Like most dark-haired* people with blue eyes, I love Ireland and the romantic bones it rattles in my soul, so this week’s invitation to do a keynote at the annual Dublin Digital Summit was accepted eagerly.
The keynote went down well, people were interesting, funny and always up for a drink… and there was great stuff shared by delegates and presenters. However it was the peripheral conversations that defined my trip because Ireland is royally screwed. Continue reading
Last summer I had an adventure and flew to Addis Ababa from Mumbai and then travelled through Ethiopia on African buses to the Red Sea and spent a week in Somaliland on the way. Right up there with the best of life.
I had to hire a soldier for $15 per day, had a few problems with child-soldiers off their tits on qat (a masticated opiate), saw amazing cave drawings at Las Keel, nearly lost a finger when ‘my’ soldier macheted a fruit melon and had my first ‘dry-swim’ in the Gulf of Aden, in temperatures of 50°C. Continue reading
Bob Dylan once said that ‘money doesn’t talk, it swears’, but in Hargeisa the capital of Africa’s Somaliland it stinks. It literally stinks, reeking of rotten paper, like a leaky library in a monsoon. Continue reading