Driving the Plymouth to Banjul Rally (2007): (Posted in April 2022)

Here’s how it all came about. Some of this might be apocryphal. You will need to decide. Once upon a time (so the legend goes) a London banker called Julian Nowill thought it might be fun to drive the Paris-Dakar rally. But when he looked into it, he discovered that a realistic entry could cost anything up to a quarter of a million pounds – once you’ve paid for several high-performance cars, a huge support team, a trailer load of spare tyres, and salaries and expenses for a retinue of mechanics and PR people and film crews and hairdressers and cooks. So he decided to set up a rival rally. This would go from Nowill’s hometown of Plymouth to Banjul in the Gambia, following a similar compass setting to the Paris-Dakar. The difference would be that cars should generally cost less than £100, teams should try not to spend more than £15 on preparations, and the whole event would lack organisation or support. Now admit it. That sounds a whole lot more fun. And to top it off, cars (or what was left of them) would be auctioned off at the end and the proceeds would go to Gambian charities.

It is fifteen years since Mike Taylor and I drove the Plymouth-Banjul Challenge. Dozens of cars set off on the same day and teams broadly choose their own routes, and you meet up from time to time along the way. Or you don’t. It’s all a bit random but that’s kind-of how it works. There were six of us, in three cars. Mike and I drove a 1988 Renault 5 we bought from a scrapyard in Brest. (The car costs us €200 so we had already broken the rules. But no one really cares, which is part of the charm of this rally.) My mate Graham Ibbotson (who appears from time to time in this blog) drove a big old Renault (I can’t recall the model) along with his son Tom. And Tom’s mates Adam Flowerday and Don Howarth drove some kind of Fiat Panda rip-off. (I don’t know what it was). Anyway, there you have our little convoy, and on the way, we grew to include two farmers in a little hatchback, two prison officers in a huge van, three guys in an unreliable Ford Modeo and a pair of Portuguese teenagers in an ancient Hillman Humber. (One of the two wasn’t old enough to drive, apparently).

It is an absolutely madcap rally. Bonkers. It isn’t a race (thank goodness). It’s a kind of test of endurance for man and machine. It rattles through eight countries (UK, France, Spain, Morocco, Western Sahara, Mauritania, Senegal, Gambia), has three ferry crossings (the Channel, the Straits of Gibraltar, and the Gambia River), and it includes one serious mountain range (the Atlas), one active minefield (see my blog on Guelta Zemmur), hundreds of miles of appalling roads, and around 350 miles of open desert sand. Which is AWESOME!

I would recommend this event to anyone with a sense of adventure. It takes three weeks – which is a lot of driving – but it is never, ever boring. There are days off in Gibraltar, Marrakech, Daklha and St Louis. The camaraderie is amazing. The adventures come thick and fast. I won’t regale you with stories because once I start I really won’t know where to stop. But trust me. The stories are good. Our little Renault barely made it. None of the dashboard dials worked. Ever. Which was a relief because we didn’t have any warning lights to worry us. We trashed the gears in the desert when we hit a massive rock so we did most of the second half of the rally with only third gear (the only gear that worked). And we bent the car so badly in Mauritania that afterwards the doors wouldn’t properly close. But hey. We kept going, we made it to Banjul, and we raised a shed load of cash for Kid’s Action.

As well as being an adventure, the experience was also pretty humbling. Mauritania is one of the world’s poorest countries. Senegal and Gambia have their challenges too. We are used to thinking that problems like these are somewhere on the other side of the world. We don’t imagine them as close enough to drive to. We all learned a lot on this trip. We grew up a lot. We are all linked. We all live on the same road. Literally. I still find it helpful to think of humanity this way. All of us just different numbers on the same road.   

My what3words link takes you to the beach. (Did I mention that you drive along 200 miles of beach! That’s 200 miles of BEACH!)

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

You can find some of the video that Tom took on YouTube. Here are the links:

Plymouth Banjul Rally 2007 Part One - YouTube

Plymouth Banjul Rally 2007 Part Two - YouTube

Plymouth Banjul Rally 2007 Part Three - YouTube

 

 what3words /// The simplest way to talk about location

My Map Pins 37: Grenada (21st April 2022)

My sister Lorraine lives in Grenada. She farms bell peppers on the windward side of the island (the East coast) along with my nephew Shaun, and Shaun's son Grahame. Their farm is right by the sea. So, you see, we had a perfect excuse to visit. But here's the thing. No one should need an excuse to visit Grenada.  It's the original spice island, a jewel in the Caribbean, and it's a truly tropical island - a lush rainforest, mountainous and green, with perfect beaches and a genuine, laid-back, reggae-music-infused-West-Indies vibe. It may not have the brand identity of Barbados, or the huge tourist infrastructure of St Lucia, but it has charm, and it feels curiously undiscovered, and I love it. 

