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Snorkelling Ningaloo
The scene The Ningaloo Coast is where outback, reef and ranges meet. Here, on the northwestern fringes of Australia, 745 miles above Perth on a rocky thumb of a promontory that juts into the Indian Ocean, great ochre canyons and stretches of flat, red earth slip into water that’s as bright blue as a kingfisher. This is also where marine giants meet — among them whale sharks, humpbacks, southern right whales and orcas, and mighty mantas with 26ft wingspans. These oceanic giants, turtles and some 700 species of fish await just offshore, often within paddling distance of the beach’s windblown dunes. The latter form part of the remote Cape Range National Park, but Ningaloo steals the show. As the planet’s largest fringing coral reef, it grows from the shoreline for…
Island Hop
SWEDEN HAS 267,570 islands, by some counts more than any other nation in the world. They’re so ubiquitous that the Swedish word for island is one letter: ö (pronounced “uh”). Perhaps that’s why Swedes consistently rank near the top of happiness indexes; there’s plenty of options to leave the world behind and surround yourself with the healing properties of water. The largest cluster in Sweden, the Stockholm Archipelago, has 30,000 islands. Once a sheltered trade route for the Vikings, the archipelago became a haven for Swedish glitterati in the late twentieth century. Greta Garbo had a summer home on Ingarö; Björn Ulvaeus from ABBA penned “The Winner Takes It All” in his hideaway on Viggsö. Now there’s a way for the rest of us to enjoy this summertime haven: The…
LET'S VÉLO!
We’re heading north, and I’m the sweeper. I wait for the other 20 cyclists to secure paniers and wheel away before mounting my e-bike. I’m secretly delighted to bring up the rear of our group, forced to go slower than my bike’s turbo setting of 25 kilometres per hour. I feel the sun and breeze on my face, smell the earthy brackish wetlands and admire fields of red poppies, their crèpe-like petals waving as we pass. I’ve enjoyed e-biking trips on three continents, and the chance to clock some kilometres during a leisurely week of cycling and sightseeing in the scenic south of France was too good to pass up. I’ve signed on with the Italian leisure company, Girolibero, for a one-week bike and barge journey that begins on the…
