Joannes Benedictus van Heutsz was one bad dude. As Military Governor of the Aceh Province in what was then known as the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), van Heutsz set out to crush the twenty-five year old rebellion against the…
I visited the Söderfjärden on a warm, rainy August morning. The ten kilometers of road south from Vasa were perfectly clear except for two fearless foxes moving from one stand of Red Pine to the other. I had spent the previous several days in Finland's…
The irritating little Spaniard followed me onto the traghetto near dawn and we crossed the Grand Canal to the markets at Rialto. “I’m like your codega, amigo!” He told me again. “You know, I really don’t want you following me…
Hitler thought the Holy Grail was hidden somewhere inside a mountain in Catalonia. According to Wolfram von Eschenbach, Titurel safeguarded the Grail at Munsalvaesche. The Benedictine monks of Montserrat, however, always claimed the Grail was hidden in the caves and…
On a chilly afternoon in early April 1799, a group of large horse drawn sledges appeared on the ice off the coast of Oulu in Finland. They had come all the way from Sweden and the horses were tired. Clouds…
Museums in London are famous. From the British Museum to the Tate. From the National Gallery to Madame Tussauds. London museums have everything you want - and more. It seems that a return to Finland is in store late next…
Besides the intense urban-ness of Rotterdam, the thing that struck me about the Dutch city as I flew over in April was its connection to water. And I keep looking at this picture: Rotterdam is the second largest port in…
When you realize that Saint Bernadette most likely saw a fairy and not the Virgin you've made a key discovery about the very core of France. Bernadette indeed saw something in the cave that day along the roiling Gave de Pau…
Sometimes it is good to be lost. Van Gogh’s sunflower painting left from France on the mail steamer Binna in late May of 1920. It arrived in Japan on December 12 of that same year. The new owner, Koyata Yamamoto was…
The FULL Travel library is available here You already know we're book hounds here at Around the World in Eighty Years. Heck, the name itself is an ode to the literature of travel. I never go anywhere without a…
At the juncture where France, Germany and Switzerland meet, Basel is a city of intricate layers with around 166,000 inhabitants. Arts and culture lovers will be in heaven here amid the theatres, galleries and museums that form a major part of…
From the ancient stone villages and fortified chateaux of the Knights Templar dotting the foothills that turn to the great wine plains of the Gare, Garrone and to Aquitaine it looks like a lonely outpost of bristling towers and domes…