia Zoo. I did a little bit of walking. It was fabulous. Memory number two would be the day I spent in Hobart where I drove up Mount Wellington (spectacular) and then went exploring little deserted coves in Hobart Bay. It was a tiny taste of Tasmania, but I loved it.  Final memory was a casino in Melbourne. I’m not a gambler, but on the flight from London I had read Bill Bryson’s ‘Australia,’ (it was research for the trip,) and he aroused my interest. Sure enough it was a jaw-dropper. Imagine a windowless warehouse, like an Ikea, packed out on floor after floor with bug-eyed people playing endless pokie games on glaring games machines. It was like that, but bigger.

I don’t have any photos of Australia because my camera was stolen a week or so later from the back of a car at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, and stupidly I hadn’t backed up any pictures. I don’t suppose I’ll ever go back, so I shall have to rely on these memories. The photo I’ve posted is the snapshot of my map pins from Google. (It isn’t difficult to build a travel map on Google Maps – I’d recommend giving it a try.) My what3words takes you to Mount Wellington.

One more memory. A business lunch in an al-fresco seafood restaurant on Sydney Harbour overlooking the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge, watching commuters zipping back and forth in ferries. Damn but it’s a good lifestyle those Aussies have…   

 what3words: ponytails.carnations.combinations     

what3words /// The simplest way to talk about location

Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com 

My Map Pins (32): Casablanca (posted April 2021)

 The first time I visited Casablanca was in 1974 on an InterRail tour with my (then) girlfriend Sue (now my wife) and my mate Les Jessop (where are you now Les? Get in touch mate.) I guess we were wannabe-hippies then, sort-of, and Casablanca was on the hippy trail. We stayed in a cheap pension, we ate street food, and we explored the city on foot. One afternoon we paid a visit to the family of Khalid, a medical student we had met on the train coming through Spain. He had given us his address and had urged us to visit. The family lived in an apartment right in the medina. His mother laid on food for us, but none of the family could eat a mouthful because it was Ramadan. In our naiveté, we hadn’t realised. And none of the women could show their faces because our arrival had caught them unawares and they were now trapped in the kitchen without veils. Awkward. Doubly awkward. But humbling. It was an eye-opening trip for us in so many ways.

I revisited Casablanca with Mike Taylor on the Plymouth to Banjul Rally in 2008. I didn’t recognise a single sight from 1974. Three decades on, the city was a massive traffic jam. We didn’t stay to do any sightseeing. We found a cheap hotel, and parked on the street, our car stuffed with our kit. In the morning we discovered we had left the car doors unlocked. But nothing had been taken. It was 5:30 am. Tom Ibbotson in the car behind us, filmed our early morning exodus from the city, so instead of a What3Words for this post, here is our YouTube record of that drive south.

(527) Casablanca in 60 Seconds - YouTube

Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com 

My Map Pins (31): Parque Natural do Alvão, Portugal ((posted April 2021)

 You will need a car. Alvão Natural Park is the smallest national park in Portugal but it is a little off the beaten track. It is, however, quite close to the delightfully named, Nossa Senhora da Graca de Mondim de Basto – a sixteenth Century hilltop chapel which dominates the region and is well worth a visit once you’ve done the park. But let’s stick with the park for this map pin. It is a mountainous region, and it’s a time capsule. You will go back in time. This isn’t a gimmick. But the villages that have been enclosed within the park look as if they’ve been unchanged for a century. Farmers eke out a living among these inhospitable peaks. How they do it, heaven only knows. You’ll feel uncomfortable, like an intruder from the future as you glide past in your air conditioned car. There are plenty of walks. They are all pretty hilly. But the views are spectacular. We saw mountain goats. There they are in the photo taken on my mobile phone.

