Caroline O'Hare
International Traveller, 60
Hello there!
Welcome to my blog where you can read selected scribblings about my travel adventures, places of interest, funny experiences, interesting encounters, exotic food and drinks, travel tips and recommendations.
Who am I? A lawyer who has just turned sixty (and how the heck did that happen??) but who still feels like a twenty-eight year old. I am English and was born in the Midlands, not too far from Birmingham. I worked there, then moved to London, then made several subsequent moves shuttling between the UK, Dubai, Bahrain, Cayman, Bermuda and Moscow.
I am currently living back in Dubai, which I love, for the third time and am not working. I’m not doing very much indeed thanks to the wretched Covid 19 pandemic, which has entirely scuppered my travel plans for this year. So I decided that, since I couldn’t travel to any new places right now (I had scheduled Djibouti and Afghanistan for the Spring), I could at least write about some of the places I have already seen, to share them with friends.
I have always been a travel aficionado. My brother John, who once went on holiday with me to the Gambia, complained that as soon as I arrived in a new place, the first thing I did was to work out where else I could go from there. We made it to Senegal and Guinea-Bissau easily (well, the road trip to G-B wasn’t exactly easy, and was probably pretty foolhardy with hindsight) from the Gambia. I wanted to tack on Sierra Leone as well but we were told that the local airlines were too unreliable and we could easily be delayed for a day or more, causing us to miss our flights back to London.
So you start to get the picture that my travelling is often spontaneous and haphazard; I rarely research a place before booking my flight and don’t normally book more than a few weeks in advance. I do tend to check the weather at my destination, so that I know what kind of clothing to pack and may go so far as to Google the most interesting sights in a country, so that I don’t miss any “must-sees” and kick myself afterwards, that’s about it though.
Unfortunately, it was not until I was in my early fifties that I realised I had an ambition to visit every country in the world. Given my full-time work, often involving long hours, all-nighters and weekends, which afforded me a strictly limited number of days holiday per year, this was not an easy task. I felt that I had already lost a lot of time, by not “cramming in” more when I had travelled but there’s no point wailing over “what-ifs”. From then on, I upped the ante and have tried to travel more often, to more places. As I say, it has all come to a grinding halt this year, but hopefully next year will be better.
I frequently travel alone and make all my own travel arrangements on-line but if its a place or string of countries, which can be difficult to navigate, either due to lack of available information, convoluted and changeable visa requirements or hostilities in progress, then I will often take an organised tour. I usually buy from one of the “off-the-beaten-track” type of tour companies but group tours can also be useful, if you need to cover a lot of ground e.g. New Zealand or Namibia. I will discuss the pros and cons of these different options, at a later date.
You will see some references in some of my writings to my being in a wheelchair or unable to walk far enough etc. This is because I developed osteoarthritis in both of my knees in my early fifties due to jogging (joggers beware and stick to brisk walking, swimming or cycling if you want to exercise without ending up like me). I finally caved in and opted for simultaneous double knee replacement surgery about two years ago. In case anyone would be interested to know what this was like, I could post my chronological blow-by-blow account of the process: The Ouch Chronicles. It was nowhere near as bad as the title suggests and I’m very pleased with the outcome.
As I mentioned, this is very much the nascence of my written reminiscences, and I cannot possibly write about all the places I have seen before launching my site. So to start with, I have written the countries I have already visited in pink and have put the country in hyper-link (these are the underlined countries) where I have posted about my travels there. More posts will be added frequently to begin with: I am aiming for at least two each week. I hope you will find my posts honest, idiosyncratic, humorous where possible and full of rapture where appropriate. If you like the way I write, please subscribe for updates so that I can let you know when more has been posted. You may also message me by completing the contact form, if you would like to hear about any particular country I have visited.
I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed visiting the places I write about, and I hope it encourages you to spread you wings and horizons , make a few plans and fall in love with seeing our world from your own perspective.
Safe and Happy Travels!
Caroline
October 2020