#adventure travel
Jewells Chambers moved to Iceland in 2016, and is the host of the popular podcast and YouTube channel All Things Iceland, giving you the inside scoop on Icelandic nature, culture, history, and language through the eyes of an expat living in the country.
It was so fun to chat with Jewells! In this episode, we talk ice climbing; how to deal with 23 hours of sunlight; interviewing world leaders; the challenges of learning Icelandic; her experience as a woman of color in Iceland; and so much more.
Find out why Jewells loves Iceland - and why you might learn to love it, too.
Available anywhere you get podcasts or https://bit.ly/LWYLep51
Early starts aren’t nice. They’re even worse when you wake up in a cold sweat imagining you’re trapped in Chernobyl and history has repeated itself. Thankfully, it became clear that hadn’t happened when I woke up, but it did leave me unable to get back to sleep from about 4am, four hours before my tour began. Perhaps that was my subconscious telling me that I was a little more apprehensive than…
Québec 2021
Things come to an end, but memories last forever.
Here’s one last video log for the year. Once again, all thanks to film shootings this last August, I got the chance to visit the capital city of Québec. It was my first time visiting; it’s really true what they say about its beauty! Thanks as always for watching.
Here are the locations you will see in this video:
- Québec VIA Rail Train Station
- Grande Allée
- Plains of Abraham Museum
- Plains of Abraham
- Martello Tower 1
- National Museum of Fine Arts of Quebec
- Battlefields Park
- Citadelle of Québec
- Parliament Building
- Fortifications of Québec
- Saint-Jean Street
- Place d'Armes
- Frontenac Castle
- Monument to Samuel de Champlain
- Frontenac Stairs
- Cathedral-Basilica of Notre-Dame de Québec
- Old Quebec
- Royal Battery
- Quartier du Petit Champlain
- Old Quebec Funicular
Blue-black sky of the high Atacama desert
The air’s thin, the landscape’s stark and the architecture’s austere.
Image: Jorin Sievers
Post link
As we sailed to Ullapool across a lake-smooth Minch, it became clear that autumn had started without us. The road to Inverness – a stretch of the NC500 packed with camper vans – wound through tall trees that were already golden brown. The strong winds that would have shoved and shaken us on the Hebrides were softened to the rustle of a branch. I have really, really missed trees. We stopped at Corrieshalloch Gorge and walked the wobbly suspension bridge, with the bizarre perspective of seeing a waterfall from directly above. The whole woodland glowed.
In Inverness we visited Leakey’s Bookshop, a crazy emporium where tall bookshelves teetered perilously close to the woodburner. Then we tried a deep-fried Mars bar at the chippie that claimed to have invented them. We ordered and the kid behind the counter said: “Salt and vinegar?” M and I looked at each other – when in Rome, do as the Romans do, I guess? – and then the kid said “oops, I didn’t mean to say that,” and we sighed with relief. Though who knows, maybe it would have been an improvement.
The start of the Great Glen Way to Fort William was a beautiful road, threading through the woods. Loch Ness sparkled grey between the trees. We set up camp on its pebbly shore, and rain began to drum on the tent. It poured all night and much of the next day: driech weather (the only Gaelic word I’ve learned).
We picked up General Wade’s Military Road, the ‘first straight road in the Highlands’, which shot up a ridiculous hill. Modern builders had put a bend in it so the gradient wasn’t quite so severe, but you could see the old road merrily ploughing straight on. We laboured to the top in driving rain and then a voice shouted over the wind: “Would you like tea or coffee?"
Standing in the doorway of a camper van was our saviour, Doug, on holiday with wife Sam and daughter Shona. They brewed us a coffee and said they were on their way to Skye to swim in the Fairy Pools, which sounded extremely cold. We wished each other happy adventuring and zoomed downhill to Fort Augustus to drip-dry in a pub. We tried to time our exit to dodge the next shower but it started up again. "Ahh, if it’s not shite now it’ll be shite later,” the barman said cheerfully.
Towpaths, forest tracks and old railways took us from the foot of Loch Ness, along the shore of Loch Oich, and onto Loch Lochy. Tiny whitewashed lock-keepers’ cottages peppered the canals linking them. We camped under the boughs of an old oak on another section of General Wade’s road, down on the lakeshore. The 18th century road was overgrown by grass and bushes but it was absolutely solid: we couldn’t stick the tent pegs in more than an inch, and had to weigh the tent down with stones. Then came a bizarre noise like the rumble of thunder and a military jet came tearing up the loch, so low we could have repaid the day’s favour and offered coffee to the pilot.
The woodland was dripping wet in the morning and I stuck my foot into my trainer and encountered an enormous black slug curled up in the toe. It was an inauspicious start to a rather miserable day on my part, and I was very grateful to get to Fort William. The weather finally lifted and we were bathed in golden evening sunlight. Ben Nevis rose above with snow right at the top. The soft light faded out and we could hear stags bellowing mournfully to each other in the trees.
The weather app said it was 1C when we woke up, the skies crystal clear. We caught the Corran ferry and then picked up Route 78, the Caledonian Way cycle path, all the way back to Oban. We span along the remains of another old railway line with frost in the verges where the sun hadn’t yet reached, and then a beautiful woodland path. We stopped for a sunny pub garden pint with a view of Castle Stalker, and then returned to Oban’s ferry terminal for the next round of island-hopping.
Read the next Island Hopping blog: Way out West
Really wild camping. Bostagh Beach, Scotland
When it rains in the mountains, it really rains. Not a fine mizzle or the odd shower like we get in England, but a biblical, all-engrossing rain that pelts down from the sky and sends rivers running down the mountainsides in great waterfalls that flood the roads and make planning any sort of activity quite impossible.
Such is the unpredictability of the Accursed Mountains, a corner of Albania whose curious histories and unique way of life woven amongst its limestone peaks will forever keep us coming back for more.
This fascinating mountain range was so named for its wildly inhospitable conditions, and is one of the rare mountain ranges in Europe that is yet to be fully explored. But mountaineers with their compasses and maps will never truly conquer these mountains, for the only way to truly navigate them is with a lifetime of muscle memory, ingrained into mountain men from the age they learn to walk. There are few roads, no signposted trails, and no forgiveness; if you get lost and the weather doesn’t get you then the wolves surely will.
But while the mountains may ward you off with their inhospitality the people will surely not, as they are perhaps some of the warmest and most welcoming in all the Balkans. With no fear of strangers and no reason to lock their doors some three hours away from the nearest town, they will happily invite you into their home for a coffee and a rakia before you continue on your journey.
The Albanian Alps possess a deep sense of mystery that fascinates us and seems almost tangible as we pull off the craggy SH25 alongside the Drin river, unwilling to drive any further in the torrential downpour. The thunderstorm would not pass until tomorrow evening when we would be rewarded with another spectacular Albanian sunset, but before that we would endure a night of lightning strikes powerful enough to knock out the area’s only phone mast, and thunder that shook us violently inside our van; if you’ve never heard thunder in the mountains before, imagine someone dropping about thirty dustbins off the side of a cliff at once. It booms.
It felt all at once overwhelmingly exciting and familiar to be back in the North of Albania once again, parked up so close to an area we’d become so affiliated with that had played home to one of our favourite travel stories. But now we were about to make more, as we were set to be heading off the road and into the furthest reaches of these mountains on foot, a place where vehicles could only dream to go and mules were the primary mode of transport.
Soon we were going back into the heart of the Accursed Mountains.
