With its marble corridors, chandeliers and Thai restaurant, Kabul's newly-opened Serena Hotel points to what the Afghan government hopes will be an affluent future.
The country's first five-star hotel has been built by the Aga Khan, leader of the Ismaeli Muslim minority, businessman and philanthropist. It has 300 staff and rooms costing up to £680 per night, equivalent to the annual income of 12 Afghans.
You can find the article here
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Monday, January 16, 2006
Figeac - France
Now I'm the right side of a pan-fried foie gras, cradling an armagnac, and gratified.
After a couple of days in the place, I have confirmed beyond reasonable doubt that Figeac, in the Lot, is the finest small town in France. I have long suspected it, and now I am certain.
So far, so clear, but so what? Well, I am increasingly convinced that small towns - say, under 12,000 population - are the best way to experience France. (Possibly anywhere, for that matter.) The much-acclaimed French villages may, of course, be lovely, but they are shut by 7.30pm, subject to curtain-twitching and a certain sullen frostiness in the café (especially, I've noted, if it's called Le Bar des Amis).
You can find the article here
After a couple of days in the place, I have confirmed beyond reasonable doubt that Figeac, in the Lot, is the finest small town in France. I have long suspected it, and now I am certain.
So far, so clear, but so what? Well, I am increasingly convinced that small towns - say, under 12,000 population - are the best way to experience France. (Possibly anywhere, for that matter.) The much-acclaimed French villages may, of course, be lovely, but they are shut by 7.30pm, subject to curtain-twitching and a certain sullen frostiness in the café (especially, I've noted, if it's called Le Bar des Amis).
You can find the article here
Kenia Safari
The Kenya safari has an image problem. As one Africa specialist put it: there is the perception that you either stay in a bush hotel and join a herd of minibuses for game-viewing, or opt for a lodge on a private ranch where you sometimes feel you are there solely to support the owner's lifestyle.
What is forgotten is that Kenya offers terrific value for those of us who don't have the budget to blow on thousand-dollar-a-night camps in South Africa and Botswana. It also has some of the most accessible and rewarding game viewing in Africa.
You can find the article here
What is forgotten is that Kenya offers terrific value for those of us who don't have the budget to blow on thousand-dollar-a-night camps in South Africa and Botswana. It also has some of the most accessible and rewarding game viewing in Africa.
You can find the article here
Albarracin - Spain
Tourists crawl all over the Iberian peninsula like ants at a picnic, but hardly any venture into this quietly beautiful and fascinating area of Spain. If they did, they'd find that there are no shops selling medieval jesters hats or plastic swords, or restaurants with laminated pictures of tourist menus. There's no hinterland of modern buildings or McDonald's - just winding, cobbled streets, meandering through an ancient settlement perched on the cliffs of a precipitous gorge. Albarracin is a Spanish Aragonese pueblo that has changed little since the Middle Ages.
The surrounding countryside boasts crystal-clear rivers stocked with trout, fragrant pine forests, ochre-red rock formations, soaring golden eagles and 6,000-year-old Paleolithic cave drawings. So how has it managed to remain so unspoilt? The preservation of Albarracin is thanks mainly to the common sense and munificence of the Moors from North Africa. Developing the site from a Roman fort, the Moors created a highly successful community that became pivotal in medieval Islamic Spain. Once a separate kingdom in its own right, prosperous and essentially peaceful, the city drifted into obscurity only in modern times.
You can find the article here
The surrounding countryside boasts crystal-clear rivers stocked with trout, fragrant pine forests, ochre-red rock formations, soaring golden eagles and 6,000-year-old Paleolithic cave drawings. So how has it managed to remain so unspoilt? The preservation of Albarracin is thanks mainly to the common sense and munificence of the Moors from North Africa. Developing the site from a Roman fort, the Moors created a highly successful community that became pivotal in medieval Islamic Spain. Once a separate kingdom in its own right, prosperous and essentially peaceful, the city drifted into obscurity only in modern times.
