Tag Archives: Landscapes

Day 20 – Monterosi to Campagnano – Hotting up towards Rome

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Tuesday 3 June 2025 – We had some 16km to cover today, and the weather forecast asserted that it would be a degree hotter than yesterday, at around 29°C. Jane had established that our destination hotel had a restaurant that would be open for lunch and had requested a late booking, 3pm. This meant we had a relaxed schedule for the walk, but we were still keen to get out reasonably early. We had been given a couple of tokens for breakfast at a bar just round the corner,

so we started off fuelled by just coffee and croissants. We were a couple of hundred metres away from the official Via Francigena route, and to get there, we passed the humble church of San Giuseppe that was closed when we passed it yesterday,

but which was open today,

so we lit a candle for Martin before starting out on the Via.  Just outside the town there’s another reference to the Via Cassia with a distance marker on it

similar in principle but very different in execution from the one we’d seen outside Sutri.  We had actually walked upon the original Via Cassia for a kilometre or so outside Montefiascone (the well-preserved actual Roman road; you remember, don’t you? ‘Course you do!) and it seems that the Vias Francigena and Cassia are very often close to each other and occasionally coincide.  The “modern” Cassia is the SS2 road; the original one started from Rome’s Ponte Milvio, a historic bridge and reference point for Roman roads (now evidently only 39.93km away) and headed towards Florence and beyond.

Much of today’s walk was, frankly, unremarkable, along tarmac, strada bianca or rough track. There was occasional shade and/or a breeze, which offered relief from the heat, and at least there no steep gradients to tackle. Well, almost none (keep reading). Some distractions along the way:

Horses in the fields

Evidence that some people had too much time on their hands

A chap sawing logs whilst still being very much awake

Someone’s going to be nice and warm this winter

Mystery object of the today. Probably was a barn, once, but Mother Nature is gradually taking over

Sheep. Well, you take your distractions where you can, don’t you?

At the start of the day, we walked among the ubiquitous hazel nut tree orchards. But after a while, the landscape changed into an open and more generally arable aspect.

Just after halfway, we came to distraction of greater pith and moment – the  waterfalls of Ice Cream Mountain! No, really.

This took the form of an engaging little trail beside the cascades

including a floating bridge

which was really weird to walk over. The stream once fed a water mill, the Mola di Monte Gelato.

It was a pleasant oasis of shade as well as a sight of some interest.

The cascades were, I suppose, quite substantial by local standards, but nothing that an Icelander would have made a foss about, of course. The site is a cool and shady oasis, markedly different from the rest of the landscape, and was probably named “Icy Hill”, using the word “gelato” before ice cream was invented and took over the word.

Importantly, this site also featured that rarest of phenomena, a coffee stop!

It was delightful to have a break, and this gave us a chance to chat to a couple of French pellegrinos, originally from Versailles, who had been walking the Via, two weeks at a time, all the way from Wissant (or possibly Wisques), in northern France, so they were on the verge of completing a multi-year project when they headed into Rome on the same day as us.

For a stretch, the arable land around the continuing trail changed to plantations.  On the one side we had what we (well, PlantNet) thought were sour cherry trees

and, on the other, butternut trees (whatever they are).

Someone with slightly too much time on their hands had decorated some roadside trees.

Then we got to just outside Campagnano, which, you’ll recall, is at the end of the Sutri – Campagnano official “leg” which we were covering in two days.

It was a steep climb in very hot conditions. But we made it, and then walked right through the old town, admiring some handsome corners as we went towards our hotel, the Albergo Bernigni.

It turned out that we had arrived some 20 minutes before check-in time. So, what was a pair of hot and thirsty pellegrini to do that could possibly pass that time agreeably, particularly bearing in mind that the hotel bar had gin?

Jane’s original online booking for a 3pm lunch had obviously stumbled at the interface between internet and reality, and the lass behind the bar suggested that 2pm would be a better option, so we had time to hose ourselves down and dress in non-sweaty clothes before quite a nice lunch.  I had meatballs as a starter and chicken thigh with stir-fried vegetables for a main course – an agreeable difference from the traditional pasta-followed-by-a-hunk-of-meat pattern of Italian restaurant meals of which, I have to say, I’m beginning to tire. And that was it for the action of the day; Campagnano didn’t appear to feature anything worth straying from the hotel to see.