Here are the stats. Grenada is one of the smallest countries in the world. It ranks 179th (out of 195) by population (113,000 people), and 185th by land area (just 133 sq kilometers). This makes it marginally larger than Malta but only three fifths of the size of the Isle of Man. It's a dot on the map, basically. And it feels like it. You're never far from the sea, and you're never more than around 15 miles from anywhere else on the island (although slow winding roads mean those 15 miles could take you an hour to drive).

They really don't know how to do tourism in Grenada (apart from wham-bang ferrying around of passengers from the cruise liners).  We hired a car (pretty much essential) and we criss-crossed the island until we felt we knew it all. Almost. Driving is easy. The roads aren't busy. Just slow. 

Sandy Island

Signposts are rare (or non existent). Google maps reception is patchy. You need to navigate with the one rather unhelpful map provided by the island authorities. But it's ok. You can't get too lost. And anyway, exploring is fun. The Grand Etang rainforest park in the centre of the island is the must-see location. But my what3words map pin today is Sandy Island - an uninhabited paradise island a couple of miles off the North East coast. You pay a chap in a boat to take you there and maroon you for most of the day. It's the place where they filmed the Bounty Ad back in the day ( https://youtu.be/h8S7B8lnOL4 ) and it is still utterly unspoiled and lovely.

what3words /// The simplest way to talk about location

What3words: decisions.trickled.deeply

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

Grand Anse Beach

Grand Etang

The view from my sister's farm. Yes, really!

Out today for COP26 ... 'The Year of the Dugong.' (1st November 2021)

 

My novella for COP26, 'The Year of the Dugong,' is now available in English as a Kindle Novella. I should dearly love you to read it. I would especially love you to read it during COP26. It isn't a long read. It's about one quarter the length of a full novel. But I hope it packs a serious punch all the same.  Here is the link: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B09KQRY62C/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_S30JFFM17SMMND320K9V

I wrote this as a short story to highlight issues around climate change and extinction. If you like it, and if it moves you at all, do please let me know. 

The story has been published exclusively as a hardback novella in German by S Fischer Verlag - as 'Das Jahr des Dugong.' 

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

Why I’m retiring (but not from writing) (23rd July 2021)

 

The overwhelming response when I’ve told people I’m retiring from full-time paid employment has been, ‘what kept you?’ ‘You should have retired when your first novel came out and devoted yourself to writing,’ one friend told me. Others are astonished that I’ve still been working all this time. ‘What!’ they exclaim. ‘You’re still working!’ As if this was somehow a sin.

A lot of novelists never give up the day job of course. Anthony Trollope wrote ten novels while working for the post office.  Conan Doyle was a doctor. Kafka was an insurance clerk. T.S. Eliot was a publisher. Nabokov was a lepidopterist (I bet you never knew that). Most of the writers I know still do a nine-to-five of some kind. Personally, I never wanted to give up the day job. Not really. I have always rather enjoyed working. I like the people I work with. I get carried along with the projects we’re doing and the ambitions we have. It’s fun. I have worked in my industry (healthcare computing) for so long that I’ve become something of a sage. There are very few of us left who recall the early days. I remember one of the first computer systems I was involved with (a lab system at a London hospital). It had 512KB of memory. Half a megabyte. It seemed a lot at the time. I remember the clunky green screens and the colossal monitors and the achingly slow response times. I remember learning BASIC programming on a Commodore PET.  And all those things that might now be hard to explain. Queuing for the photocopier. The telex machine. Memorising phone numbers. Carbon copies. The tea trolley. Circulation envelopes. Treasury ties. Ties! Fax paper. Floppy discs…

… and now, like a very-slow-motion movie, the decades have passed, and I’ve watched things change. The kind of systems we’re installing today would have been extraordinary science-fiction to my twenty five-year-old self. The almost limitless power of mobile tech, and the coming of AI are transforming this space beyond recognition.

I have been incredibly lucky.  I’ve visited hospitals in ten US states, in UAE, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Kuwait and most of Europe. I’ve worked on deals in South Africa and Malta and Nigeria and Scotland and Ireland and too many other places to mention. It has been a blast.