You can find the article here
Turkmenistan
Turkmenistan is not a place for toothache, nor for the faint-hearted. After the break-up of the USSR, the Cadogan guidebook, one of the first for Central Asia, described the former Soviet republic as "only marginally more suited to human habitation than the moon". The relentless Karakum, or Black Sand Desert, blankets most of the country. Crossing it by the Trans-Caspian Railroad in the 1880s, Lord Curzon decided that it was "the sorriest waste that ever met the human eye". What's more, this isolated nation bordering Iran and Afghanistan has one of the most secretive and repressive regimes on earth.
If none of this puts you off, Turkmenistan is definitely worth a visit. The capital, Ashgabat, is a monument to the country's eccentric dictator, President Saparmurat Niyazov - otherwise known as "Turkmenbashi", or "Father of the Turkomans". His country is blessed with the world's fifth-largest deposits of natural gas, and he is frantically turning the wealth below ground into high-rise real estate. Except it doesn't look real. Gleaming marble-clad towers have sprung up everywhere, like a brash mirage in the desert.
You can find the article here
If none of this puts you off, Turkmenistan is definitely worth a visit. The capital, Ashgabat, is a monument to the country's eccentric dictator, President Saparmurat Niyazov - otherwise known as "Turkmenbashi", or "Father of the Turkomans". His country is blessed with the world's fifth-largest deposits of natural gas, and he is frantically turning the wealth below ground into high-rise real estate. Except it doesn't look real. Gleaming marble-clad towers have sprung up everywhere, like a brash mirage in the desert.
You can find the article here
Golden Age Shanghai
Shanghai may be the crown jewel of the New China, but the Pearl of the Orient gleamed just as brightly during the late 1930s, when this infamous port city was synonymous with pleasure, power and money.
The Merchant Ivory film The White Countess, which opened yesterday in theatres nationwide, takes moviegoers back to those decadent days of mansions and mobsters, "singsong clubs" (brothels) and stylish qipaos.
Director James Ivory confessed during filming that it was extremely difficult to recreate old Shanghai amid the futuristic skyscrapers going up at record speed in this city of 16 million people. But the old Shanghai, or at least the spirit of it, still exists - if you know where to look for it.
"Reminders of Shanghai's ‘Golden Age' are everywhere in contemporary Shanghai," says Patrick Cranley, president of the Shanghai Historic House Association. "But recognizing them takes a considerable amount of familiarity with the history of this fascinating city."
You can find the review here
The Merchant Ivory film The White Countess, which opened yesterday in theatres nationwide, takes moviegoers back to those decadent days of mansions and mobsters, "singsong clubs" (brothels) and stylish qipaos.
Director James Ivory confessed during filming that it was extremely difficult to recreate old Shanghai amid the futuristic skyscrapers going up at record speed in this city of 16 million people. But the old Shanghai, or at least the spirit of it, still exists - if you know where to look for it.
"Reminders of Shanghai's ‘Golden Age' are everywhere in contemporary Shanghai," says Patrick Cranley, president of the Shanghai Historic House Association. "But recognizing them takes a considerable amount of familiarity with the history of this fascinating city."
You can find the review here
Madagascar
Although I had heard and read much about Madagascar before going, I wasn't prepared for how thoroughly different it is. Although the island's natural heritage is extraordinary, it was the human culture that most surprised me, a visitor from mainland Africa.
While southern Africa's Bantu language-speaking peoples subsist on cornmeal and are dark-skinned, the Malagasy live on rice and look Asian. Their ancestors arrived from what are now Malaysia and Indonesia about 2,000 years ago. The Malagasy speak a language said to share 80 per cent of its content with south-east Asian tongues. But a Malay-speaker from Singapore resident in Tana, as residents call the polysyllabic capital city Antananarivo, tells me she can barely understand a word.
Surrounded by rice paddies, Tana is made up of antique houses with sharply peaked roofs built on hills, which give it a fairy-tale quality. The city is laced with Parisian-style stone staircases, tunnels and other sturdy public works from the French colonial era. Ducks and geese scrabble around in the dust among the vendors and street urchins, as in a Hogarth engraving. The Queen's Palace, inhabited by Madagascar's last monarchs and damaged in a fire in 1995, overlooks the city. Marc Ravolamanana, the country's businessman-turned-president, inhabits a house perched on another precipice and moves through Tana in a traffic-stopping motorcade of wailing black limousines.
