Over the hills, under the moon - and off the beaten path

Where can you find this pastoral idyll just a mere twenty minute walk from the center of a capital city. Only in Edinburgh, I guess Inside the Holyrood park, just next to Old Town, I was amazed to stumble upon the ruin of an old chapel high up on a rocky ledge. A few more minutes of  further walk and I was climbing the slope of an extinct volcano. Arthurs Seat is described by Robert Louis Stevenson as ‘ a mountain in virtue of its bold design’ ,and even though the climb doesnt bring you to the top of the world, the view of Edinburgh, the Firth of Forth and the distant mountains of the Highlands is so amazing, you're allowed to indulge yourself with a few selfies. Most climbers do!

We're standing at the Hadrian wall, looking north. The hills and moors of Northern England seem to stretch forever into, what looks like wildling country. My friend Ole and I have for the past few days been walking along the ancient fortifications, which were erected almost 1900 years ago on the order of  Roman Emperor Hadrian. The walls were meant to protect the Roman empire from the Northern Barbarians and they stretched from sea to sea, crossing valleys and mountain tops During the following centuries the fortifications were used as  convenient quarries and although many of the original 24 million stones were used to build  castles and farm buildings all over Northumberland, significant portions of the wall still stand and they can be followed along the adjoining Hadrian's wall path The path is almost empty for wanderers, as the weather the last few days has been quite miserable. Strong winds and violent rain showers have been w...

  Michael and I have now spent a few weeks in our village in the Ardeche. Just relaxing, reading and, for my part, getting a bit more fit after my knee operation, by taking longer and longer walks in the surrounding mountains Not much happens as the village is coming out of its winter hibernation. An old man is seen scuttling down the alley. Bon jour You throw another “ bon jour” at the woman passing by as you start the first of your daily walks uphill towards Saint Roche - the chapel that was built to express the villagers' gratitude for having survived the plague many years ago. At the  walk today  I had violets to look at and each day I find a new flower blossoming  - like yesterday an abundance of  yellow anemones. The ditch is still full of chestnuts from last fall and from the torn up mud, you can see  that  wild boars must still be coming down to eat whatever is  left. These micro expe...

When Rita couldn't fly out with me to Hong Kong, she gave me a mission (should I choose to accept it!). The mission was to contact one of the city's infamous 'villain-whippers'. These sorcerers are known for putting spells on villanous people - and Rita had a certain person in mind (think politician - not mentioning any names in an open forum!) Coming to Hong Kong, the question was, how to find these three sorcerers in a city of almost 8 million? Well - this IS magic, and last night, I just happened to walk past them. Purely by coincidence! There they sat. under an overpass in the Causeway Bay neighborhood. Three elderly women, doing the 'Da Siu Van' - whacking paper effigies of bad guys with their slippers.  Surrounded by candles and burning sticks of incense, they looked like the three witches of 'Macbeth'. I sat down on a rickety plastic chair. Presented one of the women with a copied photo of the particular villain, Rita had...

It has been this way for centuries. Every year, on the 15th evening of the eighth lunar month, the small, secluded Hong Kong neighborhood of Tai Hang is the center of an awe-inspiring dance of the flames. That evening was yesterday - and I was lucky to be one of the many running around the narrow alleys, while a 67-meter blazing dragon was carried around by 300 local men. The ceremony is part of the traditional Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival, where the city parks are filled with lit paper lanterns and  where friends and families gather to enjoy an evening of the full moon. In the parks, it is a family event - in the alleys of Tai Hang it is a ritual of flame and fury. You first hear the drums and gongs - and then the beast, the mighty dragon, winds its way with burning cput into its long hemp-rope spine. It is prompted along forward by two so-called 'pearls', two burning balls of fire swinging on the end of long sticks.   Sometimes the procession moves...

When I look out the window from my 22nd-floor apartment in Causeway Bay, the view is filled with glittering lights from the high rises surrounding the Hong Kong harbor. Anchored boats are gently rolling on the water below me. Lots of cars are driving by on the Wai Chan Bypass It all seems so romantic, but it is - literally - the quiet before the storm. Mangkhut, the fiercest typhoon ever to hit Hong Kong in all of recorded history, is just hours away and I, coming from a peaceful Denmark, which was never hit by any major natural disasters, have no idea of what to expect. The last few days, CNN has been wall-to-wall about the storm Florence, which was hitting Florida. Hundreds of thousands were evacuated and as far as the news was concerned, the US storm was a matter of life or death. The Mangkhut  typhoon, coming our way, is so strong, it should  make Florence look like just a mere puff of wind, but here in Hong Kong, I see no preparations ...

I just walked past a palm tree, but it was not in Hong Kong, where  Michael and I had been planning to spend this  Autumn. The tree, I walked by, is standing on the harbor in a windswept, small, Danish fishing village   How come I'm here?  Well, as they say, life is what happens when you're busy making other plans The other day, hours  before our planned departure for our several months long stay in Hong Kong, I visited my doctor for a routine check-up - and I was immediately put up for further examinations, as my blood pressure turned out to be pretty high We thought it would just postpone my flight for a couple of days and Michael took the scheduled flight out to arrange everything in the Hong Kong apartment, we had rented. Now it turns out, my high blood pressure needs some medication - and the doctors have forbidden me to travel for some time. What to do?     Our flat was sublet to another family, the Danish autumn had set...

We're on our last day in Paris, and the stay has - once again - been a gorgeous experience. Friends, who haven't visited the city for a while, have asked us about how it is evolving. For some, Paris is probably now synonymous with armed police surveillance and  dread of terrorist attacks, of migrants camping in the streets, of piles of filth and garbage, of Paris, as one put it, being turned into a sh*thole! OK. There ARE people sleeping on benches or wrapped in cardboard boxes, but as far as we can see, most of them are not African migrants or fugitives. Most seem to be ethnic French, who have fallen through the security net of the welfare state, and even though the street people are far too many, the wast tent camps, which we, just last year, saw erected below the bridges along the Seine have now disappeared. There ARE complaints about people pissing in the streets (and even more complaints about the many, quite ...

Michael has a dream of exploring the catacombs below Paris - but his dream doesn't include standing in a long line of tourists waiting at the official entrance. He wants to find a secret manhole somewhere, which leads down to some of the 300 kilometers of labyrinthine tunnels, which lie below most of central Paris. People called cataphiles are actually exploring these labyrinths - but I have nightmares about him climbing down into slimy darkness and perhaps on his way back finding out that the manhole he entered had been closed shut from the outside. No way! Luckily he found another way to be a trespasser and explore  hidden parts of the city without going underground The Petite Ceinture (“little belt”) is a disused railway line which traces the 32-kilometer perimeter of Paris. It was built about 150 years ago and now long abandoned. Today most of the tracks are quite inaccessible and off limits, overgrown  and forgotten, ...

  This is how we do when we walk the streets of whichever place we're visiting: We choose a point of interest as our goal and then we stroll serendipitously towards it - looking behind corners, down alleys, inside courtyards - perhaps even wander so far off course, we never arrive to our original goal. This time our goal was the Ozenfant house - the first Parisian house built by famed architect Le Corbusier. The search for this house let us deep into 14 arrondissement, which - besides Tour de Montparnasse and the entrance to the catacombs - is probably not on the itinerary of many tourists. The 14th turned out to be a lovely place to wander around - the Parc Montsouris was so pretty on a sunny afternoon, with its lake and great lawns. We found the Ozenfant and I took in all the fantastic details - but just from the outside. The building is privately owned and not open for visitors. Right next to this modernistic masterpiece, we ventured down Square Mo...