The City Palace in Jaipur is an exquisite maharaja’s palace. I wandered around the complex amazed that each section seemed even more impressive than the last. Built in the 18th Century for the Maharaja of Jaipur, the palace is still a royal residence today. In an inner courtyard called Pritam Niwas Chowk, there are four […]
We arrived in Cordoba by train. It was 34 degrees when we arrived so not as hot as Seville. The train had been spacious, clean and air-conditioned, and heading for Malaga. We were impressed as it was much nicer than British trains. We caught a bus from the train station and after a quick journey […]
The Alma mater of Charles Darwin and John Milton, Christ’s is an established older college in Cambridge. Christ’s was founded in 1505, by a woman, Lady Margaret Beaufort, which makes it something rather special. The Founder Margaret Beaufort was one of the richest women in medieval England, the mother of Henry Tudor (Henry VII), and […]
Seville was stop one on my tour of Andalucia, the southernmost region of Spain. We flew from Stansted, over the Pyrenees mountains, laced with snow. Further south the land became brown and dry, despite the presence of rivers and large lakes. There were fields and fields of orange trees, planted in orderly rows. Near Seville […]
I took a trip to Kisite-Mpunguti Marine National Park, a protected wildlife area that covers part of the sea on the far south of Kenya’s coast, close to the border with Tanzania. It is one of the most beautiful places I have been to, and was so good that I went twice, making the trips […]
Tarr Steps is an ancient packhorse bridge in Exmoor. Made of huge slabs of stone, no-one really knows how old it is, or how it was built, but estimates date back to 1000 BC. The National Park of Exmoor is full of rivers, forest and wildflowers, and spreads across Devon and Somerset. Wild ponies roam the […]
A couple of summers ago I visited south Cornwall, where we took some beautiful walks along the South West Coast Path. Maintained by the National Trust and spanning 630 miles, the path connects walking trails through Dorset, Devon, Cornwall and Somerset. The coast path follows picturesque and scenic routes along cliff tops and beside beaches […]
The Llechwedd Slate Caverns are an old mining network under the mountains of Snowdonia. The caverns and tunnels are hewn from the solid rock of the mountains. Llechwedd lies in the town of Blaenau Ffestiniog, once the largest town in north Wales after Wrexham, but its population fell with the decline of the slate […]
The road to Agra We travel by bus from Jaipur to Agra. All the guide books and travel advice blogs I have read recommend train travel well above buses, but I cannot understand why. Trains have to be booked in advance, and even then it is quite common for there not to be any tickets […]