What is your idea of easy hiking
The Alps are a two-faced host. Up to an altitude of 1500 or 2000 metres, they welcome their visitors – at least for parts of the year – with a sunny smile and a warm embrace of lush fauna and colour. The barren wastelands and hostile peaks somewhere on the distant horizon do not impend…
Alpine walks have the reputation of being difficult, generally for good reasons. That does not mean that you are doomed to stick to the lowlands unless you are a dab hand at ropes and bottled oxygen. What it does mean, however, is that you must follow certain rules when looking for easy hikes 2000 metres…
Seen from the train to Marseille, the Le Ciotat shipyards are the town’s most conspicuous feature. If you stand in the city centre, however, facing these very shipyards from the marina, Le Ciotat’s “Triplet Peaks” easily rival the old docks in size and prominence. In local parlance, these peaks are known as the rochers de…
Never judge a travel destination by what you can see from afar. Chances are you will be lured into a trap by sights that promise more than they can deliver – or, much worse than that, deterred from taking a closer look by one particularly disfiguring element of the townscape. You will never know what…
Any longer journey that is in fact made up of several shorter trips – where you spend one day here and two days there – will, in the end, come out as a mixed bag. Going on journeys like that is the modern equivalent to attending a show in a variety or “vaudeville” theatre where…
Few things in unfamiliar cities are as irresistibly enticing as hilltop castles. I don’t know about you, but whenever I spot one such castle perching over a city that we are visiting for the first time, I feel something very powerful is pulling me up – and cannot rest until I have looked down on…
The Calabrian town of Cosenza – situated on the toes of the Italian boot – appears to be haunted by its own past. Much of this is down to the old town’s video-game architecture and the mix of busy street life and eerily quiet lanes, often within a cat’s whisker of each other. But partly…
Only a couple of weeks to go until the Olympics! And to get in the right mood for this biggest sporting event of the year, we have created our own Olympic challenge: the Easy Hiker Pentathlon of (1) visiting what was 100 years ago the biggest tourist attraction in the area around Nice, … ……
In any sequence that is set in time – sequences of any length and type, from songs in a Broadway musical and dishes in a tasting menu to blog posts about a specific destination – two items are of particular importance: the first (to set the tone) and the last (to sum up). So, for…
Today and for the next couple of weeks, we are asking you to accompany us into one corner of France that has managed to preserve both its natural beauty and much of its original character: this is the land where the lush Rhone valley of the Drome departement – nominally part of the central region…