Tag Archives: Scenery

Day 6 – The Most Expensive G&T In The World?

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Friday 19 June 2026 – At yesterday’s briefing, we had been, as usual, presented with a choice between two walks. The main difference would be pace, with a well ‘ard group simply walking a little faster and doing a couple of extra kilometres before being set free to get some refreshment. I actually put my name down for that, because it didn’t seem, on the basis of the information to hand, to be too arduous, just slightly longer. However, on the day, given that the forecast was for temperatures in the 30s (yes! almost as hot as the UK where I write this one week later!) I chickened out and joined the shorter walk. Which turned out not to be shorter at all. Or even much slower. But it was still chickening out.

Anyhoo, for both groups the end point would be the same: the jewel of the Italian Riviera – Portofino.

Our start point was a place called Camogli, which would be a boarding point for a boat ride and which Tomaso said was-a nice-a place, so I expected another charming fishing village. Wrongly, as it turned out. Camogli is 38km as the crow flies from Bonassola, but as the bus drives it’s over double that distance and takes an hour and a half. The bus we were in was the same (horrible, noisy, cramped, uncomfortable) bus that had brought us in from the airport the previous weekend. And it dropped us in the middle, it seemed, of a city. Which is fair enough, what with Camogli being a city an’ all, just not what I’d expected. It didn’t seem like-a nice-a place at all, particularly since the bus had to drop us off some distance from where we had to board the boat. There seemed to be other tourist groups as well, as we trooped off to find our quay.

We passed a point where we could look further along the coast, and could actually make out the city of Genoa in the distance.

Then abruptly we turned right down some steps, and we could see why Tomaso liked the town.

There were lots of steps down through some typically Italian narrow streets, and some very fine trompe l’oeil on the buildings.

The harbour itself is very attractive,

and the structure of the town is unusual, as can be seen from a map.

You can see that  there is a peninsula jutting out from the mainland; originally this was an island (hence being called L’isola) reached by a bridge, and this was the original old town. We went for a look round, but only after having bought our lunch, at a focaccieria specifically recommended by Tomaso.

The main component of l’isola is a church, the Basilica di Santa Maria Assunta.

To get to it requires climbing steps which then gives one a decent view back over the harbour,

and, looking the other way, the town beach.

Outside the church is a lovely tiled description of L’isola

above a patterned courtyard.

The church itself is, once again, sumptuously appointed, with some gorgeous painted illustrations and decoration

and some colourful stained glass.

We had a few moments before our boat departed, so I wandered round taking some more photos of the harbour.

The rather colourful boat shown above is “U Dragun“, a symbol of Camogli, a hybrid sail- and rowing boat, known for its traditional design and used in historic re-enactments and festivals.

As we boarded our boat, we noted that someone, sadly, had lost their hat,

but there were lots of places that would have sold a replacement, so probably not a tragedy. Soon, we were off and could see the slightly surreal frontage of the city – all those uniform buildings with their uniform dark windows staring at the world.  Attractive, but slightly unsettling at the same time.

It was a short trip, just round the headland to a place called San Fruttuoso. The reason we were going by boat is that it can only be accessed on foot or by sea. It’s well-known for its abbey,

a Benedictine monastery dating back to the year 1000. It’s also a miniature beach resort, of course,

and, unusually, something of a centre for scuba diving. In the abbey is a statue called “Christ of the Abyss”.

which is a replica of a statue which has been placed in the waters of the bay in memory of Dario Gonzatti, the first Italian to use scuba gear in his dives, who tragically died near this spot in 1947. It’s at a depth of about 17 metres, and is garlanded with flowers every July by scuba divers in memoriam.

We had to walk around the back of the abbey to get to the start of our trail, and this gave us some more views of the village.

We passed an old lavatoio,

which would once have been where the public could wash their clothes, and walked between a restaurant and its terrace,

which looked like a wonderful place to have said “sod it, it’s too hot, let’s have lunch”, but we pressed on. The sea was a wonderful colour. It would have been a lovely lunchtime view on that terrace. Sigh.