You can find the article here
While southern Africa's Bantu language-speaking peoples subsist on cornmeal and are dark-skinned, the Malagasy live on rice and look Asian. Their ancestors arrived from what are now Malaysia and Indonesia about 2,000 years ago. The Malagasy speak a language said to share 80 per cent of its content with south-east Asian tongues. But a Malay-speaker from Singapore resident in Tana, as residents call the polysyllabic capital city Antananarivo, tells me she can barely understand a word.
Surrounded by rice paddies, Tana is made up of antique houses with sharply peaked roofs built on hills, which give it a fairy-tale quality. The city is laced with Parisian-style stone staircases, tunnels and other sturdy public works from the French colonial era. Ducks and geese scrabble around in the dust among the vendors and street urchins, as in a Hogarth engraving. The Queen's Palace, inhabited by Madagascar's last monarchs and damaged in a fire in 1995, overlooks the city. Marc Ravolamanana, the country's businessman-turned-president, inhabits a house perched on another precipice and moves through Tana in a traffic-stopping motorcade of wailing black limousines.
You can find the article here
Jaipur Heritage Festival - India
Forget the rush hour in favour of sinuous Odissan dancing, pungi and bansuri music, more exquisite embroidered pashminas than you can conjure deserving shoulders for, a confetti of polychrome kites in a wide blue sky (this being the kite season), neon-lit streets patrolled by painted and caparisoned elephants bearing apprehensive bridegrooms (wedding season too), dusty museums whose walls vibrate with brilliant miniatures of amorous princes, palaces where the interiors glitter with mirror inlay and whose faded murals document the quotidian sex, picnics and warfare of maharajas.
The Jaipur Festival is unlike anything I have ever encountered before - the vast wealth and variety of Indian culture, craft and kitsch is laid before the visitor in a casually magnificent display. For the newcomer to India every foray to fort or temple is an adventure in fascination and, for those familiar with India and its ways, during the festival the pink city celebrates the painters, musicians and craftsmen - local and national - whose work usually has to be sought out in busy labyrinths seething with trishaws and bikes.
You can find the article here
The Jaipur Festival is unlike anything I have ever encountered before - the vast wealth and variety of Indian culture, craft and kitsch is laid before the visitor in a casually magnificent display. For the newcomer to India every foray to fort or temple is an adventure in fascination and, for those familiar with India and its ways, during the festival the pink city celebrates the painters, musicians and craftsmen - local and national - whose work usually has to be sought out in busy labyrinths seething with trishaws and bikes.
You can find the article here
Weekend in Andorra and how to write about it
The Art of Writing a Story About Walking Across Andorra
He traversed an entire nation in a long weekend. Now Rolf Potts shows how you can impress members of the opposite sex and write a textbook-perfect travel article in eight easy steps.
I. Many Travel Stories Begin as an Attempt to Impress Pretty Women
A. Once you have walked across the small Pyrenean nation of Andorra, you should proceed to Barcelona. Here, you will look for a nightclub called L’Arquer. According to your guidebook, L’Arquer contains a fully functioning archery range, and you are intrigued by the idea that one can shoot bows and arrows inside a nightclub. As with Andorra, you are attracted by L’Arquer because you find it charming that such a place exists.
B. In actuality, of course, L’Arquer will not likely live up to your expectations. The archery range, for example, will probably be in a separate, cordoned-off area, and your fantasies of chugging beers while shooting arrows over crowds of drunken revelers will not come true. For this reason, you will not look very hard for L’Arquer, and you will end up settling for a pub called Shanghai. This way, L’Arquer will remain perfect in your imagination-unlike Andorra, the memory of which has now been tainted with jagged brown ridges, chintzy souvenirs and drunken Scotsmen.
C. In the Shanghai pub, you will meet a Canadian woman named Lisa, who has come to Spain for two weeks of vacation. Eventually, she will ask you what you’re here for, and you will tell her that you just walked across Andorra. Lisa isn’t exactly sure what Andorra is, so the implicit gag (that Andorra is in fact a very small country, quite easy to walk across) is lost on her. Instead, she asks a neutral question: 'How was it?' You reply that it was quite interesting.
