Departures: Cautionary tale for enterprising readers
By PETER DUNN
PERHAPS the Independent Traveller ought to carry some sort of warning: ' Reading this section can change your life. '
It certainly did for Simon Turner, who read a feature on these pages a year ago written by Godfrey Hodgson on his travels around the Michelin ' Red Rocker ' hotels in the region around Toulouse in south-west France.
Mr Turner was a chartered surveyor who worked for Hamptons estate agents, but had realised that he ' patently wasn't suited to selling houses'.
He confesses that at the age of 40 he had reached ' the proverbial midlife crisis' and was searching for a different way of life.
' I had holidayed several times in France and was toying with the idea of buying a house there, but with no definite plan in mind.
I had already received details of properties in several regions of France, including the Toulouse area, when I providentially read your article, ' At the sign of the Red Rocker ', the catalyst being the mention of a cheap flight to Toulouse from Heathrow for 116 return. '
He immediately booked a flight to Toulouse, saw a house 35 miles north-west of Toulouse in a small hamlet and realised it was ideal as a home as well as an auberge.
' I discussed the matter with my wife and signed a contract straight away  without my wife seeing the house.
I then left Hamptons and spent two months at the Berlitz School of Language in London. '
Mr Turner his wife and three daughters aged eight, six and four moved to France in April and his auberge opened in July.
The three children are now attending the local village school.
' Despite various teething problems we are very happy in our new life, ' said Mr Turner.
' The auberge is an attractive nineteenth-century house standing in a secluded garden of about one acre with glorious views towards the Pyrenees.
Guests have the use of the spacious ground-floor living room with direct access to the large south-facing terrace.
There are also swings and a games room for the children. '
There are three rooms available: one double, one single and a family room.
Bed and breakfast prices are around 10 per person for adults, 5 for children (aged four to 12), children under four are free.
Evening meals on request at 5 per person.
Mid-life crisis readers are duly warned.
Departures: Record billing
By PETER DUNN
MR E G HARRIS of Harold Wood in Essex is claiming a Guinness Book of Records entry for an overcharge on his bill during a trip to Bayeux in Normandy last month.
After a meal for four at Les Quatre Saisons restaurant, he was presented with a bill for Fr 1,887, around 180.
When he later took the trouble to add up the bill he discovered that the actual cost was Fr 1,481, around 140: an overcharge of 40.
He recovered this money the following day.
How many people take the trouble to check their hotel or restaurant bills these days?
Perhaps there are others who have been overcharged by more than 40 for a meal.
Departures: Fares that care
By PETER DUNN
NORTH-SOUTH Travel (0245 492882) in Chelmsford is perhaps Britain's first environment-friendly travel agency.
Non-Abta and non-Iata, it refuses to sell the traditional sun-and-sand Mediterranean package: instead it offers cheap air fares to ' responsive travellers'.
All its profits are covenanted to third world charities: since November 1986 it has contributed 33,500 to organisations such as Unicef, a Tibetan children's home, Oxfam, Church Relief in Uganda and others.
According to the agency's director, Roger Millman, who is also director of the Centre for the Advancement of Responsive Travel, the aim is to encourage those travel alternatives' which do not adversely alter the natives'.
Wild isle of the strange and absolute: Alison Lurie followed Flaubert, Colette and Sarah Bernhardt to find drama and mythology on Belle-Ile, off the coast of Brittany
By ALISON LURIE
At the siege of Belle-Isle I was there all the while; All the while, all the while, At the siege of Belle-Isle Until last month these lines were only a nursery-rhyme to me, accompanied in my memory by a crude illustration of a tower by the sea and square-rigged warship balancing on humped waves.
I thought of the place as an imaginary island, a sort of French Never Never Land.
But there is a real Belle-Ile in the Atlantic about eight miles off the coast of southern Brittany: a mysterious, beautiful, isolated island shaped like a fish swimming north-west, edged with black cliffs and coves of pale-brown sugar-sand.
Just off its shore stand giant rocks carved into strange jagged patterns by the sea.
The place has always attracted writers and artists and lovers of strange and dramatic scenery.
Colette went there at 21.
While her unpleasant husband shut himself in his room and wrote letters, she explored the island with Paul Masson and for the first time in her life ' tasted and touched the salt, the sand, the seaweed, the odorous soft bed of the receding sea, the dripping fish '.
The sea-gravel seemed to her to be composed of ' shattered rubies tinted with mauve '.
Flaubert describes Belle-Ile at length in Par les Champs et par les Greves; Courbet, Monet, and Matisse lived and painted there.
Later, Andre Breton, Salvador Dali, and other surrealists stayed and worked in a now-destroyed hotel on its wild western shore, the famed Cote Sauvage.
I reached Belle-Ile by ferry from the peninsula of Quiberon, after a seven-hour drive in 27-degree heat from the Paris airport that nothing on earth would induce me to repeat  though my two companions, one British and one French, conversed enthusiastically on opera, European politics, and structural anthropology.
(A better alternative might be to travel by rail or plane to L'Orient, 30 miles west, and rent a car.)
