Top 5 most beautiful places in Europe

Dubrovnik. Renaissance city of Ragusa and major rival of the venerable Republic of Venice. Tremendously pretty, it is justifiably Croatia's most visited destination. The sun glints off the broad limestone paving stones of the Plaça, polished smooth by generations of footsteps. Narrow hillside alleys of vines and laundry lead up steep steps between Venetian balconies and shuttered windows to the famous medieval walls.

I am only passing through Dubrovnik, on my way to Sarajevo. I've been here twice now, and I think it's one of the most beautiful places in the world. Having travelled to many places I don't say that lightly. Silver-coloured cliffs surrounding Dubrovnik drop into opaline water. Tall spears of mediterranean cypress tower like shepherds above flocks of bony olive trees on the karst rock.

And somehow Croatia produces stunning women—blonde jaw-droppers who would take the catwalks of Milan by storm, and probably do.

So this inevitably leads me to the following entirely subjective list:

The Solonaut's
TOP FIVE MOST BEAUTIFUL PLACES IN EUROPE

(in no particular order)

Dubrovnik, Croatia
One of the best preserved walled cities in Europe. Maybe the best. Tourism has grown considerably in the last five years, but even amid the summer throngs it is easy to find a quiet bar in a lane, such as Caffe Soul, to drink local fruit brandy to the serenade of a live guitarist or watch an evening performance of a chamber orchestra in the chapel of Saint Saviour.

Oia, Santorini, Greece
Those famous photos of Santorini—white domed chapels with blue crosses and low, square houses barnacled above an azure sea—are taken from Oia. The island bakes in a delicious heat in summer. It is the only place I have ever been tempted to kick back with a beer and a book on a deck chair by the pool to overlook the caldera. I deliberately missed my departure ferry to stay. Pronounced ee-ah, Oia is probably my personal favourite in this list, above Dubrovnik.

Venice, Italy
Go back a thousand years in time. Tall fourteenth-century Gothic buildings usher you between piazze and you walk and walk and walk, down tall lanes, between palaces and churches, over bridges and under arched overhangs, and there isn't a hint of the modern world anywhere. You get a sense of how powerfully wealthy this state once was from the vast and sumptuous collection of paintings in the Doge's Palace—one after another gilt-framed Tintoretto, Titian, Veronese. It's like feasting on too much chocolate.

The Vézère and Dordogne valleys, France
Go in October, in wool coat and scarf weather. Leaves from woods of oak turn brilliant orange, yellow and brown in autumn and flock like starlings in the wind. Chateaux stud the hills and charming villages grace the valleys, such as the riverside La Roque-Gageac, the dramatic cliff-hugging town of Rocamadour, and the magnificent medieval Sarlat-la-Canéda, where I lodged for a week in a 16th-century tower.

Lucerne, Switzerland
In late spring, Lucerne is storybook. Yellow flowers whiffling in green meadows. Shaggy highland cattle clanking cowbells. Bright sun and blue sky. Tall evergreen trees. Snowy mountains. White swans on crystal waters. It's ridiculous.

An American tour in Paris

Why do tourists humiliate themselves? Here comes an American-run tour, thirty strong, stopping and queuing for ice cream. Against the fashionable Parisian backdrop of women in easy backless summer blouses they've been decked out one and all in reflective yellow vests like a kindergarten class on a roadworks excursion.

The Paris Five

At the foot of the Pont Saint-Louis on the Isle Saint-Louis, across from the red awnings of La Brasserie de l'Isle Saint-Louis and beside the red-awninged cafe Le Flore en l'Ile, overlooking the Seine and overlooked by the Cathédrale de Notre Dame, at perhaps the most charming, most Parisian spot in all of Paris, I was arrested by five young men in their bare twenties—sporting van Dykes and waistbands that fell below underpants elastics—on flute, clarinet, guitar, two-piece drum kit and double bass, jamming in the long summer light on "Memories of my Father" like a seasoned jazz quintet.