What3words: reordering.cherries.nitrogen  

what3words /// The simplest way to talk about location

Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com 

My Map Pins (30): The Paris Catacombs (19th April 2021)

 Have you ever visited the catacombs in Paris? No? Then I humbly suggest you add them to your bucket list. Really. Skip the enormous queues at the Eiffel Tower, or the crush around the Mona Lisa, and head underground. Also, if you have read and enjoyed  ‘Pure,’ by Andrew Miller (an extraordinary and brilliant novel set among the bones and stinking corpses of Le Cimitiére des Innocents in 1785) then you absolutely have to visit the catacombs.  To explain: the ossuaries and cemeteries of Paris were overflowing with corpses in the 1780s, and the stench had become unbearable. To resolve the problem, the bones of six million people were relocated into empty mine tunnels underneath the city. You can walk through the tunnels and see the bones. That is pretty much it, and in itself should make the catacombs worth a visit, but the story gets more macabre. Each cemetery was allocated a room – or a space within the tunnels. Some simply dumped their bones in massive heap. But other took a more artistic approach. They created walls out of skulls, and crafted elaborate patterns with the bones.  You will never see anything more ghoulish or gruesome yet simultaneously charming. Beautiful patterns constructed out of dead people. It is morbid, but oddly it isn’t spooky. The walk around the tunnels is about a mile, and then you find yourself disgorged onto an unfamiliar street, nowhere near where you went in. Give it a go. You will never look at a skeleton in the same way again.

What3words: piston.prompting.among

what3words /// The simplest way to talk about location

Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com 

My Map Pins (29): New York City (posted April 2021)

My map pin posts are about stories as well as places. And here is a story about my first ever visit to New York City. I remember just how excited I was; excited but irritated. This was a business trip, and an annoyingly brief one. I wouldn’t have any time to explore. Damn! I was on a flight from Atlanta, due into La Guardia around nine o’clock at night. I had a meeting at Mount Sinai Hospital at ten thirty the next morning, and I’d need to rush away from that to get to JFK for my flight back to London. I was resigned to seeing next to nothing of the city. But I had a stroke of luck. I struck up a conversation on the plane with the man in the seat next to mine. He was a New Yorker, now living in Atlanta. I told him about my disappointment, not being able to explore. ‘To hell with that,’ he said. ‘Did you never hear about the city that never sleeps?’ He wrote down his name and the address of his hotel. He was staying (can you believe this?) at the Waldorf Astoria on Central Park. ‘Come and find me there at 11 o’clock tonight,’ he told me. ‘I’ll be waiting in reception. You have the rest of your life to catch up on the sleep.’

What could I do? I barely had time to check into my hotel and then I went to find him. (His name was Charles, by the way.) He took me on a walking tour. We did Times Square, and Broadway, and 7^th Avenue, and 42^nd Street. He showed me the Empire State and Macy’s, and the Flatiron Building, and Madison Square Gardens. And so much more. We walked all the way up to Greenwich Village, and Soho, and we dropped into Grand Central Station. Wow! We walked the leather off our shoes, but there was no stopping this guy. He was loving this as much as I was. We had a swift beer in a little speakeasy, and off we went again. There was something on almost every corner we had to see. Theatres. Skyscrapers. The PanAm building. FAO Schwarz. All the shops were closed, but what the heck. ‘They’re way cheaper at night,’ he said. I told him I was a huge fan of Damon Runyon so he pointed out Mindy’s for me. We walked past the UN, back to Central Park, up by the Guggenheim museum, and he still wasn’t done. He showed me the Dakota Building and Strawberry Fields, and the Natural History Museum, and a load of his favourite parts of the park. ‘Isn’t it dangerous walking in Central Park at night?’ I asked him. ‘Not for two six-foot guys,’ he said.

I got back to my hotel at three forty five am. We had been walking for more than four hours. I’m guessing we had walked maybe ten miles. The next morning, following Charles’ instructions, I took a yellow cab to the World Trade Centre and an elevator to the top, and I got to see the whole city emerging from an early morning mist. And I still made my meeting.

I never kept Charles’ contact details. Which is a shame. Because I owe him. Big time.

The photos are from a trip with my family a year or so later. We did the World Trade Centre again. That’s me and Jon in the pictures. That was a great trip too.

The What3Words is Times Square. It’s as good a place as any to start.