As a result of the journey, however, I can report that French motorway food is greatly superior to American.
We were offered fresh do-it-yourself salads, good local cheeses, strawberry tart and chocolate mousse.
The souvenirs on sale, though, were of intriguing awfulness; my favourite was a plastic female head enclosing a dried and shrivelled bouquet  a dead-metaphor version of the French custom of naming women after flowers, perhaps.
Quiberon is just south of the village of Carnac, where mile-long alleys of menhirs, or standing-stones, erected in prehistoric times, wade through fields of tall rose-beige grass.
It is a crowded tourist centre, heavy on souvenir shops and jokey exploitation of local sights; the cafe opposite the ferry landing was advertising a giant hamburger called Le Menhir.
Belle-Ile, however, seems to belong to a past era of modest and amateur tourism.
Le Palais, where the ferry docks, is an agreeable, unspoilt little town of ancient houses and cobbled squares.
It is dominated by the imposing Citadelle de Vauban, constructed in 1549 to defend the island against invaders.
The citadel's rough, sheer pale-brown outer walls and ramparts resemble a giant sandcastle built on the edge of the sea.
It is now a museum of military history, but was once full of armed men and artillery.
The siege commemorated in my nursery rhyme took place in 1761: an English fleet cut off supplies to the citadel, and after 38 days the garrison surrendered.
Until about 20 years ago the citadel still served as barracks and prison, and seems to have been thought suitable for confining revolutionaries.
Placide Touiss ant-L'Ouverture, son of the liberator of Haiti, was imprisoned there, and so was, more recently, Messali Hadj, the Algerian nationalist.
After the political disturbances of 1848, Karl Marx, with other radicals, spent time in an internment camp on the island.
In the summer the ferry also runs from Quiberon to the little fishing port of Sauzon, which is almost postcard-pretty from a distance but given satisfying reality in close-up by the sounds and smells of its trade and the stacks of water-roughened lobster traps and water-soaked nets and floats.
On the jetty near the little lighthouse is a remarkably good restaurant.
We sat on its terrace overlooking the harbour, watching the sky blush rose-red and devouring plum oysters, crabs, and langoustines caught that same day  and the first snails I have ever had that did not taste like bits of black rubber boot fried in garlic and olive oil.
The Atlantic coast of Belle-Ile is known as the Cote Sauvage, and in most places is sufficiently savage to deter any invader.
In the nineteenth century the actress Sarah Bernhardt, ' attracted by the Absolute, ' as one guidebook puts it, built a chateau high on the cliff near its northernmost end, the Pointe des Poulains (Foals' Point), where the offshore rocks are said to resemble young horses galloping in the swaying navy-blue sea.
Her house is in ruins now, covered with flowering weeds and inhabited only by seagulls.
While we were on the beach below another tourist tried to climb up to the ruin; but a flock of dive-bombing gulls, screaming histrionically, drove him off.
hree kilometres south of the Point des Poulains is a spectacular sea-level cave, the Grotte de l'Apothicairerie.
Its name comes from the cormorants' nests which in the past were ranged in rows along shelves in the wet black rock, like jars in a chemist's shop.
Now only the sea thunders rhythmically through the grotto, flinging up fans of salty spray.
Further along the coast is the most amazing sight of all, the Aiguilles (needles) de Port-Coton: a chain of huge, spiky dark rocks that emerge from the sea like the petrified remains of some prehistoric monster.
The waves around these rocks churn up a salty froth that is said to resemble cotton-wool, though to me it seemed more like the foaming spit of an angry sea-serpent.
After touring the Cote Sauvage we had a perfect lunch in a crep erie: galettes  whole-wheat crepes made from sarazin (black wheat)  filled with ham or melted cheese and accompanied by foaming mugs of Breton cider; then crisp lacy brown crepes with sugar and jam or chocolate sauce, which bore no resemblance to the limp pancakes served under that name in America.
As the afternoon temperature rose our thoughts turned to the beaches.
There are many on the quieter north shore or Cote du Dedans, all beautiful and uncrowded.
The best-known is Les Grands Sables, over a mile long and backed by cliffs where the gorse-bushes were explosions of butter-yellow fireworks.
On the Cote Sauvage is Port-Donant, where the surf is exciting and sometimes dangerous.
It is popular with summer bathers, but at other times the water is cold and the fine sand dotted with jellyfish like complicated hot-weather dishes: semi-transparent yellow-streaked boeuf en daube and deep magenta grape aspic.
The central part of the island seemed at first to belong to another and less dramatic world.
We passed gently rolling pastures where fat sheep and cows grazed, empty dusty roads edged with white convolvulus and daisies, and fields of grain rippling in the soft wind like beige velvet stroked by an invisible hand.
But even here there were signs that we were not far from the sea or from strange phenomena.
The cypress es on the heights had grey wind-contorted branches and trunks, mimicking the twisted layers of rock by the ocean; and at a distance the whitewashed farmhouses, with their triangular gable ends, looked like fleets of sailboats moored beyond the farthest field.
