Tag Archives: UNESCO The Swiss city of Bern is indelibly associated with bears. The bear has featured on the city seal and coat of arms since at least the 1220s. Stories relating to the keeping of live bears in a Bärengraben (bear pit) in the centre of the city – in what is still called Bärenplatz (Bear Plaza) – date back to the 1440s (or 1513 – depending on your […]  It’s mesmerising: sitting in a rustic wooden boat, gliding across pristine emerald waters through a jaw-dropping karst landscape while listening to the gentle splash of the rhythmic rowing. The tops of the mountains are shrouded in cloud as a gentle rain falls. Bai Tu Long Bay in North Vietnam was designated a National Park in 2001. It adjoins the UNESCO World Heritage-designated Halong Bay […]  One of the nicest things about going to sleep on the water is waking up on it. I love waking up on a boat, well away from ‘civilisation’ in the middle of ‘nowhere’ – provided there is coffee! It was the morning of our second day on a beautifully fitted-out oak- and teak-finished Chinese-style junk, […]  <<Knock, knock, knock!>> “The cooking class is starting upstairs,” said one of the boat’s crew through a closed cabin door downstairs. “I guess the optional cooking class is not so ‘optional’!” I whispered to my husband, laughing. We were already standing in the dining room of our purpose-built traditional Chinese junk, waiting. I was keen to watch […]  Iceland, that tiny Nordic island nation in the North Atlantic, sits just barely outside the Arctic Circle and has more glacier-covered land than all of continental Europe. With a terrain that has been ground flat by successive periods of glaciation and rendered relatively tree-less by human predation, the winter landscape looks cold and white and eerily bleak from […] |
|