I am, however, now in my, er, mid-sixties. And here is the truth. I’ve become a bit of a dinosaur. I didn’t see it coming. But perhaps we aren’t supposed to. Maybe it takes everybody by surprise. You wake up one morning and you realise, with a start, that your time has come. There is the door, there is your coat, what’s your hurry? This is what happened to me. I can escape it no longer.  I am no longer a programme manager.    

But I am still a novelist.

I won’t ever give up writing. I couldn’t. It is what I do. So I am doubly lucky – to have had a first career I enjoyed, and a second to keep me going. Thank you to all the amazing, fascinating, brilliant people I have met and worked with for so many years. I will miss you guys a lot. Do, please, stay in touch. Keep on making the world a better place. I want to read about your great successes. And, by the way, if you fancy, just occasionally, putting your feet up with a good book – ask in any good bookshop or check out my page on Amazon.  

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

My Map Pins 36: Swimming with Manatees - Crystal River, Florida (10th June 2021)

It takes a little under two hours to drive from Orlando to Crystal River on the Gulf coast of Florida. Well worth the drive, and not just to escape the Orlando crowds. The Crystal River Reserve State Park is a little oasis of tranquility. Make sure you pre-book a session to go swimming with manatees. We booked with Fun2Dive Manatee Tours and would wholeheartedly recommend them. There is no sense of rush. You have half a day out in the boat on the river, a very helpful guide, and you see manatees! The water is brutally cold, but wetsuits are available if you need them. The manatees just ignore you, and go about their business munching the vegetation while you snorkel around them. It is perfectly lovely.

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

What3words: dangle.earbuds.paces

 

The Year of the Dugong (Das Jahr des Dugong): The Inside Story (31st May 2021)

 

This gorgeous cover-design is for my novella, ‘The Year of the Dugong’ (Das Jahr des Dugong)’ due to be published in German on October 26th by the amazing team at S Fischer Verlag in Frankfurt. So far, this is an exclusive deal and I don’t yet have (any may never have) an English language publisher for this story. All of which may sound a little odd, and it deserves an explanation.

Perhaps I should start with the story.

Early in 2020 my agent, Stan, called me for a conversation. Did I have another novel on the go? I told him I did. Sort of. Except it wasn’t strictly a novel. It was a collection of short stories. There was an uncomfortable silence on the phone. You never want your agent to go silent. And this was when I learned that short stories are not particularly popular with publishers. It may be my memory, but I seem to recall the expression, ‘career suicide’ being floated in the conversation. It wasn’t especially encouraging.

Anyway, I stubbornly persevered with the collection, and sure enough, just as everyone had predicted, the final set of stories was not really suitable for publication. Which is a shame, but I get it. I shelved the stories and started work on a novel instead.

But here comes the silver lining. There was one story in the collection I was reluctant to part with. It was a tale about climate change. Climate change is a tough subject for a fiction writer. It is a slow, unfolding catastrophe, and the time scales are generally too long to grapple with effectively – at least within the lifetime of a single protagonist. To get around this, I had the idea of a Rip-Van-Winkle character from 2019 who falls asleep and awakens a very long time in the future, only to find himself blamed for his part in the destruction of the planet. One day, in the spring of 2021, I mentioned the story on a zoom call with S Fischer Verlag. ‘The Whale at the End of the World, (Der Wal und Das Ende der Welt)’ had been in Der Spiegel’s Top 10 Paperback chart for 50 weeks, and we were exchanging ideas for the new novel. At one point I said, ‘this reminds me of a short story I’ve just written,’ and my editor in Frankfurt said, ‘send it to me.’  A day or so later she called back. Could they please publish it?

The story was The Year of the Dugong.

I am so excited that Fischer are publishing Dugong as a novella. I did wonder, for a while, if I ought to develop it into a full-length novel, but truthfully, the story felt complete;  I sensed that stretching it out, and introducing more characters would dilute the impact. I asked my editor at Fischer if she could time the publication to coincide with COP26, the UN Climate Conference planned for November 2021. She agreed. So it will hit the bookstands in Germany on 27^th October.

If no UK publisher picks up the story, I will post the English language original onto this blog as a PDF or Kindle file to coincide with the German publication. Or drop a comment into this blog and I will email it to you on 27^th October.  

And that’s it. That’s why I find myself in the very unusual position of having a book published exclusively in a language that I don’t speak. And it has a beautiful cover. Don’t you agree?

