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Dubious Saints, Mutant Sheep & Castles In The Air: Cyprus Unfolds
The downpour is so intense that we don’t really want to leave the boat, but we have to get back to the apartment somehow so it’s heads down and off into the onslaught. “Goodbye”, shouts Captain Bayram as we head off, adding, “remember, tomorrow there is worse rain, very bad”. He isn’t kidding either. By the time we return next day from a rather fruitless trip on the dolmus out to Lapta village, the streets of Girne are rivers, floodwater several inches deep racing down every slope and finding every shortcut through town. It’s an outrageous deluge which lasts for hours and has locals laughing and scurrying for cover in…
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Southwards To The Lavender Fields: From Paris To Provence
If one of our hopes for this adventure was to find quaint provincial towns with ancient and historic centres, then as we carry our backpacks from the bus station through the winding narrow streets to our apartment on the third floor of an ageing town house, we are overflowing with the feeling that we’ve hit the jackpot straight away. Welcome to Aix-en-Provence, where the squares are oozing splendour in the hot afternoon sun while the ancient plane trees which line its boulevards offer shade to anyone with a bit of time to spare. The bells from the clock tower resonate down the tight streets as we find our way to…
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Tales Of Smut, Keys & Turtles: Last Days In Mexico
We described Tulum in our last post as being too over developed, too touristy and very much too over priced for our liking, with an enormous amount of further development in the midst of construction, but, you know, everywhere has redeeming features – it’s just that in places like Tulum you have to look a bit deeper to find them. The music in some of the bars in the main street is simply too loud to hold a conversation, so loud in fact that I’m reminded of what my Dad used to say. “I do detest pubs which are so loud that I can’t hear myself drink”. But as we…
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Beautiful Places #6: Zabljak
Zabljak holds a very special place in our hearts, having been our first mountain destination together, ten years ago back in 2011. Most of our time on that trip was spent in Kotor, much further south on the coast of Montenegro, but for a spell in the middle we hired a car and drove up to the Durmitor Mountains in the north of the country to indulge in a bit of challenging trekking. And wow did we hit the jackpot, with superb hiking, other activities and a delightfully rural setting. Some of our terrific hikes in Zabljak saw us start off in 30+ degree temperatures in the village and then ascend…
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Photographic Memories #16
As every traveller knows, when you look back through old travel photos, many of them trigger wonderful memories. With lockdown incomplete and travel still on hold for a while, we currently have no new adventures to blog; we do though have many such memories… Photo #16: Sunset & Reflection Spectacular sunsets are always popular – there are places across the World which attract an army of camera carrying enthusiasts to capture that special moment as the sun goes down and fills the sky with colour. A great many such places are coastal, of course, but this one was different on both levels: not coastal, and, certainly as far as we…
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Photographic Memories #7
As every traveller knows, when you look back through old travel photos, many of them trigger wonderful memories. With no current prospect of travel even domestically let alone worldwide, we will have no new adventures to blog, but we do have many such memories….. Photo #7: Morning Light We liked this photo enough to make it the backdrop on our blogsite homepage, mostly for the way it captures the shadows cast across the water by the early morning light. Taken as we walked to our favoured breakfast spot as the town rubbed its eyes, this shot could be almost anywhere yet it comes as a surprise to most to learn…
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From The Sea To The Lakes
Saturday morning’s rainstorm has just about cleared by the time we pick up the hire car and head off on the road trip section of this adventure. With the Adriatic on all sides of the city bar one, the only way out by road is the steep climb up and over the mountains which form such a dramatic backdrop to this part of the Dalmatian coastline. For our journey northwards from Split, we ignore the motorways and head along smaller roads through great plateaux of green between the rolling hills, passing through quaint towns and sweeping valleys as we make our way towards Plitvicka Jezera, the Lake District of Croatia.…
