"A Special Smile"
All the photographs mean something to me. If I was to choose a very special one it would be this shot of a young Indian girl I met at her father's funeral. She believed there was life after death and that he was going on to a better place. I found the experience very humbling. At my own father's funeral there was typical western grief, here it was different. She was delighted when I asked if I could take her photograph, but it was only afterwards I noticed her left leg had been amputated at her hip. She saw my surprise and gave me a smile that will be with me forever.

A Special Place

I have a favourite place that until recently was not well known. It is the place I escaped to after my old man died, the place where I review my life now and again. Six miles from the nearest road the remoteness is powerful. The cliffs to the North appear to evaporate in various shades of grey towards Cape Wrath and there is a stillness over the place that I have never experienced anywhere else. I sit on the rocky strand and soak it in, feeling the loneliness penetrate my very being, not an unpleasant loneliness, but rather a great peace."

There is a small island known, about a mile off shore, there I had one of the best dives of my life.
I went by boat with twelve others, and though the beach was in sight we did not go ashore. It would not have been the same with twelve.

I have been a few times, the first after my father's death, another with a young French girl. The latter was in 1994. Two days later I flew to Rio. I met a guy from Wales and we shared accommodation. Pete was a banker who had opted out of the rat race, just as I had. When I unpacked my rucksack on the other side of the world the first thing to come out was a photograph of my special place that Estelle had secretly placed in my bag. There were nice words on the back to remember the day by.

The following day, grey and overcast, my first to be spent in South America, I walked with Pete along Copacobanna Beach. Today there were no scantily clad beauties, no sunshine. The bulldozers were on the sand clearing away all the rubbish.
As we were walking and talking about how we were each going to spend the next few months, Pete told me of his favourite beach in the world. He told me it was in a place so remote that it was unlikely that I had ever heard of it.
We formed a bond that day.

"Rook Rook" Guatemala
I took a boat to a small village at the foot of a volcano on the edge of a lake. When I was making my way to the village from the jetty, this chap asked me for money. I had a lolly pop in my back pocket and gave it to him. I asked if I could take his picture, he looked at the lolly pop & gave me this laugh. I promised to send him a copy of the picture, but lost his address. I returned to Guatemala a year later & took a copy of the photo with me, with the help of a local boy in the village I found his house but to my disappointment he wasn't in, I left the photo with his wife who was delighted. Later I found Rook Rook sitting at the pier, watching the boats come & go. I could now speak Spanish and tried to let him know I'd left a picture at his house. I couldn't understand why he couldn't understand me until a woman listening to me told me that he was deaf and dumb. He could lip read but only his native Indian tongue, not Spanish. With help of the woman I managed to get the message across that I'd left a photo with his wife. I returned again in 2004 to learn that Rook Rook had been killed in an accident at the dock a few months earlier.

It was a beautiful day and a beautiful drive through some of the most spectacular scenery in the world. Back home, some months earlier, I had read an article in a newspaper about “the monastery at the top of the cliff.” I knew then I wanted to come to Ethiopia. From the junction with the main road, there is an 11 km rough track to the base of the mountain, suitable only for a 4x4; the vehicle struggled hard but gave up after a few kilometres and I had to walk.
Debre Damo is unique and unforgettable. There is a daunting obstacle to the monastery: the only means of access is a climb of twenty-four meters up a sheer cliff. Polished smooth by fourteen centuries of scrambling monks, the vertical rock face looked more daunting the closer I got.
A monk lowered a safety rope which I tied around my waist. He then lowered a second, thicker frayed leather rope that is the monks' lifeline to the outside world. My hands grasped the rope and bare footed I made the ascent. It was almost a spiritual climb, a great feeling was flowing throughout the climb and a power I have not ever felt before gave me the strength to pull myself up. I made the climb, got to the top and as I looked back down I could not believe what I had done.

