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The Mare a Mare Nord traverses Corsica from sea to sea. It's nearly 100 miles long (152 km), involves nearly 7000 metres of ascent and descent and took me 11 days. I sailed to Ajaccio, the capital of Corsica, on the west coast, and the walk climbed thickly wooded valleys before crossing the GR20 and the mountainous backbone of Corsica at the Col de Vergio. From Corte, the town in the middle of the island, the path follows mule tracks that link...

This trip in the early summer of 1994, like other trips we made to the Alps, is a tale of two parts. First we circumnavigated the Vanoise National Park. Created in 1963, it was the first national park in France and is the most bio-diverse with over 5, 000 plant species. It borders the Gran Paradiso in Italy and together they form one of the largest protected areas in Europe. We did the six-day hike with Val, a friend from Sheffield and had th...

Terra Firma - very large, about which nothing is known", was how Columbus described the mainland of South America. David finds himself on anything but firm ground when he arrives in Venezuela to work for Jordi's uncle Manuel, the Minister of Planning. Jordi's exotic family befriend him - the uncles who chased out the last dictator, the grandfather, too old for deep-sea fishing but still chasing young women at ninety. He finds cliffs to rock cl...

I visited Iran twice: in 2014 and 2015. On the first visit I went to Manjil and Bam, two cities devastated by earthquakes in 1990 and 2003. I wanted to see how they were recovering. It was difficult to get a visa and I had to go to the Iranian Embassy in Istanbul and then to a police station in Tehran to get them extended. It is a great privilege to see a country through the intimate daily lives of its people In 2013, on a mission to Japan, I ...

Offa's Dyke runs along the border between England and Wales. I walked from south to north, from Chepstow to Prestatyn, It took me 12 days. The Path was opened in 1971 by Sir John Hunt, leader of the 1952 Everest Expedition. For over a third of its 177 miles it closely follows the earthworks of Offa's Dyke. It falls into 5 stages, all different and equally interesting and challenging. It begins by following the course of the River Wye from its...

Preview Price: £6.92 (excl. VAT) Prints in 3-5 business days Aconcagua at nearly 7, 000 metres is the highest mountain outside Asia From the south it is a hard, dangerous climb. From the north, given good weather, it is relatively easy. In my twenties I read a book about three Polish climbers who in 1934 made their own equipment and climbed it by a new elegant route up the east ridge. It captured my imagination. Over thirty years later I ...

We went from the UK, as part of an Earthquake Engineering Field Investigation (EEFIT) mission, to study recovery after the 2011 Tohoku tsunami. This was a major disaster for Japan. For the country most prepared for earthquakes this was a shocking event that will take years and trillions of dollars to repair. Fifteen months after the disaster, when we made our field trip, recovery was already underway. New embankments were being constructed alo...

The Coast to Coast was devised by Alfred Wainright and first described in his guide published in 1973. He describes the route in 12 stages, it took me 13 days. I measured it as about 187 miles long (300 km). It traverses three national parks - the Lake District, the Yorkshire Dales and the North York Moors.The walk is extremely varied passing from the dramatic granite pikes and becks of the Lake District to the fascinating Westmorland limeston...

Zahlreiche Bücher zur Architektur befassen sich mit dem gebauten Ergebnis architektonischer Tätigkeit. «Architects on Dwelling» dagegen unterzieht den vorangehenden kreativen Prozess einer genauen Betrachtung. Die darin versammelten Beiträge erkunden, wie Architektinnen und Architekten die Häuser gestalten, die wir bewohnen, und wie diese in der Folge unsere Lebensweise beeinflussen, jenseits oberflächlicher Aspekte von persönlichem Stil und G...

The Pennine Way is a tough old walk. It's about 270 miles long (435 km), was the first National trail in England and is one of the most famous long-distance walks. I did it a couple of weeks before I should have, during the Covid pandemic of 2020 when the guidelines encouraged outdoor exercise but advised against overnight stays away from home. There was no accommodation or catering en-route and few shops open. I arranged two poste-restante fo...

