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On the shunt in Hanoi, Vietnam. Click on the photo
January 2, 1995. It was my last day in Hanoi. We had returned to the city from a five-day scooter ride in the country. We had been lost, cold, battered by the “Chinese wind”, rained on and starved of gas and food, and Vietnam had, occasionally, felt mean and less enchanting, as it would from under a soaked poncho and freezing mud in our boots. We had tickets for tonight’s train, the Reunification Express to Saigon. But first I had to wash the mud off my scooter and inhale whatever last memories I could of Hanoi. Read More…
BY BRENDAN BOYLE
Every day of our two-week Vespa adventure in Tuscany seemed better than the last, right until we touched the sky more than 1000 meters up in the region of Focchia.
A Vespa completes a classic Italian scene
We had been encouraged by a day trip from Bagni di Lucca on which we discovered the gorgeous mountain town of Tereglio, an impossibly beautiful little town on its own peak, facing down its 12th century rivals on each of the surrounding summits. Read More…
BY BRENDAN BOYLE
The VespaVenture idea was to ride real Piaggio ‘wasps’ around rural Tuscany fortwo weeks with a culture break in the middle in Florence.
But just back from a night ride around this awesome city with Jed, I have to say that could just be the most fun I have had in a year. Read More…
BY BRENDAN BOYLE
San Gimignano’s fame amongst Tuscan travelers is well deserved. It is a most beautiful city high on a hill with a forest of towers that have led to its local identity as the Manhattan of Italy.
The towers of San Gimignano
Apparently the towers, some a child’s stone throw apart, sprouted in the 13th century in response to the rivalry amongst families living inside the city walls and served as command centers for each one’s little army.
They are so close together, though, that it is hard to imagine them serving any purpose other than to renew hostilities every morning with a few choice insults shouted from one to the other. Read More…
BY BRENDAN BOYLE
Volterra, visible on a distant hilltop from Montecatini Val di Cecina and an hour’s Vespa ride away, is both much more and much less.
It is a more spectacular walled city with more quaint lanes, but it has had the full Disney treatment and seems to exist almost entirely for the tourists who throng its streets. Read More…
BY BRENDAN BOYLE
Tuscany has many fortress towns and many are more famous than Montecatini Val di Cecina, but I’m claiming it as a discovery because most of the other tourists – and they were not many – were Italians discovering their own history.
Jed in Montecatini
The town was founded in 960 AD and changed hands in a series of local wars over the next 700 years. Read More…
Jed at the Vespa Museum
BY BRENDAN BOYLE
I could just try to describe how beautiful Tuscany is once you are away from the working cities and every word would be true.
Or I could start with some real world details about getting to our Vespas and getting away from the factory where they were made. Read More…
By Brendan Boyle
The walls of Rome’s Colosseum are strangely pocked with rough holes chiseled around the seams of its great travertine blocks.
The Colosseum was first attacked by scrap-metal thieves 500 years ago
They look like the marks of some great military assault, but really it is just the work of those we now know today as cable thieves. Read More…
By Brendan Boyle
It began, as these things so often do, over a bottle of wine after work.
The political scene looked pretty dismal in the wake of a recent party conference and there seemed to be nothing really special to look forward to for a while.
We fell to reminiscing about holidays we had taken together sailing in Greece, barging in France and camping in Namibia and Botswana.
By the time the pizza platters had been cleared and the second bottle flattened, we had agreed to explore Tuscany on genuine Vespa scooters. And so we shall. Read More…
When a hotel reviewer says “Had to go buy socks so my feet wouldn’t touch the carpet”, it would be fair to say you have been warned. Read More…