The monastery is a collection of stone-built houses and several small churches spread over a parched escarpment. About 120 monks live there, along with their protégés and livestock. Local people give food and supplies but the monastic community is virtually self- sufficient. It has its own water reservoirs - spectacular caverns dug deep beneath the surface of the cliff-top centuries ago. Little suggests this is the country's oldest place of worship: a community with roots in the 6th century.

Addis Ababa
I was having a coffee, on the other side of the road there must have been 100 people, sitting or sleeping rough against a wall that stretched the length of the road, they were beggars, some deformed, some naked, some diseased, many with aids, some with limbs broken or missing, some you would be afraid to touch, all living out their lives in the same place every day, all were begging, and the first reaction when you get over the shock is perhaps to think that somehow it was all their fault. That’s the easy way out, it enables you to walk past them and do nothing, give an occasional coin to the ones that tug a conscience yet when they ask for money, if instead you offer them part of a loaf of bread it is torn out of your hands and gorged like I have never seen before. Poverty is not the “not having” it is, as the man in the cafe said....”being someone whose potential in this life will never be realised”. No hope whatsoever, and I don’t know what a life without hope must be, none of us do, but having seen it day after day, as the hands reach out no longer for hope but for food, it has drained my heart.

For a very sad but true insight to world poverty Click here.

"Paradise"
If it exists then I believe I found it here at Lang Co, on the China Sea. I left home with no ties and knew that if I found somewhere better than home I could stay. Here the people were lovely, the landscape beautiful the food delicious and for a Scot, the weather most agreeable. I found however that there is for me only one home and that is as they say "where the heart is" and despite the rain, that was Scotland. Often when the rain, the cold and the long nights arrive I wonder if I made the right decision, the doubts however don't often last more than a lifetime!

Spanish Dancer

I travelled to Eritrea, a small country adjacent to Ethiopia, on the Red Sea. Here I joined a ship known as the Lady Jenny. It was a dive boat. The year was 1993 and the 30 year war had stopped 6 months before. The area was virtually undived due to the war and the Lady Jenny was the first boat to visit the area.

On board I met among others, a gentleman called Wolfgang from Sweden. We dived together for the whole three weeks and he introduced me to the world of tropical diving. He was my mentor, he knew every species and yet still had the thrill of seeing them all again.

Before I left home I had read about a nudibranch (an underwater snail with no shell) called a "Spanish Dancer" this beauty was said to be about a foot long and not too easy to find. She was the thing I wanted to see most of all on this fascinating trip. We dived for two and a half weeks and saw everything, we even saw the creatures you can only dream about seeing, and we saw those that were not even meant to be there. We saw, sharks, giant manta ray, and even two whale sharks, the biggest fish in the sea and ours was about 18 metres long. There were two professional photographers on board and between them they had dived over 10,000 dives, yet they had never seen a whale shark. I was lucky I guess, but I had not seen my "Spanish Dancer".

Close to the end of the trip that had held so much, it was time for a night dive. I jumped into the water with Wolfgang and it was pitch black. We chatted before going down I told Wolfgang I was going to find my "Spanish Dancer" this time. As we began our descent below the waves, Wolfgang had a problem and had to ascend to the surface. I being his buddy went up with him. On the surface Wolfgang told me his jacket inflation valve was not working and he would have to abort the dive. The diving golden rule is "never dive alone", but on this occasion I gave it a go. On hindsight I could have picked a better place. I was off the coast of Yemen where we were not allowed to be let alone to dive. There had been sharks seen in the water, it was pitch black and it was my first solo dive.

When I descended I saw two sharks caught in the beam of my torch, I had seen plenty of sharks earlier in the week and realised they were just as afraid of me as I was of them, however at night it is another story. The beam of the torch seemed to scare them away and when my heart beat resembled something normal I began to relax. After about half an hour under water my torch beam picked up on something red under a rock. Immediately I knew what it was, it had to be my "Spanish Dancer", and it was. Fortunately, I had my camera with me and as she danced I took my photographs. She was more beautiful than I had heard or read about and after about ten minutes of her company she went back under her rock.

