Tag Archives: rural 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 […]  Palm Sunday. Hotel Cartier, Quillan. My husband and I sat in the hotel breakfast room, people-watching surreptitiously over our coffee and croissants. The only other occupant of the room was a woman in walk-pants, about my age, with a round quirky face and short curly hair. She sat in a booth opposite us, unhurriedly drinking café […]  The English word ‘souvenir’ comes from the same word in French; in French le souvenir can be the memory itself, or, as it is in English, the keepsake in which the memory is signified. Photographs are my mementos, my souvenirs, but some of my clearest memories of our long walk in the Pyrenees never made it onto […]  Thailand goes to the polls this Sunday. For weeks, the streets of Bangkok have been lined with colourful political posters: posters with pictures of bland-faced politicians and their pork-barrel promises of fiscal payouts to just about every demographic; posters of “everywoman” in her tennis whites and “everyman” in his golf gear; posters depicting the candidates […] |
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