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Eight hours, 291 kilometers, through 91 tunnels, over hundreds of bridges: this is the route of the Glacier Express, described by rail guru Seat61 as one of Switzerland’s two most scenic train trips. I had sampled the first before the pandemic, craved a return to Switzerland to round out the short list. Please regard this…
One unheralded day in 1992, among the young pines on the southern banks of Spain’s Buendía reservoir, Madrileños Eulogio Reguillo and Jorge Maldonado hoisted chisels to sandstone to commence the sculpture shown above. La Monja, they called it; they started a second sculpture, and a third. Twenty sculptures and bas-reliefs now grace the woodsy, 1.5…
Three days, 9/29 – 10/1, from Madrid to Jerez de la Frontera, Cádiz, Marbella, Almería, Cartagena, Alicante, Valencia, then back to Madrid. All behind the wheel of a rental car. “But why didn’t you take the AVE train for part of the trip?” Spaniards may wonder. “It goes to Sevilla and Valencia. 300 km/h!” Good…
Covid-19 has now killed more than thirty-one thousand in Spain and nearly a million worldwide. Borders have closed; I can still travel freely to some countries, but would have to navigate various hurdles to get into others, and see no guarantee that the number and nature of these hurdles couldn’t change before trip day. It’s…
Remote, poor, sparsely-populated Extremadura is the unrespected Rodney Dangerfield of Spain tourist destinations. It didn’t make Planetware’s top fifteen list for the country, or, for that matter, U.S. News’ top twenty. Rick Steves’ Spain ‘at a glance’ map represents the autonomous community’s 41,000+ square kilometers as a big blank area between Portugal and Toledo. Transit…
‘But is it safe to travel Egypt alone?’ Conocidos usually asked this question before any cheery yak about pyramids and King Tut. To many, ‘Egypt’ today means Arab Spring, mass protests, soldiers, mayhem, a coup d’état. Kalashnikov-toting riot police might misunderstand an elderly tourist’s intentions with a selfie stick. Couldn’t an old codger like me…
Doha is the capital city of Qatar, a pint-sized, filthy rich monarchy that juts into the Persian Gulf from the eastern flank of Saudi Arabia. I’ll wager that most Americans have never heard of it, and that the few exceptions associate it instantáneamente with Qatar’s sponsorship of powerhouse international news broadcaster Al Jazeera. I suggest…
Galicia is a Hawaii-sized state autonomous community on Spain’s northwest corner. I asked Spaniards if I should visit. “¡Por supuesto!,” said they, while suggesting that Galicia would be: (♦) Beautiful! Woodsy green hamlets fronting windswept Atlantic coastlines. Like that. (♦) Rainy! Maybe not as wet as San Sebastian, but up there. (♦) Relatively isolated. Spain’s high-speed…
Riga is the capital city of Latvia, a small-by-American-standards country in northern Europe. Now you know. I boorishly posted A Day in Minsk without telling you what, where or when a “Minsk” is, likely spurred irritable searches in browser address bars. Sorry. As if you didn’t already have enough grief in life without my bungling!…
Attractive, clean, safe, livable. Minsk deserves those adjectives. I was surprised. My parents would have liked it. I hesitate to flatter it this way. “Inside Europe’s last dictatorship” cries the 2012 Guardian headline about Belarus. “Better to be a dictator than gay,” responded leader-for-the-past-quarter-century Alexander Lukashenko, when criticized for his rights record by an out-of-the-closet…