D. After this, there will be a pause, which implies that Lisa wants you to elaborate. This is when the real Andorra story begins. What immediately follows the pause will not be the final and definitive story, but it will set the tone for how you’ll remember Andorra in the future. This is where you begin to pick and choose, to play games with reality, to separate the meaningful from the mundane and hold it up for display. Later, when you are writing the story down, you will add details of history and culture-but for now you just want to hold Lisa’s attention, because she has clear blue eyes and a captivating smile.
E. Skipping over the actual details of the hike, you tell Lisa about the Festa Major celebration in Andorra la Vella. Here, a group of mentally handicapped Andorrans singled you out from the crowd and cheerfully bullied you into joining them in a Catalan dance called the sardana. You choose to reveal Andorra through this story because it’s funny and self-deprecating, and you want to single yourself out to Lisa as a charmed person who is instinctively adored by retards.
F. The story goes fairly well upon first telling, save the fact that: (a) Lisa seems faintly offended when you use the word 'retards'; and (b) You flub the phrasing near the end of the story, inadvertently implying (to Lisa’s ears) that you were insensitive to the mentally handicapped Andorrans while you were dancing with them. You make a mental note to sharpen the clarity of your phrasing, since you were not, in fact, acting insensitive when it actually happened.
You can find the article here.
Friday, January 13, 2006
Indigenous tourism ventures in Kakadu National Park - Australia
Kakadu Indigenous tourism ventures get green light
Three new Indigenous tourism ventures have been approved for Kakadu National Park.
The Kakadu board of management has given the go ahead for a safari camp at Cannon Hill and an art centre and safari camp east of Yellow Water.
Approval has also been given for a culture camp which gives tourists the chance to spend time with a local Aboriginal family.
The Federal Government says all three ventures deliver an authentic experience with traditional owners and will be open this dry season.
You can find the article here.
Kakadu National Park is classifed by UNESCO as World Heritage.
This unique archaeological and ethnological reserve, located in the Northern Territory, has been inhabited continuously for more than 40,000 years. The cave paintings, rock carvings and archaeological sites record the skills and way of life of the region's inhabitants, from the hunter-gatherers of prehistoric times to the Aboriginal people still living there. It is a unique example of a complex of ecosystems, including tidal flats, floodplains, lowlands and plateaux, and provides a habitat for a wide range of rare or endemic species of plants and animals.
Kakadu National Park.
Three new Indigenous tourism ventures have been approved for Kakadu National Park.
The Kakadu board of management has given the go ahead for a safari camp at Cannon Hill and an art centre and safari camp east of Yellow Water.
Approval has also been given for a culture camp which gives tourists the chance to spend time with a local Aboriginal family.
The Federal Government says all three ventures deliver an authentic experience with traditional owners and will be open this dry season.
You can find the article here.
Kakadu National Park is classifed by UNESCO as World Heritage.
This unique archaeological and ethnological reserve, located in the Northern Territory, has been inhabited continuously for more than 40,000 years. The cave paintings, rock carvings and archaeological sites record the skills and way of life of the region's inhabitants, from the hunter-gatherers of prehistoric times to the Aboriginal people still living there. It is a unique example of a complex of ecosystems, including tidal flats, floodplains, lowlands and plateaux, and provides a habitat for a wide range of rare or endemic species of plants and animals.
Kakadu National Park.
Seven strategies for making your next ski trip affordable
Strategy is everything when it comes to planning a ski vacation these days, and it can help ease the financial burden of what's invariably an expensive holiday. At the ticket window in Aspen this winter, you'll pay $78 for a one-day lift pass. Renting skis, boots, and poles at Vermont's Okemo? That'll be $47 per person, per day. And $552 is the minimum nightly rate in mid-March for a two-bedroom unit at the Beaverhead Condominium in Big Sky, Montana. A hefty tab? You bet, especially since you've still got to factor in airfare, ground transportation, and dining. It's easy to see how a family of four can spend $5,000 for a ski week. And while ski resorts such as Vail are undergoing redevelopment, funded in part by real estate, they're not offering any outright discounts as a result of construction. What's a penny-pinching skier to do?
You can find the full article here.
You can find the full article here.