It almost immediately became obvious that my hopes for a gentle uphill gradient for our walk were completely misplaced.

Bugger. That lunch-on-the-terrace idea was an increasingly attractive proposition at this point. But we soldiered on. To give you some idea of the climb, here’s a view of a Saracen watchtower taken early on.

And here’s the view of the same watchtower taken some 37 minutes later.

Between these two shots, this is the terrain we had to deal with.

We got a final view of San Fruttuoso

before – finally! – making it to our lunch spot,

where, amusingly, the well ‘ard set were still having lunch. We shooed them off so we could have ours, and then pressed on. The views continued to be lovely

but the trend, annoyingly, continued to be upwards,

albeit past some lovely views.

I see some cypresses have escaped from Tuscany

I discovered this boat is called Sea Cloud II, operated by Sea Cloud Cruises

The path levelled out a fraction and we came across, of all things, a lamppost! With a light bulb still in it!

Then there were more, and it became clear that we’d reached an outpost of civilisation, a small hamlet called Prato, where there was a water point.

Rebecca invited us to refill our water bottles, but we didn’t, because we still had plenty left. The general manic focus on water and hydration was a bit puzzling to Jane and me. We were enjoined to take litres and litres of the stuff with us, and each of us had a couple of water bottles in our backpacks; hers were 800ml and mine were 500. In all the walking in all the heat, we never needed to broach mine – I simply carried the same water up and down all the hills we’d covered. And yet we didn’t go thirsty at any point. Sure, the beers at the end of the walks were very welcome, but I found the dichotomy of what we were told we needed and what we actually drank a bit of a mystery.

Anyhow, the route to Portofino was all downhill from here, which at first seemed like a good idea,

leading us past a fantastic view of the town of Portofino,

but the path soon degenerated into steps.

Lots of the fuckers.

I had been perfectly all right going down steep slopes for the past few days, but for my right knee, these steps were the last straw. By the time I walked into Portofino, it was clear that All Was Not Well. I wasn’t crippled; walking straight and level was OK, but anything other needed care, concentration and, preferably a handrail. Didn’t stop me from joining the others at the Dolce & Gabbana bar for a glass (or, in my case, two) of something cold, though. We were joined there by the well ‘ard set, who were supposed to have done extra kilometrage out to the Portofino lighthouse and back, but it was too hot, poor dears.  Actually, in their defence, I think they took a longer route from the top down to Portofino which involved a more gentle descent – longer and hotter, maybe, but their knees were still working when they got down.

I was expecting Portofino to be (a) larger and (b) more impressive than it actually is. It’s by no means unattractive

but nothing outstandingly different from the sort of places we’d seen over the last days. It is, though, at the heart of the Italian Riviera and has a reputation of being very up-market. Well, anywhere that’s got a Dolce & Gabbana shop that doubles as a bar is likely to be on the posh side. So I was not particularly surprised to see the bar bill.

I had the gin and “Portofinese Gold” (perfectly nice beer in a very fancy bottle), and Jane had the spremuta – freshly squeezed OJ. Naif that I am, I don’t think I’ve ever paid over £20 for a G&T before. I’m not complaining, by the way – I knew it was going to be expensive. But I thought the prices worth commenting on, you understand. Actually the chap at the till was all over the place and initially wanted to charge me €90, but I’d only had a couple of drinks, so I was wise to his game.

We had to make a reasonably swift departure to catch the boat for a further short cruise round the Portofino headland. Out we went,

past the Splendido Hotel, which is a Belmond gaff, and thus thoroughly in line with the up-market values espoused by the Portofino set,

and the Portofino lighthouse that the well ‘ard set had so signally failed to get to.

The destination for our short ferry ride was the next town along the headland, Santa Margherita Ligure. It has the same slightly unsettling uniformity of architecture in the houses along the sea front, so it’s obviously A Thing in these parts.

