My Travels Around The World
I have travelled quite a lot, as shown in the table below.
| Year | Destination | Comments |
|---|---|---|
| February 1966 |
|
Working on the diamond barges in Namibia |
| December 1971 | Swaziland & Mocambique | A road trip to Lourenco Marques |
| May 1976 | Southern Rhodesia & Botswana | A camping road trip |
| July 1976 |
|
A two-month sojourn in Greece |
| October 1976 |
|
A three-year sojourn in England |
| August 1978 |
|
A summer road trip through France |
| August 1979 |
|
A one-year sojourn in Holland |
| May 1983 | Italy, Rhode Island, USA, Hawaii | A six-month sabbatical at Brown University, USA |
| June 1988 | Rhode Island, USA | The first ABAQUS Users' Conference |
| June 1989 | Italy & Switzerland | The second ABAQUS Users' Conference |
| April 2001 |
|
A three-week holiday in Australia |
| May 2003 |
|
A musical sojourn up the Mississippi to Nashville |
| October 2006 |
|
A 10-day holiday in Spain |
| November 2014 / April 2015 | Kenya | Business trips |
When I left school at the end of 1965 I didn't have enough money to go to university. So I took a job as a plant operator on a diamond barge off the coast of SWA, somewhere between Luderitz and Alexander Bay. This was a lousy job: 18 days on, 9 days back home, with 12-hour shifts (nine day, nine night). I hadn't been there six months when I put my foot onto the V-belt driven by a huge electric motor and very nearly tore my leg off. It took eight hours to fly me to hospital in Cape Town where they sewed my leg back on; I was in traction for eight weeks and on cutches for a further eight.
Having recovered I went back to the diamond fields as a land surveyor, charting the positions of the barges. At first I was based on the land party, but later transfered to the Pamona, a brand new barge. In the picture above you can just make out my original barge, the Triple One, lying some 3km south of the Pamona.
I have given a more detailed account of my time on the diamond barges here.
In December 1971, a few weeks after I graduated with my BSc, my friends George and Rollie and I took a road trip to Lourenco Marques [Maputo] via Swaziland. We lived the high life, staying in the finest hotels and eating sumptuously. LM, as it was known in those days, was a bit wild west but remarkably safe. I can't remember much about the trip apart from the luxury hotel we stayed at and the platters of prawns we ate, and sadly I don't have any photos of our time in LM.
My girlfriend at the time, Sue, wanted to see wildest Africa before she returned home to England. So in May 1976 we set off in my Kombi camper to explore Southern Rhodesia and Botswana, at the height of the Rhodesian civil war! We drove up via Bulawayo to Victoria Falls and then across to the Chobe National Park in Botswana. Chobe was really wild: there was one very primitive camp site and we were the only ones there. Herds of elephant wandered through daily (knocking down all the fences) and there were umpteen other wild beasts all over. How we survived was a miracle!
Back in Rhodesia we saw Great Zimbabwe and fished on the nearby lake. The ongoing war didn't bother us and the locals were remarkably friendly.
I spent six months at Brown University in 1983, which included visiting numerous other places, notably Hawaii. The Hawaiian part of the trip is documented here, and the academic part is documented here. The various travels around my sabbatical are described here.
In 1988 I was running a small business called Finite Element Analysis Services (FEAS). We had the South African agency for some powerful stress analysis software called ABAQUS, which at the time we were surreptitiously providing to the military, amongst others. In June 1988 ABAQUS held their first international users' conference in Newport, Rhode Island, and I went along. I also spent a few days in New York.
The second Abaqus Users' Conference in May 1989 was held in the magnificent Italian resort of Stresa on Lake Maggiore, just north-west of Milan. I stayed in a five-star hotel for the five days of the conference, which cost a small fortune; a beer cost R15! (a loaf of bread back home cost around R1-20). I fancied a swim in the lake but it was freezing.
After the conference I hired a car and drove across the Simplon Pass (still snow on the mountains!) to Swizerland, spending a few days in Montreaux, Lausanne and Geneva before returning home via Milan and Rome.
I did two business trips to Kenya in 2014 and 2015, neither of which resulted in any business and both of which were unpleasant.
On my first trip I was sitting on the grass outside the UN Compound watching the comings and goings when an armed soldier approached me an accused me of spying and threatening to arrest me. Really? After half an hour of brutal intimidation he eventually asked me how much money I had on me. I showed him my wallet and he told me to give him all of the cash, and then told me to piss off.
On my second trip I was waiting at the airport for my flight back home, standing out on the road having a last smoke before boarding. A cop approached me and told me it was a no-smoking zone and she was going to arrest me. This was Easter Thursday and I was desperate to get home, not spend the Easter weekend in jail. I literally begged her to let me go, and after making me sweat for a good twenty minutes, she let me go.
In my opinion Kenya is a bloody dump and I fully intend to never go back.
[I have yet to fully document these trips.]
