What is your idea of easy hiking
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…
The shorelines of Lake Mergozzo and the Lago Maggiore are less than a mile and a world apart. Where the Lago Maggiore is sublime and dramatic, Lake Mergozzo is serene and understated – and where the former is besieged by crowds, you can conduct a walk around its near neighbour in blessed solitude. The contrast…
On one level, the Borromean Islands in the Lago Maggiore can be seen as three independent destinations: as three little towns that have developed in as much isolation from one another as it is possible for places only a few hundred meters apart. Alternatively, however, you can also understand them as cogs in the same…
The Lago Maggiore is, despite what its name appears to suggest, not the largest body of water in the Italian “Lake District” (that honour goes to Lake Garda), but it is the most stretched-out. The shortest route around it is 170 km long, and more than 60 km lie between Arona in the south and…
Having followed a dried-out river for our last post, we will today explore a dried-out wetlands preserve. The rain in Spain – the little there has been over the past five years – has, it seems, mainly fallen outside of Valencia, and as a consequence, the Albufera wetlands, a short bus ride to the south…