Shakespeare and Co.

Books for sale plaster the walls of the most famous bookstore in Paris, Shakespeare and Co., a running maze of ceiling-high bookcases that tower to the ancient rafters in perpetual overflow in a two-storey, one-time monastery.

Upstairs is a reading room where the books are not for sale. Having been acquired as collections, often as estates, many are old and out of print.

In the corners are worn and cracked leather seats with collapsed cushions and shredded arms from the claws of the resident cat, and in one of them is me, reading passages from the out-of-print Selected Prose by Henry Miller amid the sparkling motes of morning light.

The sole window in the reading room is open to the fresh air and overlooks a small cobblestone path below that trickles out through a narrow garden and into the traffic of the Quai de Montebello. Beyond is the Seine, above it Notre Dame.

An old portable typewriter, maybe a Remington or a Royal, sits in front of the window atop a table where a young woman, consumed, captive to her notebook, scratches pencil scribbles into the morning quiet.

And suddenly a swarm of tourists who have heard of Shakespeare and Co. squall up the stairs and into the room, wheeling around us and clicking like chattering birds. They snap photos despite the signs requesting they not and pose in front of books they don't touch, spewing loud, vapid commentary and filling their iPhones with images of what their lives are not so they can be admired by those at home.

I am practically pushed aside by a vulgar American so she can pet the cat—"hey, kirty kirty!"—before she turns to her fat friends and yells "time-check! How are we doing for time? We need to make up ten minutes!" In waves they come, as they are drip-fed into the cramped aisles from their queue of uncouth on the cobblestones outside.

Then they clatter back down the narrow stairs and are gone. As the tempest clears and quiet returns, emerging at the foot of the bookcases across from me is a boy of nine or so sitting in an old wooden folding chair, unperturbed amidst the whirlwind, absorbed in a story.

There is hope for humanity yet.

The city of sorrows and living

Paris. It's one of the few places in the world I return to. This is my fourth time.

I love Paris. People ask me why, but it's for personal reasons that would be meaningless to anyone else. It was here where I had my heart, for the first time, truly broken. I was stood up on the Pont des Arts, the romantic pedestrian bridge which today is literally strained by that recent and tawdry phenomenon of love-locks. I sat in the Place des Vosges, sobbing a spectacle as I wrote a goodbye letter to the girl I loved.

Paris was cold. It was February and there was fog along the Seine. I was 26, I wore a second-hand woollen trench coat that the moths had started on, a narrow pin-stripe suit I found at the Salvation Army, and a new fedora I'd splashed out on.

My room was a crooked and peeling late night desperation at the top of five flights of dark, winding stairs. I was barked out of it in the morning in a language I commanded only in fragments, for using the shower, I think, without paying the extra francs.

I checked into the hostel on Rue des Bernardins under an assumed name instead and met a Dane who gave me ten francs on my last day there because I hadn't eaten in two days. I devoured bread and cheese gratefully, and cured it to something concrete with liquid yoghurt.

I played chess in the Jardins des Luxembourg. I eschewed the Eiffel Tower and wandered the lanes of the Quartier Latin. I shared strawberries with a stranger on a park bench and was invited to her house for coffee, where she practised her English discussing the recent election of a socialist parliament in France.

Today the thing I look forward to the most is tomorrow—breakfast of croissant, baguette, cafe au lait and jus d'orange at a table I shall own for hours.

It is the living here. The French live for now and eternity. They embrace artists, musicians and writers. What is the point of struggling every day like a rat treading water so you can one day enjoy your life? It is already here! And struggles will always come with it.

Language

In major cities, it’s easy to get by with English.  Too easy.  Speaking foreign languages is one of the joys of travel.  Too many English-speaking tourists turn up in Venice or Paris and speak English.  You can't.  That's cheating.  Aussies are as guilty of this as Americans or the Brits.  You’ve got to make an effort.

