Hiking and Walking in France
More Riviera gardens to discover! Last week, we surveyed the area east of Monaco and strolled deep into Italy, concentrating on the coast’s “classic” garden country for Riviera gardens to discover But the less climatically blessed western part of the Riviera – where the mountains are often further away from the coast and give the…
The Riviera is famous for … well, many things in fact – speed boats, card sharps, minor royals – so it never ceases to surprise me how many of the visitors we meet have explicitly come to see one of the gardens of the Riviera. I am – to be honest – not a natural…
We continue with our tips on how to get most out of your short trip to Nice In contrast to the mountainside, the Riviera’s other great area of wilderness, the Mediterranean Sea does not require its prospective visitors to embark on a long and protracted journey: it is always there, at most a few hundred…
Holidays would be different if we had unlimited amounts of time for them, but we do not. So they are what they are, which largely means: always too short. As a rule of thumb, the more affluent people are, the more often they will go on a vacation, but – since the time available for…
Two scenic train rides from Nice into its alpine back country are on the itinerary of most Riviera visits: the Train des Merveilles (to Tende near the Italian frontier) and the Train des Pignes (to Digne-les-Bains in the northwest). Ticking off the Train des Merveilles from our own travel schedule was one of the first things we…
Gardens are to nature what fictional stories are to real life. They are carefully plotted, laid out to amuse and to entertain, and they do not try to conceal that everything you see has been put there for a reason. They are highly artificial, but holding that against them is like going to the theatre…
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…
When go hiking on the French Riviera, there are good reasons for preferring either the coast or the mountainous arrière pays. One possible reason for going one way or the other is undoubtedly the right psychological “match” between hiker and route. The coast at its best is friendly and open, but can also be loud,…
Why would you want to go into a public park on the French Riviera when nature in its untamed variety – more coastal walks and mountain hikes than you could possibly pack into a long holiday – is only ever a bus ride away? On most days, admittedly, any argument in favour of a trip to…
Grasse, as Joe Namath very nearly said, is not for visiting, it’s for smoking. And you’d be surprised how many locals share this opinion, at least the first half of it: that your time would be better spent going somewhere else (not to put too fine a point on it.) Nice-Matin, our local rag, recently…