Category Archives: Travel

Preamble: preparing, panicking and packing

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Friday 6 Feb 2026 – Well, we’ve been in the UK now for four whole months! It’s definitely time to be on the move again. We both relaxed easily into a nice comfortable routine at home after our last trip, and there are times when I almost get agitated when considering the upheaval of going away for a period of weeks. This descent into a slough of ease and comfort and stagnation is the first step on a road we don’t want to take. It’s time to shake things up!

To counter the angst of preparation, generally speaking packing for us is a repeatable action, whether we’re going to the equator or the poles – we pack enough for a couple of weeks and pray for decent laundry facilities as we go, merely tailoring the sort of tops we include according to the likely weather.  The outlook for New Zealand is for temperatures in the 20s for the North Island and (hopefully high) teens in the South Island. It’ll almost certainly rain on us at some stage. No particularly specialist gear needed then, as far as clothes are concerned, anyway.

Photographically, I have the usual dilemmas about what to include in my camera bag. I call it a camera bag, but actually photographic equipment seems a minority element, alongside laptop, power banks, WiFi hotspot, backup drive, spare batteries and various other supporting paraphernalia that the well-travelled photo blogger takes with him, and so do I.

The wildlife I might expect to photograph see is in some respects limited compared to other places we’ve visited, in that there are no elusive mammals to seek out. I hope there will be a profusion of bird life and that my photographic skills are up to capturing pictures of a good variety of species. There will likely be whales and seals and dolphins, of course, but unless they get really frisky, I don’t expect these to be that photographically interesting. Who knows, I might even put the camera down and just watch! The Big Lens is clearly going to be a must, but I’m not going to have room for a profusion of other lenses or a tripod; and I’ll take a Small Camera for the sightseeing that doesn’t require a Big Camera. Total weight – 11kg. Please don’t tell the airline.

The destination being New Zealand brings with it some wrinkles before we even get through to the arrivals hall in Auckland. The Powers That Be there are, perhaps unsurprisingly, touchy about what gets brought in case some left-field pathogen escapes and wreaks havoc, so we must be able to prove we have scrubbed our boots so that they are the soles of cleanliness; we must show that our medicines (for one can’t get to our age and mileage without being accompanied by some of them) are legit; and we even have to declare our precious cargo of Twinings finest Earl Grey. Look, I know you can almost certainly buy it over there – they do have shops there, I read about them on the interweb – but there are some chances that are simply not worth taking, OK?

We also have to complete an online declaration of our compliance a maximum of 24 hours before we depart for Auckland. That’ll give us something to do to pass the longueurs of the transit

We have benefited from a slight cock-up on the travel front. The lovely Judy, of Spear Travels, who has done such a marvellous job of pulling together these major trips we’ve been on for the last eight years (eight years! Blimey!), settled on Discover The World to handle the day-to-day details of our itinerary, and a very fine schedule it is, too. But a certain amount of embarrassed shuffling of the feet followed their revelation that they’d missed a booking deadline for our flights, which were originally planned to be on Singapore Airlines, which is a decent operator even if they do shift their deadlines without warning. The practical upshot is that we’re now on Emirates, which I think means we’re slightly ahead on this deal. It’s still 23 hours in the air and arriving, probably sleep-deprived, two days after we set out, whichever aeroplane we’re on.

It’s therefore officially two sleeps before we totter into our hotel in Auckland, but it’ll probably be more like one and a half, given the exigencies of sleeping on a plane.  Still, we’re hoping that we can catch up on some of the films we can’t be bothered to go to see in the UK. According to the Emirates website, we get to choose from “up to 6,500 channels of movies, TV shows, music and games, on demand and in multiple languages”, so, with several hundred movies to choose from, one hopes that boredom is not going to be the main challenge. Even looking through the movie classifications makes me dizzy.

Jane regards any flight which isn’t showing Thor: Ragnarok as a dead loss, so she’ll be quids in. I’ll probably find we’ve arrived before I’ve even finished looking through the choice. Something of a first-world problem; I know I shouldn’t complain.

We will have a couple of days to explore Auckland. Assuming nothing goes horribly wrong in the next couple of days, I’ll report back from there.

