All posts by Jamie Lafferty

The Monuments Men

The Monuments Men

Vail in the off season is a strange place to be. Through winter, it is one of the busiest, most expensive places in America, the resort dozens of US Winter Olympics athletes choose to call home. The glamour and buzz are much harder to imagine in early summer, when Vail..
In Search of Snow Hill

In Search of Snow Hill

The Ship There’s a strangeness to being in Antarctica, a sense of the surreal. I’m fortunate to have been several times, but repetition hasn’t shaken the peculiarity of the experience. It’s a place where the air is clearer than you can imagine, where the water is purer and the landscapes..
The Eire Up There

The Eire Up There

The smashed avo on artisanal sourdough, teased with freshly ground spices and enlivened with hand-squeezed citrus was being well received by my adolescent dinner guests. OK, I would go on to make the exact same thing for dinner the next night and, yes, it was ultimately just discounted avocado on..
The Fairmen of the Boards

The Fairmen of the Boards

Rovaniemi is not bodacious. One does not go there to hang ten. Here, on the very edge of the Finnish Arctic Circle, you’ll find Christmas song before Billabong. The town unashamedly markets itself as ‘The Official Hometown of Santa Claus’, and though I don’t see the fat man when I visit,..
Arcade Fire

Arcade Fire

I have been good at many computer games, but I have been great at only one: Tekken. The ‘King of Iron Fist Tournament’ was first developed by Japanese gaming stalwarts Namco in 1994 and a few months later became one of the early flagship titles for the new Sony Playstation...
Hell in Paradise

Hell in Paradise

Ronnie Vorswyk spends most of his days in a Napoleonic jail at the edge of the Amazon jungle. A guide in the sprawling, long-disused Transportation Prison in Saint Laurent du Maroni in French Guiana, the 60-year-old is originally from the former Dutch colony of Suriname, just on the other side..
Winter’s Past

Winter’s Past

The Governor is a man of few words but many jobs. Sitting in his permanently oil-stained orange overalls, he looks past me, out of a window in the Pyramiden Hotel with the look of a concerned parent.  Out there, on the decaying streets of Pyramiden, Petr Petrovich is caretaker, driver, gardener, janitor, just..
The Last Outlaw

The Last Outlaw

Four years since Sons of Anarchy officially ended, some fans still have difficulty separating David Labrava from his alter ego, Happy Lowman. His Instagram and Twitter accounts are frothing seas of fans questioning his motivations and demanding real answers to questions about his character’s fictional actions. “People think they know..
The World Nomad Games

The World Nomad Games

Ordinarily it would have been golden eagles on the gopher’s mind, but on a sunny afternoon in early September, there was something else to worry about. As it emerged from its burrow in the Kyrchyn Valley in central Kyrgyzstan, the rodent sniffed the dusty air blowing north towards the border..
Life and Death in the Chocolate Box

Life and Death in the Chocolate Box

On a cool, clear evening in Buenos Aires, San Martín de San Juan, a small team from western Argentina, arrives to meet its fate at La Bombonera. Home of Boca Juniors, the largest and most successful team in the country, the stadium is the beating blue-and-gold heart of the colourful,..