But the effort does become draining, and the language barrier is isolating.  Spaniards are reticent to speak anything other than Spanish, and in provincial Andalucía you won’t get much else.  Luckily, my basis in French gets me by with Spanish, and it is probably my favourite language to try to speak.

In Bruges, English is so widely spoken it could be considered a second language after their Flemish Dutch (the national language of French is equally well-spoken, though pride is at stake due to wars with France).

Portugal and England share the oldest alliance in history, and English is widespread in urban areas of Portugal.  It is sporadic in rural areas.  The elderly, urban or rural, don't speak it at all.

My biggest surprise was Croatia, which easily has the most widespread English of all the countries I toured.  It is taught to children in school from young, and the standard is high.  This was a bit of a relief, because I have no knowledge of any Slavic language.  I was out of luck when I found that just over the border in Montenegro, English is not spoken at all, and I had to depend on my Croatian phrase book (for sensitive cultural and political reasons, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian are all officially different languages, but linguistically they are close dialects of the same language).

When I reached France, it was with a mixture of comfort and trepidation.  I actually speak a little bit of French, so I could have simple conversations.  But I also know enough grammar to know I’m getting my conjugation wrong or that I don’t know which participle to use.

Remembrance Day at Villers-Bretonneux

On 25 April 1918, at a cost of over 1,200 of their lives, Australian soldiers repulsed a German force apparently ten times their number at Villers-Bretonneux, the last point of defence before Paris on the Western Front.  The citizens of this little town declared their eternal gratitude to these men in a moving speech by the mayor.  The primary school, rebuilt with money raised by schoolchildren from Victoria—called the Victorian School—has emblazoned above its blackboards, “N’oublions jamais l’Australie”—we will never forget Australia.  And they never have; ANZAC Day is observed religiously to this day.  They dub the town l’Australie en Picardie, and it has been called by Australians the Gallipoli of the Western Front.
Remembrance Day, once known as Armistice Day, the last day of “the Great War,” is a national holiday in France.  This and the last day of The Second World War are of great importance to the French, as so much of their soil was battleground.  On November 11th, we visited the Australian National Memorial outside Villers-Bretonneux.  Several groups of Aussies trod softly past the sombre rows of graves either side of the French and Australian flags to reach the tall, white tower flanked by two chapels and a memorial wall engraved with the names of the Australian fallen in the battles of the First World War.  While we were there a French family with three young ones also paid their respects, the parents gently reprimanding the children when they became too boisterous.  We gave them little koala bears.

Parisian Cinemas

One of the things I really like about Paris is the number of little cinemas, mostly in the Latin Quarter, which play classic films.  Just around the corner from our hotel were playing two films by Sergio Leone, one of my favourite directors: the well-known Clint Eastwood flick “For a Few Dollars More,” and the not-so-well-known “A Fistful of Dynamite” (a.k.a. “Duck, You Sucker,” and a few other confusing titles).

It was very cool to immerse myself in a late screening of “Dollars” on the big screen.  Another cinema was playing several Hitchcock films.  In 1998, I came across one filmhouse which had been playing Casablanca continuously for many years, but I wasn’t able to find it this time.

Paris

Mai Li and I spent the final week of my trip in Paris, where it was averaging 8° or 9° Celsius.  It seems such a short time since I was being scorched by the 40°C Andalusian sun.

We kept warm with plenty of walking.  Paris is made for it.  The famed city planner Baron Haussman laid out broad boulevardes in the 19th century, though not for the enjoyment by the pedestrian masses but rather to suppress them; the narrow medieval bottlenecks they replaced prevented soldiers from effectively responding to the riots which led to the French Revolution.

The Promenade Plantée, a garden footpath slicing through the Bastille elevated on arches, was originally a railway after Napoleon III approved a right of way through the city.  Today it is a favourite spot for locals to jog or stroll.  We walked half of its four-kilometre length.

