What is your idea of easy hiking
How many forests must a man walk down before you can call him a hiker? I have no idea. But here is something I do know. Long before you have reached even half that figure, you will have experienced a case of “hikers’ dejà vu”: the feeling that you have walked down the same forest-dash-coast…
This is a first for the Easy Hikers: in this post, we will not tell you where we went for our walk. Not because this is some sort of game and we want you to puzzle it out, but because it does not matter. The scene for your autumn walk is everywhere and anywhere –…
The Croix des Gardes in Cannes is that rare thing among green spaces….. …. it is a park with a history that reaches back several hundred years. Not that the Croix des Gardes in Cannes had spent all of these centuries as a park. No public garden is that old. But it has occupied that…
We all need a bit of drama and excitement in our lives – and, since few of us get enough of it from our humdrum daily routines, we want our entertainment to take us on an emotional ride. But there are clearly limits. Even the most dedicated lovers of fruity melodrama would not want to…
When I was a boy, my home town’s local TV station carried a French adventure series that was set in the wild marshlands of the Camargue. There were a lot of wild horses, water buffaloes and cool guys riding white steeds bareback through the spray, but other than that, I have no recollection of what…
Whatever happened to Old Aspremont? It was all a very long time ago. Modern-day Aspremont – approx. 15 km to the north of Nice – is a picturesque and quiet little place, one of a dozen or so “perched villages” on the list of visitors’ recommendations issued by the Nice tourism office. But there is…
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…
Among the peaks of the Riviera, the Mont des Mules enjoys a special place. Not because of its height: at 291 metres, it is little more than a pimple on the landscape. Its long and varied history reaches back into pre-Roman times and includes the episode when, in 1909, the municipality of Beausoleil (to which…
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…
Hiking in the time of the Coronavirus. That could be the shortest post I would have ever written, consisting of nothing but a blank page. Actually, one could spin that off into an entire book – one of those novelty issues where empty page follows empty page: “The Great German Book of Humour”. ” Fine…