Cabo San Lucas, Mexico Cabo San Lucas, Mexico As I travel from time to time, I happen upon small, quirky things such as this burro painted on the wall of a pub in Mexico. This creative bit is as eccentric as the fast food restaurant in North Carolina built to resemble a woman's skirt or the holes drilled in the fence surrounding a bar in Key West with its sign instructing the viewer to peer through to get a view of New York City. I suppose that it's unnecessary to say, but this bar is in the tourist section of town. In this quarter, jewellery stores stand side-by-side with restaurants and boutiques selling Mexican pottery and knick-knacks. Only blocks away, the "worker bee" section of town shelters the Mexicans in houses stacked up the sides of suicide-steep hills. I can't imagine these tiny one-roomers with no light and no water. This barrio has developed over the years as people from the country drift towards the commercial prospects of this town. No wonder the owner of this bar has a sense of humour.

This piece was published in The Record, Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario but may have been edited. Some articles have also been published in Collectibles Canada and Tourist, Canada's Newsmagazine for Travellers.

Red Hole Boat Yard, Bermuda Red Hole Boat Yard, Bermuda Riding by on my scooter, I could only catch a fleeting sight of this busy little boatyard right on Hamilton Harbour. I went back and took a number of photos and used a line that has served me well. People are sometimes reluctant, possibly embarrassed, to have me take photos of their activity, so here is my approach. I say, "My brother-in-law thinks that he is a carpenter or painter, policeman or whatever, but I would like to take him a photo of what a real carpenter looks like." A lie to be sure, but not an obvious one, I hope. For almost ten years I sold my paintings of Bermuda through a gallery in Hamilton. It was fortunate for us that the women who owned this gallery seemed to know everyone on the island and were able to set us up with a resident who was leaving this paradise to visit their son or daughter in America. One such occasion allowed us to rent a beautiful house right on Hamilton harbour. Our gallery connection got us invited to some lovely dinner parties which gave us some insight into the local culture. Many of these residents were there for just a few years, involved as they were in banking or insurance. However, there was a hardcore who were in the island for the long haul. Much partying, tennis-playing and riding were part of this dilettante culture. Nice work if you can get it. Jonathan, who seemed to be gainfully employed in some financial occupation, expressed the party spirit. "No alcohol for me tonight, just gin and tonic."

This piece was published in The Record, Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario but may have been edited. Some articles have also been published in Collectibles Canada and Tourist, Canada's Newsmagazine for Travellers.

Family Home, Costa Rica Family Home, Costa Rica It is not often that the reality of a place matches the romantic image that occupies my mind beforehand. How many times have I had my face fixed for a super view or for a charming village only to discover that Ronald McDonald had beat me there. This time, however, after a treetop jungle trip in the morning, our small tour of Costa Rica included a wonderful riverboat passage past thatched houses such as this. Monkeys and sloths skipped through the treetops barely touching the branches while the water was occupied by alligators, silvery fish and turtles. Many birds stood and gawked at us, our river boat sliding by as we rubber-necked them. This two-hour river journey with the wild life and the jungle housing contrasted strongly with our rain forest (yes, it was raining) tour in the morning. No animals showed themselves as our cable car gondola swayed through the treetops—disappointing, but not as dismaying as the occurrence the day before when a monkey ran out of the jungle and peed on four tourists trapped in their cable car. Man, it's a jungle out there.

This piece was published in The Record, Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario but may have been edited. Some articles have also been published in Collectibles Canada and Tourist, Canada's Newsmagazine for Travellers.

Mid Morning at the Government Docks Mid Morning at the Government Docks Bermuda, this crescent-shaped island which is really the top of a volcano, is home to an uncountable number of boats. People who live there are right-headed enough to get out on the water whenever possible. It is not unusual for a business appointment to be altered because one or the other of the intended participants is "out on his boat". One day in April, almost at the end of a month-long painting holiday in Bermuda, my art dealer there invited us to take a day trip on the water in her eighteen-foot boat. We left the government docks behind the Princess Hotel in Hamilton and proceeded to circumnavigate the island, stopping several times for fuel for the boaters. The combination of bright sun, brisk breezes and water reflections made us more than ready for some cooling shade and several jars of our favourite beverage. The beauty of Bermuda is renowned, and anyone who has visited the island will remark on the colourful flowers, the pastel painted houses with their waterfall roofs, the hues of the water, and the attractiveness of the steeply terraced landscape (Terraced View). Viewed from the water, those accolades of Bermuda are in spades, which as we all know pay double but are still insufficient. For further related images, to see our section on Bermuda.