Another transformed right of way is the Canal Saint-Martin, controlled by a series of locks and once a highway for transporting food and other goods on barges.  It is now used for tourist boats.  A long stretch of it has been enclosed and covered with gardens, and a film on the history of the canal is projected onto the brick walls of the tunnel from the boat.  This and one or two locks are the most interesting; the rest of the two-and-a-half hour trip is frankly a little boring.

Gouffre de Padirac

The Gouffre de Padirac (Padirac Chasm) is a navigable underground river in the Lot départment, east of the Dordogne.  It begins at the bottom of a a 75-metre deep sinkhole, a huge cylindrical shaft which was once a cave before the ceiling fell in eons ago to leave a massive lightwell almost half its height across.  Three separate lifts and a scaffolding of metal stairs have been built against the walls to reach the floor of the chasm.

It was drizzling on the drive there.  It had been raining for days, so we were carrying umbrellas and rain jackets.  By the time we parked the car the rain stopped , but Mai Li asked if we should bring the umbrellas.

"Pff," I mocked. "We're going underground. It doesn't rain underground."

Indeed it does.

After wending us through corridors of limestone on a subterranean passage of water coloured jade with silt, our guide moored the flat-bottomed boat and led us up the corkscrewing ballroom stairway of the enormous Grand Dôme.  Water fell more heavily than the showers outside from the nearly 100-metre ceiling into the Lac de la Pluie, the Lake of Rain, below us, soaking us on the way down.

The 60-metre tall stalactite called the Grande Pendoloque, the Great Pendant, dips down to just two metres above the surface of the lake.  Limestone formations congealed over millennia on the cavern’s tiers look genuinely organic, like broad mushrooms or a Chinese Juniper bonsai, and in the pools that collect on the cascading plateaux smooth natural weirs form, curving so artistically that we debated over whether it was man-made.

The cave complex is vast.  Two journeys by boat, long passages by foot and hundreds of stairs represent only a tiny fraction which is open to the public.

The Dordogne

Three hours west of Lyon by train I picked up another car and arrived in the Dordogne départment of France in the full of Autumn.  I haven't had a Northern Autumn in over ten years, and the Périgord Noir county and the Vézère Valley is wooded with oak forests.  The countryside is orange, brown, yellow and red and threaded with bermed, winding roads, perfect for driving a stick shift.  I'm soon slaloming through falling showers of oak leaves.  I've driven into my Windows desktop wallpaper.

It is also home to the medieval city of Sarlat-la-Canéda, a preserved and restored living representation of 14th-century France.  I based myself in an apartment here for a week.  A few days later Mai Li arrived to besiege chateaux, spelunk caves, and indulge in fois gras and confit du canard before idling away the last week of this odyssey in Paris.

The day Mai Li arrived, it rained for the first time in the region for six months.  Scattered Autumn showers pestered every day thereafter, but were a cakewalk after the Adriatic vortex.

Where there is Man there is art, and where there is art there is graffiti

The Vézère Valley in the Dordogne region of France is littered with limestone caves, 25 of which are decorated with paintings estimated to be up to 20,000 years old, the earliest known example of painting.  The most famous of these is the Lascaux complex of caves, discovered in 1940 by some boys looking for their dog (actually, it was discovered by the dog himself, Robot, who had fallen in).  Comprising nearly 2,000 figures, primarily of horses but also of stags, bison, and aurochs (ancestors of modern cattle), it has been dubbed "the Sistine Chapel of Prehistory" and includes the famous Painted Gallery and the Great Hall of the Bulls.

The only other polychromatic paintings discovered in the valley are in the Font-de-Gaume cave, depicting bison and horses again but also mammoths and, the principle food source of the time, reindeer.  The best known images from this cave are a frieze of five bison and "the sexual parade of the reindeer," where a stag is smelling the head of a kneeling doe.  The natural contours of the cave walls were exploited to emphasise the hump of a bison or the belly of a horse.  (Photography is disallowed, so here's a picture from a government website.)  Sadly, yet again this is artwork defaced by graffiti, this time from the 19th century, where bison paintings at the fore of the cave have had names carved into them.  It's difficult to excuse, but it has to be said that the paintings had not been scientifically observed at the time and there was no comprehension of their age or significance.

