Each Monday, powered by Globalista, we bring you the best of the weekend’s travel pages. Looking for an escape? Look no further.
Sculpture in Faulconbridge Park, New South Wales, Australia. Photo credit: Yeyenwi
Culture and art lovers’ travels:
Avignon hosts France’s best art festival from the 7th of July. The whole city is bustling with day and night drama, dance, and music performances. Taking place alongside the festival, “the Off is the city’s answer to Edinburgh’s Fringe: a bacchanalian mix of street theatre and shows”, wrote Harriet O’Brien for The Independent in her 48 Hours In: Avignon column. Meanwhile, Paul Sullivan in the Financial Times recommended the G!, the Faroe islands’ version of the Glastonbury festival in the sea village of Gøta with its cute, turf-roofed houses where “You can bathe in the Atlantic ocean, or sit in a sauna while your favourite band is playing only a few metres away on the main stage.” Art and leisure was also the main focus of Tom Chesshyre, in The Times, who considered the 20 best hotels for art lovers, from Devon to Tasmania. “Stay in a sculpture park or a hotel with a curator, and you can soak up culture from the comfort of your room.” Finally, Adam Begley in The New York Times suggested that we follow Henry James’s footsteps in Tuscany, producing an alternative Tuscan guide, Henry James Walked Here, inspired from James’s essay “A Chain of Cities” in which he describes “his springtime wanderings in Assisi, Perugia, Crotona and Arezzo — all neatly arranged within easy distance of one another.”
Into the wild:
A return to wilderness proved very attractive to travel writers this week. Starting with Switzerland, where Tom Whipple from The Times experienced “the joys of naked hiking”, 2,000m up a Swiss mountain, where enthusiasts have just won the right to roam freely. The writer reported how naked hikers “love to feel the sun on all of their skin” but stressed the necessity of all-over sun cream. In search of sunlight and enlightement, Lydia Polgreen from The New York Times discovered “one of the wildest, most remote and peaceful corners of one of the world’s bluest seas” up in the Turkish mountains where she spendt blissful days “hiking, swimming and staring out at evergreen-clad mountains flanking azure waters.”
Away from humans:
Wilderness in Wales on horseback is what Alexandra Buxton got up to in The Guardian:“Our trip was organised by FreeRein, a family enterprise that (…) provides horses, accommodation and a choice of dozens of off-road routes in mid-Wales and beyond.” Away from sprawling crowds and human tracks, Robin Oakley in the Financial Times took his binoculars Birdwatching in Papua New Guinea, a hotspot for birdwatchers which he claimed to be “the ultimate destination, the one to do before you die (…) Papua New Guinea is a birder’s nirvana.” In a similar vein, Tim Pozzi discovered La Palma, the “other side of the Canaries” as he wrote in The Telegraph: ”La Palma, essentially a giant volcano thrusting up from the ocean floor, is something else: fecund, unspoilt, and sparsely populated.”
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