I surfaced in the pitch black about 300 metres from the ship and as I was so elated at what I had experienced I let out a huge yell of joy. One of the others on board the "Lady Jenny" later told me that Wolfgang had at that point said to those aboard "I think Jim has found his "Spanish Dancer". He was so right. Sorry you were not there to see her Wolfgang. (He later confided in me that he had never seen one)

I want to share a wee story with you, it took place in New Zealand a few years ago.
My friend Ali from Nairn / Aviemore was working in Australia, he had to leave at end of his visa so decided to come to New Zealand.
When he arrived I met him at Auckland airport and he said he had received a letter from his mother letting him know that she had heard from a distant relation from 35 years ago, Ali last saw him when he was 10. Anyway his mother suggested that Ali go stay with this person, not my scene at all, as you know I hate staying with people . But he got in touch I said I would go somewhere else. Turns out the relation had gone to England for a month but his new wife, a lady of 65 originally from England but living out here since 87, invited us to go stay in her "second" house which she kept for guests. So I gave it a go. The house was a beaut, right down on the beach and next door to where the kiwi Maori celebrate the biggest day of their year which was day after we arrived, the Prime Minister was coming up as well. Whadango. Following day we took the old dear out for a meal, as we talked I told her I was diving "tomorrow" and she asked if I had ever dived in Scotland. I told her I had and the conversation went like this. "Have you ever dived in Loch Long?"
"Yes I have in fact my father used to live there" "Where abouts?"
"In a place called Arrochar"" I know Arrochar, where did he live in Arrochar?"
at this point I thought oh oh! so I took over "How do you know Arrochar?
"Before I came to New Zealand, I worked in Glasgow and lived in Arrochar"
"Where did you stay?" "I lived in Craigard House, do you know it"
"My father lived in Chestnut cottage, right next door"
"Good God. Dont tell me your Jacks son, dont tell me you're jacks son the lawyer from Inverness." Jaws dropped all round the table, I was hit by a thunderbolt, I had come all the way to the other side of the globe, to meet someone who knew and loved my old man. I spent that evening and the next couple of days listening to her tell stories of how she and my father used to spend the hours sitting in his lounge, looking out over the loch and talking about life and how strange it all was."
She was an interesting lady (poor ali, he came to visit a relation and ended up listening to stories about my old man) When I arrived in New Zealand I met Ali the next day, I said to him, and it was he who remembered this not me, " I get the
feeling I am going to meet someone I know here, its got that kind of feel to it" "Dont be daft he said, we are on the other side of the world" And so we were!
Its a strange world indeed, I felt so much energy for the next couple of days it was wonderful, its going now, but its that sort of place that anything can happen and I was ready to see what it was.

"A Pavement chat"
I arrived in Mongolia from China on the Trans-Siberian express. The Mongolians in their capital seemed wary of foreigners. I arrived in their country with no warm clothing and as winter had arrived I purchased a "deal", which was a local coat resembling a heavy woollen dressing gown. On seeing me wearing his national coat this chap warmly welcomed me to join him on the pavement for a chat. When you have all day, it doesn't matter that it takes 2 hours to explain that you come from far away and are happy to be with them in their land. He took me back to his tent for tea. The hand in the picture? Well it could have been cut out but it was part of that moment.

"Win Lwin Too"
Burma is a country of breathtaking beauty, and retains the fascination of an unchanged culture, its gentle people always friendly and welcoming. In 1988 thousands of unarmed protesters including students, women and children, were gunned down in the streets by the army during peaceful demonstrations for democracy. Power has still not been transferred to those democratically elected in 1990, including Nobel Peace winner Aung San Suu Kyi (who remains under house arrest to this day). Burma is a country that is committing human rights abuses on a massive scale.
I met Win Lwin Too one evening, he is the most gentle human being I have ever met. Win took part in the demonstrations in 1988, he was in his fourth year at medical school. As a consequence of taking part he was forced to give up his medical studies and was now a worker in the rice fields.