All articles filed in Thorgrim54

As the year rolls over from 2019 into 2020, it is a time for looking back and for looking forward. I set myself some walking objectives at the start of the year, and I guess it is time to review those. I am also looking forward to 2020 with optimism, and the hope that it…

I was in Ireland for Christmas, and on Christmas Eve, when calling to my sister, she mentioned that she and a few friends were planning to go up Lugnaquilla mountain the day after Christmas. She asked if I would be interested to go along. Now, I must say a couple of things about nomenclature here.…

Having walked in stages from Basel to Payerne, I just had one stage left to walk in order to meet up with the classic and official Via Jacobi that runs all the way from Lake Constanz to Geneva. And so I left Payerne on a cold December morning. This would be the easiest of all…

Sometimes I do a walk, and then I don’t get to write about it for a while. This is one of those times. I actually did this walk on Saturday November 9th, but for various reasons, I am only getting to write about it now, almost two weeks later. I was continuing my way south…

I have just returned from another visit to China, a business trip. While there, I was amazingly fortunate to have the chance to visit the Yandang Mountain area. Although the name suggests a single isolated mountain, Yandang Mountain is much more complex than that. It is an entire geopark, and is currently recognised by UNESCO…

Last Saturday, I did another marathon, my third of the year. This one was in Galway. The website for the Galway Bay marathon outlines that it is a flat course, and therefore, it supports fast times, so I was optimistic when going to the start of the course. But then it started to rain. Nevertheless,…

I set out again on Saturday, September 21st, heading south on the old pilgrims’ route that brought people from the city of Basel on their way to Santiago. My last stage had reached the town of Biel, and I decided to go on from there to the little town of Murten. However, while the route…

Taizhou is a modern city. It is representative of the modern China, the workshop for the world. In fact, it was here that the modern Chinese approach of socialised capitalism began. What was first known as the “Taizhou Experiment” was where communist China first began allowing entrepreneurs to try their skills. Because of all this,…

In the past, when looking at landscape paintings from China, they often seem to show towering vertical cliffs of almost impossible size. In those paintings, the mountains have a shape and form completely alien to someone who grew up looking out at the rolling hills of Ireland. Even in Switzerland, the limestone hills of the…

My route south continues. On August 18th I took the trail from Tavannes to Biel. It meant taking an early train from Basel, and I was leaving Tavannes with the sun just over the Jura peaks to the east. From Tavannes, the route slopes upwards, giving good views back to the town. The first place…