Tom Salmon on a journey through Argentina to the ruins of a fortress city and the history of the Diaguitan people that once called it home:

It’s amazing, and pretty primeval, how your senses can take you back to a place. I got home last night to find frost already settling on the ground, it was a clear and crisp January night in Yorkshire. After putting the kids to bed it was time to eat. Steak, thin chips, salad and malbec wine had been planned in homage to Argentina.

But it was the Quilmes beer that we drank after the meal that really brought the memories flooding back from our six week trip around Argentina in 2006. My highlight from that adventure was the region around the colonial Andean city of Salta, spending the days exploring high altitude deserts and the nights eating tamales, humitas and locro in piazzas around the city. Salta, founded in 1582, was once the most important administrative centre in Argentina and the region was extremely wealthy in the time before Buenos Aires became the capital. Continue reading →

Three countries share Lake Constance, the communities of Switzerland, Germany and Austria facing each other across the water. Nowadays you can cross the border without formality – don’t tell anyone, but I spent an afternoon in Austrian Bregenz without a single piece of identification having left it behind in Germany – and there are plenty of boats that criss-cross the lake. The owner of our apartment lived in one country, worked in another, and no doubt went on Sunday bike rides in the third. There is another way to make these international journeys, although on average the opportunity strikes only a couple of times a century, if that, and that is when Lake Constance freezes over. Continue reading →

(Photo: Indian Island Tolowot California / Wikimedia Commons / Ellin Beltz)

Tony Platt travels from Berlin back home to California, comparing the ways in which societies deal with past, and the hidden history of the ‘outdoor paradise’ of Humboldt County:

In October I spent a few days in Berlin, not for oompah and pretzels, but to check out memorial culture. I don’t know of another country that assiduously remembers the worst of its history as Germany does. Fortunately, the nation that carries the weight of Nazism did not take Ronald Reagan’s advice when he visited Bitburg cemetery in 1985 – “I don’t think we ought to focus on the past.” That could be the mantra, though, for his home state. Back in northwest California, I’m struck by how scrupulously the region forgets its sorrowful history.

Throughout Germany there are close to two hundred “authentic sites of remembrance” of Hitler’s regime, as well as a lexicon of terms to describe the extraordinary variety of commemoration: memorials of apology, memorials of honor, active museums, memorial cemeteries, memorial plaques, thinking sites, learning places, documentation centers, and so on. In Berlin alone, you can spend a week going from site to site, as I did, and still not see everything. Back home in Humboldt County, a couple of hours once a year is all you need. Continue reading →