Category: Travels for Fun
-
THE SHUTTERED TERRE
The shutters were closed. Not broken, not hanging off their hinges, not weathered to bare grey — closed, and lately painted, and latched from the inside by somebody who had gone away and meant to come back. Padma, Hans and I walked through three villages in one long cloudy day and I do not think we saw more than a dozen people. Wood was stacked under the eaves. Geraniums were still in the window boxes. Everything was in order and nobody was home. I took it for abandonment. It isn’t, or…
-
TWO STONES FROM ONE VALLEY
Padma and I have seen a lot of churches in Europe. Spectacular, yes – vaulted, gilded, hushed – but after a while they blur into one another. So when our Swiss host Hans suggested we visit a church, this one up a side valley in Ticino, we didn’t exactly leap for the car keys. Then we came around the bend at Mogno. At 7.15 on the morning of 25 April 1986, an avalanche came off the mountain above this alpine hamlet and took out a dozen houses and the parish church,…
-
THE VALLEY BEFORE THE DROP
There’s a particular kind of friend who, when you turn up in his country, doesn’t ask what you’d like to see. He has already decided. I have known Hans Striker since 1981, when I met him on a train in Mexico. He was a medical student then, working his way through an extended holiday of the kind medical students used to be able to take. He’s a vascular specialist in Locarno now, and has lived at the top end of Lake Maggiore long enough to have walked most of what is…
-
ON THE TRAIL OF MARTIN LUTHER
Padma and I look at a different kind of map these days when planning our travel destinations. Instead of maps with tourist attractions we look at the map showing the incidence of COVID. And after studying the map we could tell that the former East German states of Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt had very low rates of COVID infections. So we packed the car and embarked on a roadtrip. But we did have a mission in mind. We wanted to explore the old stomping grounds of arguably the most famous German –…
-
STRANDED!
Padma, Joseph and I have something in common with 19,000 … or 100,000 depending on who is counting … Aussies. We can’t get home. Yet there are plenty of airlines eager to fly us to Australia and no shortage of hotels who will quarantine us and who are desperate to fill empty rooms. In July, the Australian Government capped the number of incoming passengers to 4,000 a week. Out of that pool, Western Australia can receive 575 a week and the airline we booked on, Qatar Airlines, can only take 30…
-
NEGATIV
‘Are we being responsible?’ Padma asked me on the first day of our journey through France and Spain. I thought for a long time and tried to spin it so that I could justify our travels during a global pandemic. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Responsible people would stay home.’ But like tens of thousands of other Europeans we were on the road for summer holidays. Non-essential travel. But does a global pandemic really mean we can’t have some vestiges of our former lives? Before leaving we consulted many friends who strongly encouraged…
-
PARTING SHOTS FROM ASTURIAS
In the end COVID won. We have returned home to Germany. We had hoped to keep travelling with no fixed return dates, but it wasn’t meant to be. When we started our journey during the first days of August, COVID was rearing its ugly head again but seemed somewhat contained. It certainly wasn’t stopping Europe’s August flood of holidaymakers … including us. At one point earlier in the summer Asturias had been the first Spanish province to be declared COVID-free. But a few cases were popping up when we hit the…
-
LUNCH ON THE CANTABRIAN SEA
Visitors to Asturias wake up with a nice dilemma as they plan their day: mountains or the sea. From our base in Gijon, Padma and I could have had either within a few minutes drive. On our last day in Asturias we chose the sea. Our local friends, Terri and Juan, suggested we try Puerto de Vega, a small fishing village where the locals actually fished rather than just appearing to be a charming fishing village for tourists. We arrived after an hours’ drive and didn’t find the typical traffic jams…
-
RUTA DEL ALBA … WITH FRIENDS
Earlier in the year when Padma and I starting dreaming of a home in Spain, I joined a Facebook group of expats in Asturias. Someone posted a question about buying property and a local named Juan provided a detailed response. I clicked some links and found Juan’s website and figured he’d be the sort of local person we’d need to manage any property. Turns out Juan has a strong Aussie connection so I contacted him and for the past few months he has been invaluable to us and has freely provided…
If you see this after your page is loaded completely, leafletJS files are missing.