It’s a very fine town,

with the usual crop of top-notch trompe l’oeil décor

but we had no time to stop and stare, as our bus was waiting for us so we could bump and grind our way back to Bonassola in time for a slightly delayed evening briefing and drinkies before dinner. Today was our last walk, and we had to return home on the morrow, so the briefing was kind of important in order that we understood the timings for the day. My knee being in the state it was, I was rather grateful that the hotel had a lift to get me to the fourth floor terrace for that…

Our official flight time home the next seemed quite reasonable, but because of the potential for cock-ups courtesy of the EES, we had to make an early start. The day turned out not to be entirely uneventful and I will detail it in the next post, which will be the valedictory entry for what has been an excellent, if quite sweaty, week.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Day 5 – Campiglia to (almost) Porto Venere and That Boat Ride Back

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Thursday 18 June 2026 – As was usual, we were offered two walks. The end point would be Porto Venere, a town at the southern end of a finger of land beside the major port of La Spezia, which itself lies south of the Cinque Terre National Park. This would be the departure point for a boat ride back along the coast. And, as usual, we opted for the shorter one, as (a) it started with a taxi ride up into the hills which obviated the need for the steep uphill climb on offer with the other walk in the (b) forecast temperatures of over 30°C. I therefore had the hope that our route would be largely level with only a bit (or possibly a massive amount, stay tuned) of downhill.

Some hope.

Anyway, Rebecca, Tomaso and all of we punters took the train to Riomaggiore, the furthest of the Cinque Terre villages. Rebecca took off up into the hills with the usual well ‘ard team, and the rest of us followed Tomaso. There was a nice echo of the Castellaners of Catalunya as we exited the station,

and I managed to get a shot which combined two elements of our Italian exerience:

Tomaso’s unwavering focus on being a guide; and a taxi rank that featured three taxis but no driver.  Eventually, a driver did turn up, clutching a focaccia or some such, and we all climbed on board so we could be taken up to Campiglia, a tiny village in the hills. The taxi dropped us off by a terrace of shaded tables which looked like it was made for sitting and drinking coffee at, and which offered a decent view over the surroundings. This, by the way, is the spot where the well ‘ard team would be walking up to and taking their lunch. This would be an ascent of some 500m over 6.5km, so now you know why we opted out.

Across the street from the terrace was Erbo Gianco, a place that outwardly seemed a rather unpromising grocery store

but which was actually a tiny miracle perpetrated in this hamlet in the middle of nowhere.

Luca, its owner, deftly prepared us focaccie for our lunches and coffee to help us on our way.

The shop is the single alimentaria for all of Campiglia, and, as well as supplying the villagers, is a popular place for hikers and other passers-by to stop for a break.

Coffee quaffed, we set off. We had a way to go, with the intriguing possibilities offered by the “Green Caravan”, a place where we could take our lunch and which might even be open to sell us something cold and refreshing.

On the outskirts of the village (i.e. in about 20 yards) we came across the local parish church, Chiesa Cattolica Parrocchiale di Santa Caterina.

It was open, so we looked in.

It had another of those processional crosses that we first saw in Bonassola.

If I understood it correctly, it’s not an active church, but is a popular venue for weddings.

The path led in a satisfactorily level kind of way

past the remains of an old windmill

and rather pleasingly downhill through woodland,

before reaching a fork, where we turned left on the Alta Via del Golfo (AVG). (AV5T is the Alta Via del Cinque Terre, the High Path that started way over in Levanto.)

Much of the path was OK,

except for the odd tricky bit.

Sadly, the basically level nature of the path was a temporary phenomenon. As usual, when you get to a decision point on these kind of hiking holidays, to quote Yazz and the Plastic Population, “The Only Way Is Up”.

We had, indeed, come down a fair way, as was shown by the view we got back towards Campiglia

which was revealed to be a bit larger than I had expected from the part we saw. We headed along a military road, through a quarry

where the local “marble” had been taken. It’s not real marble, meaning sedimentary limestone, but it’s a stone that polishes to a fine shine – dark with white veins through it. The rock we saw didn’t look that dark, and, although he hadn’t got his polishing machinery with him, Tomaso demonstrated  what he meant by wetting a small chunk,

which gives an idea of what the finished article might look like. In some cases, the veins are of a golden colour.

