Category: Postcards

Images from my travels

home thoughts from abroad

Home thoughts from abroad is a new series on Travel Words featuring a single photograph that reminds me of a country visited and showing something that uniquely identifies it as being ‘abroad’.

Wearing Feetbells (Ghungrus)

India. 2008. Almost exactly 35 years since my first visit in 1973 as a young woman travelling overland from England. This time I wasn’t roughing it, but staying in a resort at Fisherman’s Cove near Chennai. A comfortable beach cabin with a marble bathroom. Buffet meals with dosa pancakes for breakfast. The sweet scent of frangipani and the wild waves of the Indian Ocean sending me to sleep at night.

Just looking at the dancers with their feet-bells brings back the memory of the gently resonating bells representing precisely the rhythmic movements of the dancing feet.

postcard from america

Whenever we visited San Francisco we always stayed at the Argonaut hotel down in Fisherman’s Wharf. I liked it there. I loved that we were close to the waters of San Francisco bay and easy transport links including the Powell and Hyde Streets Cable Car. The turnaround for this route was just around the corner from the hotel so we could always get a seat on this iconic form of transport.