Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Guides’ Category

One of the long term aims I have is to be able to sell photos from our little collection of sites as we tend to build up quite a collection of photos in the course of developing the likes of our Pyrenees Guide and, on a grander scale, our Whole Earth Guide.

For the guides themselves, the little Nikon Coolpix 3700 was more than enough. Whilst 3mp mightn’t sound much these days, you don’t need anything like that for the internet and in fact even the largest images on the websites is under 1mp. Even those 300,000 pixel cheapo cameras have much more resolution than is required for internet use.

However, it’s quite a different matter when you want to sell the photos as prints or whatever.

So, we had a bit of an upgrade last year to the 6mp Nikon S10 which is an excellent little camera and one of the few which offer x10 zoom on a compact digital camera. It’s certainly improved the photos that we’ve taken since getting it quite substantially, it’s still limiting us in terms of potential future sales of the images we take.

Anyway, ’twas time to really up the ante and so as of next week we’ll be starting to use our brand new Nikon D40x which takes us up to 10mp and will give us a whole lot more flexibility. In fact, the resolution increase is much more than it seems as there are all kinds of settings on the camera should let us produce prints up to poster size.

Now “all” we need to do is to wait for the perfect lighting for the photos…. the weather at the moment is more like the depths of Winter than mid-Summer!

I’m hoping to rope people into writing articles for the Whole Earth Guide in exchange for a link to their own website (or just for the fame that it’ll bring if they don’t have a website).

Anyway, my first volunteer has produced a truly excellent article on Hawaii which puts my humble effort on London to shame.

Still, ’tis early days and I will be gradually upping the ante with the quality of articles that are planned for the coming winter.

If you’d like to contribute to this effort, you can add your contribution here (select “Whole Earth Guide” as the property type and don’t worry about the talk of charging etc.).

As usual on the first weekend of August, the traffic has been heavy here since shortly after breakfast and it’ll likely stay that way until early tomorrow morning.

How come?

Well, it’s the start of the holiday season in France and a number of other European countries so everyone has jumped in their car this morning and started driving. As you’d expect, by the time they get to the south of France they’re both tired and cranky (a bad combination for a driver, of course) and therefore the number of traffic accidents also leaps this weekend.

It’s best not to attempt to drive anywhere on this particular weekend. Just about every road has traffic way above the capacity which it was designed for and the queues are correspondingly long and wearisome. The queue on the left of the photo is created by having three lanes of traffic at 130km/hr going down to two lanes at 10km/hr at the border which has the overall effect that the queue gets longer and longer as the day goes on (at the time of the photo in the late afternoon, the queue was getting on for 50km!).

You might be thinking that you can avoid the traffic by going on the side-roads. Think again: everyone has already thought of that and the side roads are just as busy. Those using in-car navigation aids will find that the queues on the recommended routes are even worse as a lot of people are using those these days and, of course, they always recommend the same route.

One of the best ways to see Paris is from a cruise down the River Seine which runs right through the city.

There’s quite a selection of cruising options of course. Day cruises let you see the sights but don’t have quite the romance of the evening cruises.

Now, you might think an evening cruise would cost a fortune but, whilst not exactly cheap, they’re far from being the ripoff that they could so easily be and you can have dinner on an evening cruise for under EUR 100 which is pretty good value considering that you get a good meal with the cruise thrown in.

The evening cruises usually offer a choice of early and late. The later cruise is by far the best option as you’ll have the chance to see all the illuminations as you have your meal. For a truly fantastic evening, July 14th is hard to beat as that’ll include the Bastille Day fireworks but even on a normal evening you’ll see things like the Eiffel Tower illuminations.

In France, it’s called “le quatorze juillet” but everywhere else it’s definitely Bastille Day on July the 14th.

This is the biggest celebration in France and, whilst it’s marked by processions everywhere in France, Paris is definitely the best place to see it.

The centre of Paris becomes a huge pedestrian zone over the course of the morning up until the parade is finished. The metro system usually isn’t fully operational either and the stations close to the route are closed in the run-up to the start of the parade around 10am. After the various roadblocks are removed, the traffic is much worse than normal (hard as that may be to believe if you’ve experienced the normal Paris traffic!). Therefore, to see the parade you’ll need to be staying somewhere within walking distance of the centre; it’s not too late to book a hotel and there’s also the option of one of the network of apartments, many of which are quite central (we stayed in the Citadine at Les Halles).

Unless you’re up very early, you’ll probably get a better view of the parade in one of the side streets rather than attempting to force your way through the massive crowds along the main parade going down the Champs-Elysee. You’ll miss seeing the president if you do this but realistically you’ve little chance to do that anyway as the best spots are taken up very early in the day. If you’re really set on seeing the president, the thing to do is to walk to the Elysee Palace just after the parade where you’ll see a continual stream of dignatories heading in for lunch.

The evening sees the fireworks show based around the Eiffel Tower. The crowds here are massive but that doesn’t matter as by far the best way to get to the perfect spot is on one of the evening dinner cruises down the Seine. If you choose the second sitting, the boat arrives at the perfect spot just as the fireworks are starting. Although the prices obviously aren’t cheap, they are far from the astronomical level that you might expect on such a day and sailing down the Seine on the evening of Bastille Day is by far the most civilised way to end the day.

What about the Bastille itself? Well, the prison was demolished in 1789 by the revolutionary government and today Place de la Bastille is a massive roundabout.