What3words: café.ahead.intelligible

what3words /// The simplest way to talk about location

Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com 

My Map Pins (28): Dublin, Ireland (posted April 2021)

 

I’ve been to Dublin so many times I can just about find my way around. (Isn’t it good when you reach this stage in your relationship with a place?) It is one of my favourite cities. It doesn’t have a stack of attractions. I’ve just looked up the top ten things to do in Dublin on Trip Advisor and realised I haven’t done any of them. But they sound dull. They are all museums and galleries and churches. The magic of Dublin is in the streets and the bars and the nightlife. Nowhere buzzes quite like Dublin at night when the Guinness is flowing and the fiddles are fiddling and the feet are tapping. My favourite trip was a family weekend in July 2011. Prince was playing at Malahide Castle and we had tickets. We warmed up with a day and night in Dublin, and we ate out at a boxty restaurant (look it up) and did a pub crawl, and heard ‘Whiskey in the Jar-o’ played three different times by three different bands, and we watched some Irish dancing, and we all got very drunk. And the next day the sun shone like blazes, and we fought our way close to the stage to watch Prince play a concert of his greatest hits, and it felt as if this was the world’s best musician playing his finest tracks at the peak of his career in a city of music lovers, and I wondered if it could ever get any better than this.

What3words: dream.legal.scam what3words /// The simplest way to talk about location

Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com 

My Map Pins (27): Lake Victoria (posted April 2021)

When I was eleven years old, I took a holiday with my mother on Lake Victoria. It was a sort of cruise, although the ship, the SS Usoga, was not, by any stretch of imagination, a cruise liner; it was a smelly, oily merchant ship on an endless tour around the lake. It did, however, have two passenger cabins. My mother and I had one. The other was occupied by a honeymooning couple from Ireland called Lynam. According to the East African Railways website - on Sundays the Usoga sailed clockwise from Kisumu: on Wednesdays, anti-clockwise. The overnight passage from Kisumu to Port Bell took twelve hours. After a two to three hour stop for cargo handling, the ship left Port Bell for the two hour passage to Entebbe. Entebbe was a short (one hour) stop, and from there it was an eight and a half hour passage to Bukoba in Tanzania. From Bukoba the ship sailed overnight to Mwanza where it arrived around dawn. Leaving Mwanza at 1030, Musoma was reached at 1900 from where, after a two hour stop, the final night passage brought the ship back to Kisumu at 0700. We must have sailed on a Sunday because we set sail from Kisumu and sailed the other way around.

In a perfect world Lake Victoria would be one of the great holiday destinations on the planet. The PR men would need no imagination. It’s a huge body of freshwater - the size of Ireland. When you’re sailing you spend much of the time out of sight of land. It’s an ocean really; a freshwater ocean. It heaves and groans like an ocean. Yet all around are the dark mysterious hills and jungles of Livingstone’s Africa. There’s a hint of the unexplored - the unexplorable - about the place. Ancient peoples live all around it; people who have made their living from the great beneficent lake for countless generations. Our most ancient ancestors of all probably hung out here for a few millennia, feeding off the very fine fish, luxuriating beneath the cool forest trees that overhang the bank, wading in the thousand little bays and eddies. Lake Victoria is as African as it gets. Wildlife abounds. Hippos swim languidly. Crocodiles bask menacingly. Antelope come fleetingly down to the shores to drink. Great birds flock. Tiny birds flick over the water seeking flies. Insects throng and swarm and buzz incessantly.

Halfway through the cruise, my mother fell ill.  She was pregnant at the time (with my sister, Sally). When we got to Bukoba she was taken off the Usoga to a hospital in the town. I wasn’t allowed to go along. But I escaped the ship. I scrambled down a mooring rope and found my way to the hospital. I still feel quite proud of this feat, all these years later.

I wrote about this trip in my first published novel, ‘The Notable Brain of Maximilian Ponder.’ In the novel, Max and his friend Adam, travel on the Usoga with Max’s mother O. In Bukoba O falls ill and is taken to hospital. Max escapes the Usoga by sliding down a mooring rope, concealed within a cloud of lake flies.

I have no photographs of the trip. The photos are of my  visit with my son Jon at the dockside in Ggaba near Kampala in 2011.  The What3words will take you here.

What3words: kite.amphibian.liquids

what3words /// The simplest way to talk about location

Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com