This piece was published in The Record, Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario but may have been edited. Some articles have also been published in Collectibles Canada and Tourist, Canada's Newsmagazine for Travellers.

Downtown, Oranjested, Aruba Downtown, Oranjested, Aruba Unfortunately, much of the old Dutch-style architecture is vanishing from the heart of this Caribbean capital, replaced with soulless glass and steel boxes. I am strongly opposed to the trend of placeless architecture. A sense of place, a context, or a reference to local history creates a particularness that keeps urbanscapes from all looking the same. I think Cleveland should look different than London or Marseille. In a quickly evolving society, distinctive architecture helps to ground us. In many places the squeegee of progress has scraped clean any reference to the past so that not only has the sense of place disappeared but also a sense of time. A small island in the Dutch Antilles, Aruba has not a lot to recommend it. It's only real importance is centred in an oil refinery sunbathing on the south point, belching a cloud of unknown gasses into the cerulean Caribbean sky. That obscuring vapour would perhaps be useful on a battlefield to provide cover for advancing troops, but here, just thirty miles from the coast of Venezuela, it provides only a brief shadow for the banana boats hastening from Caracas.

This piece was published in The Record, Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario but may have been edited. Some articles have also been published in Collectibles Canada and Tourist, Canada's Newsmagazine for Travellers.

Beached Boats, Acapulco Beached Boats, Acapulco I am lured by the once brightly painted boats with their peeling paint that line the soft sands in Acapulco. The fishermen are applying C.P.R. to their wooden crafts which appear to suffer from terminal neglect. The Mexican crafts seem to blend with the murky colours of the smog-laden harbour, and the casual attention of their owners echos the lazy surf that gently massages the shore. These boats contrast in my memory to the incandescently-coloured, maniacally-maintained boats that I envied along the shoreline in Percé, Quebec. There is also a difference between the modern imposing concrete hotels that fence the bay and the old and decrepit tiny boats crouching on the sand. The tourists strolling on the strand do not notice how these air-conditioned bunkers threaten to push the fishermen into the waves as these towers claim ever larger tracts of the baking beach. The arm-wrestling of tourism with tradition may seem to be a best of many affair, but I'm afraid the result is not in doubt. For further related images, to see our section on Acapulco.

This piece was published in The Record, Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario but may have been edited. Some articles have also been published in Collectibles Canada and Tourist, Canada's Newsmagazine for Travellers.

Market Vendors, Senegal Market Vendors, Senegal Senegal is the tragically impoverished country on the extreme west of Africa that was the exit point for many slaves on their way to America and the Caribbean. Just south of the Sahara desert, this land, a former French colony, bakes in temperatures in the 30's Celsius range. Strong winds from the interior hurl sand and plastic debris everywhere. In a country where life is so harsh, there is no money for trivials like sanitation or garbage collection. There are, however, 350 miles of beautiful white sand beaches. As a regular customer at the Waterloo Farmers Market, I couldn't help but contrast 'my market vendors' with their overflowing stands to the ladies who gather in this village square to sell their meager supply of fruits and vegetables. This produce must come from gardens that are watered constantly by hand because the blazing temperature in Sub-Sahara Africa would burn out a garden in a thrice. Obviously the clothes of eye delighting colour also provide a strong contrast to the somber colours of the Mennonites at our market with which I am so familiar. The vegetables and the kaleidoscopically hued costumes add up to a colour concussion for this Mennonite-raised painter. My wife, Marilyn, who specialized in textiles during her time in art college, was most appreciative of the bright and energetically patterned clothes that the people wore, but sadly these fabrics were not offered by the vendors on the docks. Only imports from China and India that certainly were lively but lacked the animation of those true African designs were proffered. The whole scene made real the photos that I had seen as a child that returned missionaries showed of their foreign fields.

