Latest Posts
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Waipu
As you enter the Northland town of Waipu, a sign to your left extends ‘A hundred thousand welcomes’. Excessively friendly in its English form, it’s there as the literal translation of a sign in Scots Gaelic across the road, ‘Ceud… Continue reading
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Waiheke Island
We were glad to get out of Auckland, if only for the day. The city lacked the vibrancy we’d expected of New Zealand’s economic capital, and despite the jungle of construction sites in the CBD pointing to the concentration of… Continue reading
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Maungakiekie, One Tree Hill
It’s easy to understand how a bustling settlement could have existed on Maungakiekie. Buildings, food stores and plantations would once have lined the artificially terraced slopes and the extensive views from its summit would have made it easily defendable as… Continue reading
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Maungawhau, Mount Eden
Maungawhau, or Mount Eden, is the highest point on the Auckland isthmus, one of the 14 Tūpuna Maunga o Tāmaki Makaurau , the ancestral mountains of Auckland. The volcanic cones upon which Auckland is built are of profound importance to… Continue reading
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A Tale of Two Flights
Everyone accepts that air travel is unnatural. No living creature, human or otherwise, has evolved to traverse this world with the speed we can by plane. Before this week the longest flights I had been on were to North America;… Continue reading
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Interlaken
By the close of the 19th century, the growing tendrils of industrial travel had transformed Europe’s provincial backwaters into profitable centres of tourism. The Alps, once spurned as a region of backwardness and superstition, now attracted thousands seeking their own… Continue reading
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Zermatt
As he gazed across that milky vista of saw-toothed peaks and formidable massifs, Edward Whymper must have felt unstoppable. It had been four years since he first laid eyes on that spectacular mountain, and now, perched upon its precarious summit,… Continue reading
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Geneva
For a city of such global renown, Geneva can appear inconsequential. It lacks the self-assurance of a capital, the vibrancy of a metropolis, and, as a French-speaking global centre on the periphery of a majority German-speaking nation, a certain stability… Continue reading
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Stromboli: The Prison of Ourselves
Stromboli is desolate. The locals are leaving, enticed by the promise of modernity abroad. The island, drifting somewhere between mainland Italy and Sicily, is blackened and barren, a volcanic cone towering over a few bruised villages. Little grows from the… Continue reading
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On Marx’s Final Letter to Arnold Ruge
September, 1843. Karl Marx was feeling stifled. His editorship of Cologne’s Rheinische Zeitung had come to an abrupt end following the publication’s termination by Prussian censors. Authorities were clamping down on anti-monarchical, pro-democratic voices and free political discourse was becoming… Continue reading
Dead Academic 