But if you want a cultural experience utterly foreign to the average Australian then accept an invitation to a popular city beach or swimming spot near a major population. This is, to the average Australian beachgoer, as instant coffee is to the Australian coffee snob or as a British national park is to an Australian wilderness area.
Europe 2017 (Episode 4): A Holiday Oxymoron – Visiting Mljet – another undiscovered Mediterranean Island
Like military intelligence, the living dead, found missing and Microsoft Works, the concept of an undiscovered Mediterranean Island is about as near to reality as Australia being the Clever Country.
Europe 2017 (Episode 3): The Balkans: Beauty and the Beast – from Dubrovnik to Sarajevo
To travel through the Balkans is to experience both its beauty and its heartbreak; the people are welcoming but beneath the surface are hundreds of years of brutality and genocide. All played out against a landscape as beautiful as any on earth.
Europe 2017 (Episode 2): Florence – Avoiding Peak Tourist
There is no rest in Florence from the madding crowds....except choosing the right time of day and a 20 minute walk away from the city centre. Rules for the Idiot Traveller: anytime before 8 am is a good time to visit tourist spots and any place more than a kilometre from the key tourist attractions is a million miles from the madding crowd.
Europe 2017 (Episode 1): Corsica for short people, the credit card-less and mirror manufacturers
Somewhere in Corsica you will find the bodies. The poor fools that travelled up the Cap Corse without cash. Ostensibly we are in France a modern, 21st century nation. But not in Corsica. No you are in anti-France where the French are just more foreigners, credit cards are a yet to be discovered means of paying for things or, alternatively, a trick to be played on innocent Corsicans by tourists and the Italians (Genovese) were simply invaders that happened to hang around for a century or four.