This piece was published in The Record, Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario but may have been edited. Some articles have also been published in Collectibles Canada and Tourist, Canada's Newsmagazine for Travellers.

Riverside Trees, Costa Rica Riverside Trees, Costa Rica "Oh, artists always think that they see beauty when there is nothing there," puffed my Aunt when she saw my painting of a trough in the corner of their farm field. She believed, as many do, that the subject is the concern of a painting rather than the visual poetry of that topic. In art college we were encouraged to develop our looking skills through an exercise that sent us out from the school with instructions to paint whatever we found just ten minutes away. "Go in any direction, on foot or in a vehicle, but in exactly ten minutes you will be at the subject for your work. Find the visual interest there." After over thirty-five years, this sensitivity to visual opportunity has become instinctive for me so when our open river boat in tropical Costa Rica slid past the jungle shores, I could hardly contain myself. Monkeys and sloths gawked from the tightly packed vegetation. Crocodiles and water birds went about their daily routines as the management at Kodak smiled their approval from afar. Thatched houses stood stork-like on skinny legs along the edge of the smoothly flowing river. Everywhere I looked I saw opportunities for paintings. The colours, the patterns, and the intensity of light conspired to make me nuts. I find it impossible to close out stimuli, unlike my bride who could do her income taxes in the middle of a shopping mall, such is her concentration. She prefers to call it focus. This simple view of a tiny slice of shoreline is only one of the paintings that sprang from this journey. It is not surprising that as a painter, I need not discipline myself to work, but rather I must restrain myself from painting myself into exhaustion.

This piece was published in The Record, Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario but may have been edited. Some articles have also been published in Collectibles Canada and Tourist, Canada's Newsmagazine for Travellers.

Welcome Band, Costa Rica Welcome Band, Costa Rica Bands suggest a sense of occasion. From the apparently sleepy group of musicians, performing on auto pilot in Costa Rica, who had been hired to entertain the bus traveller queuing for lunch, to the energetic Mariachi band, strolling while playing, in the Mexican silver mining town of Taxco, the music of bands, either stationary or mobile, lifts the spirit. Bands set a tone and adjust our attitudes. Dockside in Recife, Brazil, dancers whirl so quickly to the spirited music that they become a blur. In Key West, a base-voiced announcer booms to the rhythm of the reggae band playing the rude songs of Bob Marley, "We Say Goodbye to the Day and Hello to the Night Here in Paradise". Big band melodies drifting from a cruise ship's ballroom or the sweet sophisticated jazz sounds of a quintet in The Rainbow Room, Rockefeller Plaza, high above New York long before 9/11, create a mood, instantly transporting us to a private place in the core of our beings. Sun-soaked in the Mall in London, England, hopelessly trapped in seething crowds for the Queen's Jubilee, our pulse is quickened by the brash sounds of the busbied players with their flashing brass instruments. This march, emphatic and powerful, can actually be felt. The boom of the huge base drums is like a giant's heartbeat, quick and strong (Drum Horse and Jubilee Crowds). Some years ago, we rented a house on Poorhouse Lane in Key West (Beside Poor House Lane, Key West, Florida). How prescient it was coming years before the recent stock market meltdown. Standing on a second floor porch during that stay, we watched a different type of brass band of black Conchs as they danced, white uniformed, behind a hearse making its way past our house next to the cemetery. This New Orleans style group played "When the Saints Go Marching In", twisting and swaying to a sad, desperate beat for the latest victim of Aids, leading the mourners as they made their way down Solares Hill one more time. For further related images, to see our section on Bands.

This piece was published in The Record, Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario but may have been edited. Some articles have also been published in Collectibles Canada and Tourist, Canada's Newsmagazine for Travellers.

