People riding the escalors at Mid-Levels, Hong Kong
I APOLOGIZE for the mess,” the owner of OPT Art Gallery says with a smile. She is wearing a loose white shirt and a comfortable air that match the ambience of the small space where she is showing the work of Taiwanese artist Chiou Jyian-Ren. Middle-aged and British, she is chatty and charmingly harried and has just finished holding a drawing class in the gallery’s central space. “I’ve been too lazy to clean up,” she confesses.
RED Ferraris wink at revellers in downtown squares. Music booms out of every doorway. Policemen direct traffic through circuitous detours long into the night. It’s the typical annual Grand Prix weekend in June, drawing hundreds of thousands of tourists from around the world to Montreal.
JUST 10 minutes had passed since I had dropped from the edge of the boat and into the shimmering blue water that lapped at the edge of a cove. In that interim, I had fallen on my face, my side and my rear a hundred times.
Belize is a land smooth and green, like a bedsheet tugged flat, with an embroidery of palm trees that only wrinkle and bump the landscape.
When confronted by great white sharks a few feet away from our boat, jaws dropped open and a collective “wow” swept the onlookers. We forgot everything we had seen in scary movies and on Discovery Channel’s Shark Week and just stared.
One of the seven wonders of the modern world, the limestone structure that is the Kukulcán pyramid looms at the centre of the vast public ground in Chichén Itzá, the ancient Mayan city in the heartland of Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula.
Most rapids seemed to be named after people who had died or were rescued at the last minute from a terrible fate. Maybe someone long ago had thought that it would add to the thrill of rafting down the river, but to me it seemed rather depressing. I shivered in the sunlight.
“Cookies for the survivors!” yelled Nelson cheerfully as we climbed up a muddy slope made slippery by the driving tropical rain. It was not the right sentiment to warm the hearts of the dozen or so tourists about to voluntarily zip from treetop to treetop 400ft above the ground.
