Patrick Leigh Fermor on taking a town for the first time: With details of a free, self-guided walk from Schiphol Airport to Amsterdam's red-light district, for you, Sinterklaas, and all others of exceptional holiness.
(24/01/2012)
Free self-guided walk from Barcelona airport to Barcelona: Via the Llobregat delta, the Mercabarna wholesale food market, the Nissan car factory, a lively Sunday clothes market, decaying light industry and remains of slums, and the cemetery and castle of Montjuïc.
(02/01/2012)
Look for a good guide, not an official one: In which I discuss anonymous threats from the official guide mafia, and take a brief look at some of 18th and 19th century Spain's stranger tourist gurus.
(14/11/2011)
In the footsteps of Spartacus: Instructions on how to walk along the Appian Way to Rome from Ciampino Airport.
(25/10/2011)
Conan the Barbarian (1982) Making-of Tour: I'm off through Soria, Valladolid and Zamora later this month with some folks, and pointed out to some other folks who wanted to see where Arnold trod 30 years ago that, although Shadizar has yet to be located, Doom's Hyborian Zamora may actually be the real Zamora on the Portuguese border, rather than a stony (03/10/2011)
Arturo Pérez-Reverte: build shit, attract shit: APR is one of Spain's best-known novelists, and a blustering columnist to boot. Here, translated by Lenox Napier, is a tourism rant of his which is getting a lot of attention at the moment:
We forget that for decades we have been clamoring for this exact kind of tourism and how we were prepared to (04/09/2011)
Walking from Barcelona to Madrid: Featuring sunstruck indignados, the Spanish postal service, ancient trade routes, the march of 30 blind lottery vendors, and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V's wife's shocking case of toothache.
(27/06/2011)
Eastward, cross-country pub-crawl to Bristol airport: Here. I'll be posting more of these, my basic criteria being that they must
Be cheaper and nicer than airport shuttles and taxis. Travelling to airports by the conventional means is generally a humiliating rip-off.
Pass beautiful or interesting things.
Include at least one excellent drinking hole.
(21/05/2011)
Prices down: Mr Wu has written an integrated booking system which considerably reduces admin for most clients, who will benefit from this saving. In addition, prices have been rebalanced to make most walks cheaper for most people. Depending on how things go this summer, we may implement an automated tool to let people register provisionally for walks (30/04/2011)
Heron City, Meridiana, Barcelona to Cerdanyola on foot: Since someone asked, here's what I can remember. Walking time probably 2.5 hours. Your money back if you die of hunger or are eaten by wolves.
Head to Roquetes more or less via Via Julia metro (couple of excellent bars in the pedestrian street leading up to it), walk to the top of the shantytown and (27/03/2011)
Located, the fifth fanny / Encontrado, el quinto coño: "El quinto coño" refers, for reasons unclear even to connoisseurs of Jamesian multivulvular theory, to an almost impossibly far-away place. There's a meme going round at the moment which places it in an undetermined locality in Murcia. Murcia is not far away from anywhere, so this is presumably Valencian slander.
Restaurante el Quinto Coño is (23/03/2011)
Church of Sant Pau at Montmany about to fall down?: That's the claim here, although I have to say it doesn't seem to have got much worse in the years I've been basing a route around it. Partial collapse, leaving accessible Gothic-ish ruins, might even be preferable, but if it disappeared completely and the mad, mad farm next door were to be civilised then the (21/03/2011)
Story of my life: From Hansel and Gretel, a 1954 stop-motion feature based on Humperdinck's children's opera:
Michael Sporn has some more on the film. The Padraic Colum writing credit has me re-arranging my mental furniture - he was in his early 70s by then, and I'm afraid if you asked me for an Irish writer contributing to late German (16/03/2011)
Trev’s Tinker Trail – walk from Aurillac, France to Zaragoza, Spain this June:
French tinkers, pig-gelders etc migrated seasonally and finally permanently from the late-ish Middle Ages, leaving traces in Spanish dialect, law, music, etc. I'm research-walking one of the routes they might have taken for the entire month of June with anyone reasonably fit and sociable who fancies coming along and contributing a minor subsidy. The plan (15/02/2011)
Discount for kiddies clarified: They were always given, but now the walk price calculator incorporates them. Apologies for the apparently eternal wait!
(21/01/2011)
Happy New Year!: I suppose you could say he's my role model.
(31/12/2010)
Barcelona Star Wars Procession: Seen Sunday on this Barcelona city tour. Paying people to mount ridiculous events to coincide with walks doesn't come cheap, but it's something we just have to do. Barcelona is full unemployable actors, and I spent ages trying to persuade various of their number that they could gain valuable paid experience dressing up as a (06/10/2010)
