There is a noise I associate with heat and fever, and I am not sure if it’s real or from distortions of memory. It could be from something as simple as the cicada, that strange beast that emerges from the ground, periodically, in the hot humid months, and rages against the known world with its […]
Swish, swoosh — the oar smoothly fends the water. Quite the statement, the Venetian way of rowing: proudly standing up, and facing forward, eyes into the future. Swish swoosh, the roar rhythmically breaks the green surface of the lagoon. The pungent smell of salt and shallow marshes. An island here, another there, and more as […]
My idea of a fabulous time on safari is exploring by mobile tented camp, going from place to place, deep in the bush. To make that experience even better, add the possibility of tracking and counting herds of wild elephants in Botswana. No, I am not daydreaming of my own perfect little world – the […]
After spending a good part of two decades hunting for small (and charming) hotels in Greece, it’s the question I get most often: “Which hotel is your favourite?” It’s not an easy one to answer. It so depends on the circumstances. What the mood is. Who is coming along. The season. The budget. Ask me […]
I laughed a little too hard recently when reading Anne Lamott’s words, “By the end I was deteriorating faster than I could lower my standards”. I cannot be the only human whose covid days, home-cooked meals and masked conversations have become excruciatingly banal. We’re all yearning for discovery, spice and a rollicking time anywhere but […]
Comfortably ensconced on my sofa at home in the small Provençal village of Mouriès, I am enjoying the warmth of both my fireplace and a glass of local red wine. I am listening to the radio announcing that the fight against Covid is possibly taking a turn with the discovery of a vaccine. The future […]
If ever there were a time to revel in plans of future road trips, the moment is now. To imagine remote exploration, untethered from the nucleus of a country, an impeccably well planned but impossible to script journey. Driving along the Carretera Austral or Chile’s ‘Southern Route’, has long been a soul dwelling desire of […]
Holidays are lurking and with it, more Coronavirus cases and renewed lockdowns. It’s all been enough for anyone to reach for the bottle. As we hunker down for the winter, we asked around our planning team to see who’s got the bartending chops in the Trufflepig farm. Below are some road-tested recipes that came back […]
Twenty something, rebellious, and by all accounts, “randy”. A young English poet named George Gordon Byron (“Lord” to all but those who knew him well) swept through the small enclave of Sintra in 1809, penned a few lines of what would become Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and sent letters home to friends declaring Sintra the most […]
For most of us travel this year has meant moving about locally, if at all. I’m lucky then to live in such a wonderfully diverse country as Morocco with plenty of opportunity to explore. Morocco did surprisingly well in the initial months of home confinement, achievements that sadly, as with many other places around the […]
Anticipation – that mixture of stress and excitement, with a dash of trepidation. The rush that comes from thinking on what’s to come next. It’s that magic ingredient that keeps you watching a play performed, a sport in action. And it’s the sine qua non of electronic music. Today we are talking about anticipation, and […]
Castro and the revolution reached Havana on 9 January 1959. Two years later to the month, while reducing the US embassy and stoking the early embers of the Bay of Pigs, he and Ernesto “Che” Guevara went golfing at the Havana Country Club Park, a sprawling chunk of the city, rolling hills, manicured greens. It […]
One of the main pleasures in my life is jumping on my bike (she’s called “Joyce”) and exploring my beloved London. I am lucky enough to pretend that part of this is for work: I am seeking out cool stuff for our clients to see when they come to the Big Smoke. It’s true that […]
I think I speak for all of us at the Pig when I say that we’re chomping at the bit to be back on the road. But trying to figure out should one travel let alone can one travel, right now is a pretty complicated dance. There’s a lot to take into consideration, to put it […]
You may know Chefchaouen already, but under a different name: Xauen or Chaouen among others. Or perhaps you’ve seen any one of the millions of photos of it on Instagram, “The Blue City” or “The Blue Pearl” being some of the confoundingly inaccurate nicknames for Chefchaouen that I suppose sounded good to some PR folks […]
Italy’s food culture is a constellation of countless regional specialties, so place-peculiar that dishes can vary significantly in the span of just a few hundred meters. Such is the case of some mountain valleys, for instance, where the natural landscape has helped keep the local from spreading further. But one aspect that unites all these […]