flying kiwis

Italy- who knew? Well, the thousands of tourists who go there every year, but the gob-smacking beauty of the place caught us by surprise. We knew about the Alps of course, but there are huge craggy mountains everywhere and we drove through many on the way to our first stop, the Cinque Terre, through tunnel after tunnel and over viaduct after viaduct, with steep valleys plunging below, sprinkled with hill villages and clusters of towns on the coast. We branched off the motorway and followed one of the steep valleys to within sight of the mountains plummeting into the Mediterranean. Later in the week we took a walk round the headland from our town to the start of the Cinque Terre and witnessed first hand the steepness of the terrain and grandeur of the scenery. It ... read more

I guess being born 20 miles from a city makes you a little partisan, but I would like to assert that London is the best city in the world. Yes it’s noisy and crowded and dirty…isn’t this part of what makes a great city? But it’s also exciting, surprising, fun and beautiful. In the style of all good travel websites I would like to propose my Top 10 best of London, based on our last week there: 1. Walk along the Thames embankments – it doesn’t matter where you start, a circuit from Westminster Bridge upstream to Tower Bridge downstream will give you all the main icons in one go. 2. A river cruise - most tourists do one of the many on offer downstream to the Thames barrier, but the best part of the river ... read more

DISCLAIMER – Don’t expect the photos to match up with the words – the website can't do exact placement and I either write too much or have too many pics, or both, so I’m starting the photos from the most recent and they may match up somewhere in the middle!! NB – if I wrote more regularly to keep up with the number of pics I take, you’d all be bored witless ;p Let’s go to Lincoln he said. Why? We’d agreed this trip was to be about places we hadn’t been before, but in my mind Lincolnshire was flat farmland with nothing much to commend it. However we had a week before our next booked cottage and Lincolnshire was sort-of on the way. My opinion now? Lincoln is a beautiful little city (about 100k pop.) ... read more

We got talking with two Austrian girls in a restaurant in Lisbon (we were the only diners and yes, people think they are Australian and ask them if they have kangaroos in their garden). They made an interesting comment about their country’s approach to the recession – that Austrians more-or-less expect bad things to happen and had accepted life would be grim for a while. (They also said people still celebrate Hitler’s birthday, which was more disconcerting than any recession stats.) In Lisbon the recession is clearly visible. The city is undoubtedly beautiful – set on the broad Tagus river estuary, full of lush green parks and impressive columnar statues glorifying kings and statesmen like the Marquis of Pombal who oversaw the reconstruction of the city after the devastating earthquake in 1755. The central city was ... read more

We walked out of the train station in Valencia right into the middle of Las Fallas - the biggest fiesta in the region - which, from the four hours we were there, seemed to be about eating, (mainly paella and chocolate coated churros) drinking, spontaneous loud and fast brass band music on street corners, very loud fireworks and huge cartoon-like satirical sculptures on every available plaza. I'd read that effigies are set alight on the last day of the week long fiesta - but these giant tableaux were so artfully and professionally constructed - surely they wouldn't meet a firey destruction days after they were errected? We found out through the local TV channel that this was the case - we watched (without understanding a word of the commentary of course) as dozens of Disney-styled 3D ... read more