Marrakech Market Marrakech Market Hanging on the studio wall above my computer is a pencil drawing by the late Terence Cuneo of child beggars in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. For many years, he followed in his father's footsteps working for the London Illustrated News, producing drawings and paintings from lands distant and exotic for a readership living in the sceptred isle. My painting of a children's clothing shop in Marrakech strikes me as other worldly. To be sure, children's wear is a common, ordinary classification of merchandise, but set in the streets of this Moroccan city churning with humanity, this everyday subject takes on a new perspective. Our ship stopped at Morocco as part of a relocation cruise from Buenos Aires, Argentina to Barcelona, Spain. We chose a day-long bus tour from Casablanca to visit Marrakech. We could have toured all the Hollywood related sites but chose instead to spend most of the morning driving through arid landscape that was only occasionally animated with a few goats and a herder. We did have one rest stop along the way where it was necessary to purchase toilet paper by the square from an attendant. Strangely, the tourist place where we broke our journey looked new and almost American in style. There was no trace of the traditional architecture which features arches and much intense painted or tiled decoration. When we arrived in Jemaa el-Fna, the main square in Marrakech, a huge space the size of two football fields, we were told to be alert as pickpockets made a good living from the tourists, and the local authorities were not very bothered by this, thinking, I assume, that rich tourists were fair game. Following a guide, we visited the much celebrated labyrinth of shops called the souk in the medina or old town. Over 40,000 artisans toil in small, poorly lit stalls in this vast complex. "If we don't have it, you don't need it" seemed to be the attitude, as the range of merchandise from live animals to spices competed shoulder to shoulder with rugs, clothing, housewares and motorcycles. The noise of the crowds punctuated by the cries of the merchants, music from various stalls, and throaty bark of motorcycles added to the general sense of chaos. The smells of animals, cooking food, and dusty heat combined with gasoline fumes and eastern spices to make for sensory overload. After the heat and confusion of the shopping area, we followed our guide through a small archway into a cool, dark restaurant. Sitting in a room with twenty-foot ceilings, we feasted first on the tiled décor. Intense repeat patterning in strong shades of blue, green, gold and pink were lit subtly by clerestory windows that surrounded the huge banquet hall. Our meal of Moroccan chicken and beef stew in couscous was complemented by cabbage salad, cucumbers, figs and oranges. Marilyn wrote in her scrap book that this was the best meal of the whole trip. In fact, Moroccan chicken has become a great favourite at our house. Surprisingly, we also had wine and beer. I didn't know if in that Muslim country alcohol would be permitted. After the meal was completed, a band of six musicians playing drums, tambourines, flute and triangle led the procession around this cavernous place, followed by a dancer who certainly put the belly in belly dancer. Photographs in this restaurant were encouraged, while on the street, picture-taking was discouraged until a fee was paid. I was pleased to visit this exotic place, one of those spots that we are acquainted with, but few have the chance to visit. With television, movies and books, our mental world is studded with buildings and views that we all know but will never really see. My late friend, Terence Cuneo, has added to the picture library in my head, and perhaps I have brought something to yours.

This piece was published in The Record, Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario but may have been edited. Some articles have also been published in Collectibles Canada and Tourist, Canada's Newsmagazine for Travellers.

