Last week, I told you about the bus company Zest and its daily tours from Menton into the arrière pays, the French Riviera’s mountainous back country. Of these altogether ten different day trips, most are going to places that also are, in principle, available on Zest’s ordinary lines. The problem is that the schedules of…
Vienna: for some people it is the city of Mozart, for others the city of Freud, for others still the place where Orson Welles charms and deceives everybody in The Third Man. Possibly the only thing they can all agree on is that Vienna is located on the Danube. It turns out, however, that the…
In the initial post about our trip along the Danube, I said that the Rhine landscape featured a large number of castles. While this is undeniably true, it may have been misconstrued to imply that the landscape of the Danube did not. So let me clearly state once and for all that this would be…
Once they were giants – Breil and the Roya River. From the train, Breil-sur-Roya looks incongruously large and imposing, with its tree lined riverside avenue and two large churches in the centre of town. Located in that part of the border country between France and Italy that is characterized by perched hilltop villages and their nervous…
Sanremo and San Romolo: once conjoined twins, with the Funiculaire of San Romolo. Once upon a time, the remote hillside village of San Romolo was one of the Italian Riviera’s most popular day trip destinations. Mention its name to natives from Sanremo of a certain age only if you are ready to be showered with…
Here is a tip if you face an acute what-to-do-with-the kids emergency in Barcelona. If you are visiting the Catalan capital with teenage kids in tow who have become ever so slightly rebellious after three days of art nouveau, hallucinogenic architecture and the musty smell of museum corridors take them to Girona (it’s a little…
Castellar is a vaguely picturesque medieval village just to the north of Menton on the French Riviera, and on its own (we might as well be honest about this), it is not worth the trip. Castellar’s 972 inhabitants may hate me for saying this, but such are the risks of boldly speaking truth to power….
What constitutes a “beautiful landscape”? Opinions on this may vary, but most people will agree on at least one of the five reasons why rivers make great travel companions. A a beautiful landscape must contain some …. 1. Body of water For the simple reason that we are programmed to find beautiful what is good…
W. G. Sebald and The Rings Of Saturn, the greatest literary work about hiking The book deals – as you may suspect – not only with hiking but with a great many other things besides, but its central conceit is a long walk that the author undertakes along the coast of East Anglia, the peninsula…
Since 2010, we’ve been sharing with you, easy hikers of the world, tips on where to find trails wherever your holidays bring you. We’ve walked and hiked trails in Paris, Barcelona, the French Riviera (among the many), and of course, in the land of hikers, Germany. Choose from these top easy hiker tips that proved to…
