Easy hiking in the South of France To get the best out of an easy hiking trip to the French Riviera, you must adapt your schedule to your surroundings and the opportunities they provide: this, after all, is not the Black Forest. Take it easy: the Côte d’Azur is best enjoyed in small portions –…
Hiking in Germany Hiking Eifelsteig Trail In 2008, sections of several older German hiking trails through the rural and underdeveloped Eifel region (southwest of Cologne, near the German-Belgian border) were patched together to form the continuous Eifelsteig: 300 km, divided into 15 stages, from Aachen to Trier. Profile The Eifel is different from other easy…
When you pick a provincial city in France as your holiday base or destination, you never know in advance what you will be getting. Some of these cities are prosperous, well-kept, lively and colourful – others drab and full of the stench of misery and neglect. I call this the French Tourism Roulette. Not everything…
Telgte, a small town in the flat and fertile German province of Westphalia, is visited by 150,000 people every year. This is 15 times the number of people who live there, a ratio of tourists per inhabitant similar to that of Amsterdam and Barcelona. But don’t be surprised if you have never heard of Telgte….
If you like forest hikes that are attractive and at the same time not overly strenuous, I bet you will like this one. It has, after all, everything that an Easy Forest Hiker could possibly expect. You will be entertained by glimpses of dense undergrowth that seem to come straight from the primeval woodlands of…
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…
You have some time to kill over the Christmas holidays? You feel you should go out for a walk – but cannot bring yourself to step into the cold rain, sleet or snow? Then here is a suggestion: just wander with your eyes over this page, stop here or there for a while if you…
Last week, we enjoyed the baroque splendour of the landscaped gardens around the Prinz Moritz trail. Today, we stay in the same area and (roughly) the same period of German history, moving only a few kilometres up the Lower Rhine Valley and a few decades down the line to the time of the friendship between…
Over the years, we have introduced you to a large variety of hiking trails: trails in the mountains, trails by the sea, trails through wild forests, trails through parkland and so on. This time, however, we are going to tell you about a trail that is still very much in the making. Liberation and Remembrance…
Alone among European countries, Germany can claim sections of both the Rhine and the Danube, Europe’s most storied rivers. Most of you will have been aware of that, of course, but here is something that may surprise you: the German sections of both rivers are of a roughly similar length (865 km for the Rhine,…