Tomorrow, we have a long walk – around 25km – and the forecast is for it to be even hotter than today – perhaps 30°C. Plan A is, therefore, to start out really early and thus, we hope, avoid the worst of the heat of the day. It will be the last really long walk of our journey, which started from Lucca just over three weeks ago, so wish us luck, eh?

North! to Al.. Belrose

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Saturday 21 September – Today marked a change in pattern of our holiday travels, as we left our hotel room so that we could stay with friends for a few days, first in the Sydney environs, before then moving on to Brisbane.  But I had a photo project first, which meant going out before breakfast so I could catch the morning light. I suppose the photo I was after is something of a cliché, but my first attempt, from yesterday’s wanderings, was less than satisfactory

because the light was all wrong, and if I’m going to perpetrate a cliché, I might as well do it properly.  In the morning light, the scene looks much better to my eyes.

The journey to get to the photo location was pleasant – the temperature was lovely and the sun was shining. Because it was reasonably early, the sun was low and I found myself at one point casting no fewer than three shadows – one behind me from the real sun and two others from reflections from buildings in Sydney’s CBD.

The lovely light gave me a second chance to capture some scenes I‘d tried yesterday, but which looked better today,

as well as one that I hadn’t.

My vantage point for the Opera House shot was also a good one to construct a panorama of the city

which looks a bit skinny on the web page, but I think might be a good candidate for the wall at home.

After this very satisfactory start (and the usual rather chaotic breakfast at the Intercontinental), we checked out and headed for Circular Quay, and caught the 11 o’clock ferry to Mosman. Jane prowled the decks checking out the view on the 20-minute journey across the water.

At Mosman Bay, we met our friends Lorraine and Paul, with whom we would be staying for the next couple of days. They live in Belrose, a northern suburb of Sydney, and under normal crcumstances it would have been more logical to connect at Manly; but this weekend was the Manly Jazz Festival, rendering parking and other such practicalities out of the question, so Mosman Bay (lower circle below) it was.

The plan for the day was to get towards North Head and stroll down into Manly to see what entertainment the Jazz Festival might offer, so Paul found a suitable parking spot, at North Head Sanctuary, where there was immediately a fantastic view back towards the city.

This photo really demonstrates the popularity of boats around the harbour – with an environment like Sydney Harbour and the sort of weather we were enjoying, then why wouldn’t you?

Of course, being at North Head, we could see across to South Head, and the landmarks we’d passed yesterday – the Hornby Lighthouse

and the Macquarie Lighthouse.

You can just about make out the radar mast in front of the signal station.

North Head clearly had an important military role to play in days past, possibly fuelled by fears at one stage of Japanese aggression. In an enlightened move, the military area has been turned into National Park rather than being sold for development. It features a number of military installations, some of which are used as educational installations, such as a gun emplacement, which has information boards describing how it was used.

Other military buildings are now used as a quarantine station, down by the shore, and there were barracks

parts of which are now used as an entertainment venue

and parts of which are now home to small businesses.

There are also reminders about Australia’s involvement in so many theatres of war.

The path back to Manly led through bush

and past some wildlife, such as this Burton’s legless lizard

and a pair of brush turkeys, which are common enough to be a nuisance to the locals but which were new to our eyes.

Male Brush Turkey
Female Brush Turkey

They’re called brush turkeys (not bush turkeys) for a reason.

When we saw Manly Beach on the descent (the leftmost beach in the photo below), it was clear that smoke we’d seen earlier was actually quite a significant bush fire.

As we headed down towards Shelly Beach, the path continued along the cliff tops overlooking these beaches, and there was a sombre message among the lovely views.

Shelly Beach presented a rather dissonant juxtaposition:

people having fun on the beach in the foreground whilst a bush fire raged in the background. (We learned later that it was a controlled burn that went somewhat out of control, but no-one was injured.)

On the walk past Shelly Beach, there’s an interesting little art installation built into the rocks,

and then we reached Manly, where the market had been displaced to beachside

by the clearly very popular Manly Jazz Festival.

Manly was very crowded

so (having queued for quite a while to get some splendid ice cream at Gelato Messina) we found a taxi to take us back to the car and headed over to Lorraine and Paul’s house in Belrose for the evening.

Sunday 22 September 2024.

The next day was a chance for us to catch up with more friends who lived in the area – something of a “small world” story.  Two years ago we were exploring Canada on a major trip, one segment of which was spent based in Churchill, on the Hudson Bay, looking for polar bears. Whilst there, we met two delightful Australian ladies, Vicki and Kris, who were pretty much at the start of a fantastically impressive world tour over the space of a whole year. It turned out that they live in Mona Vale, which is near to Belrose and so we arranged to meet them to catch up with them. Vicki picked us up, and took us for a tour of the local beaches.

