Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Guides’ Category

The castle at Chantilly is one of the small collection of spectacular chateaux in the general Paris region. Yet, there’s a whole lot more to it than that as you can see from our Whole Earth entry on it.

Perhaps surprisingly, the castle houses one of the foremost collections of historical paintings in France and yet it receives relatively few visitors for that collection.

It’s easy enough to get there from Paris and very worthwhile too. Not only do you get a chateau, there’s the magnificent gardens and the artwork thrown in too!

Not that I’m running out of photographs but I thought that it was time that I started on the regional guides for our Whole Earth Guide so after a little enhancement of the code for the site, the Languedoc-Roussillon guide made its debut this evening.

It mightn’t look terribly spectacular but that simple enhancement is the first step to let me start integrating the guide into the various B&B/self-catering listings sites though I’ll need to run up a few more regional guides to make that worth doing. Courtesy of the way which the software works, you’ll see at least one detailed article for each of the regions which I roll the guide out to.

Still haven’t made a bean on the guide as yet but hopefully that’ll begin to change over the next month or so as the various articles are coming pretty well on google searches.

Although we’ve been living in the Languedoc-Roussillon for getting on for four years now, we’ve only seen the Pont du Gard for the first time yesterday.

How come? Well, the Languedoc-Roussillon region is really strung out and the Pont looked a long, long way from us. In fact, Wendy didn’t believe that it would only take us a couple of hours to drive there yet, as usual, the Mappy was just about dead on.

The perfect time to arrive at the Pont is in the early afternoon as you can see. That has the light falling on the aqueduct just about perfectly.

As you’d expect there are loads of water based activities on offer around the area yet strangely it doesn’t seem overlly touristy as the relatively few tourist shops are confined to the visitor centre complex which isn’t visible from the aqueduct itself.

We’ll be running up a full article shortly for Whole Earth Guide but don’t wait around for that if you’re in the area: just go!

I’ve been writing more articles for Whole Earth Guide and it’s starting to pay off in terms of traffic coming onto the site.

Already, I’m sitting at number two when you search google.co.uk for “giants causeway pipe” for instance. Now, that might not sound like a terribly common search and you’d be right in thinking that, but on the other hand WEG doesn’t even have a pagerank yet so it’s darned impressive that it’s coming out at number two on anything at all.

I’m hoping to keep plugging away with around three or four articles per week over the Winter with the latest being our first draft of what will eventually become a major article on the Cathar castles.

Coming soon are the first of the regional guides for the site which I’ll be adding to as I work my way though the various articles planned for the site.

I’ve already added the first of the invited articles (on Hawaii) and hope to collect a whole lot more of those as the site grows. Why not be the author of the next one? All that I need are about 300-400 words plus a photo on a city or attraction somewhere amongst the countries presently supported for the site which can be added here; you will, of course, receive credit for the article.

Thanks to dreadful flight times, I decided to stay a day in Manchester on the way back here.

Manchester aiport is a brilliant place for flight connections as all three terminals are within the one complex which includes access to the city via bus and train services too. The airport is so close to the city that you’ll often find it takes you longer to walk to the bus/train station than it does to get into the city itself. That closeness makes the price quite low too so it’s under a fiver for the return trip.

We were lucky enough to have timed our trip to coincide with the Manchester Pride events which, as you can see, include a very colourful parade through the streets. As usual with parades, the traffic before and afterwards is something of a nightmare but the small size of the city meant that we could easily walk back to the train station.

Also very pleasant is the free bus services which cover the Manchester city centre area.

We’ve just added Manchester to our Whole Earth Guide where you’ll find more information on the attractions of the city.