We were heading steadily and occasionally steeply uphill, and arrived at the high point, where I thought that, even though I didn’t have the drone with me, I’d indulge in a bit of aerial photography,

and we finally reached a view of La Spezia that had been threatening to become visible for the last few hundred metres of upward trail. And it really was quite a view.

The naval military area of La Spezia is huge;

everything to the left of and below the harbour bar in the photo above is the La Spezia arsenal – a town within a town. As well as the city, we could see across to the Carrara mountains.

The white areas are (real) marble, the posh Carrara marble that can be seen in posh places, such as the Sheik Zayed Mosque in Abu Dhabi, which must singlehandedly have consumed a mountain or two from the range.

The path then became a pleasantly downhill dirt road,

suitable for vehicular access to the quarries we’d passed, and indeed we weren’t alone on the track.

We pottered along past a viewpoint which showed us that there was an island, Palmaria, at the very tip of the finger, and gave us a sight of the castle and church at the extreme edge of Porto Venere,

and, at closer range, a Scarce Swallowtail Butterfly.

It wasn’t that scarce, actually. There were at least three of ’em, and I was glad to get this shot when one perched, un-butterfly-like, for a few instants.

Continuing downhill, we came at last to the Green Caravan, which

was closed. A sign told us that it would open in a few days’ time, which was a fat lot of good. But we found some shady patches and ate our lunches there anyway.

The walking route from the Green Caravan, which is formally identified on Google Maps as “Gitana on the road“, to Porto Venere has an exceedingly steep downhill end section. Rebecca had mentioned that there were some 2,000 steps to go down and as far as I can tell, these took one down 250m vertical in one kilometre – that’s one in four. We said “bollocks” to that, and  Tomaso organised a cab to take us the rest of the way down. Thus it was that we arrived on the outskirts of Porto Venere.

Entry to the town is through a medieval gate.

Beside the gate are some mystery objects.

These are actually measures – standard Genoese units at the time – which were used to enforce fair trading.  If I remember correctly, on the left is one for wine, in the middle for olive oil, and on the right, one for grain. On the other side of the gate is a frescoed arch

and the town is – would you believe it? – very attractive,

though some sartorial choices on view  were less aesthetically pleasing. The town was also, delightfully, relatively uncrowded.

We had the chance to visit the church-and-castle that we’d seen from up in the hills.

The church is the Chiesa di San Pietro. We looked inside, of course. Entry is through a couple of magnificent doors.

and the inside is wonderfully calming. Remarkably there were very few people to intrude.

We walked back to the town,

which led past an intriguing tinkly shop.

and headed for the quay to board the ferry that would take us back towards home along the coast. This give us some decent departing views of Porto Venere and the castle

and then we had the chance – and the light – to take some photos of Riomaggiore, Manarola and Corniglia from the water, with the sun behind us. Forgive me here for a plethora of photos, but this was seeing the villages from a fantastic viewpoint.

Riomaggiore – New town to the left, old town to the right

Riomaggiore old town

Riomaggiore new town

Manarola

Corniglia

Corniglia

It made me think that we could have foregone all that bloody trekking up and down hills for days on end, and just taken the ferry.

Well, not quite, I suppose.

Anyway, we had to disembark at Vernazza in order to get back to the hotel in any kind of decent time, so we had another of those train journeys,

but got back to Bonassola with the feeling of great satisfaction about the day. Yes, it was hot and occasionally sweaty, but we’d seen some fantastic views and visited a couple of lovely places.

We had one more day’s walking as part of this trip, and it would be nowhere near the Cinque Terre, but much further to the north.  Perhaps it wouldn’t feature the sweaty toiling up and down hills that are such a hallmark of the Cinque Terre? Keep watching these pages to find out!