Puerto Rico's Lost Coast
Drive the surfer's paradise of Puerto Rico's west coast with our road trip map, complete with itinerary, tips for food and lodging, and even a playlist of music to drive by.
Unlike its eastern islands of Vieques and Culebra, which have drawn rave reviews and droves of zinc-nosed gringos, Puerto Rico's wild west coast has managed to remain (refreshingly) off the radar. New direct flights to Aguadilla amount to a speed pass to some of the best surfing, diving, and, yes, driving in the Caribbean. Granted, some roads lack signage, and many are white-knuckle narrow, but the rewards of getting behind the wheel-a bucolic cruise along La Ruta Panorámica, "the scenic route," the chance to climb the island's highest peak-are, as the locals say, vale la pena (well worth it).
You can find the full article here.
Unlike its eastern islands of Vieques and Culebra, which have drawn rave reviews and droves of zinc-nosed gringos, Puerto Rico's wild west coast has managed to remain (refreshingly) off the radar. New direct flights to Aguadilla amount to a speed pass to some of the best surfing, diving, and, yes, driving in the Caribbean. Granted, some roads lack signage, and many are white-knuckle narrow, but the rewards of getting behind the wheel-a bucolic cruise along La Ruta Panorámica, "the scenic route," the chance to climb the island's highest peak-are, as the locals say, vale la pena (well worth it).
You can find the full article here.
Travel recommendations for 2006
SmartTravel.com recommendations for 2006 (including Albuquerque, China, Croatia, Thailand, The Netherlands and Turkey).
The new year brings with it up-and-coming destinations worth keeping on your travel radar as you begin to plan your vacations for 2006. From destinations in the U.S. to those in Europe and even farther afield, several factors influenced our choices, including cultural events, political changes, increasing popularity and major rebuilding.
Our picks for the top six destinations to watch for 2006 are Albuquerque, China, Croatia, Thailand, The Netherlands and Turkey.
You can find the full article
here.
The new year brings with it up-and-coming destinations worth keeping on your travel radar as you begin to plan your vacations for 2006. From destinations in the U.S. to those in Europe and even farther afield, several factors influenced our choices, including cultural events, political changes, increasing popularity and major rebuilding.
Our picks for the top six destinations to watch for 2006 are Albuquerque, China, Croatia, Thailand, The Netherlands and Turkey.
You can find the full article
here.
A family visit to Ethiopia
Article by film and theatre director Richard Eyre at the Telegraph.
Addis Ababa is a city - huge, musky, dusty and chaotic - that still lives up (or down) to Evelyn Waugh's description: " . . . everything was haphazard and incongruous: one learned always to expect the unusual and yet was always surprised." (...)
Unusually for such a large country - the size of France and Spain combined - the landscape changes quite rapidly and at each change you search for a description but your comparison is never quite sufficient: Alpine valleys give way to Provençal scrubland that channels into chasms as deep and splendid as the Grand Canyon, which open onto plateaus noble as the plains of Greece.
It is a landscape that fuels legends and has inspired fiction for centuries: "The Letter of Prester John" in the 12th century told of a huge Christian kingdom in the East, comprising the "three Indias'', free of crime and sin, where "honey flows in our land and milk everywhere abounds''; Samuel Johnson's The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia used the country for a parable about how to live better; the tales in James Bruce's Travels to discover the Source of the Nile, though later verified, were dismissed as too exotic to be credible and, two centuries later, served as source material for George Macdonald Fraser's latest Flashman adventures.
You can find the full article here.
Addis Ababa is a city - huge, musky, dusty and chaotic - that still lives up (or down) to Evelyn Waugh's description: " . . . everything was haphazard and incongruous: one learned always to expect the unusual and yet was always surprised." (...)
Unusually for such a large country - the size of France and Spain combined - the landscape changes quite rapidly and at each change you search for a description but your comparison is never quite sufficient: Alpine valleys give way to Provençal scrubland that channels into chasms as deep and splendid as the Grand Canyon, which open onto plateaus noble as the plains of Greece.
