Blog posts about Big Wide World at Permanent Tourist

Männlichen, Switzerland

Re-photographing the Bernese Alps from a viewpoint I found last year.

A small mountain cabin overlooking the Bluemental valley serves as a restaurant for hikers in the summer and for skiiers in winter. Between seasons, when the restaurant is closed, the spot is a blissfully peaceful point on the mountain, to which only determined walkers come. The Birg mountain station overlooks the scene, and on a […]

St. Ives, Cornwall

The fishing village of St. Ives is no longer a village. Its character changed in the second half of the nineteenth century, when fishing declined and the new railway brought the first artists. These days, the town is mobbed by tourists and most are forced to abandon their car or coach in a massive car park on top […]

St. Michael's Mount, Marazion

The small tidal island off the coast of southern Cornwall called St. Michael’s Mount has been home to the St. Aubyn family since the middle of the sixteenth century. The island, which is connected to the nearby mainland by a man-made granite causeway at low tide, is a smaller version of the acutely similar Mont Saint-Michel […]

Burgh Island, off the coast of Devon, was re-christened by Agatha Christie in 1941 for her famous Hercule Poirot novel “Evil Under The Sun”.

I’ve never been one for sitting around at lunchtime. Give me time to do nothing, either during the day or in the evening, and I’ll end up dozing off. I like to use the midday hour for something productive; whether spending time with team colleagues, working on personal projects, catching up on email, walking the […]

Ever on the search for “perfect” viewpoints in the Bernese Oberland, I sometimes end up driving up tiny roads in the hope that they’ll lead me to a new photograph. A (luckily tarmaced) single-track road, for which you have to buy an inexpensive day permit at the shop in Waldegg from a machine by the roadside near […]

Going through my photo archives, I sometimes come across images from long ago which I’d forgotten about. This view of the lake next to the office where I used to work dates back to December 2006.

I visited the English Peak District for the first time this autumn and was much impressed. After many years of visiting the dramatic Lake District, a little further north, I’d been worried that the landscape would be tame in comparison, with gentle hills instead of dramatic mountains. What I found was a different landscape for […]

I follow a couple of photographers and film-makers who post images and sequences from the English Lake District to their social media channels. Jason Chambers’ landscape photos are terrific and make me want to visit the region even more often, while Terry Abraham’s films go a stage further by adding sequences and interviews which go beyond the static beauty […]

Part of the joy of photography for me is the ability to travel in time. Not like Marty and the Doc in my favourite ever films, which celebrated a big milestone a few days ago, but in the ability to look at a scene in large levels of detail as it was many years ago. […]

Kiental is known both locally in the Bernese Oberland and further afield as a destination from which to start hiking into the high mountains around the Blüemlisalp. It’s also a popular destination for locals to go skiing and sledging in winter, well away from the more heavily-visited destinations in the region.

Instead of heading up from the top train station along the tourist track to the summit of the Brienzer Rothorn, turn left instead and follow the clear footpath to Schongütsch. The views are just as spectacular, but the experience is a little less “touristy”.

The Brienzer Rothorn is the tallest mountain on the northern side of Lake Brienz. The peak is accessible by a cable car from Sörenberg and – in summer and autumn only – by an open-sided, oil-powered steam railway from Brienz. The view across to the larger peaks of the Jungfrau Region and down to the lake are […]

I started a website project in May, featuring the panoramic photographs I’m taking for an ongoing personal project I call Big Wide World. I designed the website from scratch and added new technology – like a map view and a better photographic list view – which I’d wanted to develop for a while. Unfortunately, time has proven that running […]

I used to visit the Bödelibad leisure centre regularly. Before I had a car, I used to catch the train to Interlaken West station and walk from there. The route takes you along the river Aare, forming the border between Unterseen and Interlaken, leading to a footbridge with this view. In the foreground Unterseen, with […]

Pfingstegg, on an elevated ledge amongst the southern cliff faces in the Grindelwald valley, is the starting point for a great hike. The path is less well-trodden than the easier and more popular routes on Männlichen and First, but offers much more dramatic views than the gentler routes in the valley. Once away from the restaurant […]

Oberried BE

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