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

Tracing my Family Tree (6th May 2021)

 I’ve often been sniffy about people who obsess over their family tree. It always felt, to me, a rather pointless exercise to dust-off and parade your male ancestors from the last few generations when we are all pretty much related. I’ve blogged about this before, but it bears repeating. Every human who walked the earth ten thousand years ago is either a direct ancestor of everyone alive today, or else they are an ancestor of none of us. It’s true. Our most recent common ancestor, from whom everyone on the planet is descended, probably lived between 55 BC and 1,400 BC. We are all pretty close cousins. You and me and Kamala Harris and Xi Jinping and the Pope. We are none of us further apart than 27^th cousins, but we are almost certainly much closer than that. A shocking statistic for all those people who prefer to believe in racial purity or Brexit – but there we are. *

Anyway. This has always been my objection to family trees. Until I started to trace one. And almost immediately my opinion changed. Genealogy may still be wholly pointless as an exercise in understanding our biological origins. But as a way of uncovering some genuine family stories, it is extraordinarily fascinating. I’m a convert.

It started as a way to while away the long days during the first Covid lockdown. My wife, Sue, wanted to resolve a few puzzles in her family tree. So we started to dig. Ancestry.com proved to be really helpful. Expensive, but ultimately worth it. (We paid the subscriptions for about six months.)  I should warn that it all took rather longer than we anticipated. There is something of a learning curve you need to get past. And we made mistakes. We spent days unravelling the family of one Welsh ancestor who proved not to be an ancestor after all. Never mind. We did uncover a host of stories. Like Sue’s great-great-great-grandfather, born in 1801, who died of exhaustion on Christmas Eve 1869 walking with a heavy bag of Christmas provisions from Whitchurch in Shropshire to Handbridge in Chester, intending to stay with his son – a journey of around 30 miles. He collapsed and died less than a mile from The Old Red Lion in Handbridge – the pub where his son was the landlord. The pub is still there. Or the black sheep of Sue’s family who drifted from job to job in the 1800s, and was fined £10 for assault in 1882 after throwing a cup of tea over his wife. It is endlessly fascinating. We discovered the marriage bans of ancestors who signed the register with a cross. Neither of them could read.

Sue was a Newnes and her mother was a Sargeant. We compiled all the stories we uncovered into a book (for family only of course). After this I had to do my tree too. More fascinating stories, and another book. My dad’s family were cockneys, living in the borough of Bow in the East End of London for five generations. They worked on the railways. I never knew. One of my ancestors, Robert Ironmonger, was indicted for ‘certain petty larcenies’ and transported to his majesties colonies in America in 1774, leaving his wife and baby son (my ancestor) in London. In 1776 the pesky colonists only went and started a revolutionary war and Robert was conscripted to fight for the British. Fascinating! I traced my father’s family line back to a gentleman fittingly called ‘End Ironmonger,’ who appears to have been born sometime around 1400 AD. Or thereabouts. And that’s as far as it goes.

So here I am with some new advice. Check out ancestry.com (they’re not paying me a commission). And have a root through your family stories. You might be surprised what you find.

And by the way ... if you happen to be an Ironmonger or a Newnes or a Sargeant or a Wilson, or if you think you might be related in any way ... drop your email address into the comment field and I'll send you the pdf of the book.

 *Humans Are All More Closely Related Than We Commonly Think - Scientific American

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

My Map Pins (35): Lombardy (3rd May 2021)

 Lombardy is a huge piece of geography in the north of Italy and I can never do it justice with a single map pin. But, quite frankly, if you haven’t been to Lombardy yet, what’s keeping you? This is the home of the Italian Lakes. It needs to be on your bucket list. This isn’t a manufactured landscape like the English Lakes, this is Italy rough and raw from Milan to the Alps, from urban to wilderness, possessing some of the most glorious vistas imaginable. Hire a car (a little Fiat 500 is fine), book somewhere reasonably central to stay, and then get out there and explore for a week or so. As well as all the things you’ll discover on TripAdvisor (and there are lots) I’d recommend hiring bicycles to pedal around Lake Varese (it's about 28km all around so not too taxing – although we lost out way at one point and ended up going much further), visiting the Parco del Campo dei Fiori national park and the Santa Maria del Monte Trail, taking the cable car up Laveno Mombello on the edge of Lake Maggiore, and of course those lakes. Ahh, those lakes. Bella. Bella.

what3words /// The simplest way to talk about location

What3words: decorate.solves.building

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

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 

My Map Pins (26): Ojców National Park, Krakow, Poland (Posted March 2021)

 