Bilgola Beach
Newport Beach, from Bilgola Lookout
Barrenjoey Lighthouse, Palm Beach
North Palm Beach

and Palm Beach proper, where I got a nice close-up of a kookaburra.

Whilst we were with Vicki and Kris, we were visited by a flock of rainbow lorikeets, which are beautifully coloured and really quite noisy.

Kris cooked a wonderful lunch for us and their friends Rosie and Astley, who were great company and whose extensive travel history enlarged our already-daunting list of possible travel destinations before Vicki took us back to Belrose where we could reflect on a lovely occasion. It’s quite common to agree to keep in contact with people met on holiday whilst travelling, but actually rare to find that the connection is deep and enduring. We had met Vicki and Kris on the UK leg of their world trip, and it was clear that they were grand people to stay in touch with; that it was so close to Belrose and such a good opportunity to meet again was a large slice of luck; similar to the slice of luck that enabled us to get back in touch with Sharon and David when we were in Melbourne*.

We have one more day staying in Belrose with Lorraine and Paul.  I wonder what plan they’ve hatched for our final day in the Sydney area?

 

* I’m embarrassed to find out that I didn’t write this day up; it was filled with Melbourne murals and a lovely lunch with David and Sharon, whom we met on a walking holiday in Slovenia back in 2016 and formed a connection similar to the one which kept us in touch with Vicki and Kris. With apologies to them, I will rectify this omission as soon as our schedule permits.

 

 

 

 

Watson for today, then?

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Friday 20 September 2024 – Acting on a suggestion from the friends we met last night, we decided that Watsons Bay would be a good destination for an excursion, particularly since the weather outlook was so good – sunshine and temperatures in the mid-20s.

So we headed for the ferry and queued up

to get on to F9 on the B side of Wharf 2. I’ve been pretty impressed with the way the public transport available around Sydney is organised. There’s no need to buy tickets; one can simply “tap on” and “tap off” using a credit card or, in my case, my phone. The trains are double-decker, the ferries seem to be very competently operated and the services have suited us very well on our short stay here. The ferry ride out of Circular Quay offers, unsurprisingly, some great views of the Sydney skyline

North Sydney

and, of course, its iconic structures.

Jane noticed that there were people climbing the bridge,

something that she and I did when we were here last, in 2001. Nice to see it’s still going; and they’ve added the aboriginal flag at the top of the bridge since our last visit, unless I’m mistaken.
Many ships leaving Circular Quay will pass a Martello Tower built on a small island:

Fort Denison, a former military site which is the most complete Martello Tower in the world and has been a museum, tourist attraction, restaurant, and popular location for wedding receptions and corporate events. It’s now closed for conservation work, apparently.
Watsons Bay is an attractive place

with a great view back of the Sydney skyline.

One of Sydney’s great attractions is a restaurant, Doyles, known for its seafood generally and its fish’n’chips specifically. The Watsons Bay location

is the original one, dating from 1885. Another attraction is the heritage trail which starts at Camp Cove (a place, not an over-theatrical chap) and leads up to South Head, the southern jaw of the mouth of Sydney Harbour. It’s a walk. So we went for it. Obviously. It takes you past some of the nice houses there,

and behind a cannon, which is pointing, for some reason, back at Sydney.

The furthest point of the trail, about a kilometre from the start, is Hornby Lighthouse

with the old lighthouse keeper’s cottages beside it.

One can also see how narrow the gap is that leads into Sydney Harbour. North Head – the upper jaw – is really quite close.

The lighthouse is a good, photogenic location. It’s therefore catnip for today’s generations of phone camera wielders (mainly, today, from the far east),

who seem to find it intolerable should a photo not include themselves. In many cases, quite an inordinate amount of time is spent organising poses (e.g. staring (nautically? pretentiously?) into the distance or pointing at the top of the lighthouse as if surprised to see that it has one). This specific posing seems to be a cultural thing among oriental tourists, and I wonder what will become of all of these images. Instagram, I suppose; the idea is that other people should see the photos. I doubt that, once posted online, the images will ever be seen again by their originators.

Grumpy? Me? Bloody right.

