A car may come along, but it probably won’t.
Like most right-thinking people, we ate and drank more than was absolutely necessary over Christmas. Fortunately we did it in an area with ideal places to walk off the damage and the guilt.
I’m not talking serious hiking here, just gentle morning strolls on beach, country lanes or rail trails. Continue reading
Filed under travel photography, Travel-Australia
Walking in the Dolomites. Nice work if you can get it.
Does this sound like a job for you?
You go to Italy twice a year, in spring and autumn to avoid the main tourist season. On each trip you spend a week or two walking through attractive countryside with a jolly group of like-minded people, staying in boutique hotels, eating the best local food and sampling the local vintages.
You get paid to do this.
Simon Tancred and a cafe that bears his name, plus a bit.
Lots of us aspire to converting our love of travel into a paying job or business.
Simon Tancred seems to have it nicely worked out. Continue reading
Phillip Island, Victoria. Just looking costs nothing.
Thanks to Leo who contacted me with the Tourism Australia list of 100 things people can do for free in our country.
I was delighted with all the ‘hits’ and the comments on my previous blog post about Tourism Australia’s latest glamorous ad, apparently catering to the glamorous potential visitor.
We skinflint locals know that there are plenty of things to do DownUnder that won’t cost anything but the time and trouble (okay, a bit of transport money too) you take to get there.
I love lists, so of course I picked through Tourism Australia’s top 100 freebees, ticking off the ones I’d done. I scored 51.
Here are my top 10 ‘been there, done that’ Australia for tightwads experiences, in no particular order: Continue reading
Filed under Budget travel, Hiking, Travel-Australia
Pointy church, pointy mountains.
Filed under Hiking
A little mountain mist adds magic and mystery.
We have few regrets about the decision to abandon our hike over the high Karwendel cols. It was simply too hard and too dangerous for most of us, and the weather was looking threatening.
We can choose another route, though the fear when we leave the peaks and cols is that we’ll spend a few dull days walking through the valleys, sharing tame, flat roads with the cars.
This is Austria, however. There are far more interesting hiking trails than tame roads. The route from the village of Scharnitz to the tourist town Pertisau is not life-threatening but still spectacular and challenging – an excellent five day trek, in other words. Continue reading
Filed under Hiking
One slip here and you’ll be several hundred metres lower in a very short time. Not worth the risk, was the assessment.
Hiking is a hobby and supposed to be good for your health, not something you should risk your life for. So I’m grateful to have walking companions with cool heads.
The six of us are sitting on a comfortable patch of grass, somewhere over 2000 metres, in the Karwendel region above Innsbruck. We have a week’s route planned out and accommodation booked in mountain huts (thanks for organising all that, Kees). But we’re still shaking slightly from the twenty metre track section we’ve just crossed. Continue reading