Standing in the fields in the centre of the island were two tall stone menhirs, known locally as Jean and Jeanne.
According to legend they were young lovers whom the druids forbade to marry.
When they disobeyed they were transformed into pillars of rock and placed where they could see each other but never meet.
Once every 100 years they resume their human shapes and renew their embraces; anyone who sees them then is turned to stone.
Flaubert, who visited the island in 1847, got lost in these deserted, deceptively placid fields, of which he wrote: ' One would have said that all those who owned them profited from them but did not like them. '
He preferred the shore, where the long vistas of rocks with their thick coverings of seaweed appeared to him as the heads of ' black phantoms emerging from the underworld, ' and the grottos were full of strange brilliantly coloured rocks and polished white beds of gravel which seemed about ' to receive the water-nymph when she emerged from the waves'.
Like Flaubert, I left Belle-Ile hoping to return  and hoping, too, that the island's isolation and the occasional fogs that cover it would discourage too many other tourists.
Alison Lurie is Professor of Children's Literature at Cornell University, New York.
Her latest book The Truth about Lorin Jones (Abacus, 3.99) has just been published in paperback.
Alison Lurie's next book Don't Tell the Grown-ups, on children's literature, will be published next year by Bloomsbury.
FACT FILE Flights: Brit Air (01-499 9511) offers daily direct services from Gatwick to Brest and Rennes; a special weekend fare to both destinations costs 99 return (travel out Friday, return Sunday or travel out Saturday and return Monday).
Normal economy return is 262.
Ferry: Brittany Ferries (0752 221321) has a daily service from Plymouth to Roscoff, crossing time six hours.
A five-day bargain return for car and two adults costs 84.
Berths from 9 per person.
No service 23 December 1989 to 20 January 1990; one sailing a week on the route from November to February.
Brittany Ferries also has a daily crossing from Portsmouth to St Malo: crossing time about nine hours.
Bargain five-day return fare for two adults in a car from 84.
Berths from 10.50 per person.
No service from mid-November to mid-February.
Car hire: Seven days hire with Hertz (01-679 1799) under its Europe on Wheels programme costs from 216, including unlimited mileage and all extras.
Skiing: A Swiss role on the slide: Chris Gill asks why few British skiers choose the cantons
By CHRIS GILL
THOSE who care about such things are at present locked in combat over the issue of whether the greatest number of British skiers go to Austria (which traditionally enjoys the distinction) or to France (which is the flavour of the decade).
Both, according to the latest figures conjured out of a hat by the French, have just over 35 per cent of the market.
Of much more interest to Alp-watchers is the performance of the other great Alpine skiing nations.
The French reckon that Italy now gets 7 per cent of our custom and, more surprisingly, that Switzerland gets only 5 per cent.
Once upon a time, this might have been 95 per cent.
This is partly a consequence of simple arithmetic.
Switzerland has lots of Alps, but they are now less densely equipped with skiers' dormitories than those of France and Austria.
Many of the big names of Swiss skiing have fewer than 10,000 beds; the total for Val d'Isere/Tignes approaches 50,000.
But it is more a consequence of the view we have of Switzerland and of Swiss skiing.
A dominant factor is the idea that Switzerland is expensive.
It is not entirely without foundation: holidaying on the cheap in such places as super-smart St Moritz, Zermatt and Gstaad is next to impossible, whatever the tourist offices there might say.
But it is not expensive when you compare like with like  that is, when you compare French with Swiss.
Of course, if you squeeze yourself and your mates into a ' compact ' studio and live on bread and cheese, you can live more cheaply in France than in a Swiss hotel.
But in the important area of mountain lunches, for example, my experiences (and the distilled findings of those who report to The Good Skiing Guide on such matters) point to parity between France and Switzerland, with Austria and Italy providing worthwhile savings.
It remains true that Switzerland is not a place for ' convenience ' skiing in the way that France is.
Ski areas tend to be as fragmented now as they were 20 or 30 years ago.
In some cases this may be attributable to the Swiss tendency to conserve (money, not nature); in others, the terrain makes links between areas impracticable or unnecessary.
Zermatt, for example, is a resort where many skiers must have wished for better links.
In Davos and St Moritz, the areas are so widely spread and rewarding individually that the idea of linking them scarcely arises.
One resort seizing the bull by the horns is little old Adelboden, which for 1991 is building a big new gondola to link two of its smaller ski areas to its major one.
Whatever its weaknesses, Switzerland always has a couple of aces up the sleeve.
The first is that there are no Alps like the Swiss Alps.
The French, Italian and Austrian Alps have their spectacles, but they are not presented so conveniently for the the idle downhill skier (or even non-skier) as the great set-pieces of the Swiss.
The second ace is the country's near-monopoly of traditional traffic-free villages  or what pass for traffic-free villages in these days of electric taxis and buses.
It is from these villages and their ski areas that the most impressive mountain scenery is to be seen.