We had wanted to continue our walk down the other side of South Head rather than just completing the heritage trail loop. Trouble is, there’s a fucking great military establishment in the way, HMAS Watson,

and they clearly take a dim view of people wandering past their buildings. So, back towards Camp Cove it was,

which at least gave us the chance to take a coffee stop. From there, we cut across to the other side of the head. There’s clearly a military link here, since (as well as the naval base there) the road passed an armoury, an “Officers Quarters” building

and what we think were once gun emplacements.

There was some wildlife action along the way: Jane spotted a kookaburra

which really was sitting in an old gum tree; a couple of remarkable ants nests;

an engaging pair of blue wrens (male and female)

and a bunch of sulphur-crested cockatoos,

who were pretending to be sea birds perching on the cliffs and

inspecting tourists for food value.

We also spotted this dove

which, coincidentally, is a Spotted Dove.

The wrens and the cockatoos were at Gap Bluff, which has a small National Park area and also provides a couple of great cliff views.

There’s a historical memorial there, too;

the anchor belonged to a ship, the Dunbar which was wrecked on nearby rocks

in August 1857. Only one of the 122 aboard survived and the anchor was recovered some 50 years later and placed as a memorial to the others. The wreck was the catalyst for the creation of the Hornby Lighthouse and its survivor, one John James, went on to become the lighthouse keeper there.

Further along from Gap Bluff is the Watsons Bay Signal Station,

first established in1790; a permanent guard would watch out for arriving ships, raising a flag both to give them a sign of the new location of the settlement, and to notify the colony of the imminent arrival of the long awaited ships. Amazingly, the station has remained in permanent use from that date and has thus maintained its role for over two centuries, and from the same building for most of that time.

Near it is a lighthouse, the South Head Upper Light, also called the Macquarie Lighthouse.

Its site is the longest serving lighthouse site in Australia, with some kind of navigational aid in place since 1791 (sadly not sufficiently effective to save the Dunbar, though). The lighthouse shown above was completed in 1883 and is still fully operational. Next to it is the lighthouse keeper’s cottage

and in front of it, complementing the formal informational plaque on the lawns, is a much more informal tribute.

One could have carried on walking the cliff path, but we turned back to the bay to catch the ferry

back to Circular Quay, whence we walked towards the Sydney Royal Botanic Garden. On Circular Quay there are some plaques in the ground celebrating well-known Australians; we recognised a couple

and I suppose this one

must be the one originally dedicated to Rolf Harris.

The Botanic Garden is a large, pleasant park

with some remarkable trees

The tallest palm tree I’ve ever seen

and a few quirky sculptures.

My main objective was to get Mrs. Macquarie point and something called Mrs. Macquarie’s Chair. This Macquarie name keeps cropping up. Major General Lachlan Macquarie (born on the island of Ulva off the coast of the Isle of Mull in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides) was a British Army officer and colonial administrator. Macquarie served as the fifth Governor of New South Wales from 1810 to 1821, and had a leading role in the social, economic, and architectural development of the colony. He is considered by historians to have had a crucial influence on the transition of New South Wales from a penal colony to a free settlement and therefore to have played a major role in the shaping of Australian society in the early nineteenth century, hence the ubiquity of the Macquarie name.

He was married, as we can infer from the naming of Mrs Macquarie’s Chair,

an exposed sandstone rock cut (by convicts in 1810) into the shape of a bench. Folklore has it that Elizabeth Macquarie used to sit on the rock and watch for ships from Great Britain sailing into the harbour. She was known to visit the area and sit enjoying the panoramic views of the harbour. Above the chair is a stone inscription referring to Mrs Macquarie’s Road. That road was built, on the instruction of Governor Macquarie, between 1813 and 1818, and ran from the original Government House to Mrs Macquarie’s Point.

By this stage we were getting a trifle foot- and back-sore, so decided to return to the hotel. We diverted for a quick look into The Calyx,

to see if it would sell us some beer. Sadly, the café is just a café, and coffee wasn’t going to cut it for us, so I took a couple of valedictory photos

and we headed back to the hotel, past the Conservatorium of Music, which has the least music-related architecture I think I’ve ever seen.

Thus ended a very pleasant day’s outing; ample justification for a glass of something cold and a bite to eat. Before we retired for the night, for amusement, I set a timelapse going to cover the comings and goings of the ferries at Circular Quay, which we can see from our hotel room. I hope you find it as engaging as I do.

Tomorrow we leave the city proper to spend a few days with friends who live to the north of Sydney. I have no idea what this means in terms of photos and verbiage on these pages; you’ll just have to keep an eye out to see for yourself, won’t you?