As always, when we travel we get up early. We were sleeping in a typical wooden house in Gosau Valley, Austria, close to Hallstatt, which is considered the most beautiful town in the world. We don’t know if it is true… we have seen so many beautiful towns… but for sure it is in the top10. From Gosau we took the car and drove towards the largest ice cave in the world. This is one of many must-see places in Salzburgerland, a land full of surprises!
Montserrat was once a delta of the Tetis Sea. It was before the growth of the Pyrenees, before the actual Iberian Peninsula and the rest of Europe merged. But then the tectonic forces pushed the Iberian plate towards the north and the land started to compress, fold and grow towards the sky. The Pyrenees were created and other mountains appeared where there used to be sea, plains or deltas. Nowadays Catalonia stands on the land that once was under the water and in the center of the country; Montserrat is still the light that guides the Catalans. It is our sacred mountain and a must-see place when you visit Barcelona.
There is an island where you can feel in the middle point between the heaven and the underworld, a place that you can only reach by boat and where the shrines seem to float on water. A World Heritage Site, along with the virgin forest of Mount Misen and numerous preserved shrines, monuments and historical sites makes you realize you are in a unique place in the planet. The perfect harmony between human beings, nature and spirituality that Japanese people usually do so well can be felt in every corner of this island, Miyajima Island, the Island of Gods.
From the boat we saw the floating Tori while approaching the island.
Summer is coming and, when it arrives, all Catalans use to go and bath in the Costa Brava –in our opinion, one of the finest landscapes of Catalonia. It may not be the typical exotic coast, but it has the incomparable Mediterranean charm of its cliffs and its plant life. The Costa Brava, which literally means “rugged coast”, is the scenery of our summer childhood memories. The coast follows the Catalan counties (comarques) of La Selva, Baix Empordà and Alt Empordà, all of them within the province of Girona, whose inhabitants have seen how fishing has been replaced by tourism as the main business of the area.
We love traveling because it generates the perfect conditions for having unique experiences. This is what happened in Didac’s trip to New Zealand.
If I met an alien and it asks me to show the Earth in just three weeks I would take it to New Zealand. The reason is that it is a country where you can find active volcanoes, incredible high mountains, sand deserts, jungle, glaciers, fiords, beautiful villages, a mix of cultures… everything! Traveling to New Zealand is like traveling to the five continents.
I traveled to New Zealand and rented a campervan for three weeks. I started in Christchurch, did a round route through the South Island and then crossed the Cook Strait towards the North Island. As you can imagine I cannot explain all my experiences in just one post, so I will explain just one amazing experience that everyone should do at least once in a lifetime: taking an helicopter to a high point of Franz Joseph Glacier and then start an unforgettable hike through the blue ice.
"There is a thing that makes any trip unique. We know that where we walk around, where we eat, where we sleep, where we take a rest or where we laugh are places that probably we will not visit again. Places that we discover while knowing that some seconds later we will no longer be there, in an ephemeral manner, but with the same enthusiasm as two kids discovering the colors." Mapping The Map
