Stays - Detour

A Refuge at 2,300 Metres

Delphine Roy — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

People hear “mountain hut” and picture a bothy: a stone room, a wooden platform, bring your own everything. A rifugio in the Dolomites is not that. It has a kitchen, a wine list, hot showers on a timer, and a dining room that at seven in the evening is as loud as any restaurant in Bolzano.

The half-board rate covers a bunk, dinner and breakfast. Dinner is three courses and it arrives at a set time for everybody at once, which is part of the point: you eat with whoever walked in that day.

The hut we should have booked and did not, an hour further along the ridge. Photo: Felix Mittermeier.

What is included and what is not

Included: bunk, blanket, pillow, dinner, breakfast.
Not included: sheets. You bring a liner, every time, and they will sell you a paper one at a mark-up if you forget.
Not included: water, in some huts. Everything is carried or helicoptered up, and a bottle can cost what a beer costs.
Rarely included: a working card machine.

The lights go out at ten. This is not a suggestion and nobody who has walked seven hours will be on your side about it.

Booking

Open in mid-March for the summer, full by May for August weekends, and the good ones on the high routes go first. Email, do not phone. Confirm a week before. Cancel properly if your plans change, because somebody on a four-day traverse is waiting for the bed.

The Riad Worth the Alley

Delphine Roy — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A riad is a house built inward. Every room faces a courtyard, the outside walls have almost no windows, and the whole thing is arranged so that the hottest part of the afternoon happens somewhere you are not. Once you have slept in one, a hotel room with a view of a street feels like an odd thing to have wanted.

The trouble is that “riad” has become a marketing word, and half the places using it are ordinary guesthouses with a plunge pool in an atrium.

The last thirty metres, which no taxi is going to drive. Photo: Mike Van Schoonderwalt.

Telling them apart

The entrance is a bend. A real riad has a dog-leg between the street door and the courtyard, so that nobody outside can see in.
The courtyard is the middle, not a feature at one end.
Rooms are different sizes, because it was a family house and not a plan.
The roof terrace exists and is used, which is where you will end up every evening.

Ask how many rooms. Under eight and you are in a house. Over fifteen and you are in a hotel that has bought three houses and knocked them together.

The alley problem

The address will be unfindable and this is normal. Every riad will meet you at a recognisable corner if you tell them which one you are arriving at, and every one of them expects to. Arrange it in advance; do not stand in the medina at eleven at night with a suitcase and a screenshot.

A Cabin With No Road to It

Delphine Roy — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The listing said “40 min walk from parking”. We read it as a detail. It is not a detail; it is the entire character of the place, and it decides what you eat, what you wear and how you spend the first evening.

Everything arrives on your back. Four days of food, which is heavier than you think, and firewood if the shed is low, which it will be. In exchange you get something genuinely rare in Europe, which is a building with no other building visible from it.

The same kind of place in March, when the walk in becomes a ski in. Photo: Landsmann.

What you have to think about

Water. From a stream, boiled, or carried. Ask which before you book.
Heat. A wood stove that takes an hour to make a difference, so light it before you unpack rather than after.
Dark. From October it is dark at four, and there is no light switch.
Waste. You carry it out. All of it.

Nothing recalibrates a week like an evening where the only decisions available are the fire and what to cook on it.

Booking one

The Norwegian trekking association runs hundreds of huts on this model, some staffed, most not, some unlocked with a standard key you buy for the season. Private hytter go on the usual sites. Read the access line in the listing first and the photographs second — it is the only sentence that matters.

A Ryokan, and What to Do With It

Delphine Roy — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A ryokan is not accommodation with dinner attached. It is an evening with a schedule, and the room is where the evening happens. Arrive at seven, as you would at a hotel, and you will have missed the bath, the light, and the hour the whole thing is arranged around.

Check in at three. That is not early; that is the start.

Outside, briefly, between the first bath and dinner. Photo: Satoshi.

The shape of it

15:00 — arrive, tea and a sweet in the room, change into the yukata.
15:30 — first bath, which is the quiet one. Most guests go after dinner.
17:00 — walk, if there is anywhere to walk to. There usually is.
18:00 — dinner, in the room or in a dining room, many courses, no menu.
20:00 — the futon appears while you are out of the room.
21:00 — second bath. Outdoors if there is one, and in winter especially.

The bath is the reason, not the meal. People remember the meal because it is photographable, and remember how they slept because of the bath.

Manners, briefly

Wash before getting in, not in. No swimwear, no towel in the water. Tattoos are still a problem at some places and not at others, and the ones that mind say so on the booking page. Ask about breakfast: it is enormous and at eight, and a ryokan does not really do a lie-in.

A Room at the End of the Road

Delphine Roy — Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There is a whole class of building that has been made redundant by technology and turned into somewhere to sleep. Lighthouses went automatic. Pilot stations lost their pilots. Customs houses on small harbours stopped having anything to inspect. What is left is a set of extremely solid buildings, in positions nobody would be granted permission to build in today, available by the night.

They are rarely comfortable in the way a hotel is comfortable. They are almost always in the right place.

Not a lighthouse, but the same idea: built for the position, not the view. Photo: Rino Adamo.

What to expect

Wind noise. These buildings are on exposed ground on purpose, and at night you hear it.
Stairs. Frequently spiral, frequently the only way to the bedroom, and never designed for a wheeled bag.
A drying room, which tells you everything about how the building expects to be used.
No restaurant. Shop before you go. The nearest one is a drive.

The value of these places is entirely positional. You are paying to be at the end of a headland at four in the morning, and that is worth doing once.

Booking

National trusts, coastguard charities and a handful of small operators run most of them, and the listings are scattered rather than aggregated. Search by the name of the lighthouse rather than the region. Book a minimum of two nights, because one night is a drive there and a drive back.

Booking Late on Purpose

Delphine Roy — Tue, 12 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Every trip produces information. On day three you find out that the town you allocated one night to is the best place you have been, and the city you booked four nights in has about a day and a half in it. If the whole trip is booked, that information is worthless.

So book the first half and leave the second. Not the whole thing — arriving somewhere unfamiliar at ten at night with nothing reserved is a bad experience with no upside. But the back three nights of a ten-night trip can stay open almost anywhere outside a festival week.

Booked at four in the afternoon for that night, which is how the good ones go cheap. Photo: Clement Proust.

The rules that make it safe

Book arrival and departure nights always. Those two are about logistics, not experience.
Check the calendar for the region: a saint’s day, a festival or a trade fair will empty a city of beds overnight.
Have a fallback, an unbooked but identified place you would accept, so the decision is never made under pressure.
Do not do it in August on a coast. Everywhere is full and the price of the one remaining room reflects it.

The best night of most trips is somewhere you had not heard of on the day you left home. You cannot book that in advance, by definition.

Where it pays most

Places where the good accommodation is small — Greek islands out of season, rural Portugal, the Scottish west coast. Places with a dozen rooms in total respond to a phone call in the afternoon in a way a hundred-room hotel never will, and the phone call gets you a better price than the platform.