This week’s theme is V, for Valletta. Valletta, like all of Malta, is quite religious .. after all, this is supposedly where St Paul was shipwrecked around 60AD – he was being sent to Rome as a political prisoner, but his ship was pounded ashore by storms at Malta. The locals apparently took him and…
This week’s theme is V, for Valletta. Valletta is the capital of Malta, a small republic about 80km south of Italy which has been at the crossroads of empires for millennia. Malta has been strategically important for traders and military forces from the Phoenicians and Carthaginians to the Greeks, the Romans, to Byzantine and…
This week’s theme is U – for Undulations. It might have been 6 million years ago that the Colorado River started cutting through the deserts of Arizona. Or it might have been 17 million years ago. It could even have been as long ago as 70 million years ago. But whenever it was it…
This week’s theme is U – for Undulations. For Saturday, it’s a sleepy New Zealand seaside site. Dolphins with droopy dorsal fins; earthquake-damage apologies; French street signs; frigid teal waters; rose gardens; mosaic galleries – we’re talking about Akaroa, on New Zealand’s South Island. The town is on the Banks Peninsula in the Canterbury…
This week’s theme is U – for Undulations. And today, it’s a hiking trail and steps below the Ngong Ping peak, on Hong Kong’s Lantau Island. Lantau is Hong Kong’s largest island – but until the 1990s it was largely undeveloped – home to fishing villages and not much else. In fact, film buffs may…
This week’s theme is U – for Undulations. For Thursday, we are at Raglan Castle, in Wales. Dating back to Norman times (1100 or so), the majority of this castle’s construction came in the 1400 through to the mid 1600s. It was a perfect example of ‘conspicuous consumption’ – this castle was both a defensive…
Today’s ‘Undulations’ are in New Zealand’s Fiordland National Park. The region, on the southwest of the Southern Island of New Zealand, features three main sounds: Doubtful, Dusky and Milford – each of which has deeply gouged fiord valleys – remnants of the glaciers which have dominated the area for millennia. There are few roads .. in…
This week’s theme is U – for Undulations. Yesterday, we looked out at the Great Wall of China … today, we are standing among the remnants of another great defensive wall – this time in Northern England. Hadrian’s Wall is the largest Roman artefact anywhere – a defensive wall that runs for about 115km in Northern…
This week’s theme is U – for Undulations. I’ve taken a fairly liberal interpretation of that to mean hills, and valleys .. and so we start with the mountainous country around Beijing, in China. And the Great Wall that is built along those mountains. They say the Great Wall of China is the only man-made structure…
For our final #Temples travelpic, lets head to Pura Luhur Uluwatu, or Uluwatu Temple in Bali. This is a ‘sea temple’, built on a clifftop, and is one of the most popular tourist spots in Bali. The temple started life sometime in the first millennium CE, but the current structure was expanded in the 11th…