The famous trio of Eiger, Monch and Jungfrau loom over the pistes of tiny British-dominated Wengen, and are seen to even better advantage from even tinier Murren (the one resort which genuinely is traffic-free).
Money-dominated Zermatt is synonymous with the unreal pyramid of the Matterhorn (which is unrecognisably ordinary when seen from Italian Cervinia, next door).
The peaks surrounding glacier-dominated Saas Fee may be less distinguished, but the ice-falls of the Feegletscher hanging over the village are in their way just as striking.
Of course, we must not forget that these are ski resorts.
Wengen's skiing is extensive, but for piste skiers is mostly easy; Murren is very limited, with one spectacular descent from the famous Schilthorn; Zermatt has something for everyone and lots for experts, but to reach its full potential needs better snow than it often receives; Saas Fee has an excellent glacier, but again needs abundant snow to provide much more than that  in particular, to satisfy better skiers.
But the quality and quantity of the skiing to be done in these places is almost a secondary consideration.
Perhaps that explains why most British skiers aren't inclined to go to Switzerland  and why a minority wouldn't dream of going anywhere else.
Skiing Update: Runway enterprise
By CHRIS GILL
EXETER-BASED InStyle Holidays (0392 70131) has displayed enterprise in flying from little-used airports in Britain to little-used airports in the Alps, using small propeller aircraft.
Their six resorts in France are served by flights from Plymouth, Exeter and London City to Chambery, their three resorts in Austria from Exeter and Bristol to Innsbruck.
Skiing Update: Letters, pray
By CHRIS GILL
OVER coming weeks, this page will cover subjects on which we'd like to hear from readers.
First, ski-guiding  now widely offered by tour operators.
Is it the valuable service it's made out to be?
Then, skiing with young children.
If you've done it, what lessons could you pass to those who have not?
Finally, chalet holidays, and in particular upmarket ones: are they worth the extra cost?
Write to Chris Gill, The Old Forge, Norton St Philip, Bath BA3 6LW.
The most stimulating letter on each topic wins The Good Skiing Guide.
Skiing Update: French lesson
By CHRIS GILL
IT IS always worth timing visits to the French Alps to avoid French school holidays.
This season, according to Chamonix tourist office, the peak period will be 14-25 February, when schools in two of the three national zones will have broken up.
The churches built on wool: Angela Lambert enjoys the riches at the heart of East Anglia
By ANGELA LAMBERT
UNTIL six or seven years ago, outsiders associated East Anglia with fens, flatness and the vanished Edwardian nannies of Frinton.
Its old churches, green fields and long beaches were cherished by the inhabitants of Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire, but not yet on the tourist agenda.
Today, I was told, villagers living around the great wool churches of Lavenham and Long Melford have to bar their doors and ignore the knocking of tourists, who take them for antique shops and offer to buy their furniture.
The tourists are right.
East Anglia on a sunny weekend is a place of matchless beauty.
Its villages look too good to be true.
Lavenham and Long Melford, for example, have no telegraph poles, to preserve the timeless air that pervades them.
Yet you only have to read Ronald Blythe's Akenfield to realise that these picturesque, half-timbered cottages, often painted the characteristic Essex pink (pale salmon), ochre or spring-leaf green, are more prosperous now than ever in the ' real ' past.
Many are still elaborately decorated with pargeting, an ornate, patterned plasterwork practised in this area since the early thirteenth century.
Most of East Anglia's prosperity today is due to City commuters, the second-homes market and tourism.
The ideal hotel from which to explore is Dedham Hall, set among tall trees in the Vale of Dedham, looking directly across towards Dedham church on one side and Flatford Mill on the other: both painted by Constable.
The hotel lies in five acres of fields and garden, and the Slingos, who own it, make the most of their beautiful surroundings by running painting courses for about 200 a week (including breakfast and dinner), or 90 for a long weekend.
These are so popular that you will need to book at least a couple of months in advance.
The other great joy of Dedham Hall is the food.
The Slingos have their own vegetable garden, chickens, ducks, sheep and cows.
Everything is home-grown, home-made and fresh: it tastes like forgotten food.
If Dedham Hall is fully booked  and it may well be  try the best bed-and-breakfast we have ever found, just a few miles away at the Old Vicarage, Higham, near Colchester.
It is a rambling Tudor house run by John and Margaret Parker, whose breakfast room and drawing room look out over a wonderful walled garden, beyond which fields of grazing cows stretch down to the river.
Another hotel that would make a good starting point for a weekend  or longer  in East Anglia is the Black Lion at Long Melford.
It changed hands recently and is now run by Stephen and Janet Errington.
After dinner there, when the moon was full and low and deep orange, we walked up the road from the hotel to Long Melford church.
Its vast walls of flint and glass and Gothic tracery were brilliantly floodlit and the churchyard cat, sleek and black as tar, greeted us querulously and led us right round the church and through the gravestones at the back, glimmering and pale in the moonlight.
We were quite alone and the great church, the size of a cathedral, was unearthly in its floodlit, moonlit beauty.
Long Melford is one of the wool churches that commemorate the wealth of East Anglia in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Another is at Lavenham, 10 minutes' drive up the road.
