On October Saturday
4th, our first speaker
was Globie member Roger Widdecombe who showed us
what a Raleigh International expedition is really like.
Roger’s project was in the west African country of
Ghana. These trips are no holiday: participants undergo
assessment and rigorous training in orienteering and
crossing rivers, first aid etc. Once in Ghana, there were
many projects for Roger and his group to take part in,
including building a school in a remote village, health
programmes dealing with blindness caused by cataracts and
for those who wanted to work nights, working on a project
monitoring turtles as they came in each night to lay their
eggs on the beach. Roger assured us that although the
participants do work hard, they also have a lot of fun,
including playing football in forty degree heat with the
local people and enjoying canoe expeditions on Lake
Volta.
Whilst our first speaker had talked of travelling and
doing good, our second speaker Juliet Coombes’
theme was travelling and having fun! Juliet’s talk was
about the festivals around the world. She showed us
colourful photos of the bulls at Pamplona, mad water
festivals in Thailand, The Full Moon festival in Laos, and
the colourful Venice festival held in the weeks leading up
to Lent. The Venetian festival involves lots of dressing
up, particularly in masks and in previous centuries was an
excuse for much debauchery, sorry Globies, you are 200
years too late! There are thousands of festival around the
world each year, too many for Juliet to show us, but she
did tell us about boat festivals in Cambodia and Elf
festivals in Iceland, before winding up her talk by looking
at London’s own Notting Hill carnival.
Next month, on Saturday
1st November, Amar
Grover will talk about India – The “Hindustan Tibet”
road and on to Ladakh in which Amar looks at India’s
National Highway 22 “The Hindustan-Tibet” Road, an old
trading route that exited the Raj but never quite took off.
His talk includes the Tibetan regions of India, Spiti and
Ladakh.
After Amar and the break, Tom Freemantle will be
talking about Mexico to Manhattan with a Pack Mule, a 2,600
mile walk retracing the footsteps of his ancestor, Colonel
Arthur Fremantle, who travelled from North Mexico to New
York at the height of the American Civil War in 1863. The
swashbuckling colonel used stage coaches, paddle steamers
and steam trains to get around but nearly 140 years later
his great-great nephew used a cantankerous but heroic mule
called “Brown”
London meetings are held at The Church of
Scotland, Crown Court, behind the Fortune Theatre in Covent
Garden at 2.30pm the first Saturday of each month. There is
no London meeting in August, but we will be back in
September. For more information, you can contact the
Globetrotters Info line on +44 (0) 20 8674 6229, or visit
the website: www.globetrotters.co.uk