Outdoors - Detour

Hut to Hut in the Dolomites

Delphine Roy — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The thing that stops most people walking in the Alps is the camping. Carrying a tent, a stove and four days of food over a pass is a different sport from walking, and it is the sport people imagine when they say they could never do it.

You do not have to. The Dolomites are covered in rifugi — mountain huts with bunks, showers and a kitchen — spaced roughly a day’s walk apart. You carry a sleeping bag liner, a change of clothes and a waterproof. That is it.

The second morning, an hour after leaving the hut and about twenty minutes before the cloud lifted. Photo: Nicola Toscan.

Three days that work

Day one: up from the valley, four hours, mostly forest. Dull, and it gets the height done.
Day two: the long one. Six to seven hours along the ridge, and the reason you came.
Day three: down, three hours, knees complaining, bus at the bottom.

A hut is not a hotel and it is not a bothy. It is a busy restaurant with beds above it, at two thousand metres, and the strangeness of that never quite wears off.

Booking and manners

Book by email, weeks ahead, and confirm. Bring cash, because the card machine is at the mercy of a radio link. Take your boots off at the door, take the top bunk if you are the last to arrive, and be in bed by ten — everybody around you is leaving at six.

The Faroes Walk Themselves

Delphine Roy — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There is no point writing a Faroes itinerary. You can write a list of eleven things and an order to attempt them in, and then the fog comes down on Vagar and the order is decided for you. Everyone who goes learns this in about a day and a half.

What works instead is a list with a weather condition attached to each item. Clear and still: the coastal walks. Clear and windy: the drives, and the ferry if it is running. Low cloud: the villages, the museum in Torshavn, the long tunnels, the cafe.

Low cloud is not a bad day here. It is most days, and the place is built for it. Photo: Veronika Benz.

Things that need clear weather

Sorvagsvatn, the lake that appears to sit above the ocean. Worthless in fog, extraordinary otherwise.
The Kallur lighthouse walk on Kalsoy, which needs the ferry as well as the visibility.
Anything on Mykines. The boat cancels more often than it sails.

Locals do not talk about good weather. They talk about a good window, which is about ninety minutes long and arrives without warning at half past four.

The practical bit

Hire a car with the tunnel toll included, book accommodation for the whole week in one base rather than moving, and understand that several of the best walks cross private land and charge for it. Pay it. It is what keeps the paths open.

Four Waterfalls and a Wet Coat

Delphine Roy — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The south coast is a conveyor belt of waterfalls and it is very easy to see six in a day and remember none of them. The trick is to stop at fewer and stay longer, because they are all roughly the same from the car park and completely different from anywhere else.

Take a coat you do not mind soaking. Not a shower-proof one — a properly waterproof one, with a hood that stays up in wind, because at three of these you will be standing inside the spray for twenty minutes.

The second stop, where the path goes down to the pool rather than along the top. Photo: Suju.

The four

Seljalandsfoss — the one you can walk behind. Do it, get wet, and then walk the ten minutes north to the one in the cleft, which most people miss.
Skogafoss — climb the steps. The falls are better from halfway up than from the base, and the path at the top follows the river for hours.
Kvernufoss — a twenty-minute walk from a car park nobody uses.
Gljufrabui — inside a slot in the rock, reached by wading. Bring the shoes for it or do not bother.

The waterfall you remember is never the biggest one. It is the one you stood at for half an hour because the weather was doing something.

The one to skip

Not because it is bad, but because by four in the afternoon you will have reached your capacity for falling water, and standing in front of a fifth in failing light while cold is nobody’s idea of a good day. Drive on and have dinner instead.

The Case for the Wrong Month

Delphine Roy — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The standard argument for travelling in April or October is that it is cheaper and emptier. Both are true and both are slightly beside the point, because they frame the off-season as a compromise — the same trip, discounted, with worse weather.

For a large number of places it is not the same trip. It is a better one. Coastlines, moorland, mountains and northern cities are all designed by their weather, and in the months when the weather is doing nothing they are versions of themselves with the interesting part removed.

February on an Atlantic coast, which is the only month it makes sense. Photo: WorldIsNotOurHome.

Places that improve

Anywhere with a sea wall. A harbour in a gale is the thing the harbour was built for.
Northern cities. Copenhagen, Edinburgh and Hamburg are built around being indoors, and in August that architecture has nothing to do.
Moorland and fell. Needs low cloud and low light to look like anything.
Big museums, which stop being a queueing exercise.

A wet week somewhere built for wet weather beats a fine week somewhere that only works in the sun and is full of everybody else who booked it.

Places that do not

Be honest about the exceptions. Anything whose point is swimming, anything above two thousand metres between October and June, and anywhere that closes — Greek islands in January are not atmospheric, they are shut. Check the ferry timetable before booking the romance.

Cold Water, Warm Car

Delphine Roy — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Cold water swimming has acquired an enormous amount of talk around it. Ignore most of it. What is true is simple: a Scottish loch in June is about thirteen degrees, thirteen degrees is survivable and unpleasant for roughly four minutes, and four minutes is plenty.

The rule that matters is the one about getting out. Cold does its real damage twenty minutes after you leave the water, when your core temperature is still falling and you are standing in a car park feeling fine. Dress before you feel cold, not when you do.

The far end of the loch, which is where the shallow entry is. Photo: Nunzg.

What to have in the car

A flask of something hot, made before you swim, not after.
A hat. Sounds trivial; is not.
Two towels and a mat to stand on, because the ground is the problem.
Shoes you can swim in. Loch beds are stones, and stones get slippery.

Nobody has ever regretted a four-minute swim. Plenty of people have regretted a fifteen-minute one, and they regretted it in the car half an hour later.

Where to go in

Look for a bay with a track to it, an obvious shallow shelf and no river mouth, because a river mouth means cold plumes and current. If the map shows a hotel or a ruined pier, there is usually a shelving entry near it: people have been getting into that water for two hundred years.

A Ridge You Can Do in a Day

Delphine Roy — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A good ridge walk is mostly a transport problem. The walking itself is straightforward — you go up, you stay high for several hours, you come down — but the up and the down are rarely in the same place, and the difference between a brilliant day and a long one is whether you solved that before you started.

Solve it with a bus, a lift, or two cars. Solve it badly and you will walk an out-and-back, which means seeing everything twice and spending the last two hours retracing the least interesting section.

The middle third, which is the entire reason for the other two. Photo: Monika Balciuniene.

What makes a ridge worth it

A long level middle. Anything over three kilometres of staying high.
Two different valleys, one on each side. A ridge with the same view twice is a hill.
An escape route at the halfway point, so weather does not mean turning back the whole way.

The best measure of a ridge is not the height. It is how much of the day you spend above the treeline, and how little of it you spend getting there.

Timing

Leave an hour earlier than the guidebook says. Not because you are slow, but because afternoon cloud builds from about two in most ranges in summer, and the difference between a 6am start and an 8am one is whether you see anything from the top at all.