Just inside the front porch, a handwritten book is prefaced with the words' This book has been compiled that something, more than their mere names, may be known of the Lavenham men who gave their lives for their country in the Great War. '
This is followed by 50 or so names, each with a description.
The much-thumbed book is deeply moving, and sets the tone for a walk round this glorious building, which has seen the christenings, marriages and burials of the folk of the village for more than 600 years.
East Anglia is exceptionally rich in churches and cathedrals.
There are several splendid houses near Long Melford that would make for a gentle afternoon's potter through the rooms and possessions of the rich of a few centuries ago.
The loveliest, to my mind, is Melford Hall, whose charming, octagonal Jacobean gatehouse is reached along an avenue of clipped yew trees and, with its high windows flooding the octagon with light, is my fantasy of the ideal study.
Lavenham is often called the finest medieval village in England.
It is an image of the world we have lost, its gently sloping streets converging upon the market place.
Here stand the early sixteenth-century timbered Guildhall, now a museum to 700 years of the cloth industry.
Next to it is The Little Hall, dating from the fourteenth century, with its floorboards gleaming with the patina of age, low-beamed ceilings and a tiny, unruly, charming walled garden.
Precisely next door to this is a restaurant called The Great House.
Here, in the cool, pretty setting of the dining room that was once Stephen Spender 's, you will be served an exquisite three-course lunch for 9.50, 6 for children.
The wine list is small but perfectly chosen.
The service is impeccable.
East Anglia has bookshops filled with titles like 101 Things For A Boy To Do...
Constable landscapes...
Gainsborough's house... to say nothing of huge grey sweeps of empty beach from which, at Aldeburgh, you can buy goggle-eyed skate direct from the fishing boats as they come out of the water.
It has Colchester oysters.
It has Ely Cathedral, its great green windows casting a translucent light across the Lady Chapel.
With all this, small wonder it also has tourists.
Sore pedal push to the pagodas: A mountain bike is the perfect way to explore the byways of Nepal, says David Reed
By DAVID REED
THE FIRST thing to do in Kathmandu is dump your bags and hire a bike.
A bicycle is to the medieval streets of Nepal what a convertible is to a California freeway: appropriate technology.
Until recently, Nepal knew only one brand, the Hero, a clunky steel one-speeder.
Now, Kathmandu has discovered mountain bikes.
They're everywhere, not just in the capital but exploring crannies where no other form of transport will go.
A mountain bike is the perfect touring vehicle for Nepal's roads, which in recent years have deteriorated badly.
After this summer's monsoon, the Kathmandu-Pokhara highway (the country's most popular tourist route) probably looks like a donkey track.
A serious petrol shortage is only making things worse  bus travel, crowded at the best of times, is now cruel and inhumane.
I joined a group going to Nagarkot, a hilltop resort on the rim of the Kathmandu valley.
Organised by Kathmandu's only cycle tour operator, the trip wasn't too long or demanding, and was designed to introduce Nepalese culture, history and (in theory, anyway) Himalayan views at the top.
We were a group of eight Australians and Americans, led by a former Atlanta debutante named Frances Higgins.
She'd come to Nepal with a back-pack three years earlier and ended up marrying the US embassy dentist.
After a ritual distribution of chocolate and biscuits  they came in handy later  we wheeled out of the Kathmandu Guest House and into the demolition derby of old Kathmandu.
Pedestrians were the main hazard, but rickshaws, curio sellers, money-changers and the odd sacred cow also had to be manoeuvred around.
And the bumps.
I quickly found that mountain bikes don't particularly spare you the bumps.
We pedalled eastwards, first past the new Royal Palace  a weird, menacing building with bats hanging in the trees like handbags  and on to the great domed stupa, or Buddhist monument, of Bodnath.
It was Buddha's birthday.
An army of beggars and lepers had turned out, each crouched behind a cloth heaped with rice grains and coins.
For pilgrims, the ritual prostrations and prayer-wheel-spinning were out of the question, because beggars blocked the shrine.
Once out of Kathmandu we started getting long stares from villagers, laying out spring wheat on the road to be threshed by passing cars and carts.
I felt pretty silly wearing a plastic walnut shell on my head.
The flashy gear turned you, however unwillingly, into a sort of pied piper of Western materialism.
We stopped in Thimi, a village obscurely famous for a type of papier mache mask.
An instant crowd formed, mostly children.
Two or three pairs of hands roamed sensuously over the alloy frame, tentatively flexing the brakes and fiddling with the gear shift.
' How much you pay for this? ' asked a lad in a Michael Jackson T-shirt, hopefully.
I didn't buy any masks, but I was tempted by the matching two-foot-high figurines of King Birendra and Queen Aishwarya.
The King is said to be a reincarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu.
Ten miles from Kathmandu we pulled into Bhaktapur, the best preserved of the three ancient cities of the valley.
The tall brick houses would have looked like Victorian mansions, except for the pagoda roofs and the intricate wood lattices in place of glass window panes.