Dancing With A Gaucho Dancing With A Gaucho As a small child, the only personal knowledge that I had with Argentina was visits to our church of furloughed missionaries who sang the exotic wonders of this distant land. Exotic and distant are the key words here. I heard about maté, gauchos and the pampas. It was all very exciting. I couldn't envision a land where people lived ordinary lives. When I did get to visit Buenos Aires, Argentina, I was slightly disappointed not to find an unusual foreign city but a European-styled one where I felt quite at home. We signed up for a day-long bus trip to the Pampas, the flat cattle grazing area just north of Buenos Aires. When we arrived at Estancia Santa Susana, a large ranch, our forty passenger bus passed through acres of horses and cattle munching contentedly in the fields. There I got my first chance to meet gauchos, Argentine cowboys. They were not this year's model, mind you, and had been retired for well over two weeks. This operation was prepared for tourists and had organized tours of the farmhouse which has been converted to a museum of Spanish-Victorian artifacts and furniture. Painted and carved decoration, mostly in the Spanish style, covered every available surface. Tin boxes, carved angels, sewing boxes, chinaware and one lonely cuckoo clock fought for the tourists' attention. Religious regalia, belled harness and front parlour antique furniture added to the jumble in this low-ceilinged stuccoed home surrounded by a wide colonnaded porch. The house tour was preliminary to the main event of the day, Lunch. Passing by slabs of meat the size of a coffee table book cooking on a grill, we were led into a thatched, barn-like structure, open on all sides. Bottles of wines and quarts of beer created a boulevard on every table. We were clearly in for an extravagance. We were not surprised. I thought that Texans ate beef in heroic quantities, but obviously the Argentines take no backseat in that department. The entertainment following this feast featured a "Charo-esque" young woman performing a flamenco dance. She was coupled with a young man wearing a wide-brimmed black hat, a striped shirt, baggy gaucho pants secured by a wide silver-studded leather belt and calf-high leather boots. This dance was sexless and noted more for noise than fury. Later, back in the city, we did get a chance to witness the real thing at a tango club. After the pallid dance performance, the band started into popular tunes from the Fifties and Forties and the former waiters, those superannuated cowboys, made the rounds of tables asking the women to dance. These gauchos seemed to strike a chord with the females that set off a flood of flash-assisted photos. Pictures for friends back home, I guess. I was more taken by the outside display that capped our visit. In this event these old cow punchers put on a demonstration of horsemanship as they charged at a full gallop with an extended forefinger spearing a ring the size of a loonie from a dangling string. There was, I guess, something for everyone in this day, and strangely, few of the things we witnessed had ever been mentioned by the Mennonite missionaries. I guess they had just forgotten about the booze, the women and the tango.

This piece was published in The Record, Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario but may have been edited. Some articles have also been published in Collectibles Canada and Tourist, Canada's Newsmagazine for Travellers.

Petropolis Petropolis If the venerable Sunday Times of London says "Brazil is Buzzing", who am I to argue. "More than beach bums … why Rio and São Paulo could soon rival Milan and Paris", its headline continues. We will never know just how in, how incredibly hot Rio is, as we opted instead to visit the cool Petrópolis, an alpine retreat that is much different in flavour than the beaches of Ipanema populated by dental-floss-sized swim wear. We passed as well on the Corcovado Hill tour which visits the site of the Christ the Redeemer statue that overlooks Rio like a diver on a 2,400 foot high tower. It is not that the other two options were not attractive, but rather with only one day ashore, we felt that a place that figured so prominently into the history of Brazil would be more interesting. Rio de Janeiro was founded in the early 16th century by Portuguese explorers, but it was not until the 19th century that Petrópolis became a full fledged town. Dom Pedro II, Brazil's last emperor, built an Imperial Palace up in this lush mountainous location. Although this regal venue is only forty miles north of Rio, to reach it is a tortuous drive even today. The road climbs and curves some 2750 feet around mountain walls offering breathtaking views of the valleys below. The impression that I had on arrival was that I had taken the wrong bus and had arrived in Switzerland. True, there were no snow-covered peaks, but many of the venerable buildings had a distinctly European flavour. Cobbled streets and tiled-roofed buildings, some constructed of wood in an alpine style, strengthened that across-the-seas flavour. In the middle of town the former royal Summer Palace, now the Imperial Museum, exhibits the crown jewels as well as collections of fine china, tapestries, paintings and ornate furniture. Surrounded by lush tropical gardens, this building, a pink and white confection, presents a strong contrast in style to the restrained perpendicular gothic style of the gray stone Catedral de São Pedro de Alcântara with its finely tapered spire thrusting up into the cerulean sky. Parks bisected by spring-fed streams and canals occupy a good portion of this hilly tourist town. Palm trees and flowering bushes frame the views of major-sized half-timber houses that grip the hills. After all these years many of these mansions are still owned by relatives of the last emperor. The journey from our ship in the harbour up to this mountain retreat had taken a fat hour so we were curious when the timing back to the ship was set for 2½ hours. Perhaps an unannounced stop on the way down would surprise us. The extra time quoted, it turned out, was indeed a great revelation for us. As we neared the heart of the city driving on an expressway through leafy suburbs, the traffic thickened and then clogged. Very quickly cars, trucks, and motorcycles started to drive on the median and verges. Soon the vehicles were inextricably snarled as some drivers attempted to turn around in the ditch that bordered this six-lane road. For over thirty minutes we did not move at all. Young people got out of their cars and lounged on the vehicles' hoods. Music played, people talked and laughed, horns tooted. Occasionally voices were raised in anger but not often. Then people got back into their cars as the traffic uncoiled and mysteriously started to crawl. When we arrived back at the ship, we told one of the crew about this cacophonous experience. He started to laugh. He explained that we had fallen victim to Brazilian "democracy" in action. Apparently the residents of the suburb in question wanted an overpass built to avoid a rather long and tedious journey, and when the government refused, the citizens instituted a revenge process. Each day at rush hour, burning tires were rolled into the road with the resulting black smoke obscuring vision and thus stopping the traffic. I have no way of knowing whether their ploy worked, but it certainly added a memorable sidebar to an already outstanding day.