Photos courtesy of Pixabay: Florence: darrenquigley32 Lucca: SLPix Siena: Makalu

Another Long Walk In The Foreign

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We successfully walked the French route of the Camino de Santiago nearly two years ago.  The memories of tedious uphill slogging, being occasionally either fried or drenched and getting fed up with crowds of pilgrims punters on the final stretch have faded sufficiently that Jane and I have decided we should undertake another major slog pilgrimage route in The Foreign; the Via Francigena, in Italy.

When we Jane first came up with the idea, we thought that this was the pilgrimage route for another saint, Saint Francis of Assisi.

It isn’t. That one is the Via di Francesco, which is so obscure it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry! Its route runs a more northerly course through Umbria, passing through Assisi before eventually jinking south to end in Rome

The Via Francigena in its entirety runs from Canterbury in England, through France and Switzerland, to Rome, and then to Apulia, Italy, where there were ports of embarkation for the Holy Land. It gets its name from France: the route was first documented as the “Lombard Way”, and was first called the Iter Francorum (the “Frankish Route”) in the Itinerarium sancti Willibaldi of 725 (how can you tell that it does have a Wikipedia entry, eh?) .

We’re not walking all of it. Not, at least, on this occasion. Under the auspices of the excellent Walk The Camino who organised our Santiago excursion, we’re walking the section which runs from Lucca to Rome.

and it’s not on the straight and level, I can tell you.

It’s not quite as daunting as the Pyrenees crossing that the Camino Francés demands and overall it’s only (only!) half the distance, but we’re quietly confident that we’ll be much fitter if when we return home after the walk, which will take us about four weeks.

It would, of course, be madness to go to this area of Italy without visiting Florence (where I’ve never been) and Pisa, as well as spending a little time exploring Lucca. So we’ll do that before setting off from Altopascio, just up the road from Lucca. En route we’ll pass through Siena (if it hasn’t been burnt by the time we get there). We’ll also spend time in a place called Montefiascone, where I hope nominative determinism is at least temporarily on hold.

The photographic element will vary a little from the previous Camino routes we’ve walked, in that I will use a Proper Camera, rather than the phone, to take pictures.  It’s a long walk and I don’t want to lug a Big Camera all that way, so I will take a newly-acquired Sony RX100 VII, which, in a pocketable form factor, is the equivalent of my Nikon setup (24-200mm equivalent lens). It will be interesting to see whether it does the job or whether I go back to using my phone for speed and convenience. In theory, I’ll get better quality images from the Sony.

As is usual with these long walks Day One Is A Bastard (why do organisers always seem to set it up this way?) – 29 km, or 18 miles in the old money (the last time I plan to use it, by the way – everything henceforth will be metric). So: long. And not flat, either.

Therefore we thought we ought to have a bit of a practice. Everything round our way is rather flat, but at least we could simulate the distance via three excursions around the local roads and paths.

That was yesterday. We made it, though we were both footsore and weary by the end.

The rest of the journey will unfold in these pages, and we’d be delighted if you want to follow our progress. If you haven’t already subscribed to the pages, then all you need to do is to leave a comment somewhere and tick the box that says “keep me updated” and – lo! – you’ll be able to received e-mail updates as I write them.

Our journey starts on May 6th; see you then, I hope!

Last day in Biarritz

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Monday 14 August 2023 – There’s nothing like not having a choice to direct one’s thinking, and we found that now having a greater understanding of the hotel’s limitations enabled us to arrange things so we had a more comfortable night and a less jaundiced view of the accommodation. (The night was cooler, which helped a lot.) Actually, within what’s possible in such a sharply delinited space, it’s about as good as it could be, and it’s certainly in a very convenient location.

Today was our last full day in Biarritz, and we had only explored the area north of the hotel in our time here so far. So we went for a walk. in the other direction. Obviously.

There were still plenty of people about, but the town and beach were nowhere near as crowded as yesterday.

We made our way past the stone bridge, which was very uncrowded;

not surprising, given that it was closed for maintenance. The road carries on past a pair of good views back over the Port des Pêcheurs

and one enters a network of paths round the headland, leading to the aquarium and the Rock of the Virgin Mary.

