EAST TIMOR to EVIA

2009-12-21T09:37:00.000-08:00

EAST TIMOR I imagined a green land of dense forest where guerrillas hid, but a woman who has just come back from filming the “cetacean soup” of whales and dolphins that gathers in a global hotspot beside the island tells me it is dry and dusty and has never recovered from the vicious occupation

EBOLI Christ stopped here. We kept driving. It looked like a sorry southern Italian industrial town.

EBRO ELTA The rice fields, thatched huts, marsh ferries and birdlife (my first encounter with a pratincole) are like a long sigh of acceptance that nobody ever hears.

EDINBURGH At the Festival one year, at the start of a performance of Nelken (Carnations) by Pina Bausch, a dancer leaves the stage, beckons me from my front-row seat and leads me down the length of the Playhouse aisle. Her name is Paula, she says as we pass out through the exit door. And she asks me mine.

EL DORADO Walter Raleigh, on his round the world voyage and quest to find the golden paradise, wrote so evocatively of his ride along the Orinoco, the first European in what is now Venezuela, that is seems a contemporary account.

ELEPHANT ISLAND Heiroglyphics lapped by the Nile, Nubian villages, feluccah boatyards on the shore…

ELLIS ISLAND To visit here, to see the Immigration Hall and the luggage and memorabilia of the dispossessed Europeans, is to start to understand America.

EPHESUS No other Greek site gives such a good idea about day-to-day life in Classical times, from lewd graffiti to a magnificent library. And imagine it when the Temple of Artemis flanked its port. It must have been dazzling.

EPIDAVROS From nowhere in the cooling day, people arrived across the fields through the olive groves to take their places on the stone seats to watch the masked performers, just as they did nearly 2,500 years ago.

ESTEPONA From here you can see Gibraltar's rock, and Ceuta. A sudden realisation that Europe and Africa are no more than a sea kiss away.

ETNA We reached its feet at Taormina but mist kept it hidden. It didn't care that we had come a long way to see it.

EVIA It's not so much the current I remember - changing direction in the channel 12 times a day and famously flummoxing Aristotle. It's the great rusting tankers on the bays of the mainland nearby. Greek ship owners all washed up.

A–Z Travel Snapshots [E]

EAST TIMOR to EVIA