The alleys between them were dark and damp, rich with the smell of onions hung from the eaves.
To park the bikes we had to strike a deal with the children in the main square.
They wanted a few rupees as protection money  a common arrangement.
We lunched in a cafe overlooking a five-tiered pagoda temple, tall and slender like a square bullet.
After Bhaktapur, the real biking began.
As the land rose, the rectangular paddy fields gave way to thin terraces that carved the valley into steps; here and there an irrigated paddy glistened in a green crescent.
The road angled towards the rim of the valley, climbing 2,000 feet in eight relentless miles.
The grade was manageable in the lowest of 18 gears, but it was like riding an exercise cycle in a sauna.
The weather was fiendishly sticky, what they call the ' pre-monsoon '.
Clouds rose in thin columns up the mountain sides, grey upon grey, and started smudging out the valley.
The hilltop we were aiming for looked like an angry volcano.
I asked Ms Higgins what the difference was between the monsoon and the pre-monsoon.
' Oh, ' bout two weeks, ' she said from behind her Ray-Ban sunglasses.
We climbed into the clouds and a cooling drizzle began to fall.
I noticed I could see my breath.
We kept spiralling up towards a high point on the ridge, and when we reached it there was a lodge, perched improbably like a ski-lift station.
Next to it was a bamboo out-building with a big sign saying: ' The Restaurant at the End of the Universe '.
We sat there drinking hot chocolate and watching the clouds scrape raggedly past.
They seemed to be breaking up, and to the west a different valley - the one we would descend into the next day  was filling with a luminous gold haze.
But to the north, where the main Himalayan chain should have loomed, the curtain never parted, and it was the same story in the morning.
' Y'all should see this place in the fall, ' Ms Higgins apologised.
I'd seen the Himalayas in the autumn, so I was able to imagine them.
On my previous visit, at dawn, the range had floated eerily above a sea of fog.
At sunset the slabbish, orange peaks had appeared like ghosts out of the clouds and then, in less time than it took to wind on a camera, swirled away again.
Sore bottoms on saddles, we pointed our fat tyres down the steep track.
The descent was nerve-racking and it reminded me of the slow, queasy way light planes come in to land in Himalayan valleys.
At the first sign we came to, women were bashing wheat sheaves against rocks and men squatted in the dust playing a game with pebbles.
We were back in the sultry heat of the valley.
FACT FILE Flights: Royal Nepal Airlines has begun direct flights from London to Kathmandu: return fares cost 520 through Babin Travel (01-383 4314).
An alternative is Pakistan Airlines via Karachi.
Mountain bike operators: Himalayan Mountain Bikes, located in the courtyard of the Kathmandu Guest House, runs trips all over Nepal from 1 to 13 days, with costs ranging from $20 to $1,940; the Nagarkot trip costs $80.
Price includes everything  equipment, food, hotel or tent and, on longer trips, an escort vehicle.
Overnights can be arranged in Kathmandu, but longer trips should be booked by writing to the company at PO Box 2769, Kathmandu, Nepal.
Mountain bikes can be hired for $8 a day from America Nepal Mountain Bike Rental, south of the Old Vienna Inn in Kathmandu.
Books: A Guide to Trekking in Nepal by Stephen Bezruchka, The Mountaineers, 8.95.
David Reed is also writing a guide to Nepal.
Health: Hepatitis (gamma globulin), typhoid and Japanese encephalitis jabs are recommended; malaria pills may be advisable for lowland areas.
Visas: 14-day visas, extendable to one month, available on entry at the airport; for longer stays, apply in advance to the Royal Nepalese Embassy, 12a Kensington Palace Gardens W8, London (01-229 1594).
Trekking permits are necessary only for off-road trips in certain areas.
Maps: The Schneider map of the Kathmandu Valley is invaluable; outside the valley, the Nelles map of Nepal should be taken with a pinch of salt.
Trekking maps sold in Nepal may prove useful.
Tavel Update: Travel Top Ten
By DAVID REED
ACCORDING to figures from the English Tourist Board, the following historic places attracted the most (ticket-paying) visitors in 1988.
Tavel Update: Neat Noel
By DAVID REED
A THREE-NIGHT Christmas holiday in Rouen, France, at the Hotel de Dieppe costs 119 per person  including a six-course dinner on Christmas Eve -in a ferry-inclusive package offered by P &amp; O European Ferries (0705 772233).
The winter Short Trips to the Continent brochure also offers pre-Christmas shopping trips from Portsmouth to Le Havre, or Cherbourg, from 50 return for a car and four passengers.
Tavel Update: Credit caution
By DAVID REED
IF YOU buy air tickets by telephone, be very careful about giving your credit card number.
David Rundle of Slough rang a London agency, seeking a return seat-only deal to Athens.
The agent was able to offer a ticket and quoted a fare of 153.
' I said I was very interested and gave my credit card number as requested. '
The agent told Mr Rundle that she had to check his' card rating ' and put him on hold  to the accompaniment of taped music.
' This played for at least 10 minutes and finished and the phone went dead.