 

On our last leg(s) – the journey to Christchurch

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Sunday 22 March 2026 – Dunedin was our last stop on the tour of the South Island. All we had to do was to get ourselves to Christchurch and hold ourselves in readiness for our return flights to the UK. Because of the unpleasantness in the Middle East, our original journey back via Dubai had been changed so that our route was now (a) via Singapore and (b) a day later. Thus we would have two nights and one day in Christchurch, and a layover in Singapore’s Changi airport of some six hours: total journey time therefore 30 hours, including 24 hours in the air.

But first we had to get ourselves to Christchurch, a distance of some 360km. Despite Jane’s best research efforts, there wasn’t a whole host of things to do and see en route, but she did find a couple of interesting diversions on our journey.

The first of these was still just about within the Dunedin city limits – Baldwin Street, dubbed the World’s Steepest (driveable) Street.

It’s notoriously difficult to convey steepness, either up or down, in photographs, so I made the sacrifice of walking up the steepest bit so that I could bring you a dispassionate measurement of the gradient.

It’s not that steep the whole way; a section near the top is the steepest.

I walked up the road, but Jane took advantage of steps, which run up one side of the steep bit.

For fun, we did another way of conveying the gradient.

At the top is a seat, much needed by some of the folk that had got that far

and some info about the street

Of course, some people have to make getting up the street a real challenge, and there are a couple of plaques there which are nods to the “because it’s there” lunatic tendency of some people.

and there’s one rather charming record, by the water fountain there, of a successful attempt to climb the street by a young lad aged only 3 years and 4 months.

After that little workout, we moved on, leaving logging country for more pastoral landscapes.

There were some exceptions to the low-rise nature of the landscape; Jane took this photo as we refuelled near a town called Bushey.

The Glastonbury Tor lookalike at the top is the Sir John McKenzie memorial, by the way (he was a politician in the last half of the 19th century). The last two thirds of the journey is through pancake-flat landscapes, which are conducive to high-density cattle farming, something we had noted in a few other parts of the country.

As we followed the coast northwards, we reached a town called Moeraki. It shares a name with Lake Moeraki, but the connection is merely linguistic, if ChatGPT is to be believed; Both names come from the word “moeraki” in the Māori language, often interpreted as something like “sleepy sky” or “day of rest”. Anyway, this Moeraki is a beachside town and on the beach are some geologically very interesting objects: the Moeraki Boulders.

Although their formation is a matter of abstruse geology, it’s clear that they are a popular tourist attraction. They are “septarian concretions”. A concretion is a hard and compact mass formed by the precipitation of mineral cement within the spaces between particles, found in sedimentary rock or soil. Septarian concretions are carbonate-rich concretions containing angular cavities or cracks (from the Latin septum, “partition”, referring to the cracks or cavities separating polygonal blocks of hardened material). Some of the boulders show this partitioning very clearly, indeed looking as if someone has taken a broken one and glued it back together.

There are some broken boulders on the beach, which also give an idea of the crystalline nature of the material between the compacted mudstone.

There are many intact boulders, most of them part-buried within the sand

and very popular for kids to play on and (sigh) selfies. There’s one which looks to have rolled off the cliff where it was formed relatively recently (in geological terms, anyway).

Human provided for scale

The boulders are spherical through the way they were created, over a period of some 65 million years and starting with a seed, which might have been a shell fragment. Mineral-rich water percolating through the mud deposited crystalline material and mudstone evenly so that it expanded spherically within the cliff it was building up in.  When the cliff is eroded away by the sea, the formed boulders then roll down to the beach. There are apparently other similar phenomena on the North Island as well as these here.

We might have then completed the journey to Christchurch with no further stops other than for coffee, for example at this accurately-named establishment

which had a very enticing array of cakes.

But Jane noticed that a place called Geraldine had a vintage motors and machinery museum.  I was taken enough with the name of the town, as well as with Herbert and Alma along the route; but the prospect of a vintage museum proved irresistible, so we stopped off to take a look.

The desk was manned by a volunteer called Bruce, who was very pleased to see us, and accompanied us as we went into the first of the halls, which was real veteran cars.

