"A walker's dream": Plaka, Crete, Greece. Photo credit: Randolf Rautenberg
Each Monday, powered by Globalista, we bring you the best of the weekend’s travel pages. Looking for an escape? Look no further.
To walk or not to walk
“A walker’s dream“ is how poet Henry Shukman, writing in The Financial Times, described Crete’s South Coast: “The walks here never end. There are ancient paths all over the terrain. You could spend months on end threading between the mountains and the sea, among the goats”. Half a globe away is more walking: Little known except to local residents are “hundreds of miles of hiking trails” within an hour’s drive of major urban areas in California, revealed Bonnie Tsui in The New York Times. And, if you’re tired of walking, one of the most famous places of pilgrimage in the Christian religion, Santiago de Compostela, is not only for walkers: “If you don’t want to do it on foot, you can let the train take the strain on a 12-day railway excursion with Explore,” explained Bob Maddams in The Guardian.
On the trails of lost Pygmy tribes and De Niro
On the Trail of hope for Uganda’s lost Pygmy tribe, The Guardian Simon Collis followed Uganda’s Batwa cultural trail and had the “increasingly rare opportunity to see the forest as it has been viewed for millennia, a vastly complex combination of larder, medicine cabinet, home and temple.” Following de Niro’s footsteps in Sicily, The Independent Sankha Guha reached Toaormina where he checdke into the new hotels and had the chance to sleep in “the presidential suite, recently occupied by Robert De Niro during the Taormina film festival”. Risking the wrath of a Volcano in Java, The New York Times writer Edward Wong explores Mount Ijen and the other volcanoes that form the spine of Java which “offers travelers a chance to understand how geology has so deeply influenced the lives and culture of the people who reside in the highlands.”
Feet in the sand
Unlike the Dutch and the German, “The British haven’t really cottoned on to the great beaches and fantastic food that’s almost on their doorstep,” wrote Jane Dunford in The Guardian about Belgium’s summer beach secrets. Feet in the sand, The Guardian James Stewart enjoyed The barefoot biergarten in Hamburg: “Strandpauli is one of seven outdoor beach clubs that make Hamburg the coolest summer city in Germany. While landlocked Berlin swelters, the other German metropolis is all balmy North Sea breezes and barefoot boozing in beach clubs.”
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