I rang again and the agent said she thought I'd put the phone down. '
He said that he hadn't, and he was put on hold again  and again the phone went dead.
' By this time I had waited about 15 minutes hanging on the phone and the clerk had not confirmed any booking. '
His patience exhausted, he called another agent and booked a dearer ticket.
He was surprised to receive shortly afterwards an invoice from the first agency informing him that his Visa account had been debited for 153 for tickets he didn't know he had bought.
The second agency had warned him he was entering into a contract by giving his credit card number.
He demanded a refund from the first agents but they refused, arguing that because he had given them his credit card number he had entered into a contract.
Mr Rundle took his case to Save &amp; Prosper who issued his Visa card.
On investigation, they discovered that the first agency had failed to get proper authorisation from Visa for the transaction.
According to Ian Lindsey, a director of Save &amp; Prosper, if the agency had obtained authorisation there is' no way ' Mr Rundle could have received a refund.
' Never, ever give out your card number until you have reached agreement, ' Mr Lindsey said.
Medieval bridge-builders to tourists: Hilly Janes found Bruges full of foreign hordes and historical haunts
By HILLY JANES
The first thing the lady in the hotel pointed out when she showed us our room overlooking the canal was an electric mosquito killer.
' Infested with tourists and mosquitoes'  the verdict of some friends who had spent a weekend in ' the Venice of the North ' earlier in the summer flashed through my mind.
Fortunately, in the cooler weather of late September, the scarlet geraniums in the window-boxes were still in bloom, but the mosquitoes seemed to have wilted.
Not so the human swarm.
If you perceive yourself as a traveller rather than a tourist, read no further.
If walking down streets teeming with non-residents induces mild panic, or if it strikes you as undignified to whizz around a museum in 10 minutes, because entry is part of the combination ticket you have bought from the tourist office, then forget Bruges.
You would be better spending a weekend in Antwerp, about 15 miles to the east, less well preserved architecturally but with more comprehensive museums and galleries, and much more the feel of a ' real ' town.
Almost entirely surrounded by a circle of water that formed part of the original fortifications, and still linked to its neighbours and the port of Zeebrugge about eight miles away by canals, Bruges' attraction is that its medieval architecture is remarkably intact.
Cobbled streets with gabled houses are criss-crossed by a network of tree-lined waterways linked by more than 50 arched bridges (which is how the city got is name).
A trip in a motorised open punt, with stripy red and white umbrellas at hand as shelter from the Belgian drizzle, is an enjoyable way to find your bearings, and at 2 for half an hour, offers a quick fix of what exactly hooks all these tourists.
As the boat chugs under the low arched bridges, the driver catalogues in Dutch, French, German and English the exhibits in this living museum.
There is St John's Hospital, the first in Europe, built in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, although founded much earlier, and still in use until the 1970s; the Beguinage, a religious foundation for women that dates back to the twelfth century, now a convent; the thirteenth-to fifteenth-century Church of our Lady, with a 350ft tower; the Stadhuis, a magnificent Gothic town hall dating from 1376-1420.
The Blue Guide lists almost 20 museums, churches and galleries within a circular area about half a mile across.
The contents of these buildings are no less spectacular than their exteriors.
The St John's Hospital allows a glimpse of early health care, with mock-ups to show how the patients were housed in rows of wooden cots, and cared for by nuns and friars.
Displays of early surgical instruments give a chilling glimpse of the pain the sick must have endured before anaesthetic was invented.
The hospital's fifteenth-century chapel houses a small collection of works by Hans Memling: exquisite, jewel-like portraits and interpretations of biblical scenes and Christian legends, as vivid as when he painted them 500 years ago.
In the chapel at the Beguinage, you can listen to the nuns chanting their prayers wearing the white headresses and black robes of the original beguines.
The Church of our Lady has a Michelangelo sculpture of the Madonna; the Gothic hall in the Stadhuis is crowned by a magnificent wooden vaulted ceiling.
Elsewhere there are Breughels; walls covered with Delft tiles; a medieval belfry with 366 steps from which you can gaze down on the town's steep, red tiled roofs; holy blood brought back from the crusades.
You begin to feel dizzy with history.
Of course, the well-groomed head of modern Bruges pops up all over the place to remind you that this is not really a medieval theme park at all.
On Saturday morning, we watched outside the Stadhuis, where couples still marry in the Gothic hall.
Limousines drew up to disgorge a wedding party; women in elegant outfits topped with splendid hats were a fanfare for a bride who stepped out of an old white Daimler, tanned beneath her white silk.
Very bourgeois, but that is probably what Bruges has always been.
The patrons of all this art were merchants in the thirteenth century, who profited from cloth manufacture.
From the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries, Bruges was the chief market of the powerful Hanseatic trading league.
At the end of the fifteenth century, one enterprising family realised there was money to be made from all the foreign merchants, and turned their house into sort of prototype stock exchange.
The family name, Beurze, explains the origins of the name for similar operations all over the Continent.
Their house is now a bank.
