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…
I told you it was going to be a sunny day. Which was no mere coincidence, of course. In fact, we let several days go by since the lockdown in our area had been lifted. Because there was no way we would let our first post-Covid 19 walk since what felt more like an imprisonment…
Savannah, jungle, farmland: most landscapes on Planet Earth fall into one of these categories. They are quite frequently separated by dozens or even hundreds of kilometres But on Mont Vinaigrier in the outskirts of Nice, you can visit all three of them within a couple of hours: arranged in a neat vertical stack and sprinkled…
When you are looking for a good restaurant in a strange and unfamiliar town, ask the locals: that is the Golden Rule Of How To Eat Well. It is an equally Golden Rule for picking the right hike. If you can, always ask your host: where do you go or take your family for a…
Street art works best as a visual counterpoint. It needs something it can aggressively challenge, an urban environment that provides some bite into which it can sink its sharp teeth. This is why street art looks best either in organically grown streets of historic buildings or in an architectural setting of geometrically austere glass-and-steel constructions….
Six weeks ago, we finished our walk down the most celebrated stretch of the French Riviera in the place where the Promenade des Anglais, while continuing down the Bay of Nice, becomes the Quai des Etats Unis. “To the casual observer,” I finished the post, “this is a mere change of name: a barely perceptible…
If you have the time to spend an entire weekend exploring the Calanques National Park near the southern French port city of Marseilles, we recommend you take the Three Calanques Hike that we described last week. This is without a doubt one of the most glorious and rewarding walks anywhere on the coast of the…
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…
When I tell you that we visited a park last weekend to get away from midwinter blues, you will still have no idea of the type of thing that we saw and the type of experience that we had. Whether we had a pleasant but essentially low-octane stroll between flowerbeds, well-tendered lawns and playgrounds for…
The key difference between small cities and large cities resembles the difference between a single song and an album collection. Nice in the south of France is an excellent example for the single: attractive and catchy, but essentially a play on one motive or melody. Paris, conversely, unites a wide range of different themes: luxurious…
