Stephen Phelan

FIVE YEARS after the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami, the port of Onagawa has a craft beer bar, an artisanal coffee house, a Spanish tile factory, and a workshop where electric guitars are carved from local cedar, all laid out along the new Seapal Pier shopping precinct, at the town’s own Ground Zero. None of these were here before March 11, 2011, when the quake sent a wave of almost fifteen meters through Onagawa Bay and over the waterfront – destroying more than seventy percent of the town’s buildings and killing about eight percent, or one in twelve, of its residents.

On a recent Saturday morning, I caught The Cervantes Train from Madrid’s Atocha Station. Don Quixote greeted me on the platform. He was dressed pretty much as described in the novel that made him immortal: a lesser nobleman of La Mancha from the early seventeenth century, passing for a knight in flimsy (cardboard) armor, and carrying the (padded foam) lance with which he tilts at windmills.

ON December 5, 2015, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos announced that the long-lost San José treasure galleon had been found at last, some 307 years after it was sunk by English warships off his country’s Caribbean coast. The vessel was carrying a fortune when it went down – bullion, coins and gemstones en route from the mines of the New World to the coffers of Spain’s King Phillip V and his French ally Louis XIV.

ON a recent visit to Morocco, I had a touch of déjà vu. It was my first time in the country, my first sight of the capital, Rabat, and the Kasbah of the Udayas. But walking up the outer staircase of that 12th-century fortress, a vivid image came to mind – a lucid memory of a silver car flying down these same steps, through the air, in the opposite direction. “Maybe you’ve seen Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation?” asked my guide Aziz Goumi. Oh yeah, I thought.

THERE was once a tiny island in the Parana River, barely big enough to give a fisherman a seat or save a drowning swimmer. That river was and is one of the most turbulent on Earth, crashing down through Paraguay and making a musical sound where it rushed around that particular rock. For centuries, native Tupi and Guarani people had called it “Itaipu”, meaning “singing boulder”.

CONSIDER the macaw. The brightest bird in the rainforest comes in three main colour combinations – blue and yellow, red and green, and the particularly eye-popping scarlet macaw, its luminous plumage tinted with the full spectrum and tapering to iridescent golden tail feathers.

THE same sun that rose in the Far East this morning is now setting on the hills above the Scottish Highland village of Tomatin. It glints along the blade of Jock Brocas’s sword and casts his shadow on a gold and purple landscape. In this light, Brocas looks as much like a mythic Japanese warrior as he ever will.

THE terracotta warriors came to Dublin when I was a kid. A small detachment of them, anyway – perhaps a dozen life-sized clay soldiers from an army of thousands. Most were infantrymen, arranged in marching formation. A couple were cavalry, mounted on sepulchral horses and frozen in mid-trot. Their eyes were open, their faces angled and shadowed in a way that made them seem splendidly charismatic, if also potentially wicked. They didn’t quite look alive, but you wouldn’t want to turn your back on them either.

I moved to Buenos Aires the weekend before the 30th anniversary of the first day of the Falklands War. I knew enough not to call it that in Argentina, where those islands are known as Las Malvinas. To refer to them by their British name is a political statement if deliberate, and a dead giveaway if accidental.

AN ex-banker named Guillermo Benitez swings a sawed-off hockey stick in each fist, bringing both of them down on an old computer keyboard like a furious gorilla locked inside a school supply cupboard. His girlfriend Lorena Dominguez is more methodical, lining up empty wine and beer bottles on a metal rack to smash them one by one with an axe handle. The Ramones are playing loud and dumb over the in-house PA system. Through the bunker-like slit of the observation window, it looks and sounds as if these two are having a wonderful time, and this is the entire point of The Break Club.