Excerpt from my Albanian travel journal notebook: Mon 20/2 klo 13.25 Cold so won’t write for long, but just to share magical moments w/ you. Sat alone @ top of Mount Something, maybe begins with a Q (pronounced “ch”), maybe not. I LOVE THIS. Views are PHENOMENAL. Just had a nutritious lunch of yesterday’s peanut […]
mountains
Cable Cars of the Dolomites
Disclaimer again: This is blog entry 3/3 from our Dolomites trip in June 2022. Better late than never tho innit! I love cable cars. Nikki doesn’t. Or at least didn’t. She has quite a fear of heights and really did not promise to join me in any cable car escapades during our trip to the […]
Curral das Freiras – second to nun
One thing that seemed both intriguing and feasible without a car was a trip to the famous Curral das Freiras, Nun’s Valley. What was it? A village in a valley, basically, where once upon time a group of nuns fled to escape pirates (in 1566 to be precise). Today, it is nunless but nonetheless meant […]
Big Almaty Lake feat. Sultan
Big Almaty Lake was the first site I’d decided I wanted to see when I started researching Almaty, frequently heralded as the “most beautiful lake in Kazakhstan”. Hidden amidst the mountains at an altitude of 2,511 metres, this imaginatively named wonder is a turquoise natural reservoir which provides drinking water for the city. Due to […]
The sun which set beyond the Kok-Tobe cable cars
What to do when first arriving in a new town? Go see the highest view you can find. This can be via a tower, via a tram up a mountain or, traditionally in the Story of My Life, via a cable car. One of the attractions of Almaty in the first place was the cable car […]
Lake Kaindy, the mystic sunken forest
110 years ago Lake Kaindy was a forest like any other. Then the 1911 Kebin earthquake happened, which created a landslide which created a dam, eventually causing rainwater to drown the forest. The trees have taken Ariel as a role model and still appear to be living underwater as mertrees, covered in sea plants and […]
Jiufen, Taiwan: The definition of Travel
Let me introduce you to Jiufen, Taiwan. This is Travel. These pics define more or less my image of Travel with a huge, beautiful capital T. Mountains, sea and an exotic temple to remind you this is not just anywhere. My last whole day in Taiwan I spent with T and L exploring further away […]
A study of Taiwanese clouds: Yangmingshan National Park
Taiwan is known for its gorgeous scenery. The ‘easy’ option for stunning mountain views, nearish to Taipei, was the famous Yangmingshan National Park. So, one morning me and my mates J & T (the ones in the celebrity selfie a few entries back) decided to try it out. We had been warned the previous day it had been way […]
Day 18: Switzerland Sightseeing
Today was the day we left Interlaken and took the scenic train to Montreux, which is in the west of Switzerland, in the French speaking area, at Lake Geneva. It started not too well with me in floods of tears and CC running barefoot thru town, now with shocking blood blisters on his feet. (Once […]
Day 17: Schilthorn – Up to nearly 3km!
Today was the day we were originally supposed to do the Jungfrau. I got inspired by it by seeing a picture from that region on one of my fb friends’ wall, and it seemed a good starting point for looking into pretty scenic trains in Switzerland. The Jungfrau is called the “top of Europe”, the […]