Queen Maeve’s Tomb sits high above the town of Sligo, Ireland on a low mountain named Knocknarea (”Mountain of the Moon”). Legend states that it is good luck to bring a stone up the mountain to place on the large cairn, but that it is bad luck to remove a stone. This would explain it’s formidable height.
From the center of town, the mountain looks anything but daunting. It looks like another one of those beautiful hills that Ireland’s Northwest is so well known for. Look a little closer however, and you’ll notice a bump on the top of this relatively flat-topped hill. This bump is of course, the tomb of Queen Maeve herself.
In Celtic mythology, Queen Maeve was known as the Warrior Queen of Connacht. Unfortunately, the queen had a reputation of being quite unkind, having murdered her own sister Eithne with the intent to covet Eithne’s husband. She also seems to have made her way through a number of husbands, disposing of each by murder. She figures prominently in “T
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Athens is one of the most beautiful central European cities. The Greece capital has an incredible past; being one of the oldest cities in the world Athens is the birthplace of the democracy. Visiting this city is an incredible experience. Just walking the streets is a unique experience because Athens architecture combines many styles from the earliest in the history to the newest.
The Acropolis of Athens including the Parthenon, the Erectheion, and the Temple of Athena Nike is certainly the cities landmark and it is definitely worth visiting. These are architectural masterpieces and the most important ancient Greek monuments. If you want to make a complete tour of the city, you should take the funicular railway. It starts in Kolonaki and covers the entire city including the port of Piraeus and the island of Aegina.
There are many museums in Athens but the recently renovated National Archaeological Museum is probably the best one holding a magnificent collection of antiquities, masterworks of the ancient Greek civilization, and many works of art that decorated the Acropolis. At the Benaki Museum, you can see private collection of jewellery and weapons and some of the most wonderful collections of Greek art. This museum has a prolonged program on Thursday and the entrance is free. Athens is full of coffee shops bar and clubs therefore; you will not have problems finding a place where you can party all night. Clubs usually open around midnight but before that, you can spend your time in Psyrri the up and coming social centre in Athens.
If you decide to visit Athens, you should better do it in autumn or spring because during the summer is extremely hot and dry. Getting around the city is quite easy due to the many transportation means. If you prefer to avoid agglomerated buses or metros, you can take a cab it is very cheap. You can chose from a vide selection of hotels and champing places. If you have, some money put aside you should stay at Plaka hotel but remember to book a room in advance. It is not the most expensive hotel but it is situated in the middle of the tourist district.
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My trip to Mali (Guerba’s Journey to Timbuctoo), the vibrant heart of West Africa, amazed my in the variety and beauty of it’s mud buildings. Perhaps most famous of all is the huge mud mosque at Djenne. The triple minaretted structure was built on the site of a royal palace as long ago as 1240. There have been several rebuilds along the way, and the current building was mostly constructed in 1907. The walls are made of mud bricks, and coated with a cured mud plaster. Palm fronds were inserted at regular intervals to add strength to the structure, and with the branch ends left protruding, they provide an instant scaffold for the annual repairs.
Apart from an electric megaphone, the building does not use electricity, yet the thick mud walls and cunning design for ventilation ensure that even on the hottest Sahel days the building is deliciously cool inside. Every year after the rains, the building is replastered with mud, and the whole exercise is woven into a festival so that all the community is involved. The women fill mud pits with water several days before the event, and young boys play in the mud as a way of mixing it. The townsmen then race to see who can be the first to deliver the mud to the selected builders, who start the re-plastering in front of an audience which includes past master plasterers. The mosque is made of local materials with local labour yet could not really be improved upon for design or functionality. A true marvel and environmental masterpiece!
We were not allowed into the mosque on this visit (hospitality had recently been abused by some photographers taking inappropriate images), but the east facing prayer wall faces Djenne market and the building forms the natural and cultural centre of this busy town on the Niger river.
Our trip then took us even further into the desert to the Bandiagara escarpment, home to the Dogon peoples and more exotic buildings. The Dogon are a tribe who went to live in caves on the steep Bandiagara in order to escape the drive to Islamification that swept this region about 600 years ago. Since that time, the Dogons have settled into villages at the base of the escarpment and have developed their own unique architectural style. The huts and granaries are square section (unusual in Africa) and have pointed and sometimes crenellated roofs, but my favourite buildings here were the village courthouses. Each village has it’s own courthouse with unique carvings on the support pillars.
These pillars are about 3 feet high, and would be spaces about 5 ft apart, so that the floor spaces are broken up by them. The roof sits on these pillars, making headroom only 3ft inside, yet these thatched roofs can reach up 15 feet in layers of thatch bundles sometimes 15 layers deep. I enquired as to why so many layers, and why such lack of headroom inside and enjoyed the response. The roof gets a new layer of thatch for each successive village chief. This makes it easy to roughly date the village by the number of layers times the average chief’s reign. The matter of limited headroom was very pragmatic, it means that the accuser and accused have to sit bent doubled while their case is argued in front of the chief, and there is no room for fighting! The other interesting aspect of these rooms are the carvings decorating the pillars, often of the Dogon cross that represents the link from sky through to the earth via man. Snakes and lizards were also common, and all these form the mainstay on the traditional ceremonial masks.
So, get over to West Africa for some vibrant and colourful life with a rich culture and some stunning architecture. And the beer is good!
Adventures to Mali can be arranged through Guerba World Travel. An adventure travel company, with over 25 years experience and trips worldwide, allowing you to see the world in close-up. For more details see www.guerba.com
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