This piece was published in The Record, Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario but may have been edited. Some articles have also been published in Collectibles Canada and Tourist, Canada's Newsmagazine for Travellers.

Cartagena Photo-Op Cartagena Photo-Op In 2001 Andres Pastrana, the President of Columbia, wrote a piece in the Los Angeles Times in which he decried the message that movies such as Clear and Present Danger, Proof of Life, and Blow gave of Colombia. He maintained that the situation in this South American country is not as simple as Hollywood presents it. In the movies the boy gets the girl, good triumphs over evil, and the cowboy rides off into the sunset. The drug wars that have torn Colombian society are real. Pastrana himself barely escaped with his life after capture by the henchmen of the notorious drugs warlord, Pablo Escabar. There is no happy ending. Cartagena, the former capital of Colombia, is not a stranger to strife. The city was founded by the Spanish in 1533 to manage the controlled attack on the natives of this mountainous land, the Chibas Indians. This Pre-Columbian society had become expert as goldsmiths and so attracted the interest of the ever avaricious Spanish. Emeralds and gold flowed into Cartagena from the mountains for shipment to Spain. In 1586 Sir Francis Drake, that British adventurer, showed up at Cartagena and in return for 10 million pesos agreed to sail away and not burn down the town. Hey, a guy's got to make a living. So serious was the fear of attack on this motherlode of gold and gems that King Felipe II built a stone wall around the city starting in 1686 at a cost of 59 million ounces of gold. Crooked narrow streets were also part of the defensive plan. When the English attacked again in 1741 with a force of 24,000 men in 186 ships, the Spanish investment in defense proved a wise one. The British Army led by Admiral Vernon and accompanied by a half brother of George Washington could not break the defenses. Cartagena's greatest military victory did not however come over a fleet of ships menacing in the bay but from the internal enemy when in 1821 Simon Bolivar led his successful attack against the Spanish and once and for all liberated Colombia. On a political level, that is true, but I'm afraid on a human, day-to-day level, Colombia and Cartagena are still at war. Although coffee, platinum and timber as well as oil provide financial freedom to this country, in the mosaic of life here, drugs and the violence that follows that horrid enterprise continue to dislocate every piece of that potentially beautiful picture. Kidnapping has become commonplace in the drug-fueled conflict that permeates every aspect of politics. As a visitor there, I enjoyed the beauty of the old town of Cartagena with its backdrop of Miami-style buildings bunched together by the bay. On our visit to the Marine Museum and the proud fort, San Felipe de Barajas, I asked a policeman in the shopping precinct for directions to an American-style hotel just two blocks away. His reply, "Don't walk there without a police escort. It is really too dangerous." There had been several tourist kidnappings just that week as the war between the government and the various drug cartels and political factions once again burst into flame. That sort of political violence of course, just as in Northern Ireland, breeds an underclass that takes advantage of those lawless situations. That conflict did not appear to deter this woman in my painting dressed as Carmen Miranda complete with fruit in her basket. She was not selling fruit in the marketplace. She was obviously aware of the potency of Hollywood. Tourists must have pictures, and for a price, she would be happy to create a Kodak moment.

This piece was published in The Record, Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario but may have been edited. Some articles have also been published in Collectibles Canada and Tourist, Canada's Newsmagazine for Travellers.