Another site, Grotte de Rouffignac, is sometimes called "the cave of a hundred mammoths."  An electric train takes visitors into a ten-kilometre deep complex of painted mammoths, horses, ibex, and even rhinoceros.  I hugely regret that I missed this.  On 30 October, I set out late to see both Font-de-Gaume and Rouffignac, but had to wait for over an hour at Font-de-Gaume because they limit the size of the tours.  This is understandable; when Lascaux was discovered there was no such limitation, and the change in air quality from 1,200 visitors a day caused the development of a green fungus, la malaise vert, and a white calcite crystal, la malaise blanc, to damage the paintings.  This in turn led Lascaux to first limit numbers of visitors, and then to close permanently in 1963.  Indeed, there is suggestion that this may happen with Font-de-Gaume; the tour guide showed us an example of a white fungus growing on the wall.  The only way to appreciate Lascaux today is to visit "Lascaux II," an impressive centimetre by centimetre three-dimensional reproduction of the cave built into the hillside beside the original, with the paintings exactly reproduced using the same pigmentation and techniques.  Of course, knowing it is a facsimile unavoidably detracts from the awe, and the experience becomes a slightly carnivalesque appreciation of the facsimile itself.  Nevertheless, it is sympathetically and tastefully executed.  But with the delay at Font-de-Gaume and the closing for the season of Grotte de Rouffignac on 01 November, it was too late to return another day.

Nazi war crimes

In 1944, in the Limousin region of France, was a small village of about 670 people called Oradour-sur-Glane.  On June 10, it ceased to exist.  The village and all but twenty-odd survivors were wiped out by a German Waffen-SS company en route to intercept the Allied advance following the D-Day landings at Normandy.  All the men were rounded up into barns and machine-gunned, and the women and children were corralled into the church, which was then set alight.  The town was then razed.

Today, the Village Martyr has been preserved exactly as it was left that day as a memorial to the victims and the atrocities of war.  A rusted car is parked in the street beside the single disused tram line, power poles still supporting snapped, coiling cables.  Deformed bicycles and Singer sewing machines are strewn inside the collapsing stone shells of houses.  On the tiled floor of a broken boucherie lays the prostrate scale on which the family's evening meals were once weighed by the butcher for the village wives and mothers.  Even with the visiting tourists, the streets have an eerie quiet.

There is some debate over the exact circumstances of the massacre, but it appears that the battalion commander, Adolf Diekmann, believing the kidnapped German Sturmbannführer Helmut Kämpfe was being held by the French Resistance in the town, exceeded his orders to take 30 hostages and instead ordered the population be exterminated as a "just retaliation."  Though his actions prompted protests within the German army, including from Field Marshall Rommel, Diekmann and much of the company which had committed the massacre were never tried; they were killed in action shortly afterward in the Battle of Normandy.

Lyon

My rule of thumb when travelling is to stay in the old part of town.  By definition it is the most historical, so typically has the highest density of things to see when you walk out of your hotel door.  The average cost of a room is slightly higher, but in almost all European cities cheap accommodation can still be found in the centre.  This remains true of Vieux Lyon, "old Lyon," where the cheap rooms are in bed and breakfasts and auberges, but despite that mid-October is well out of the July-August peak season, all ten or so of the B&Bs I rang were full.  Mai Li and I had similar difficulty finding vacancy when we were in Lyon in April 2007. Despite it being France's third largest city, there must simply be a dearth of accommodation in the old part of town, which would explain the high prices of the hotels, but after three-and-a-half hours of faffing around just to find a bloody place to stay I relented and threw €135 a night at the Collège Hotel.  Included in that was free wi-fi, water and Coke from the refrigerator in the hall.  I don't even drink Coke, but that night a drank my bloody money's worth.

