Paris hotels range from stately palaces like giant wedding cakes, to space-station-esque design disasters, to dives and dumps and dungeons. Quietly minding her business, tucked away on the Place des Vosges, is the true queen of the castle, the Pavillon de la Reine. We love the Pavillon de la Reine. You couldn’t claim it had […]
Abandon Aqaba. Ditch the Dead Sea. To get way off the beaten wadi in eco-friendly style, head for the simple pleasures of Feynan Ecolodge. Perched on the edge of the Great Rift Valley in Jordan’s Dana Biosphere Reserve, Feynan is something of an architectural oddity. Its look is part crusader castle, part Bedouin spaceship—and 100% […]
Even in a country as small as New Zealand, a three room hotel (for lack of a better word) is considered tiny. And yet, somehow there’s something about Edenhouse, in the Nelson/Abel Tasman area of the South Island, that isn’t little at all. Like any masterpiece Edenhouse plays the scales beautifully, twisting large and small […]
It’s a tricky thing, being off the grid. How disconnected can you be, really? I think that’s why I like Africa so much. Most of the countries that you can travel to have modern cell phone networks and broadband internet connectivity, but you can still find places that don’t. There are remote regions all over […]
No place has ever made me so happy as Soneva Fushi. This truly is a fantasy island, where everything you are and know is left behind once you get off that seaplane. It is not a hotel, or even a retreat. It’s a world unto itself, where the Great Gatsbys of our age wander about […]
There’s a reason Grandma’s been hoarding the sherry. Turns out she’s been keeping the best drink in the cabinet all to herself. It’s time to loosen her bony grip on the Amontillado. Here’s everything you ever needed to know about sherry but were too young to ask. There are five horsemen of the sherry apolcalypse: fino, […]
If like me you groan at the mere thought of another Philippe Stark-designed hipster bar, or über-minimalist white-carpeted trend hotel where you can’t figure out how to turn the bathroom lights off, I bet you’ll love the un-hip un-cool not-at-all-with-it Parador hotels of Spain. King Alfonso XIII may have been the proud owner of the […]
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom for travel in Europe are: food, wine, architecture, art, music, landscape and experimental alcoholic concoctions. Overflowing in all of the above, it’s no wonder that Jerez is my latest crush. After a dalliance with Córdoba and a brief fling with Úbeda, I didn’t expect to be swept off my feet so completely by […]
A montage of doors and gateways from the neighbouring UNESCO World Heritage towns of Úbeda and Baeza in northeast Andalucía. Most people don’t make it up here on trips around Andalucía. The hordes head to the beaches. Hikers head to the sierra around Ronda. History buffs are spoilt for choice in the cities: Granada and […]
Ten years ago you had to look pretty hard to find a fantastic place to stay in Marrakech. Sure there was a grand dame (that would be La Mamounia), but mostly it was a city of damsels in distress—long-in-the-tooth-and-never-that-beautiful-in the-first-place sort of places. And then began the riad renaissance, a remarkable era of restoration in […]
“You have destroyed something unique, to create something commonplace,” said Charles V, when his bishops crashed a Gothic cathedral right into the middle of Cordoba’s amazing 8C Mosque. The result was an amazing layer cake of Spanish historical flavour. I’m on a jaunt around Andalucia, getting to grips with the ebb and flow of Christian […]
Some countries have all the luck. Just think of what the film ‘Lord of the Rings’ did for New Zealand tourism. Or how about ‘A Year in Provence’? One petit book and all of a sudden the world wanted to relocate to rural France and spend a year renovating an old stone house. Sometimes even […]
Parts of Croatia and Montenegro’s Adriatic coast combine some of the most stunning landscape and villages in Europe, with the very worst that cheap mass tourism has to offer. How do you see past the café umbrellas and postcard stands, to the original character of the place? Since the likes of Dubrovnik and Kotor decided […]
It’s that time of year when any self-respecting Brit recognises his deep cultural debt to the sun-kissed city of Seville by rolling up his sleeves and sharpening his paring knife: it’s marmalade-making season. And perhaps the best time of year to visit Andalucia. What what?! You’re not British, or—worse still—you don’t make your own marmalade. […]
‘Marché’ means ‘market’. ‘Gras’ means ‘fat’. Welcome to the awesome ‘Marché au Gras’—the Ugolino’s Tower of every vegetarian’s worst nightmare, but the Bower of Bliss on my quest to understand authentic French country cooking. The Marché au Gras is where those of us who aren’t the wives of traditional peasant farmers buy our fattened geese […]
You’d never know it with a casual stroll through its charming streets, but Jerez de la Frontera, in Cadiz province, is home to perhaps the best flamenco scene in all of Spain, if not the world. If you are unfamiliar with this art form (i.e. if you think the Gypsy Kings or Ottmar Leibert are […]