So there we were in Krakow, in March 2020, when the country went into the first Coronavirus lockdown. There had been fourteen confirmed cases and panic had set in. (The UK would not announce its own lockdown until eleven days later.)  We had one day left of our city break and it looked as if it might be a rather bleak day. All visitor-attractions were closing. All of the delightful bars and brasseries in the city, all museums and galleries, churches and castles. The salt mine was closed. Wartime memorial sites were closed. Oscar Schindler’s factory was closed. We had already done the city walking tour (recommended). What to do? We consulted a map and popped a random metaphorical pin into this place – Ojcówski Narodwy park, and the four of us set off there in a taxi that could comfortably have taken three. Ojcow is pretty small for a national park.  But there is a charming riverside walk through the gorge, and it is really rather lovely. Halfway along the trail, the river diverts through a trout farm with its own restaurant selling freshly caught trout. Hand on heart, it is the tastiest trout I’ve ever eaten. All in all we felt the lockdown had done us a favour. Check it out if ever you’re in Krakow.

what3words /// The simplest way to talk about location 

What3words: strategic.idiomatic.wound

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

My Map Pins (25): Nouakchott, Mauritania (Posted March 2021)

Here's a quiz question for you. Can you name the capital of Mauritania? OK, perhaps you can because it happens to be the title of this Map-Pin post. But that's cheating. I bet you didn't know it before. Nouakchott is not a well known destination. It's a Saharan town.  A poor town in one of the poorest nations on earth. Brutally hot. I read in a travel guide that the city is subject to sandstorms on 200 days of the year. This isn't hard to believe. Everything about this city creates the impression that it is clinging onto life at the very fringes of habitability. We were there for just one night, driving through. We found a cheap hotel that put us up in a tent on the roof. 

In the morning, driving south on the long road towards Senegal, we witnessed a daily ritual that keeps the city alive. A tanker filled with freshwater had docked at the port, and now hundreds of donkeys were delivering water around the city. A standpipe at a crossroads was filling barrels and assorted containers, and a huge queue of donkeys and their drivers were lining up for their ration. What other city has a dependency on an army of donkeys for its water supply? We were quickly gone, leaving the city and its donkeys behind us, but I would like to have stayed longer. It felt as if there was a lot to explore here, and we missed it. It felt like a secret city, like Timbuktu, or something from the Arabian Nights. I often think about Nouakchott. This unlikely city in the sand. I don't suppose I shall ever go back. I feel quite sad about that. 

what3words /// The simplest way to talk about location

What3Words: rinse.claw.reheat

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

My Map Pins (24): Llyn Elsi, Snowdonia, Wales (Posted March 2021)

The trail to Llyn Elsi, one thousand feet above the town of Betws-y-coed in Snowdonia, is one of our favourite walks. Pick a fine day to do it. Take a picnic. Park up behind St Mary's Church. Lace up your boots, and off you go.  It isn't a long walk. It's around four miles. But the first mile is pretty brutal - this is where you do most of the uphill stuff. When you reach the top, there's a surprise. A twisty-turny lake with a trail all the way around it. So basically, you climb the hill, you walk half way around the lake, you pick a spot with an amazing view for lunch, then in a more leisurely fashion you complete the circuit of the lake and you descend to Betws for a coffee or something stronger. Honestly you won't find many better walks than this. You can thank me when you've done it. 

what3words /// The simplest way to talk about location

 What3Words: ranks.doses.parrot

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

My Map Pins (23): Skara Brae, Orkney (Posted March 2021)

 

Skara Brae is Europe’s most complete Neolithic village. It is older than Stonehenge or the Pyramids and was occupied for about seven centuries which is quite a humbling fact. It was built around 3,100 BC - so if you trace your ancestors back for 200 generations the chances are pretty good that someone in your family line helped build it. Why would Neolithic people choose to live in this windswept bleak corner of the British Isles? Why wouldn't they just set off south and make a home in Cornwall? Who knows? But it is truly an amazing place. I’d recommend a visit. It is a fair old journey to get there mind. We drove to Thurso on the very north tip of the Scottish mainland, and took the ferry. We might have seen an orca. Some passengers did. But what we saw might just have been a wave. Never mind. We always need to remember, as TS Eliot said, ‘It is the journey, not the arrival that matters.’ That is especially true of Orkney, but mainly because the journey there is so beautiful. If you’ve never been to Orkney, add it to your wish list. 

what3words /// The simplest way to talk about location

What3Words: calendars.handwriting.rotation

Please check out my website to learn more about my books:  https://www.johnironmonger.com