After a few days in the heat, hustle and bustle of Hyderabad, I was headed for a different world – the tribal markets of Odisha and Chhattisgarh. But to get there, I first took a flight to the seaside resort of Visakhapatnam. Vizag is Andhra Pradesh’s biggest city and port but staying near the wide, long beach, and sniffing in the fresh salty air, it definitely has a resorty feel to it. There is also a very wide prom and…
Week 1, Chennai to Hyderabad, Feb 2016 According to the Lonely Planet, with its withering southern heat, roaring traffic and scarcity of outstanding sights, Chennai has always been the rather dowdy sibling among India’s four biggest cities. I don’t know about dowdy sibling but I have have to say Chennai doesn’t really have much going for it. Having said that, it IS India and therefore there is always something to see, taste and experience. And I spent a couple of…
For us, September is holiday time and it usually means a road trip into Spain. This year was going to be a long one – 3000kms in 10 days. It was long because a friend of ours had kindly lent us his holiday apartment which happened to be located in the far South East of Spain in a little pueblo blanco called Mojacar. As it was 900kms from our house in Portugal we weren’t going to attempt the journey in…
We had been avid watchers of the Tour de France for a number of years. Afternoons in July are often unbearably hot, so what better than to relax on the sofa and watch the peloton streaming through the beautiful French countryside. However, we wanted to see it in the flesh. Well the next best thing – the Spanish tour or “La Vuelta” and it was going through Asturias when we were due to go for our annual holiday. Asturias was…
Santiago de Compostela is supposed to be the final resting place of St. James (Santiago in Spanish) and so is also the end of the Camino de Santiago, one of the most famous pilgrimage routes for Roman Catholics. You are supposed to walk there from your home and although there is a route marked out from Portugal we decided to take the car. Located in the far North West of Spain and about 400kms due north from our home in…
May is when Jackie’s parents generally come to stay for a couple of weeks and therefore our chance to get a few days away for a camping trip. We chose the Alentejo again (we went to Marvao last year) because it would be warm, there would be plenty of places to take the dogs walking, there are a few interesting towns and we could enjoy the last of the spring wild flowers. We camped at Camping Rosario which turned out…
We had been putting off going to the Algarve primarily because it is the most popular area of Portugal by far. So I was worried it would be packed with foreign tourists, expats and all that goes with them. However, a good friend of ours had a holiday home in a less-touristed part of the coast and so we thought we would give it a try. After all you can’t malign a place properly until you’ve been there yourself, can…
This website contains photos from some of the most exotic destinations on the planet. Controversially (at least to my family) one exotic destination was missing up till now – the island where I was born and grew up. Although I live abroad, I go back every summer. Perhaps my time away means I appreciate it even more when I come back. Anyway, here are a few snaps of my last trip back. Apparently it was one of the worst summer’s…
We occasionally go for walks with a group of friends known appropriately as ‘Portugal friends’. Obviously the hairy one is a popular participant in these events, the most recent of which took place not that long ago. As we hadn’t been for a while there were lots of enthusiastic greetings for the hairy one, accompanied with cries of ‘oh gordo, gordo’. I think it was a compliment but it actually means ‘fat’. As Labradors (as well as some of us…
An unusually warm September meant that we could get away for a final weekend camping trip for the summer. The destination was a place we had intended to visit many months before – Salamanca. We weren’t disappointed. It was a three hour drive to the border and then once over we stopped for lunch at the first major town in Spain – Ciudad Rodrigo. After Ciudad Rodrigo we headed East for a further hour across the plains to Salamanca. We…