author, mountaineering writer – books, blog, opinion
Like most normal people, I swear from time to time. More unusually, I also swear quite a lot in my writing, and recently I received some feedback that it might be excessive. So when is swearing acceptable in travel writing, and when is it too much?
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I’ve recently been reading In Ethiopia With a Mule, about a trek across — you guessed it — Ethiopia, in the company of a mule, by the famously brave travel writer Dervla Murphy. She is widely admired for her intrepid travelling style, but does this come at a price?
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In the process of editing my new book about Chimborazo, I’ve had to chop the following excerpt. But it’s an interesting read, about a couple of places in northern Ecuador that are rarely visited by tourists, but should be: the mountain Cotacachi and its picturesque crater lake.
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The story of British climber Tom Ballard, who has been missing on Nanga Parbat in Pakistan for nine days now, is a particularly poignant one. Twenty-four years ago his mother Alison Hargreaves also lost her life on another mountain in Pakistan, K2.
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