Wayback
Acropolis, Athens
Beograd, Yugoslavia
The train journey from Venezia to Athens was overnight; note the working steam locomotive in the engine shed in Beograd (Belgrade) even in 1981. Athens was a culture shock, a bustling business city, not only even hotter, another currency and another language but another alphabet so we had trouble even reading the signs. We stayed in a hostel and found we picked up crabs from the beds but enjoyed a boat trip for a day out to the island of Aegina.
More photos: Athens - Olympia - Kalavita. Inter Rail 81 pt 2
Pompeii and Vesuvius
Brindisi (I)
My camera stayed stowed for the overnight boat trip from Patras to Brindisi. We slept on the deck outside. Italy seemed so much tidier and lush compared to the parched Peloponnese. Brindisi even had palm trees, our first on this trip.
We next pitched tent outside Pompeii and explored the ruins, very hot. But we were now on a schedule to get back to London for work. Sleeping on the train was cheaper than camping and saved a day so we took overnight trains from Napoli (Naples) to Milano (Milan) and slept on the luggage racks in the corridor, then an early morning train to Brig in Switzerland and pitched tent in a comparatively luxurious campsite that I’d used before in Brig.
More photos: Pompeii - Kandersteg - Paris. Inter Rail 81 pt 3
Arrival at Firenze (Florence) railway station (I)
Camping at Koblenz on the river Mosel, then Nürnburg (D)
An Inter Rail ticket gave almost unlimited travel on European railways for a month for the Under 26’s in the days before cheap air travel.
More photos: Kôln - Koblenz - Firenze - Pisa - Sienna - Venezia. Inter Rail 81 pt 1
I enjoyed a week hiking on the Indian Ocean island of La Réunion in November 2008. The hiking in and around volcano craters was spectacular but the climbs were tough. I stayed first at Saint-Gilles-les-Bains, the first couple of days were cloudy in the mountains, eventually I got a hike up from le Maïdo. Then I moved to Cilaos, but had to return early due to an Air France strike.
We were hiking a trail in the Lamar Valley in north-west Yellowstone National Park: it’s a wide alluvial valley with lots of grassland, which was giving me serious hay fever. Lamar Valley is also habitat for a number of Yellowstone’s biggest animals, which is why we hiked there.
We were following two hikers, Terry spotted a bear ahead, we froze to see what would happen as the bear had already spotted us. I suppose it knew the route hikers would usually follow. The hikers up ahead carried on, I’m not sure they had yet spotted the bear. The hump on its shoulders characterised it as an adult grizzly, so maximum caution. Of course we didn’t have the binoculars with us as we were hiking light, but I did have my telephoto lens which I swapped on to the camera as quickly as I could.
More photos: Grizzly bear encounter - Yellowstone National Park - June 2000