France: Avignon, Rhone Valley; Switzerland & Italy

Well, here we are in Florence. Yes, that's right. We decided to skip Siena instead. I like to say that we came to our senses that it would be folly to come this far and pass right by the birthplace of the Renaissance, but the truth is that it was more a logistical decision; it just would have been a pain in the arse to get to Siena after already having been on the trains from Switzerland for seven hours. It's a pity, since Siena is meant to be "charming," according to the Lonely Planet, but another consideration is that accommodation is harder to get there.

Back in Carcassonne, the lady at the little shop where we bought our absinthe gave us a sample of these little white lollies which were really tasty, called pastilles au lait d'anesse. My French is only average, and it wasn't until I was eating one on the train from Switzerland that I realised this translates to lollies made of donkey's milk.

Florence is, as expected, overwhelming. Everywhere you turn there are incredible sights. It's a shame that the morass of tourists one needs to wade through almost ruins it. This isn't even high season, and they are thronging. We plan to catch a bus to San Gimignano tomorrow (27 April) and spend the day there.

Okay, catching up....



On our way to Avignon, we saw the Pont du Gard, a massive Roman aqueduct which is nearly twice the height of the one in Segovia. We didn't do any sightseeing in Avignon; the only thing we did was laundry before heading to the Roman theatre in Orange. Then we drove up the Rhone valley and stayed in two little ancient mountain villages: Alba-la-Romaine, dating from Roman times where we stayed in a 200-year old stone B&B; and Pont-en-Royans, built at the end of a gorge at the foot of the mountains with old houses built hundreds of years ago perched on the side of the gorge, propped up on stilts angled into the canyon wall.

We had by this time already extended the rental of the car by a day, and we were still running behind my itinerary, so we decided that the breakneck pace we were setting was too much and agreed to scale back. We would skip Vienne, blitz Lyon, leapfrog Geneva and Bern and head straight to Lucerne. Lyon was a very charming city; I would like to see it sometime! We also decided to skip Venice and Verona. Alas.

Next chapter: Switzerland; but for now, I won't get a chance to update again until after Rome when we are in Paris, from 01 May.

France: Toulouse, Carcassonne, Montpellier, Sommières...

We've just arrived in Lucerne, Switzerland, and we plan to stay here for three days before heading down to Interlaken and the Jungfrau region for another two days. This is a change from our original plan because we've been moving so fast that we haven't had any time to stop and enjoy these places. So, we've decided to bail on Venice. Shame, but oh well.

After returning the rental car in Cordoba, we caught the fast train back to Madrid and flew to Toulouse, France. Somewhere in between a baggage handler who either likes or dislikes Australia cut Mai Li's securely stitched Australian flag from her pack, leaving a bare spot bordered with frayed threads. We arrived at night and were booked into a nice little hotel, but wandering the streets was a bit dodgy. We were followed at least once, and I reckon twice.

We picked up a car the next day and drove to Carcassonne, about an hour out. This was one of the most memorable stops so far -- a 13th century fortified city. We stayed within the city walls, and had great food for dinner -- cassoulet, a regional specialty. We also picked up a bottle of absinthe, complete with slotted spoon and sugar cubes, but haven't got stuck into it, yet.

What was next... it's all a blur... we tried to get to Montpellier, but driving in these European cities can be a nightmare. We tried to follow signs to hotels and they just led us out of the city, so we said "screw you, Montpellier!" in slightly more colourful language and spent the night in some crappy suburban motel. When we get to the little medieval town of Sommières the next morning, not thirty minutes away, we discovered they'd had the annual bull run through the streets the evening before, which would have been brilliant. Still, tough to beat a crappy suburban motel.

Next chapter: Avignon, the l'Ardeche, Lyon....