What is your idea of easy hiking
The southern German spa town of Baden-Baden has been attracting visitors since the dawn of the tourism age in the 19th century. It is renowned for its beauty … … as well as for its historic sites that include the elegant casino where the Russian writer Dostoevsky conducted intensive research for his novella The Gambler…
“Parma as a capital city needed a river”, said the Italian poet Artilio Bertolucci (the father of the internationally famous and Oscar-winning film director), “but since it is was only a small capital of an undistinguished Duchy, all it got was a torrente.” Torrenti are so unfamiliar in Northern European countries that most of the…
How many forests must a man walk down before you can call him a hiker? I have no idea. But here is something I do know. Long before you have reached even half that figure, you will have experienced a case of “hikers’ dejà vu”: the feeling that you have walked down the same forest-dash-coast…
This is a first for the Easy Hikers: in this post, we will not tell you where we went for our walk. Not because this is some sort of game and we want you to puzzle it out, but because it does not matter. The scene for your autumn walk is everywhere and anywhere –…
The Croix des Gardes in Cannes is that rare thing among green spaces….. …. it is a park with a history that reaches back several hundred years. Not that the Croix des Gardes in Cannes had spent all of these centuries as a park. No public garden is that old. But it has occupied that…
We all need a bit of drama and excitement in our lives – and, since few of us get enough of it from our humdrum daily routines, we want our entertainment to take us on an emotional ride. But there are clearly limits. Even the most dedicated lovers of fruity melodrama would not want to…
When I was a boy, my home town’s local TV station carried a French adventure series that was set in the wild marshlands of the Camargue. There were a lot of wild horses, water buffaloes and cool guys riding white steeds bareback through the spray, but other than that, I have no recollection of what…
Whatever happened to Old Aspremont? It was all a very long time ago. Modern-day Aspremont – approx. 15 km to the north of Nice – is a picturesque and quiet little place, one of a dozen or so “perched villages” on the list of visitors’ recommendations issued by the Nice tourism office. But there is…
There are nature walks and there are town walks, and rarely the twain shall meet: trees, mountains and birdsong for one, historic buildings and traffic fumes for the other. But there are also walks that challenge you to work out which is which: to determine where nature ends and where the “town“ of human culture…
Among the peaks of the Riviera, the Mont des Mules enjoys a special place. Not because of its height: at 291 metres, it is little more than a pimple on the landscape. Its long and varied history reaches back into pre-Roman times and includes the episode when, in 1909, the municipality of Beausoleil (to which…