It is a landscape that fuels legends and has inspired fiction for centuries: "The Letter of Prester John" in the 12th century told of a huge Christian kingdom in the East, comprising the "three Indias'', free of crime and sin, where "honey flows in our land and milk everywhere abounds''; Samuel Johnson's The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia used the country for a parable about how to live better; the tales in James Bruce's Travels to discover the Source of the Nile, though later verified, were dismissed as too exotic to be credible and, two centuries later, served as source material for George Macdonald Fraser's latest Flashman adventures.
You can find the full article here.
Affordable accommodation in Paris
You'd be surprised what comfortable accommodations the budget traveler can find in Paris. If you don't mind the occasional oddly shaped (and usually tiny) room or lugging your baggage up some stairs, you'll find that staying in a hotel in Paris doesn't have to significantly lighten your wallet. These small, mostly family-run lodgings offer some things that most luxury hotels can't supply: hominess, intimacy, and a degree of authenticity.
Don't be afraid to ask for what you want when making reservations. Tell the management you want a large room, a quiet room, a room with a view, a bathroom with a tub, or simply the most recently renovated room. Ask to see your room before checking in, and if you don't like it, ask to see another.
You can find the full article here.
Don't be afraid to ask for what you want when making reservations. Tell the management you want a large room, a quiet room, a room with a view, a bathroom with a tub, or simply the most recently renovated room. Ask to see your room before checking in, and if you don't like it, ask to see another.
You can find the full article here.
Benguerra Island - Mozambique
A report from Jamie Doward in the Observer
I enter my chalet and London feels a long time ago, the stress of the journey instantly expunged. There is a four-poster bed the size of my spare room that looks as if it has come from the set of The English Patient. The shower is an impressively colonial affair; the floor is polished teak and there is a huge fan hanging from the ceiling. Outside my door lies a hammock on which I can watch the sun go down over Africa and ponder on the uncomfortable fact that only a few years ago Mozambique was a geopolitical basket case, a country ripped apart by a seemingly interminable civil war that saw landmines planted with the sort of enthusiasm normally reserved for GM cash crops and Marxist ideology disseminated to the locals with a gusto once confined to East Germany.
You can find the full article here.
I enter my chalet and London feels a long time ago, the stress of the journey instantly expunged. There is a four-poster bed the size of my spare room that looks as if it has come from the set of The English Patient. The shower is an impressively colonial affair; the floor is polished teak and there is a huge fan hanging from the ceiling. Outside my door lies a hammock on which I can watch the sun go down over Africa and ponder on the uncomfortable fact that only a few years ago Mozambique was a geopolitical basket case, a country ripped apart by a seemingly interminable civil war that saw landmines planted with the sort of enthusiasm normally reserved for GM cash crops and Marxist ideology disseminated to the locals with a gusto once confined to East Germany.
You can find the full article here.
Western Australia - Sun and Surf
Travel to Perth, a report by Simon Busch in The Guardian.
Whether it is cheaper than therapy I don't know, but revisiting your past by aeroplane at least means you can get a ticket out again. I was quite an intellectual child and felt thoroughly deracinated when moved, at the age of 12 or so, from the relatively urbane environment of Sydney, on the east coast of Australia, to Perth, 4,000km away as the kookaburra flies across the flat, arid, lonely interior of the continent to the opposite, western shore.
Perth was not only the most isolated city in the world - as far from its nearest neighbour, Adelaide, as London is from Istanbul - but also, I found, populated by alien-seeming beings. These were perma-tanned, muscular creatures with sun-bleached hair falling over wrap-around, reflective sunglasses, who seemed to be almost evolutionarily adapted to the fortnight-long stretches of 40-degree heat and, by their slightly bow-legged stance, poised on their surfboards even when they weren't. What they apparently lacked was an affinity for literature; what they evidently lacked - they told me so, with a characteristic raucous obscenity - was an affinity for the socks and sandals that I, at first, unselfconsciously wore.
But, some years after going west, I discovered a wonderful retreat in the form of the shire of Margaret River: a hamlet and its surrounds three hours' drive down the coast from Perth in the cooler clime of the south-west. Now, making that drive again 15 years on, having since left Perth for Melbourne and then London, but returned to Western Australia for a week, the sharp, sulphurous smell of the eucalypts by the side of the road sent me, as smells will, spiralling into a disquieting zone of temporal uncertainty.
