I’ve spent a few nights in the Mazarakis Guesthouse in Mystra, but I’d happily stay for a week. It’s one of those rare B&Bs where the location is as good as the welcome is as good as the rooms is as good as the food. Yup, I’m afraid this is going to be a gushing […]
Cusco has its fair share of hotels, welcoming grubby backpackers, blue rinse jet setters, and everything in between. You could spend hours (if not weeks) choosing the best place to bed down. If you’re a hotel aficionado and want to be wowed, it’s no done deal; there are several properties worthy of distinction. And of […]
If you’re keen to explore the pata-negra heartland of Spain’s Extremadura region, make the Monasterio de Rocamador your base. Surrounded by the oak groves typical of Extremadura, which teem with semi-wild pigs munching on acorns and getting tastier by the minute, Rocamador is a weird, wonderful and totally unique hotel, in a quite unlikely part […]
How can it be that a town of two thousand people (give or take a thousand), a hundred temples and shrines (give or take a dozen), and a 350 ft high granite rock (give or take an elephant) doesn’t feature on Google Maps? You can zoom in ‘til the holy cows come home, but you […]
Halfway to the sea from Montalcino, where Tuscany gets a little wilder and a little less visited, the Castello di Vicarello is tucked away at the end of a country lane, and is as good as any small hotel we’ve ever visited. With four suites and one villa, it’s a small, personal place. The thousand […]
Lodge-to-lodge trekking out of the Kasbah du Toubkal gives you access to some of the most beautiful parts of the Atlas, remote rural communities, and sweeping other-worldly landscapes. The well-known Kasbah du Toubkal has been doing up lodges, scattered in the hills and valleys around Imlil, which the lodge uses to put together multi-day treks beginning and […]
When Marrakech begins to overwhelm you with its smells and persistant sales pitches, click your heels three times and chant “there’s no place like Toubkal. There’s no place like Toubkal.” In a flash (relatively speaking—a 45 minute drive to be more precise) you will find yourself in a mountain retreat where the air is fresh, […]
First things first, it’s pronounced ‘Why-Hecky’. And it’s a tiny island in New Zealand. Not the North Island, nor the South Island, Waiheke is it’s very own dot on the map. Okay, so it’s more of a speck. I think everyone knows by now (or has been told ad infinitum) that New Zealand is a […]