This week, our Travel pics series is F for Fort de France. Well, strictly speaking this isn’t Fort-de-France – its the previous capital of Martinique, Saint Pierre. Or what’s left of it. Saint Pierre was the first European settlement on Martinique. It seemed like an ideal location – but then The Great Hurricane of 1780 produced a…
This week, our Travel pics series is F for Fort-de-France. We were in Martinique’s main port for just one day – on April 9, 2015 – while on a 25 night cruise from the Dominican Republic. We were travelling on the MSC Musica, on what I thought was an exceptionally good deal – a ‘re-positioning cruise’ that…
This week, our Travel pics series is F for Fort-de-France. The capital of Martinique, in the French West Indies, is not a particularly large city – with only about 165,000 people. In fact, the whole island has only about 350,000 residents and about 7% of the workers are employed in the tourism industry. Amongst those are the…
This week, our Travel pics series is F for Fort-de-France. Today’s image is of Britain’s HMS Severn (P282) tied up alongside the French navy’s Germinal (F735), at Fort Saint Louis, the French naval base in Fort-de-France. We took the picture in April 2015, as the Severn was on the final leg of her tour of duty in the…
This week, our Travel pics series is F for Fort de France. And for Tuesday, it’s the Sacré-Coeur de la Balata. This is like a one-fifth miniature version of the Sacred Heart Basilica in Montmarte, and construction was proposed, perhaps not coincidentally, in the same year as its larger namesake was completed. It was built to cater for…
This week, our Travel pics series is F for Fort de France. It’s the capital, and largest settlement, on Martinique, a French “Overseas Department’ in the Caribbean. Fort de France was not originally the capital – that honour went to Saint Pierre – but that town was wiped out in a volcanic eruption at the turn of the…
This week, our Travel pics series has been E for East Asia.The final picture comes from the Summer Palace, in Beijing. A World Heritage listed series of lakes, gardens and palaces, the Summer Palace is considered one of the best examples of Chinese lanscape gardening in the world – as befits its status as the pleasure gardens of…
This week, our Travel pics series is E for East Asia. For Saturday, we return to Hong Kong – and we return to 2010. I mention the year that this image was taken merely because this reconstruction will have finished five years ago – but ones like it are happening every day in Hong Kong. We were…
This week, our Travel pics series is E for East Asia. Friday’s image is of a streetscape that looks like it could be in any European city – except that is it, in fact, in Shanghai. The Bund is an embankment, or quay, along the banks of the Huangpu River, which runs through Shanghai. It’s made up…
This week, our Travel pics series is E for East Asia. When we were in San Francisco the first time (stay with me, this is relevant), we went to the Asian Art Museum – and it used the spread of Buddhism as a chronological guide to the artefacts on show. Amongst other things, it showed just how…
