Category: On The Trevithick Trail
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Uyuni: where trains (and dreams) come to die
Pre-order ‘Long Road to Nowhere: The Lost Years of Richard Trevithick (Part One)’ now, HERE. During my trip so far I’ve visited abandoned train stations, hiked along both active and disused railways and even been woken up by them rumbling through Antofagasta in the middle of the night, but so far on the trail of…
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THE ZIGZAG METHOD
What might not be clear, probably because I didn’t explain it properly is that Trevithick is unlikely to have gone to Chile, at least this is what I think right now. If I find any leads when I reach Peru this may change, as it was from Lima he may have ventured south when he…
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George Hicks and the upside-down anchor (Antofagasta Part 3)
Pre-order ‘Long Road to Nowhere: The Lost Years of Richard Trevithick (Part One)’ now, HERE. Walking back into town late on Saturday afternoon I spotted the anchor as two buildings parted and the ominous Martian hills came into view once more. I had read about the anchor before, mentioned in passing in the late Michael…
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The Arab of Antofagasta (Antofagasta Part 2)
I don’t know how I managed it but I did. Halfway round the world, as far from Makkah as possible and here I was on a Saturday afternoon sat outside an Egyptian’s shop with Nelson drinking thick black coffee flavoured with cardamom.
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Antofagasta Part 1
It is still very much an industrial city to this day, far off the tourist trail and even more so off the backpacker trail, making my presence slightly peculiar as always. Only the high-rise apartment blocks would have seemed alien to Cornishman George Hicks, who worked for the ‘Compania de Salitres y Ferrocarriles de Antofagasta…
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Widening the Trevithick Trail: the voyage that never was
Pre-order ‘Long Road to Nowhere: The Lost Years of Richard Trevithick (Part One)’ now, HERE. As much as he was cursed with bad timing, Richard Trevithick also liked to make his own life as difficult as possible with a mix of defiance and belligerence. It appears that Don Ricardo was itching to escape from the…
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Valparaiso: the trail continues…
The groundsman and an elderly woman talked quietly facing a tomb, eyeing me slightly as I did the rounds. I found a bench in a quiet corner and sat for a few minutes to write these thoughts down in my notebook. I pondered on the prevalence of headless angels. Was it a deliberate act of…
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Valparaiso: where the trail begins?
Pre-order ‘Long Road to Nowhere: The Lost Years of Richard Trevithick (Part One)’ now, HERE. I left Santiago in style. The Salon Cama buses here are luxury business class style seats that recline 140 degrees, spaced apart so well that you can recline the whole way without infuriating the person behind you (overly). Thank the…
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The Myth of the Trail (Create your own legend and tell it to your son)
Fact and fiction blur together everywhere we look. If you tell a lie enough times it becomes the truth and a good story is a good story, regardless of whether it is ‘true’ or not. Who is to say, in the age of endless information, rolling news cycles and a constant power shift that tries…
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Welcome to The Trevithick Trail
Pre-order ‘Long Road to Nowhere: The Lost Years of Richard Trevithick (Part One)’ now, HERE. Anywhere in the world you come across a mine, the chances are someone British was at one time bankrolling it and someone Cornish was down there with a lovely bit of crib in his lunchbox. In the mid-19th century at…
JOEL GRIFFETT 