Monthly Archives: September 2011 Even with someone else transporting your baggage, a hike in the French Pyrenees is no walk in the park! By Day 10 of our rondonné (“tour”) along the mountainous Cathar Trails in April, we were truly ready for a day off. I guess we are not alone, as the walk organisers have built an extra…  It’s seven o’clock on a weekday morning. A bus pulls up outside your house and eighteen foreigners with twice as many cameras spread out onto your street, taking pictures of you, your home and your children. How would you react? Now, if it were me, I’d be less than amused by what I would see…  In Canada, where I grew up, the shift between seasons was slow with subtly changing colours. I always associated red and green with Christmas: the middle of winter, against a backdrop of frozen white. Australia, on the other hand, is the opposite. Reds come out in spring and summer; a white backdrop is more likely…  Even though the ground passes slowly when you are walking, it is amazing how much that ground can change in the course of a day – or from one day to the next – on the Cathar Trail in the French Pyrenees, where tiny villages are connected by quiet country roads and ancient walking tracks….  Pai is one of those out-of-the-way and hard-to-get-to places that everyone seems to have been to. Situated in a lovely valley and surrounded by hills which are home to natural hot-springs, elephant camps and numerous ethnic groups (“Hill Tribes”), Pai has grown from a sleepy market town to a mecca for budget tourists, with plenty of… |
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