Some of the oldest stories in the human repertoire are a collection of ancient animal tales, which have traversed the ages, and within which a few of Aesop’s fables offer us a faint and familiar echo. Known centuries ago by Europeans travelling on the Silk Road as The Fables of Bidpai, this tapestry of stories is believed to have first originated (as far as we know) in India over 2,500 years ago in some of the Jataka Tales. That huge Pali collection […]
Category: Culture
As a few readers may know, I’ve been working diligently for years on a non-fiction book about the Sasquatch phenomenon. The travel memoir entitled, In the Valleys of the Noble Beyond: In Search of the Sasquatch, chronicles my wanderings through the British Columbia coastal communities of the Great Bear Rainforest, to hear about eyewitness encounters with […]
In 1951, British explorer Eric Shipton and his climbing team came across a set of mysterious snow tracks on Menlung Glacier, along the Nepal-Tibet border near Mount Everest. Shipton’s Sherpa colleague, Shen Tensing, told him that the tracks, which resembled a human footprint with a very large toe, belonged to a “Yeti” – a hair-covered […]
Canadian journalist, and friend, Adnan Khan, has been covering South Asia and Middle East for over a decade. When not traipsing around Turkey, his home turf, the Maclean’s correspondent can usually be found in Pakistan or Afghanistan working on his next feature story. In 2012, Khan took a much needed break from his reporting duties and embarked […]
One of the few remaining structures bearing the scars of Lebanon’s fifteen year civil-war (1975-1990) is Beirut’s Barakat Building. This once stately and aristocratic edifice straddles a key intersection near the centre of the capital. The four-story avant-garde building was designed by two architects in the 1920s and 30s and fused Art Deco elements with […]
On a recent trip to Yukon, I visited Kwaday Dan Kenji (“Long Ago People’s Place”), a First Nations cultural interpretive centre on the old Alaska Highway near the village of Champagne. Harold Johnson and his wife Meta Williams of the northwest Champagne-Aishihik First Nation live on the wooded lot, an ancestral site, where they’re sharing the […]
Travel writing may often entertain and sometimes astonish, but not often does it take the reader past a constellation of anecdotal experiences into the true essence of a place beyond all preconception. Jason Elliot’s Mirrors of the Unseen: Journeys in Iran takes aim at the blunting assumptions and false perceptions of this little understood country, […]