I first met Maria Ximena when she talked about Cazuca, a barrio to the south west of Bogota and I visited Colombia three times. Working with young architects from the Universidad Piloto and a Women's Foundation we devised plans to improve the neighbourhood. I also describe visits to Cartagena, Santa Marta, Valledupar and the Tayrona National Park where I met and talked to Kogi Indians.

We went to St Petersburg in 2009 for a meeting on an EU project called ISAACabout heritage tourism. The May weather was marvellous and we stayed in a nice hotel next to the Fontanka River in walking distance of Nevsky Prospect.The high spot of our trip was a private tour of the Impressionist paintings inthe Hermitage and Russian art in the Russian Museum. The Hermitage Museum, founded in 1764 by Catherine the Great is spectacular - lavish, orn...

Terra Firma - very large, about which nothing is known", was how Columbus described the mainland of South America. David finds himself on anything but firm ground when he arrives in Venezuela to work for Jordi's uncle Manuel, the Minister of Planning. Jordi's exotic family befriend him - the uncles who chased out the last dictator, the grandfather, too old for deep-sea fishing but still chasing young women at ninety. He finds cliffs to rock cl...

In the summer of 2004 we went climbing with Dimitri in the Valle Garrafano in the Apuane Alps, a limestone area famous for its Carrara marble. Dimitri had been a tenant of ours in Cambridge when he had a sabbatical working in the University Library. We returned the following summer and were whisked off again to the rocky valleys of Italy's far northwest. We climbed in the Valle Maira and Valle Gesso in the Maritime Alps, Then we drove further ...

In 2003 we went climbing with Muni and Rose to Varasova, a limestone cliff in Greece east of Missolonghi. This 900m high promontory that drops into the Ionian Sea is the home of Greek climbing. There are over 200 routes, some sports routes of 3-4 pitches on the south face near the sea and some much longer trad climbs of up to 18 pitches on the south-west face. The rock is very solid, relatively sharp, mostly gray or yellow limestone of outstan...

The city of Van on the Silk Road in eastern Anatolia, Turkey. It was hit by an earthquake on Sunday 23 October 2011. People were killed and many more made homeless. I went there a year later to see how well the city is recovering. Scharlie, my wife, came for the first week in Izmir where we stayed with Bahar, a former PhD student of mine, and her parents. With the help of a guide, Harun, I visited Van and Ergi

We went to Ecuador to visit my daughter Frances. In Quito we stayed with Ecuadorian friends who introduced us to culinary delights such as calf's foot soup (good for hangovers), cow's udder (like eating Pirelli tyre rubber) and guinea pig (like roast chicken on a spit). We planned to climb volcanos, acclimatising slowly, starting from Loma Lumbisi at 3039 m and building up to Chimborazo at 6, 268 m. Although not technically difficult, they wer...

El Autana is a sandstone tepuy or butte about 400 miles south of Caracas in the Amazon Territory of Venezuela. We climbed the left hand ridge in the photograph in three days in 1974. A cathedral sized cave pierces the mountain from side to side, so that light shines through about 400 ft from the top. Like all good jungle mountains, this too has its indian legend. At dusk, when the sun shines through the cave that pierces the mountain from one ...

went to Vietnam at Vietnam at very short notice to do a job for the World Bank about housing reconstruction after Typhoon Damrey in Novemeber 2017. Others on the team were reporting on transport, irrigation, agriculture, fisheries and economic development.Unfortunately I pulled a calf muscle at dawn on day one running along Nha Trang beach, as shown in the photo, so I didn't see as much of Vietnam as I would have liked. Nevertheless I did go n...

An account of a trip to Thailand to test using satellite imagery to monitor long-term disaster recovery. We had two or three days in the hot and steamy concrete jungle of Bangkok and then spent a week in Ban Nam Khem, a fishing village on the west coast, that had been badly damaged by the tsunami. We had a day off and visited the fabulous 'James Bond' island in Phnag Nga Bay Phuket where Roger Moore fought Scaramanga played by Christopher Lee ...