Vincent van Walt's
Travel Journal

Un Barbiere di Qualita

August 9, 2018

I suppose that you would regard the Milano as a "bijou" Hotel. The room is tiny but well appointed and very comfortable and it is but a stone's throw from the Verona Amphitheatre.  Turn right and, if...

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Multnomah Falls

June 17, 2018

The highway A5 is the road that takes you from Seattle to Portland Oregon and runs more or less straight for some 180 miles. The rental company had upgraded us to an enormous 8 seater GMC; very thirsty,...

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Clay Cliffs and Ice Crystals

June 1, 2018

Mix the right sort of clay with cobbles, site them where streams and rain will erode it in a geologically short period, sprinkle them with minerals to tint the cake and you get the Clay Cliffs in Omarama,...

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Four countries in two weeks

April 29, 2018

Admittedly two of them are pretty small and we barely grazed French territorial waters but when you travel at an average cruising speed of 6 knots (six nautical miles per hour) and you have 400 miles to...

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Goodbye Varanasi and a train journey

February 10, 2018

We are templed out, stupaed out, mausoleumed out, mosqued out.

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Buddhist Tranquillity

February 8, 2018

An ancient Stupa is possibly neither a mausoleum nor a temple. Those Stupas were mostly completely solid structures. They did not contain burial chambers nor did they contain caskets of treasure. They...

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The Road to Varanasi

February 8, 2018

There is a highway of sorts which leads from Lucknow to Varanasi. It is about 300 km and so straight for the first half that the Romans would have been jealous. They promised us that it would not take...

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Lucknow the hidden gem of India

February 5, 2018

Part I - Lucknow by night

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A very organised chaos

February 4, 2018

Prabhat Singh is a fountain of knowledge and a scholar of Buddhist Iconography. I had to look up the word; a branch of art history which identifies, describes and interprets images. His information was...

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I cannot remember her name

February 2, 2018

She can't be more than 12 or 13 years old and we can only imagine what her life must really be like and I am ashamed that I can't even remember her name because I bet she can remember mine.

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