Veronika Wild

There's quite a lot of snow on the mountain this morning and it's a balmy 8°C here. Running a bit late with my post this week, so here is something to ponder in the meantime. Enjoy! There is a peculiar magic to a Tasmanian winter that mainlanders and other visitors never quite understand until they've lived it. Even if you have managed to cram in a trip around the state, taking in its major cities and maybe Cradle Mountain and Strahan, you may have missed some of the best things of all.     It arrives gently — in the blue-grey light that lingers even at noon, in the woodsmoke curling from chimneys up and down the streets of its quaint C19th villages, in the cold that doesn't so much bite as settle. There’s less traffic and there are even fewer tourists.     Into the Woods There's a lovely campaign by Tourism Tasmania right now about Forest Bathing. Here's how it's done. Take yourself down or more likely up to a forest. Mt. Wellington/Kunyani is clos...

This says "Russia" in Russian. Reading Russian is a bit like cracking a secret code. I was really excited when I first worked out that CTON meant STOP. I am glad I didn't drive. It would have taken me so long to decipher the road signs that I would have ended up in Vladivostock. There weren't many roads in Siberia though. Trains are the main form of transport. I'll tell you about them in the next couple of posts. Also about some of the great places I visited and the people I met in a journey of over 10,000 kilometres. The Russian Odyssey I had always wondered about Russia . For most of my life it was shown as a large blank space in the Philips World Atlas. Now that Russia is finally letting in independent travellers – even shoestring ones like me, I thought I should have a look around and give you an idea of what it is like. I can tell you now that it has 145 million people, at least twelve different ethnic groups and eleven time zones! I’d always ...