Nowadays the bourgeoisie is more likely to patronise the city's luxurious food and clothes shops, all housed in the medieval streets.
The oldest tavern is the Vlissinghe, of which mention was first made in 1552, but there are hundreds of little bars and cafes, many of them housed in olde-worlde buildings that have the Americans squealing with delight.
Plenty have terraces from which to watch the world go by accompanied by a hot waffle or a glass of beer.
There were once 40 breweries in Bruges, and although now there are only two, the choice of Belgian beers is still enormous.
One cafe lists 300.
My rich, dark Trappist practically knocked me for six at lunchtime, while a deep red cherry beer, Kriek, tasted like alcoholic cough mixture.
For more substantial meals there are plenty of bigger cafes and restaurants offering set-price menus.
The north side of the market square, the Markt, is lined with them, and for about 6 you can have three basic courses.
For a little more many include fish treats such as half a dozen oysters in season; waterzooi, fish cooked in a light stock and served with leeks and carrots; a fillet of turbot or chunks of eel in a green herb sauce.
An enormous bowl of mussels cooked in a delicious liquor with celery, onion, parsley and plenty of black pepper can be had for about 4.
The open air fish market does brisk business every morning except Sunday and Monday and is well worth a visit for its display of fresh and smoked specialities, as well as a huge range of shellfish.
It is best not to leave eating too late.
Bruges goes to bed early and can hardly be said to be throbbing with night-life.
Last weekend the highlights were marionettes miming to Die Fledermaus at the puppet theatre and a country music festival.
We did try a night cap in a ' classical music pub ' but as it was in the underground of a shopping arcade, and the clientele seemed more interested in chomping through their steak and chips than appreciating Karajan's version of the Emperor Concerto, we just had the one.
Once fully saturated with culture, food, drink or any combination of the three, it is possible to escape the tourist honeypots, which are mostly in the centre and south of town.
To the north the streets are quieter, and by following the canals  a smelly exercise in high summer, no doubt  or simply the end of your nose, Bruges can be appreciated on a more domestic scale.
The flat-fronted facades are often decorated with intricate brickwork, and even modern restorations seem to be strictly controlled in a style that combines discreet Post-Modern twiddly with forms and colours that are in the spirit of the original.
There are few cars here, though lots of bicycles, very few dogs and almost no dog mess (even the horse-drawn buggies for tourist joyrides have built-in pooper scoopers).
Best of all, there are hardly any other tourists.
Accommodation: The Bruges tourist office produces a comprehensive guide.
Independent travel: Bruges is four hours from Victoria by train via Dover and the 90 minute jetfoil to Ostend.
Alternatively you can fly to Brussels or Antwerp and take the train to Bruges.
Eating Out: Plenty of places in all price ranges  just look at the menu displayed and take your pick.
Serious eaters look at the red Michelin Benelux guide, which lists about 25 restaurants in the centre, a handful of which have one star.
Appetites should be matched by pockets, as here you are entering 30-a-head-plus territory.
Markets: Apart from the fish market, there is a general market every Saturday morning on T'Zand, on the west side of town, and every Wednesday on the Burg, in the centre.
A flea market along the Dijver, one of the main canals, takes place on Saturday and Sunday from March to October but looks like a real tourist trap.
Books: Blue Guide to Belgium and Luxembourg (Black/Norton, 11.95), good for historical sights; Brugge Inside Out available locally for about 4 is useful for more down-to-earth matters.
Useful information: From October to March the Tourist Information Office in the Burg (44 86 86) is open Mon-Sat 9.30am-12.45pm and 2am-5.45pm, closed Sundays.
It sells combination tickets to four museums for about 3.
Agenda Brugge is a useful free guide to what's on each month.
Ostend Ferries: P&amp;O European Ferries (0304 203388) has up to six sailings a day in each direction from Dover to Ostend, crossing time four hours; a 60-hour return for a 4.5 metre car and two adults costs from 50 to 89 depending on sailing.
Zeebrugge Ferries: North Sea Ferries (0482 77177) has a daily sailing from Hull to Zeebrugge: crossing time 14 hours.
Short break fares including one night's hotel accommodation in Bruges, cost from 78 per person  cars extra.
P&amp;O European Ferries (0304 203388) has five sailings a day in each direction from Dover to Zeebrugge: crossing time four and a half hours.
A 60-hour return for a 4.5 metre car and two adults costs from 50 to 89, depending on sailing.
P&amp;O has two sailings a day from Felixstowe to Zeebrugge, crossing time five and a half hours.
A 60-hour return for a car and two adults costs from 55 to 94.
Dunkirk Ferries: Sally (0843 595522) operates five sailings a day from Ramsgate to Dunkirk: crossing time is two hours, 30 minutes.
A 60-hour return for a 4.5 metre car and two adults costs from 47 to 84, depending on day and time of travel.
Market: The town market takes place on Wednesday and Saturday in the place Jean Bart.
Hypermarket: The best is Auchan on the RN1, en route to the Sally ferry terminal.
It accepts Visa cards.