The rock owes its name to the statue of the Virgin Mary looking out to sea from the top of the rock; you can just about make out the statue in the photo above. The statue was erected in 1865. Legend has it that fishermen from the port of Biarritz were caught in a “terrible storm” (is there any other sort?) while out at sea hunting whales. A divine light guided them back to port and the survivors erected a statue of the Virgin Mary in gratitude.

Napoleon III decided to cut a tunnel through the rock and had a bridge built to make it accessible from the seafront. The first wooden bridge did not withstand the onslaught of the sea, so, in 1887, Gustave Eiffel was instructed to design a metal bridge, which still stands today.

Sadly, as we discovered,

it was closed today, whilst men used hammers and other serious tools on it.

Looking over the beach of the old port, now called La Petite Plage, is a very pleasant view, with a striking building on the right, more of which later. Importantly, though, Jane spotted something of significance just below that building – a Bar, which we decided It Was Time For.

Walking round the cove gives a good view over it from above the central building,

and the bar, the Eden Rock Café, gives a nice view over the beach as well.

There are steps down to the water from the café, and it seems that if you decide to climb over the gate and go down them and start drowning in the huge waves, someone with a helicopter will come and rescue you, which is decent of them.

After refreshing ourselves, we carried on round the coast, past that striking building.

It shows one How The Other Half Live.  If it were mine, I’d call it a castle, but no, it’s a Villa, the Villa Belza.  Just along the road there’s a bend where watching the surfers is clearly something of a spectator sport.

The waves here weren’t as dramatic as we saw in front of the town itself yesterday, but there was clearly some fun to be had

even if the inevitable end of it was to crash ignominiously into the water. You have to admire the persistence, stamina and skill of these people even as you question their sanity. At least on skis one can coast to a dignified halt outside a bar.

We walked along the front a little, and then found a path up the cliff, which offered a variety of view back over the Villa Belza, of which this is my favourite.

Then we headed inland towards the centre of the town, where there was a market area called the Halles de Biarritz, which Jane thought would be worth nosing around.

The central halls were surrounded by market stalls on the adjacent roads,

and – ooh look! There’s a tapas bar! There, on the right!

This place runs a surprisingly large number of outside tables from just this small interior and they do a fine tapas selection, which we discovered through sampling.

We then headed back to the hotel, through the streets,

past the (modest but pleasant) Jardin Publique,

more fine buildings

and the very handsome façade of the old railway terminus,

now just the frontage for an event space.

As we’d been walking around, I noticed that there were some cute little buslets in operation.

and I even managed to get a shot of one being taught how to navigate by its mother.

And so we arrived back at the hotel, via a couple more pleasant street scenes.

It’s been a pleasure walking around such a handsome town.

After something of a siesta at the hotel, we went out again, as Jane had discovered that there was an evening market at the Port de Pêcheurs. We partook of refreshment en route, once again at the excellent Dodin bar at the back of the casino, where we once again saw the cabaret of the lifeguard station being put to bed.

The night market was a reasonably small affair within the carparking area of the port.

It didn’t have anything to offer that we were interested in, and once again, the queue for Casa Juan Pedro was at Café Opera levels.

That place must be extraordinary to attract the queues it does. Sadly, we will never find out why.

There was a bit of cabaret going on at one corner of the market, and it turned out to be a troupe of three guys wowing the crowds with some acrobatics.  We missed them at the market, but when we climbed up to the Place Saint Eugénie, there they were again. They were quite impressive, so I grabbed some video {and gave them a small contribution in return).

Our return to the hotel involved buying an ice cream and watching the sunset, alongside a load of other people.  The sunset was quite nice, as these things go

but went completely unnoticed by the bunch of beachcombers on the beach below, hopefully scanning for any valuables that might have been dropped by tourists during the day.

The final act of the day was rather lovely – a candlelit parade with some very good singing passed the hotel, marking the Assumption.

Tomorrow, we leave Biarritz for St-Jean-Pied-de-Port. Well, I hope we do; we’re rather dependent upon the driver organised by WalkTheCamino being able to find the hotel. Check back on these pages in a day or so and you’ll find out whether we made it OK.  For now, It’s Time For The Bed, I Think.