It turned out that he owned one of them

but was also anxious to tell us about many of the other ones, too.  He was a lovely chap, but we were quite glad when other customers came along and diverted his attention away from explaining all the cars there. There were some interesting exhibits, such as this Model T Ford

and this creation, which I’d never come across before, the Reselco Solocar.

We wandered around the other sheds: tractors,

with a very charming array of tractor seats along one wall

and some very elderly-looking examples;

Stationary engines;

Crawler tractors;

and models.

There were other sheds with various other sorts of machinery, such as lawnmowers, much incidental period stuff such as old cameras and household goods, and a model horse in the yard.

The last shed contained cars of a vintage that was much more my period

Vanden Plas Princess 3-litre R
Wolseley 6/99
Armstrong Siddeley
Vauxhall Veloxes

and a Jag I’d never come across before, an XJ40 (mislabelled as a JX40, I might add).

The place had the same amateur air as Brooklands Museum used to have before it got really popular; amateur in the good sense of love being lavished on the exhibits.

There were a couple of quirky roadside objects to be spotted en route – creative use of hay bale “marshmallows”

and, having passed Bushey (the name of a town near where I was born), we also passed Chertsey

a town near where we now live. But there wasn’t another roadside attraction to divert us and so we found ourselves at the Sudima Hotel in Christchurch, not far from the George where we’d stayed before (and would have again, had they had room for us). It wasn’t the Small Luxury Hotel that the George is, but it was a well-organised and comfortable room and the service was friendly and efficient.

During our free day in Christchurch, apart from writing this blog, my main task was to return the hire car. This had the potential to be complicated, as I had agreed, on taking on the car at Greymouth all those weeks ago, to return it to the airport rather than the city depot of the car hire firm. Our travel agent hadn’t managed to change the arrangement, and I couldn’t persuade the agent on the phone to Budget that I even had one of their cars, far less could make any change to its return location. So I drove it, via a refuelling stop, to the Budget city offices to discuss whether it was OK to just drop it off there. To start with, that was a very frustrating process because there was only one chap on the desk actually helping customers, but, for some reason, a couple of others drifting about Doing Mysterious Things that didn’t help at all reduce the queue of three people in front of me. The chap at the desk was being frightfully helpful to an elderly American couple who seemed to be having many troubles picking up a car; he even spent time explaining phone charging cables to the lady and helped her buy one from the machine on the premises. All this took about 20 minutes with the three guys in the queue and me exchanging ever more meaningful looks and raised eyebrows. I had just resigned myself to a long wait when a guy wandered in to the office with a key for a car he was returning and said “fuelled up, no damage; can I just leave the key here?” and the desk chap just nodded. So I followed this wonderful example, and got the nod from the desk chap that the airport/city dichotomy was not a problem, dropped the key off and hightailed it back to the hotel before they could change their mind. I haven’t received any credit card charge, so I am currently assuming that all is OK.

We treated ourselves to one more Decent Cocktail And Nice Meal at the George in the late afternoon, after which, to shake the food down, we went for a walk. Obviously. So we got a few more photos of Christchurch’s street art,

cafés,

handsome buildings;

Antarctic Heritage Trust HQ

scenes of riparian beauty,

and even a farewell wave from Robert Falcon Scott

before turning in for the night to get some sleep before the long journey home.

So, that was it for New Zealand. We’ve had a wonderful time, full of new experiences, sights and sounds; we’ve covered over 3,700km on largely uncrowded roads; and we’ve walked over 200km, including a couple of toughish hikes. The country is a delight for British tourists – well-organised for a wide variety of activities at a wide variety of accommodation types and it’s been a pleasure to be able to enjoy much of that variety. Slightly sadly, we head home; there will be no more entries on these pages for New Zealand. But fear not: we will be on the road again in about six weeks’ time and I hope to be able to bring you the exciting sights of our next trip here. Where are we going? Ah – you’ll have to keep in touch with these pages to find that out.