What is your idea of easy hiking
Having a holiday in the diary adds to the promise and excitement of the new year, with thoughts on grey January days of sinking your toes into warm sand or sipping wine as the sun plunges behind a jagged mountain. In this spirit, why not make your 2019 getaway a slow one? As well as…
The Romans never much liked the Riviera. They found its stony slopes too tiresome for agriculture, its small settlements too poor to plunder, and its mountainous interior too difficult to protect against the troublesome natives. Which is why the Romans did not settle in great numbers here and only ever built a few garrisons in…
Our final word from last month’s Slow Travel Fest in Tuscany, and we have deliberately set today’s walk apart from the other posts. For two reasons: firstly because the Sentiere Elsa is only incidentally linked to the festival’s central themes (of drilling deep into your holiday destination instead of merely skipping over its surface), through…
Slow Travel, as we told you last week, may involve a lot of hiking, but there is more to it than that. Another key imperative is to take not only your physical self on the journey you are undertaking, but also your mind. Translated into every-day terms this means that the challenge is to take…
“Slow Travel”, above all, means to explore your destination at a speed which is natural to the human species. The human mind did not evolve to process impressions when hurled along at the speed of a car or a coach. So if you want to give your travel experiences a chance to penetrate the mere…
Several posts ago, I said that there were no more bits of “undiscovered” or unknown Italy. Germany, however, present a different picture. One might even say that Germany consists wholly of unknown regions – as far as the rest of the world is concerned, that is. Inside Germany, this is a different matter: the Germans’…
For the past five years, we have been visiting easy hiking destinations on the Riviera. Since then, we have published roughly 100 posts on trails and day trips in the area, and that is counting the French side of the coast alone – while we are still adding new ideas and suggestions on a regular…
As the last walk before our summer break away from the Mediterranean, we had to complete some unfinished easy hiking business along the River Var after last month’s aborted mission. The Var is the river of the French southeast. Not so much because it was long or mighty – it is neither, not even making the…
The Canal de la Siagne is said to offer one of the best easy hiking experiences in the southeast. We found this only partly confirmed in April when we walked down the waterway’s final stretch near Cannes. For our second visit, we picked a section much further “upstream” – just to the south of Grasse…
Briga is the Italian mountain village from central casting … … that somehow got lost and wound up on the other (French) side of the border where it was subsequently renamed La Brigue. Whatever nomenclature you prefer: this is a pleasant little place, much more charming than gloomy Tende a few kilometres to the north,…