Wednesday 31 August 2011

Next 10 Travel Memories

21. A sleepless-with-fear-and-excitement night or two before going to stay with family friends in Singapore in what would now be called a Gap Year. Then it was just waiting to go to Medical School.
22. Watching the Moon Landing in the middle of the day in Hong Kong, Granny stayed up all night to watch it at home
23.Falling in love with Hong Kong ( a place always sounding so exotic as to be mythical, like Kota Kinabalu and Timbuktu) and going back to study there for two months in 1974.
24. Wanchai at night, the lights, smells, sounds and trying the wok food on sale along the streets with a Canadian-HongKong-Chinese And Greek-Australian student, also both visiting Queen Mary's.
25. An epic journey in a 1950s Standard Vanguard in the first summer vac. Down through Spain, seeing cork-oak plantations, to Morocco (briefly), Algeria and Tunisia, then up through Sicily and Italy . The original plan was to go to the pyramids, but Gadaffi had just taken control of Libya, and tourists were not popular.
26. Being offered hedgehog cooked in clay by a local farmer, then missing a scorpion sting by 1/2 an inch, the firelight flared up just in time to see it.
27.Driving by night in starlight as the engine could not cope with day-time temperatures.
28. Having the "annulo pistone" replaced in  a tiny village in Italy, they were just the same size as a popular motor bike.
29. The car finally being scrapped a few miles after dropping me at home, the others didn't quite make it back to Bristol.
30.Fulfilling a lifelong dream of driving over the Alps in an open-topped car, although a 2CV wasn't what I'd imagined!

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