Wynn Corser-Horn, Writer, Editor, Communications Professional
All about travel & cruise editorial
Cruise and travel writing samples from Travel Etc. and ISLAND Home & Style Magazines
Toledo spain
Toledo spain
"Beyond Bilbao"
Past the third stone donkey corral to the left, our driver turned down a narrow country lane hemmed in by thick stone walls.
From the rooftop of a nearby granary, a plump stork made an arduous lift-off and, across the road, a circle of sheep were conferring over a lunch of wild poppies.
A river, a bridge, a church spire, and then the car suddenly stopped before a low stone building on the edge of a little valley filled with green peppers and tomatoes and white asparagus as fat as a child’s fist. It seemed an unlikely setting for an intro- duction to the famous gourmet Spanish Basque cuisine.
But it is typical of the Basque that the finest food will often be found out here among the fields and the horreos (stone granaries), or emerging from the kitchen of an unassuming, off-the-beaten-donkey-path taberna...”
"My Dinner with Andre"
*Published in The Globe & Mail
In the rice fields, the unflappable water buffalo stand knee-high in mud, contentedly devouring rice stalks: the ubiquitous Indonesian lawn-mower, slowly but efficiently preparing the rice paddy for the next crop. Clothes, hair, babies and pots are being washed with equal vigor in the streams running through the paddies.
The roadway outside Jakarta is crowded with cars, bicycles and market carts piled high with sweet potatoes and durian fruit and we are overtaken by an entire family stacked on a motorscooter, like a Ringling Brothers act.
Andre, a former long-distance truck driver from Sumatra, has been hired to do the driving for our journey across the Indonesian island of Java with our Jakarta-based friend, O.B.
In the custom of his people, Andre is married to two women – one older (32) and one younger (16). He has a deceptively charming smile, hair that appears to be slicked with margarine, and a girl in every town. He is fanatically proud of his Mitsubishi van, which has been embellished with slippery white satin seat covers, a fitted satin cover for the karaoke systemand elegant white doilies.
Andre doesn’t speak English, which allows our travelling companion, O.B., to freely curse him each time he grinds his way through all four gears, or loses his way for the fourteenth time, or asks for yet another cash advance to visit the local karaoke, or decides to straighten anerrant doily while overtaking a truck on a blind corner.
But on this first, promising morning of our drive across Java, all is fresh and glorious and unknown... and so is Andre.
"Yes, Virginia, there is another Toledo"
*ANTOR (Assoc. of National Tourism Organizations) award for best travel writing in Canada, 2000.
The blanket is spread out in an olive grove on the side of a sandy hill. The cheese, sausages and wine await. The only sound is the ponderous peal of bells, the sighing of leaves above our heads and the conversation of sparrows. It is the spot which has waited for us in our dreams all through the dark, wind-whistling Canadian winter nights: a slender olive tree, a covey of insipid clouds skirting a blazing sun and, far below our feet, a medieval imperial city – the walled city of Toledo, Spain – wobbling in the heat of a sultry Spanish afternoon, an aloof and immaculately preserved relic of the Middle Ages.
But our hillside reverie is quickly and rudely interrupted by Spanish ants and bees, the universal party-crash- ers, arriving to inspect the contents of our paper bag.
They are in luck – we are having a quintessential, bugs-dream of a picnic: a quarter-round of creamy La Mancha cheese, Queso Manchego Don Bernardo, four crumbly buns, a coil of pink, oily chorizo sausage, a dozen slivers of anchovies glistening in wax paper, and an inexpensive bottle of great red wine, Senorio de las Llanos, grown in the luscious La Mancha grape grow- ing region to the south.
It’s a meal so European as to be almost cliché – but it is exactly what the secretaries eat every day in the cafeteria near our pension...
"Shoeless in Acapulco"
Acapulco stole our shoes and re-claimed our hearts. Here’s how it happened...
First, the shoes. We had been sitting beneath a thatched roof at a little seaside cafe in the heart of Acapul- co, along the edge of the deep blue Bahia de Acapulco. The waiter had just placed our order for two grilled pescado (fish) and “dos cerveza, por favor.” Acapulco looked... well... better than a postcard of Acapulco: a task that would be difficult for less-endowed locales.
The ice-blue skies were dotted with pearly clouds and the Costera promenade was dotted with bronzed beauties and walking gods with abdomens that appeared to be reinforced with sheet metal.
On the beach, tourists with stronger stomachs and less active imaginations than mine were allowing themselves to be strapped to a giant sail and hauled 200 feet intothe unforgiving sky behind a speeding boat, their fates dependent on the vagaries of the wind and an oversized dishcloth.
We took our shoes off and et the southern sun warm our milky northern skin. Our fish meal arrived and the waiter called to us, waving two frosty bottles of Corona as an added inducement.
It wasn’t until an hour later, as the afternoon sun began making tracks for the horizon, that we remembered our shoes. Alas, they were making tracks toward South America, perched on a wave, already converted to a refugee boat for migrating seagulls. The walk home along melting tarmac closely resembled a Mexican hat dance, and we arrived back at the Acapulco Princess hotel, chastened and chafed.
And the reclaimed hearts? Therein lies the real story...