501 Places

Mention that you are travelling to most Muslim countries and you are likely to get a look of concern. “Is it safe?”;  “Why do you want to go there?”; “I don’t understand why they don’t like us”; all likely reactions if you live in the US or UK. And this is a shame, as people [...]

It is easy to see how entire armies perished on the road to Khiva. By land the city is reached after an 8 hour journey from Bukhara, along one of the most desolate and inhospitable highways in the world. Temperatures frequently top 45C in the shade, and even stepping out of our vehicle for a [...]

When his family had been deported from their homes in eastern Poland in 1940, my dad was only 9 years old. He saw his father for the last time in his home village of Niechniewicze (now in Belarus) when he had been taken into custody by Soviet forces and transported to Siberia. Only recently my [...]

I am quite reticent of photographing local people on our travels. I don’t know why, but my shyness means that while many others have stacks of pictures of women and children in colourful costumes and toothless men smiling broadly for the camera, my albums only have a small number of these shots. Occasionally though, we [...]

(for Polish version published in the leading UK daily Polish language newspaper, Dziennik Polski, click here) It was only recently that my parents discovered the resting place of their fathers. When his family had been deported from their homes in eastern Poland in 1940, my dad was only 9 years old. He saw his father [...]