General

Sicily & the Aeolian Islands (Italy)

Normandy (France)

Portugal

The first week of our stay was overwhelming with Baroque, Roman, Greek and Norman and other cultural heritage. Unfortunately for us, most of the Baroque villages were in repair with UNESCO funds and many attractions could not be visited, but it will be splendid once these renovations are finished! Fortunately, we went in the beginning of September and the tourist season had ended.

Occasionally "nature trips" were made to escape the cultural treasures a bit! The trip to the "Pantálica", which features an impressive gorge with thousands of caves, forming a necropolis was very nice.

A very good pass-time is a visit to a traditional puppet theatre in Palermo, where the knights Orlando and Roland fight for the honour of the princesses and against the Moors. Some of the dolls have "special effects" and the during the fights the music cheers you up!

The second week was dedicated to the Aeolian Islands and we had to visit the Stromboli. It was our desire to see a live volcano once (click here to see more on Cornelia's list of "things to do"). We dropped one backpack at a restaurant and took the other one up with sleeping gear, determined to sleep at the rumbles of this exclusive natural hazard (very forbidden).

Blessed with a completely cloudless sky we mounted the Stromboli. The sensation of climbing the Stromboli is very strange: at a certain moment you start hearing rumbles every now and then, accompanied by little black dots in the air, far away. Only later you start to realize that "little" here probably comprises any size starting at a fully grown refrigerator or so!

Then at about six o'clock we were well settled on the "panoramic ridge" were it is supposed to be safe. We watched open-mouthed for hours. It was very sensational, each twenty minutes you feel trembling, hear an eruption and the darker it gets, the better you see it. But you never know whether it is going to be a "big" one  or not, which keeps it a bit of a sport.

At about ten o'clock, so many guides had told us to really get back down, with all kinds of threads and warning for potential danger of falling rock, that we decided to follow their advise. This would also enable us to catch the five o'clock morning boat off the island; apart from the beach and the volcano it has not much to offer.

Now this was different than going up: pitch back, at the top no real path, and only one small torch allowed us to do maximum of three meters at the time per person. But we managed to be down within two hours and slept under a beautiful sky full of stars on a public bench.

For a long first of November weekend we went to Normandy and a bit into Brittany. The weather was exceptional, bright sunshine and nearly twenty degrees, it could have been summer, ensuring entire Paris had come to join us for the weekend. We did a real tourist-tour:

- Êtretat, a small village famous for its water eroded cliffs forming. We found ourselves a neat room in the hotel "L'Aiguille Creuse", called after the French bestseller in which the gentleman-villain Arsène Lupin uses a rock structure, hollow in the story, for evil purposes. At night we walked the cliffs, which are very high and magnificent.

- Le Havre where we visited the start-off quays for; "La Route du Rhum", one of the famous boat races Fabrice would love to sail and Cornelia would rather not, considering financial consequences of eventual mishappenings with such boats.

- Honfleur historically a very rich city which is very nice and which would be nicer still if there were not so many tourists.

- Bayeux with it's famous (and very nice) tapestry

- We carefully avoided all WW II beaches and WW I & II cemeteries

- A drink in a cafe with a very romantic view: we sat on the terrace seeing the sunset behind the Mont-St.-Michel.

- Lunch at the beach of Pirou on which boats are lying dry during low tide, followed by a visit to the medieval Pirou castle (very charming!).

.... and from that moment on, all hotels were fully booked. We looked for a place to sleep but that was completely impossible. Then we turned in the direction of St.-Malo, considering that it was having far more beds. Also there, all beds were taken, no matter what we tried. When someone told us that he knew still a hotel with one room empty at one-hundred-and-fifty kilometer drive, we decided to first visit the fortified city of St.-Malo and then sleep in the car.

St.-Malo is famous for its piracy past; the great Surcouff (I read about in my youth) made the city a wealthy place. We walked the streets and imagined life there three centuries ago and finally dived into a bar. And this was the place! Run and visited by bar-flies, not only was there still a room for rent, it was immense and furnished with an old bric-a-brac of furniture: this was the last pirate-bar in the old St.-Malo!

The next day we visited Mont-St.-Michel; it was loaded with tourists at the entrance, but after a while it seemed that it was how it should be: anciently a market must have been kept there, also very crowded. Getting further into the village, it became less crowded, on some places at least. We visited the abbey and the church, a part of the beach and looking from the ramparts we imagined the people coming in a procession to the island, crossing the bay at low tide. It was magnificent!

Portugal is now especially known for the beaches in the Algarve (where I never have been). The country has much more to offer than just beaches: a great of cultural heritage; beautiful churches, palaces and castles and charming rural villages, scenes and lively cities. The Portuguese themselves thrive more on their heroic past, that of the great sea fare conquerors, ruling Brazil, Angola, Moçambique, Macao, half of Timor Madeira and the Açores. The latter ones still are Portuguese.

Portugal has changed a lot in the past thirty years. It became a democracy after the revolution in 1974, but it was very poor and very inverted. When I arrived in Oeiras in 1989, Lisbon was nervously reacting to this strange milky-white giantess (I'm 1.76m; they all were 1.50m). Café's fell silent when I entered, then started to hum in excitement until I made clear my Portuguese was quite well-developed and they'd shut up.

Ten years later the only special reaction to my appearance is a drug dealer who wants to sell hashish to a tourist. The Portuguese youth has grown; I was the tallest in class at school in Oeiras, but now eighteen year olds look down upon me, as they do in the Netherlands. This is good: now I finally can buy clothes there. Before, that was a bit of a problem!

Some of the other lovely places I visited and loved were:

- the old city of Lisbon with its Castello and Sé (the oldest church in town, present in many old Portuguese city centres) and the old neighbourhoods where life changed a lot less in the past century...

- the city of o Porto, where Port-wine is only one of the treasures

- Sintra, not very large, but it proudly presents two palaces, impressive remains of one old castle some very nice restaurants and a bit further lovely Atlantic beaches underneath the cliffs.

- Coimbra on of the eldest universities of Europe. In may the students celebrate their diplomas during the one-week-lasting feasts of the Queima das Fitas (burning of the ribbons). This includes a parade (at which's end the ribbons on the diplomas are burned) where the entire city eagerly consumes the (mainly alcoholic) gifts of the students, bull fighting in the bath-town Figeira-da-Foz (no bull killing in Portugal; torture suffices) and the nationally famous Fado de Coimbra at the stairs of the old Sé.