You can find the full article here.
Whether it is cheaper than therapy I don't know, but revisiting your past by aeroplane at least means you can get a ticket out again. I was quite an intellectual child and felt thoroughly deracinated when moved, at the age of 12 or so, from the relatively urbane environment of Sydney, on the east coast of Australia, to Perth, 4,000km away as the kookaburra flies across the flat, arid, lonely interior of the continent to the opposite, western shore.
Perth was not only the most isolated city in the world - as far from its nearest neighbour, Adelaide, as London is from Istanbul - but also, I found, populated by alien-seeming beings. These were perma-tanned, muscular creatures with sun-bleached hair falling over wrap-around, reflective sunglasses, who seemed to be almost evolutionarily adapted to the fortnight-long stretches of 40-degree heat and, by their slightly bow-legged stance, poised on their surfboards even when they weren't. What they apparently lacked was an affinity for literature; what they evidently lacked - they told me so, with a characteristic raucous obscenity - was an affinity for the socks and sandals that I, at first, unselfconsciously wore.
But, some years after going west, I discovered a wonderful retreat in the form of the shire of Margaret River: a hamlet and its surrounds three hours' drive down the coast from Perth in the cooler clime of the south-west. Now, making that drive again 15 years on, having since left Perth for Melbourne and then London, but returned to Western Australia for a week, the sharp, sulphurous smell of the eucalypts by the side of the road sent me, as smells will, spiralling into a disquieting zone of temporal uncertainty.
You can find the full article here.
Cacun in the aftermath of hurricane Wilma
How the Riviera Maya is recovering.
Five-star resorts stand battered and broken, crawling with construction crews that hammer and bulldoze, weld and replaster long into the night.
The discotheques are dark, many shopping centres and restaurants remain smashed, and the beaches have lost much of the sugar-white sand that made them famous.
Cancun won't feel like Cancun for months, but many resorts on the nearby Riviera Maya have reopened and are nearly fully recovered.
Cozumel is again teeming with tourists arriving aboard cruise ships, though most of the island's top hotels remain closed and officials say its coral reefs may need a century to recover from Wilma's wrath.
You can find the full article here.
Five-star resorts stand battered and broken, crawling with construction crews that hammer and bulldoze, weld and replaster long into the night.
The discotheques are dark, many shopping centres and restaurants remain smashed, and the beaches have lost much of the sugar-white sand that made them famous.
Cancun won't feel like Cancun for months, but many resorts on the nearby Riviera Maya have reopened and are nearly fully recovered.
Cozumel is again teeming with tourists arriving aboard cruise ships, though most of the island's top hotels remain closed and officials say its coral reefs may need a century to recover from Wilma's wrath.
You can find the full article here.
Trekking in the Ruwenzori Mountains - Uganda
A report from Alexandra Ferguson in the Telegraph
Thick as a hosepipe and 30 inches long, the earthworm seems perfectly ordinary in this fecund jungle. The undergrowth glows like Astroturf; big, bright butterflies scatter as we walk and armour-plated ants pour from the rich, red earth. Yet a few hours' walk away, obscured by swirling mists, a snowy mountain waits.
We are in the Ruwenzori Mountains, which rise from Uganda's fertile plains, a day's dusty drive west of Kampala.
We are here to complete a six-day trek through the National Park and climb Margherita Peak, situated along the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo. One hundred years have passed since the Duke of Abruzzi first conquered the highest of Mount Stanley's three summits and named it after his queen.
You can find the full review here.
Thick as a hosepipe and 30 inches long, the earthworm seems perfectly ordinary in this fecund jungle. The undergrowth glows like Astroturf; big, bright butterflies scatter as we walk and armour-plated ants pour from the rich, red earth. Yet a few hours' walk away, obscured by swirling mists, a snowy mountain waits.
We are in the Ruwenzori Mountains, which rise from Uganda's fertile plains, a day's dusty drive west of Kampala.
We are here to complete a six-day trek through the National Park and climb Margherita Peak, situated along the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo. One hundred years have passed since the Duke of Abruzzi first conquered the highest of Mount Stanley's three summits and named it after his queen.
You can find the full review here.
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