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A Taste Of Delhi, And On To The Buddha Train
“Please wear this for your identification”, he says, handing us a white baseball cap with the Indian Railway Company logo emblazoned on it. “And carry this too”. A bright yellow pouch bag. Classy. Now, we’ve always smirked at people on cruises being shepherded around sites with their colour coded labels or whatever – now here we are setting off on this adventure with uncharacteristic white headgear and an even more uncharacteristic yellow bag, all for the purposes of being in that very type of herd which we thought we’d never be part of. Well, there’s a first time for everything. But before all this, we arrive in India’s capital city…
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Seeing The Light?
When Matt the weatherman peered out of our TV screen and into our living room the other day, we pricked up our ears to pay attention: we’d heard the s-word. Snow. Now that’s a complication we don’t need when we’re heading to Heathrow on Thursday. Matt, though, doesn’t scare us too much, because although it’s going to turn colder everywhere (“Arctic freeze” according to those sections of the media which are incapable of understatement and love the odd shock tactic), the snow is more likely in the North. By Sunday, both the forecast and the messenger have changed. Matt has become Darren and the cold down south has become “mild…
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What Do We Miss About Home?
Funnily enough, it’s not usually the very first pint of English ale which goes down a treat and makes me realise what I’ve been missing: no, it’s more often than not a few days after we’ve returned and we’re now settled in a pub somewhere, absorbed in chatter whilst quaffing beer and scoffing peanuts and saying to ourselves, “yeah, this feels good”. That’s the moment. These days though, we don’t miss much about home when we travel, and it’s with a little sadness that we say we don’t miss too much about England either. Since we left these shores on our first post-retirement adventure in January 2020 we’ve spent over…
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Ancient Homes And Shifting Sands
After the stillness of the last few days, today feels a bit more like old school February, the coastal wind bringing a chill factor which makes a nonsense of the official temperature figures, cutting in via the rib cage and exiting the body somewhere just south of the shoulder blades. In any lee-side location, the lukewarm sunshine teases with a kiss: turn a corner and your body braces involuntarily against the cold. The dark afternoon clouds bring tiny hailstones which dance across the ground like mini ping-pong balls, darting into corners where they threaten to drift but then melt away quickly without a trace. It was incredibly cold up by…
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February Days In England
The stillness of a windless February day in England is a stillness unlike any other. Even the most stirring of places becomes a sensory underload, sound deadened by the absence of birdsong, colours diluted like too-thin water paints, no breeze to carry scents, no leaves to decorate the woodland. Gorse splashes its yellow blotches on to the clifftops but carries no fragrance, its delectable musk scent absent yet for another month or two. Gulls’ cries sound forlorn and lonely, the occasional rasp of a jackdaw only serves to accentuate the stillness. If a skylark takes flight, its song is truncated, a burst of panic more than a trill of joy.…
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It Dropped Into My Inbox And….
Our 2017 trip to India incorporated an overnight sleeper train journey from Agra to Varanasi, and for reasons we can’t quite explain we have never unsubscribed from emails from the India railway company. Recently, one of their emails landed and I did one of those double takes. “Michaela, listen to this……” Now, anyone who knows us, knows that we don’t like to be organised by others, we like to travel completely independently and sort things for ourselves. It gives us freedom, and of course it’s hugely cheaper. It’s also true to say that neither of us are what you would call spiritual, and we’re certainly not religious. So why would…
- Europe, Independent travel, Outdoor Activities, Photography, Switzerland, Transport, Travel Blog, Walking
From St Moritz To Zermatt On The Glacier Express
The White Turf course and its attendant marquees stand silent now, dormant until the next race meeting in a week’s time, while the rest of the town blinks its eyes as the morning sun bounces off the white snow and dazzles those emerging from their slumbers. It’s sunglasses at dawn here. It’s not just the brightness which makes the eyes water in St Moritz, it’s the prices too – make no mistake, this is one seriously expensive town. A couple of nights here would buy a three-week trip to some parts of the world. It feels considerably colder this morning as we stride along the platform towards the waiting Glacier…
- Europe, History, Independent travel, Italy, Outdoor Activities, Photography, Switzerland, Transport, Travel Blog
From Style On The Streets To Horses On Ice: Milan, St Moritz & The Bernina Express
Elegant, stylish, classy: words we would all associate with Milan and accolades which this city effortlessly lives up to, with its lofty majestic buildings and wide open piazzas. By day these imposing, ornate structures tower over the streets in proud glory; at night, tastefully illuminated by well placed floodlighting, the grand buildings assume another yet more alluring pose in what is effectively an architectural catwalk. Emerging from the metro and out into the square at Duomo station is to soak in one of THE great cathedral views as the shaped facade of this magnificent building soars above the piazza like some giant ice sculpture. The famed Duomo is in good…
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A Short One This Time….To The Snow
Yes, yes. We know we’ve only been back from Panama for a week but it’s time to be hitting the travel trail again, though only for a short one week break this time. What’s more, just to cap the fact that we’re really feeling the cold English weather after the heat and humidity of Jamaica and Panama, we’re heading off somewhere much colder, up into the Alps where there is plenty of snow. Anyone who is kind or mad enough to read and remember stuff we write in these posts might know that I absolutely love train travel. I was born and bred in a railway town (it’s a city…
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Nudity, Numpties & Numbers: Back Home Once Again
A few years back in the Canary Islands, we (or rather Michaela) suffered a moment of extreme embarrassment which you can read about HERE. But wow our last few days in Panama so nearly brought another… The sound of the door closing behind me was the first sign that I’d made something of an error of judgment. Long before going to bed it had started to dawn on me that the draught beer in The American Bazaar in downtown Casco Viejo was considerably stronger than I had realised, not least because the flat paving slabs had somehow become just as difficult to walk on as the cobbles – they just…
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