So, it’s time to plan your next trip and you’re thinking… Europe. But you’d like to venture to a place not yet overrun by tourists, an area of rugged, natural beauty, one where the streets of the local towns still whisper the secrets of those who walked there centuries ago. Is there such a place left to be discovered? I believe there is, and it’s called Extremadura.
My wife and I took a memorable 2-week Greek vacation in August ’07, spending four to five days each in Crete, Santorini and Athens. We traveled only to Greece because we had missed it on a previous trip and we wanted to focus on one country to experience it more in depth.
Chile’s landscape stretches from the northern deserts of Atacama to the southern glaciers of Patagonia, adorning it with a diverse and alluring array of scenery that is catching the eyes of Hollywood filmmakers and setting Chile apart as a hotspot for movie-making.
Fresh air and the exposure to sunshine helped reset our body clocks, and the exercise felt great after the long flight the day before. At the end of the trail was an array of seafood restaurants, well stocked with refreshing cold drinks and snacks and convenient for either having lunch, as we did, or just awaiting the arrival of the ferry back to Hong Kong.
“Hans Sloane’s agreement ushered in Chelsea’s golden age as the world’s most richly stocked botanic garden,” commented Atkins as we strolled the garden’s quadrants in October ’07 under a sky threatening a downpour. “A new concept was taking hold: the treatment of disease rather than the chasing out of spirits. Physicians could not study medicine without studying botany.”
Martha and I, like many travelers, are drawn to Paris and seem to return there more often than to any other European city. On a recent 3-week trip to France, we spent our first week in Paris.
“When we commissioned the first edition of this guide in 1997 it seemed an almost impossibly obscure destination.” Even though 10 years had gone by since that comment was made, and although tourism there had probably grown, I expected that a trip to this rarely visited volcanic archipelago — off the coast of West Africa, some 600 miles south of the Canary Islands and scattered from 275 to 480 miles off the coast of Senegal — would be a fine source of “soft adventure.”
Everywhere I went in this outdoor museum, something enticed me to look more closely. The city’s Baroque past was everywhere. Men and women of stone and marble stared out from doorways of elaborately ornamented buildings while carved faces peered down from amongst the swirls and curves above their windows. The statues that couldn’t fit at eye level adorned the parapets — a veritable army of warriors, saints and historic figures living at the rooflines.
There’s an apocryphal story, probably not true but fun to tell, about the establishment of The Gambia’s borders. When the British, during sailing-ship days, wanted to set boundaries for a country along the river, they fired a ship’s cannons in both directions perpendicular to the river, and where the cannon balls fell, that’s where the boundaries were drawn.
Haley’s book and the TV miniseries were wildly popular, presenting in a graphic and realistic way the horrors of the slave trade. The book was translated into 26 languages and sold 8½ million copies. Haley was awarded a Pulitzer Prize and won multiple Emmys for the TV series that riveted us to the tube with its 12-hour marathon presented over eight consecutive nights.
