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In April 2023 we took a package tour to South Africa with our friends Craig and Sonia. We flew via Singapore to Cape Town.
Africa
Southern Africa
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- Written by: Richard_McKie
- Parent Category: Travel
- Category: Africa
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This is a fascinating country in all sorts of ways and seems to be most popular with European and Japanese tourists, some Australians of course, but they are everywhere.
Since childhood Burma has been a romantic and exotic place for me. It was impossible to grow up in the Australia of the 1950’s and not be familiar with that great Australian bass-baritone Peter Dawson’s rendition of Rudyard Kipling’s 'On the Road to Mandalay' recorded two decades or so earlier:
Come you back to Mandalay
Where the old flotilla lay
Can't you hear their paddles chunking
From Rangoon to Mandalay
On the road to Mandalay
Where the flying fishes play
And the Dawn comes up like thunder
out of China 'cross the bay
The song went Worldwide in 1958 when Frank Sinatra covered it with a jazz orchestration, and ‘a Burma girl’ got changed to ‘a Burma broad’; ‘a man’ to ‘a cat’; and ‘temple bells’ to ‘crazy bells’.
How I miss Rio. Rio de Janeiro the most stunningly picturesque city on Earth with its dark green mountains and generous bays, embelezado with broad white, sandy beaches. Rio forever in my heart. Rio my a minha pátria, my homeland, where I spent the most wonderful days of my life with linda, linda mãe, my beautiful, beautiful mother. Clambering up Corcovado Mountain together, to our favela amongst the trees.
Thinking back, I realise that she was not much older than I was, maybe fifteen years. Who knows?
Her greatest gift to me was English.
Sometimes things that seem quite different are, when looked at more closely, related.