Travel stories, quotes and fun facts

Bargaining badly

I accepted the second price and the seller looked genuinely disappointed. He explained that the negotiation was the point, poured tea, and gave me a better price than I would have got.

The Alps are still rising

The Alps grow roughly a millimetre or two a year as Africa pushes into Europe, though erosion removes almost as much.

The Danube passes ten countries

The Danube touches or crosses ten countries and four capital cities, more than any other river on Earth.

The felucca captain's nap

The wind died and our captain tied off the sail, lay down on the deck, and slept for forty minutes. We drifted backwards. When he woke, the wind came back within five minutes as though he had ordered it.

Life is either a daring adventure

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.

Europe's largest canyon is in Crete

The Samaria Gorge runs sixteen kilometres to the Libyan Sea and narrows to just four metres at the famous Iron Gates.

The Camino has many starting points

There is no single Camino. Pilgrims walk from France, Portugal, Seville or their own front door, all converging on Santiago de Compostela.

Sunrise on the Nile

Twenty balloons went up at once over the Valley of the Kings. From the ground it looked like the sky had been decorated. From the basket it was completely silent except for the burner.

Northern lights need dark and luck

Aurora hunting works best between September and March under clear skies far from town lights, and even then patience matters more than equipment.

The best view

The best view comes after the hardest climb.

The bus with no timetable

The bus left when it was full and not before. Full meant something different than we expected. We made friends with everyone in three rows and arrived eleven hours later knowing four words of Amharic.

The midnight sun never sets

Above the Arctic Circle the sun stays above the horizon for weeks in summer, and locals often play football at two in the morning.

Hallstatt has a salt mine older than Rome

Salt has been mined at Hallstatt for around 7,000 years, and the world's oldest wooden staircase was found preserved in the shafts.

Coffee three times

The ceremony took an hour: green beans roasted in the room, ground by hand, brewed and poured three times. Refusing the third round, we were told, is a small insult. We stayed.

Take only memories

Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints, kill nothing but time.

Sintra's palace has an inverted tower

Quinta da Regaleira hides an initiation well, a spiral staircase that descends 27 metres into the earth instead of rising.

Bruges froze its own skyline

Bruges lost its sea access when its channel silted up in the 1500s, and the resulting poverty accidentally preserved its medieval centre.

Priests in the rock

A priest unlocked a church cut down into the ground and held up a cross older than most European cathedrals. Then he sat back down on a plastic chair and continued reading his phone.

Ghent banned cars from the centre

Ghent removed through traffic from its historic core, and shop revenue and cycling both rose in the years afterwards.

Leave no trace

Leave it better than you found it.

Tallinn's old town is nearly intact

Tallinn kept most of its medieval walls and 20 defensive towers, one of the best-preserved Hanseatic centres in northern Europe.

The gorilla that walked past

We were told to stay seven metres away. Nobody told the silverback, who walked within an arm's length of my knee without breaking step. The guide's only instruction was to look at the ground.

Riga is an Art Nouveau museum

Around a third of central Riga's buildings are Art Nouveau, the densest concentration of the style anywhere in the world.

Crossing the equator twice

The sign said equator and a man demonstrated water draining in opposite directions three metres apart. The physics was nonsense and the performance was excellent, and we tipped him anyway.